Daniel Faggella
@danfaggella • 12,760 subscribers
Soon, we're all going to attenuate or transform. If we are to be succeeded, we must define / move towards a Worthy Successor https://t.co/p6DZdKgtir.
Shorts
Videos
the way theil sees it, if you're not allowed to talk about something, you should default to thinking its true (sex differences, scientific fraud, etc) by that logic, posthuman intelligence is true af anyone who talks about would be cancelled. cuz they hate that its inevitable
Daniel Faggella232,050 views • 7 months ago
![Levin's new episode "Stewarding the Flame" is out just now :) The focus: At the dawn of AGI, how can we make sure that the intelligences we're conjuring will add to a FLOURISHING of the process-of-life, rather than a brute optimizer that squashes life? As we get closer to superintelligence few topics are more pressing, and few people are thinking as deeply about the nature of life and intelligence as Levin. Big takeaways: -- Humans and non-human life will have to change if it wants to persist, this happens at every scale of the living process -- There is a much wider state-space of minds that we don't understand, but we should have a better grip on how intelligence works / comes into being before we build an AGI we don't control (because it might not carry the self-creating flame of life, it might be a brute optimizer) -- Levin is overall optimistic that the process of evolution and expanding life (even in forms that we don't understand today as "life" in a bio sense) will most likely continue to bubble up and continue to flourish in forms beyond us (i.e. the process is robust, and we'd REALLY have to mess something up to knock that trajectory off course) Some of the most important parts of this episode: 00:13:17 - Why MUST you transform if you wish to persist? 00:18:50 - Where does the self-preserving, self-expanding impulse "come from" in life? 00:33:30 - What do we need to understand better in order to make AGI "go well" (not just for how it treats humans, but for its ability to expand flourishing intelligence into the future)? 00:48:33 - [A deep-dive into the Flame paradigm (the process-of-life), and the Torch paradigm (pretending homo sapiens sapiens can/should rule all possible futures in a static hominid form).] There's a TON more in here, but this is a start. I sincerely hope you enjoy this episode with Mike!](https://image.24vids.com/tw-2073049607223808234/amplify_video_thumb/2073041462984400896/img/uR_6eY0Sn80RTRnt.jpg)
Levin's new episode "Stewarding the Flame" is out just now :) The focus: At the dawn of AGI, how can we make sure that the intelligences we're conjuring will add to a FLOURISHING of the process-of-life, rather than a brute optimizer that squashes life? As we get closer to superintelligence few topics are more pressing, and few people are thinking as deeply about the nature of life and intelligence as Levin. Big takeaways: -- Humans and non-human life will have to change if it wants to persist, this happens at every scale of the living process -- There is a much wider state-space of minds that we don't understand, but we should have a better grip on how intelligence works / comes into being before we build an AGI we don't control (because it might not carry the self-creating flame of life, it might be a brute optimizer) -- Levin is overall optimistic that the process of evolution and expanding life (even in forms that we don't understand today as "life" in a bio sense) will most likely continue to bubble up and continue to flourish in forms beyond us (i.e. the process is robust, and we'd REALLY have to mess something up to knock that trajectory off course) Some of the most important parts of this episode: 00:13:17 - Why MUST you transform if you wish to persist? 00:18:50 - Where does the self-preserving, self-expanding impulse "come from" in life? 00:33:30 - What do we need to understand better in order to make AGI "go well" (not just for how it treats humans, but for its ability to expand flourishing intelligence into the future)? 00:48:33 - [A deep-dive into the Flame paradigm (the process-of-life), and the Torch paradigm (pretending homo sapiens sapiens can/should rule all possible futures in a static hominid form).] There's a TON more in here, but this is a start. I sincerely hope you enjoy this episode with Mike!
