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A Theory of Everyone

Posted by Peter on January 12, 2024
Posted in: Book Reviews, Politics, The Flynn Effect, The Human Mind. Leave a Comment

Book review: A Theory of Everyone – The New Science of Who We Are, How We Got Here, and Where We’re Going Energy, culture and a better future for everyone, by Michael Muthukrishna.

I found this book disappointing. An important part of that is because Muthukrishna set my expectations too high.

I had previously blogged about a paper that he co-authored with Henrich on cultural influences on IQ. If those ideas were new in the book, I’d be eagerly writing about them. But I’ve already written enough about those ideas in that blog post.

Another source of disappointment was that the book’s title is misleading. To the limited extent that the book focuses on a theory, it’s the theory that’s more clearly described in Henrich’s The Secret of our Success. A Theory of Everyone feels more like a collection of blog posts than like a well-organized book.

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Dark Skies

Posted by Peter on December 28, 2023
Posted in: Book Reviews, Freedom, Science and Technology. Tagged: , , . Leave a Comment

Book review: Dark Skies: Space Expansionism, Planetary Geopolitics, and the Ends of Humanity, by Daniel Deudney.

Dark Skies is an unusually good and bad book.

Good in the sense that 95% of the book consists of uncontroversial, scholarly, mundane claims that accurately describe the views that Deudney is attacking. These parts of the book are careful to distinguish between value differences and claims about objective facts.

Bad in the senses that the good parts make the occasional unfair insult more gratuitous, and that Deudney provides little support for his predictions that his policies will produce better results than those of his adversaries. I count myself as one of his adversaries.

Dark Skies is an opposite of Where Is My Flying Car? in both style and substance.

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The Accidental Superpower

Posted by Peter on December 11, 2023
Posted in: Book Reviews, Economics, Politics. Tagged: . Leave a Comment

Book review: The Accidental Superpower: The Next Generation of American Preeminence and the Coming Global Disorder, by Peter Zeihan.

Are you looking for an entertaining set of geopolitical forecasts that will nudge you out of the frameworks of mainstream pundits? This might be just the right book for you.

Zeihan often sounds more like a real estate salesman than a scholar: The US has more miles of internal waterways than the rest of the world combined! US mountain ranges have passes that are easy enough to use that the mountains barely impede traffic. Transportation options like that guarantee sufficient political unity!

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When Will AIs Develop Long-Term Planning?

Posted by Peter on November 16, 2023
Posted in: Artificial Intelligence, The Human Mind. Tagged: , . 1 comment

[I mostly wrote this to clarify my thoughts. I’m unclear whether this will be valuable for readers. ]

I expect that within a decade, AI will be able to do 90% of current human jobs. I don’t mean that 90% of humans will be obsolete. I mean that the average worker could delegate 90% of their tasks to an AGI.

I feel confused about what this implies for the kind of AI long-term planning and strategizing that would enable an AI to create large-scale harm if it is poorly aligned.

Is the ability to achieve long-term goals hard for an AI to develop?

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Disentangling Our Terminal and Instrumental Values

Posted by Peter on October 13, 2023
Posted in: Artificial Intelligence, The Human Mind. Tagged: . Leave a Comment

Disagreements related to what we value seem to explain maybe 10% of the disagreements over AI safety. This post will try to explain how I think about which values I care about perpetuating to the distant future.

Robin Hanson helped to clarify the choices in Which Of Your Origins Are You?:

The key hard question here is this: what aspects of the causal influences that lead to you do you now embrace, and which do you instead reject as “random” errors that you want to cut out? Consider two extremes.
At one extreme, one could endorse absolutely every random element that contributed to any prior choice or intuition.
…
At the other extreme, you might see yourself as primarily the result of natural selection, both of genes and of memes, and see your core non-random value as that of doing the best you can to continue to “win” at that game. … In this view, everything about you that won’t help your descendants be selected in the long run is a random error that you want to detect and reject.

In other words, the more unique criteria we have about what we want to preserve into the distant future, the less we should expect to succeed.

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The Coming Wave

Posted by Peter on September 28, 2023
Posted in: Artificial Intelligence, Book Reviews. Tagged: . Leave a Comment

Book review: The Coming Wave: Technology, Power, and the Twenty-first Century’s Greatest Dilemma, by Mustafa Suleyman.

An author with substantial AI expertise has attempted to discuss AI in terms that the average book reader can understand.

The key message: AI is about to become possibly the most important event in human history.

Maybe 2% of readers will change their minds as a result of reading the book.

A large fraction of readers will come in expecting the book to be mostly hype. They won’t look closely enough to see why Suleyman is excited.

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Require AGI to be Explainable

Posted by Peter on September 20, 2023
Posted in: Artificial Intelligence. Tagged: . Leave a Comment

Context: looking for an alternative to a pause on AI development.

There’s some popular desire for software decisions to be explainable when used for decisions such as whether to grant someone a loan. That desire is not sufficient reason for possibly crippling AI progress. But in combination with other concerns about AI, it seems promising.

Much of this popular desire likely comes from people who have been (or expect to be) denied loans, and who want to scapegoat someone or something to avoid admitting that they look unsafe to lend to because they’ve made poor decisions. I normally want to avoid regulations that are supported by such motives.

Yet an explainability requirement shows some promise at reducing the risks from rogue AIs.

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Outlive

Posted by Peter on September 13, 2023
Posted in: Book Reviews, Health. Tagged: , , . 1 comment

Book review: Outlive: The Science and Art of Longevity, by Peter Attia.

This year’s book on aging focuses mostly on healthspan rather than lifespan, in an effort to combat the tendency of people in the developed world to have a wasted decade around age 80.

Attia calls his approach Medicine 3.0. He wants people to pay a lot more attention to their lifestyle starting a couple of decades before problems such as diabetes and Alzheimer’s create obvious impacts.

He complains about Medicine 2.0 (i.e. mainstream medicine) treating disease as a binary phenomenon. There’s lots of evidence suggesting that age-related diseases develop slowly over periods of more than a decade.

He’s not aiming to cure aging. He aims to enjoy life until age 100 or 120.

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