The Neon God
paulkingsnorth.substack.com
paulkingsnorth.substack.com
He is a Christian convert but his radical roots show through. There's the danger for cultural commentators of seeing the apocalypse around every corner and in thinking that right now this very moment is the most important of all time (and not observing that we have thought that at every moment in the past too!) and there's the attraction for authors that stories invoking fear are a powerful motivator for attention and that it lends emotion to stories. Without this we would get blander, dryer and less emotion filled reports. Less eyeballs.
Nevertheless behind this at the foreground which I have to navigate, there are some interesting ideas and stories in the article. Those bots in churches and temples are so weird , but seeing the AI developments with a spiritual lens could be good.
I'd suggest reading some of the comments in the article too.
Ok, that's enough internet for today (and it's only 11:00).
then so is sin, and Satan.
I guess you can call anyone you want a researcher, it's not like the term has any legal meaning. But in a more conservative sense, Yudkowsky is not a researcher. Maybe an activist?
> regarded as a leader in the field of Artificial General Intelligence
No. Not regarded as a leader.
He's not an actual AI scientist/engineer (more like "handwavist who likes to keep company with actual geeks and talk about science and stuff, often in the way college kids do after a few joints"), but he's still regarded as a leader in the field - if not for anything else because he wont shut up.
And I'd definitely say he's a legitimate leader in the field; more than that, I'm inclined to agree with Time Magazine on this - in the byline, Eliezer is said to be "widely regarded as a founder of the field [of Artificial General Intelligence, or at least of aligning AGI]" (emphasis mine).
OpenAI folks? Anthropic? All the AI pundits and pundit wannabies so loud these days? They're all people directly or indirectly influenced by Eliezer's writings, talking or dismissing or commenting the specific concerns Eliezer described/popularized more than a decade ago. Hell, I've been on HN for more than a decade, and in that time, GAI existential risks, and X-risks in general, have always been strongly associated with Eliezer and LessWrong crowd (read: them being mocked for indulging in delusions and fear-mongering).
So don't tell me Yudkowsky isn't a "leader in the field", when the very reason he's invited to the table with all the current AI movers and shakers is precisely because the latter recognize his contributions are foundational to the field. Sure, he mostly wrote a lot of blog articles dealing with topics most considered purely theoretical then, but the field was started in the earnest by people who read that blog, making it a foundational mythos of modern AI research.
Going further on this line of thought, if we were successfully able to automate things so much that human effort is no longer necessary for most of our daily activities and we have a lot of leisure time (the promise that almost every tech. revolution has made), the existential question of what do we do with all this time looms. The answer, I think, given current trends, is to consume and distract ourselves so that we don't think about this.
One thing that's a huge part of human history is religion and while a lot of people can disagree on the truth of it, its personal utility for (or atleast effect on) individuals is pretty much a given. I don't know how effective an AI bot issuing blessings will actually have the "effect on the user" but that remains to be seen.
As a religious person myself, I feel it's kind of defeatist if there is no human being who has the time and interest to actually preach to his congregation and guide them on their spiritual journeys. I can personally say that listening to a bot deliver a sermon or a speech wouldn't have any effect on me and I'd probably stop going to wherever it's operating. Perhaps my background in tech. makes this transparent to me so I might be the exception but nevertheless.
Not to say you cannot have such. But a system focused on education, community, and understanding. As a Foundational basis could support what you want and respect belief without the same teeth.
I know Paul Kingsnorth from the "Dark Mountain" days -- I worked closely with Dougald Hine on a project (http://collapsonomics.org) before they started Dark Mountain.
The rhetoric is strong, but the realism is not. Next step: let's turn off the electricity.
Why not?
Or an even better question: say electricity is deemed OK to keep. Does that transfer to anything else we have or will build?
Should we ever not develop something, e.g. are there any diminishing returns combined with negative tradeoffs beyond some point?
Or we should develop everything, even a future "government can add telemetry to get all your thoughts and remotely zap you if you had one it doesn't like" device, for example?
So might as well go for it.