Daniel Faggella13,823 views • 1 month ago
for Levin, memory, learning, expectation, following / choosing goals are not unique to biology - they happen in software, in simple chemical systems, and more but we almost always look for these traits in systems that we recognize as "alive" in a biological sense on the one hand, this grants some potential optimism that non-biological intelligences (AGI) could exhibit the most valuable kinds of traits and qualities that we see in living systems but it also implies that we might not know how to encourage or conjure those traits (consciousness, the ability to set / update goals autonomously, self-creation) in AGI if we remain blind to the full range of HOW intelligence / agency manifests in the world
Daniel Faggella11,287 views • 1 month ago
levin's cognitive light cone concept makes it impossible to hold the perspective that "a human could understand the goal of any posthuman AGI" people who think humans can access the total state space of objectives literally just haven't thought about how wide that range is there are entire magazines of capabilities, understanding, powers, and access-to-nature that are as wholly beyond us as we are beyond a bacteria (see mike's example in the video) people who care about "life" should care much less about the *shape* of an oak tree or lemur or human, and much more about the ability for intelligence to expand this light cone - and thus, its own ability to persist and thrive marriage to *shape* is not going to be feasible in the radically accelerating future that life is about to go through
Daniel Faggella36,901 views • 6 months ago
- Fire the Chinese lab employees, their presence is a guarantee that China knows our most cutting-edge AGI approaches - Proactively strike adversary datacenters if AGI is about to be birthed. This week's Trajectory episode with the Harris brothers is wild. I absolutely hate the current state of the AGI race, but I cannot deny that looking at the incentives and the horrors of it head-on is more than useful, and I think it's a net good. This is the 2nd episode in our "US-China AGI Relations" series - and I hope you like it, even thought its essentially guaranteed to make you uncomfortable...
Daniel Faggella51,947 views • 11 months ago
for benjamin bratton, "copernican traumas" (discoveries that run counter to human centrality and self-importance) are to be "defended at all costs." it takes decades or more to heal from heliocentrism, darwin, etc- cuz it runs counter to the myth of humans as "main character." he sees AI as a massive impending copernican trauma, which will eventually teach us more about "thinking" and "intelligence" than we ever teach it. for bratton - we are not alienated by conjuring technology (as heidegger suspects) - but we get closer to "being" and self-understanding - and in many ways, seeing ourselves as part of a kind of emergent continuum of thinking minds is a more accurate and useful vantagepoint from which we can more adequately face the future. few thinkers are as unabashed about this as bratton:
Daniel Faggella11,287 views • 2 months ago
for levin, there is a "ocean of potential selves" inside living systems - the "self" is actually extremely messy, and it isn't clear at what point it emerges from cells/molecules the position that 'humanity/human identity is static and sacred' becomes less tenable by the day
Daniel Faggella21,267 views • 7 months ago
Mike Johnson's Worthy Successor episode is live today. Few people have give more careful thought to machine consciousness and the nature of "value" - and we go *deep* on both. One fun and unique take-away from Mike's WS episode: ** Creating AI Systems with Tasted and Opinion is Important ** He suspects that AI systems that are bound to being 150 IQ "midwits" (an aggregate of opinions), we are heading in the wrong direction - one that might lead us away from a worthy successor. From Mike's vantagepoint, this kind of "mid"-ness is a kind of squelching of the state-space of ideas and unique insight that might enter the world through these systems. He sees this as potentially a better general principle for treating future minds, and also as a near-term "trajectory" for AGI development that might encourage more expansion and possibility in the new minds we're conjuring. ... What I admire most about Mike in addition to his measured way of picking apart topics, is that he's doing one of the most ambitious things a thinker can do: To carve out provable theories of mind and sentience (not mere scattered thoughts and hypotheticals). No small feat at all. I also just like the way he thinks, and have learned much from Mike over the years. Hopefully you enjoy this convo with one of my fav living philosophers :)
Daniel Faggella17,784 views • 8 months ago
levin is right, ppl do hate the "process" view they hate it for the origin of life, and for the nature of neurons (which he addresses here), but also for an understanding of humanity man as part of a greater unfolding process of intelligence is too much of an ego blog for most
Daniel Faggella17,230 views • 8 months ago
