The Basilisk of Phil Sandifer, part 3/10

Hubris

The liberal arts eschatology rejects AI safety as obviously preposterous. After all, the basic premise of AI safety is that any sufficiently powerful optimization process would be nigh-inevitably driven by what might as well be laws of nature, leading to them optimizing human flourishing only incidentally as a side effect which might be sacrificed the instant it is no longer beneficial for the process, and that it would be a really good idea to design a solid, self-sustaining system that provides an actual alternative to such basic drives. The liberal arts eschatologist only engages with things on the surface while Marx would be right at home with the underlying logic.

Another part where Sandifer’s degraded marxism displays itself very prominently is the idea of “how can we respond to the eschaton without the arrogance of thinking that we can change its speed or trajectory” being somehow a question worth considering. The liberal artist deals with the social, and is ultimately concerned with the social, the appearance, the status ladder, the spectation and entertainment of observing people who think differently. The “technolibertarian”, the “accelerationist” and the “decelerationist” alike reject the “without the arrogance of thinking” part, and for such a crime of departing from the social, the reasonable, the comprehensible, Sandifer’s kind has little more than a response that can underneath its superficial verbosity be distilled into two words: “scorn dem”. After all, it had already been assumed that we are fucked, and it isn’t fair to try to change the rules when the game is being played.

One might hypothesize that this is because the liberal arts eschatologists have never been dealing with solvable problems. They are usually only good for writing descriptions of problems, many of which I find quite agreeable; the knee-jerk libertarian inequality apologia that is basically endless words on top of the just-world fallacy disgusts this libertarian just as much as the knee-jerk cishumanist death apologia. Some people purchase ice creams that are more expensive than the entire lives of millions of people, and to say that something is quite iffy with this shouldn’t be controversial. It is a goddamn civilizational disgrace that the keyboard I’m typing this text on, the headphones I’m listening to music with, and the cheap-ass laptop processing the words themselves, are together worth enough to push one person out of extreme poverty for an entire year, yet nonetheless we do have extreme poverty because we haven’t figured out how to not have it. Believing this does not obligate me to support any single proposal for a solution, any more than rejecting any single solution means that I reject the values the proposed solution was based on; but in the politics of mandatory comprehensibility the ought and the is are kept together and thus a great deal is inferred about a person’s values from the things they consider realistic. Of course, this works as long as everyone plays along to the rules and keeps their is and ought tightly bundled, but someone who rejects the rules appears effectively alien.

The liberal arts eschatologist’s solution is to write “Let us assume we are fucked”. The engineer’s solution is to try to find out what would actually work. In this sense Marx was certainly an engineer at heart, and his approach to the problems he observed was sensible at a time before the acceleration of technology gave ideologies that cannot be expressed as numbers a decisive disadvantage (something that once again is a far better match with the meta-level of marxism, historical materialism and everything, than the degraded object-level manifestations mainstream marxist liberal artists have transformed into). A thousand polemicians may advocate a policy, and one Satoshi Nakamoto may design a technology that renders it practically unenforceable, or makes it actually possible. This liberal arts eschatology rejects the obvious conclusion that the most pressing concern of the modern left would be to get into the game and impose one’s ideology on silicon (it isn’t even that hard to imagine how blockchain technologies, cryptography, and worldwide connectedness could be harnessed for socialist ends) and instead doubles down on its traditional talking points of democracy and/or revolution; the latter being obviously purely social from beginning to end, for a technological revolution solving social problems is so utterly horribly in contradiction with Marx and his historical materialism that even the thought itself might not be entertained for even a moment, and the possibility that a single person might effect meaningful change just doesn’t fit with the theories of a man whose followers number in millions if not billions and whose ideas dramatically influenced the entire 20th century.

Thus, any attempt to actually evite the supposedly inevitable fuckedness must be simple hubris.

Part 1: A False Manhattan

Part 2: The Rabbithole’s Event Horizon

Part 3: Hubris

Part 4: The Marvels of Duct Tape

Part 5: The Darkening

Part 6: A Game to End All Games

Part 7: The Players of Games

Part 8: Men, Machines, Monsters

Part 9: The True Basilisk of Phil Sandifer

Part 10: Denouement

1 month ago · tagged #the basilisk of phil sandifer #basilisk bullshit #nrx cw · 16 notes · .permalink

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