The Sentinelese and the various uncontacted and/or hunter-gathering tribes still in existence across Australia, sub-Saharan Africa, and South America would tend to disagree with this notion. And barring complete ecological collapse, they'll be here after we're gone :)
Except that's not how it works for protestants. In the Lutheran church, to quote Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confession_(religion)#Lutheran...):
> The first form of confession and absolution is done at the Divine Service with the assembled congregation (similar to the Anglican tradition). Here, the entire congregation pauses for a moment of silent confession, recites the confiteor, and receives God's forgiveness through the pastor as he says the following (or similar): "Upon this your confession and in the stead and by the command of my Lord Jesus Christ, I forgive you all your sins in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit."
...so you don't need to actually confess your sins to anyone, but you do need a priest to "hand out" God's forgiveness. Which is what this robot (which is "meant to start a debate about the future of technology and the church" in the city where Martin Luther nailed his "95 Theses" to the church door) does.
However I am concerned about the conservatism and religious overtones of the anti-technology reactionaries. To me (and a large and growing demographic) modern major religions are at best irrelevant, or morally bankrupt and malignant. Its a shame to because we lost some deeper dimensions of human experience this way.
The core teaching of Buddhism is the middle path: neither absolute asceticism nor hedonism.
I also like how John Vervaeke puts it: "Neither utopia, nor nostalgia" (is the path to wisdom, presumably).
And the sign flashed out its warning In the words that it was forming
And the sign said, "The words of the prophets Are written on the subway walls
And tenement halls And whispered in the sounds of silence."
The sound of silence - Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel
This is how you build dystopias: one product at a time.
- Feynman
(I've been a birdwatcher since I was about 6, did a PhD partially on birds and have done lots of scientific field work on birds in addition to "birding")
What you said (and Feynman's specious know-it-all comment) is actually not true. Let's take your example of someone seeing a Yellow-rumped Warbler. Being a birdwatcher, this person is probably interested in seeing other Yellow-rumper Warblers in the future, or more likely, in seeing other Warbler species they've never seen before. Because they are interested in seeing birds, they'll notice Yellow-rumpeds microhabitat choice -- leafy branches in mid to high canopy. And when they see Black-and-white Warblers, they're obviously going to learn that Black-and-White has a habit of foraging along the trunk itself in a manner more like a treecreeper, and quite unusual for a warbler. So their birdwatching is already teaching them something about habitat and foraging behavior.
They'll be learning how to tell something is a warbler on sight, rather than say a Chickadee or a Thrush, and hence learning how morphology and plumage features vary across avian taxonomy. And they may even start wondering whether that bird-book taxonomy accurately reflect the true evolutionary relationships.
They'll hear the Yellow-rumped warblers thin, high-pitched calls and song, and they'll hear songs of other warblers and other birds, and eventually they'll realize that they can tell that a call is a warbler, even if they don't know what species. So they'll have learned that vocalisations are correlated with phylogeny. Perhaps they'll wonder whether birds vocalisations are arbitrary or not: they might end up learning about the notion of sexual selection, and also the fact that birds living near fast-flowing water (Kingfisher, Dippers, Wagtails) have strikingly loud and sharp high-pitched calls which can be heard over water (so not arbitrary sexual selection) and maybe they'll learn that in some species, studies have shown that females prefer males with more complex songs.
The bird-book / app they use to carry out their hobby shows them geographic ranges, and which species are migratory. They'll learn not to look for warblers in the winter, and hence they'll learn which birds are migratory and which not, and how that varies over avian taxonomy, and it will lead to many questions about what can be learned from these phylogenetic and geographic patterns versus what is just random.
Of course, what you said is true of some people, but the general statistical characterization of birdwatching is the opposite: identifying species is the starting point for virtually all field studies of biological organisms, and of course there is a huge statistical tendency for people who know what species they are looking at to end up learning more natural history and biology than those who are oblivious to it all.
I don't know much about Mount Athos, but the Amish famously have rejected modern technology including smart phones, so it certainly is possible to live without them, despite the author's jarring impression of the monks.
Also, I remember reading about a type of jaundice that is common among Old Order Amish in some areas due in part to a lack of genetic diversity, and those families are allowed to have electricity to their homes to run the therapeutic lights those children are prescribed.
There’s a lot about that culture that I don’t think is great, but cautious reflection before bringing new technology into the home, and especially around kids, is a practice worth borrowing.
"The fact that the Amish choose to regulate how the phone is used shows continuing concern over potential ill effects, were it to be fully accepted."
Amish don't even run electricity into their houses, so I imagine it would be a tough thing to use in practice, except in limited scenarios. It'd be cute if a people decided to reject automobiles, mechanization, most forms of electricity, etc, and also plugged in smart phones and browsed TikTok all day.
In general, don't you at least think they say more than just "technology is evil"? Perhaps there is analysis to be made why you'd be so quick to dismiss a text that doesnt match one of your unemotional assumptions about the world! Because a lot of good thinking (and writing) comes from granting an assumption and seeing where that leads. Its never a failure of your unprejudiced intellect to connect with what a writer is actually saying, even if you don't agree with some belief of theirs.
> my belief in the profanity of technology is not widely shared, and that even people who I imagined would have a serious critique of technology often simply don’t
with a vague suggestion that the religious people who dedicate their life to spiritual pursuits are in the wrong
It's funny you refer to the tyranny of Christianity when by far the most tyrannical regimes were all officially atheist (Stalin's, Mao's, Pol Pot's, North Korea), and the west has been getting steadily more and more authoritarian as it's gotten less and less Christian. Fundamentally most non-religious people are utilitarians, who see no inherent value in a life and hence are open to the idea of sacrificing a few lives for the "good of the many".
The first step to dictatorship is convincing people there's no such thing as "absolute" rights, so that they won't object to the regime making up more and more excuses to violate people's rights. And without a belief in some kind of higher power the majority of people also won't have any reason to believe that some rights are inherently inviolable.
Non-religious people are no different than religious people in the way they view life and its inherent value. They simply don't feel that value necessitates a supernatural framework. I know this will likely be incomprehensible to you, but one does not need to believe in God at all to value human life.
In other cultures and times in the past, for example, all human life was not valued and slavery was considered a normal part of life.
We don't really understand what culture is and think that the values are fundamental constant variables baked into biology.
That's funny, because in a large amount the justification for slavery was religious.
The perks of religion are great if you're on the right side. The downside is that you might also find yourself on the side of the "other", and then any concerns you might have stop mattering, and how much that might suck for you doesn't matter because deontology doesn't concern itself with consequences.
The idea of mechanical equality, where all are masters, is absurdism.
Gee, I wonder. Maybe read a history book?
> The idea of mechanical equality, where all are masters, is absurdism.
Because you put it in an absurd way. Dispense with the idea of "masters" and what you have is peers, which makes perfect sense.
Regardless, the claim that only religious people value human life and everyone else is an amoral sociopath is as pernicious as it is false.
And I say that as someone who still considers herself to be a Christian.
The Western world is a lot less authoritarian than it was 60 years ago for people like me - women, that is. In the early 60s, I could not get a bank account, a job or a driver’s license without my husband’s permission in Bavaria.
And that was nothing to very Catholic Francoist Spain, where I couldn’t leave the country or study at university without my father’s (if unmarried) or husband’s permission.
Besides, since you are talking about valuing life, whenever I think about the catholic church, their inability to deal with their own cases of child molestation comes to mind first. So swinging the moral sword from the position of a church which still molests children without consequendces is probably a bit, hm, brave to say the least.
What they share in common is that they both reject the value of a lived human life in favor of some totalizing ideology like a "god", church or the "state". Both can be credited with millions of lives lost. Lets not forget centuries of religious wars, or what role Christianity played in Western colonization. Both excuse those deaths because of proposed ideas like "god's will" or "the after-life", or the "good of the many" etc.
The post is much deeper and nuanced than the excerpt
I really wonder if people use that thing.
Imagine this guy was born a hundred years from now. No way his judgment on the relationship between humanity and technology would look the same, so all of this hand wringing is a nice pastime, but not saying anything substantial.
Even Christian churches do machine stuff, just in a way slightly less goofy to our eyes.
Eg, coin operated votive candles: https://c7.alamy.com/comp/A82EPW/artificial-candles-lit-when...
No doubt our world is far from perfect, but does he honestly believe destruction of technology would somehow magically improve the situation, when we know from history that our technological past was full of just as much, if not more, unnecessary suffering than the present?
Vigilance is necessary, yes. Reducing our reliance on fickle technology is valuable, yes. Practicing mindfullness, in our use of technology as in other aspects of everyday life, is beneficial, yes. But, no, destruction is not merited.