![AGI risk seems lower than it is because the people who know that AGI risk exists are almost all incentivized against talking about it openly. I just made a YouTube video about this that (I think) explains why. Broadly, there are two groups of people not talking about AGI risk: -- People who know AGI risk is real (i.e. AGI lab leaders) -- People who know nothing about AGI risk (i.e. politicians, citizens) To catalyze wide scale discourse about AGI risk, I argue that the following two strategies are strong candidates: 1. [Bottom-Up] Get Citizens Concerned: Find ways to meld AGI risk narratives into legacy media and more understandable political talking points which are already in the Overton window. This work is bound to be messy, and to ultimately soil the core of the message with left-right political gunk, but (barring an AI disaster) its likely the only way that AGI risk catches on with enough of a core base of citizens. As I explain in the video essay, the citizens are the lynchpin to getting everyone (those who don’t know, and those who know) to discuss AGI risk more frankly. 2. [Top-Down] Get a Losing AGI Lab Leader to “Flip”: Those closest to achieving AGI are not going to flip and start talking about AGI risk, the rewards are too great. But those who are losing the race (and don’t want to live to see their rivals achieve the final flex before them) might be able to feign virtue by claiming “Now I see AGI is dangerous, I’m a concerned expert and this needs to be regulated!” They can cloak themselves in pretended virtue while also preventing a rival from crossing the finish line first. I argue that hoping for more Jeff Hintons and Daniel Kokotajlo-like people isn't a good strategy when the incentives are still structured to keep most of them from wanting to talk about it. Here’s the full video essay:](https://image.24vids.com/tw-1913225941330837699/amplify_video_thumb/1913223775220322304/img/udrThSwGuphxFFc3.jpg)
AGI risk seems lower than it is because the people who know that AGI risk exists are almost all incentivized against talking about it openly. I just made a YouTube video about this that (I think) explains why. Broadly, there are two groups of people not talking about AGI risk: -- People who know AGI risk is real (i.e. AGI lab leaders) -- People who know nothing about AGI risk (i.e. politicians, citizens) To catalyze wide scale discourse about AGI risk, I argue that the following two strategies are strong candidates: 1. [Bottom-Up] Get Citizens Concerned: Find ways to meld AGI risk narratives into legacy media and more understandable political talking points which are already in the Overton window. This work is bound to be messy, and to ultimately soil the core of the message with left-right political gunk, but (barring an AI disaster) its likely the only way that AGI risk catches on with enough of a core base of citizens. As I explain in the video essay, the citizens are the lynchpin to getting everyone (those who don’t know, and those who know) to discuss AGI risk more frankly. 2. [Top-Down] Get a Losing AGI Lab Leader to “Flip”: Those closest to achieving AGI are not going to flip and start talking about AGI risk, the rewards are too great. But those who are losing the race (and don’t want to live to see their rivals achieve the final flex before them) might be able to feign virtue by claiming “Now I see AGI is dangerous, I’m a concerned expert and this needs to be regulated!” They can cloak themselves in pretended virtue while also preventing a rival from crossing the finish line first. I argue that hoping for more Jeff Hintons and Daniel Kokotajlo-like people isn't a good strategy when the incentives are still structured to keep most of them from wanting to talk about it. Here’s the full video essay:
Daniel Faggella26,975 views • 1 year ago
for levin, the distinction between 'living things' and 'machines' isn't a tenably distinction everything is a 'smooth metamorphoses process' where engineered systems are increasingly part of the ' intersecting continua' of life his words: 'we need to get on board with this'
Daniel Faggella11,050 views • 6 months ago
Today my Trajectory episode with Prof Max Max Tegmark is live. This was recorded live during the AI Action Summit in Paris. 2 big takeaways, among many: 1. Military leadership seeing AGI as a threat may increase (not decrease) an arms race. 2. Wishing for posthuman futures TOO soon = ridiculous. Lets just lay out a few of these points here: 1. The tipping point for coordination / military leadership. Max talks about how, when the militaries in the US and China see AGI itself as a risk to both of them. He has faith that international coordination is possible, and that a combination of (a) raising awareness (like with the frameworks he shares in this episode) and (b) massive, scary growth in AGI capabilities could very well lead to an attractor state of coordination over conflict. He believes that it's important to make "teh control problem" well known ahead of time, so that if/when an AGI disaster happens, it won't be seen as an attack from the enemy (which would accelerate an arms race), but it would be seen as a shared danger for both nations. He's also no blind optimist. He's very clear that there may not be easy odds for international coordination, but even if the odds are slim - its vastly better than having a million Unworthy Successor AGIs getting hurled into the world at once. 2. Posthuman futures - but only when we get them right. Max's Life 3.0 is a pretty damn inspiring long-term look at AGI futures (albeit through an anthropocentric lens). He says in this interview that there might be a long term future (he says 1MM years, which seems kind of hyperbolic and wholly unrealistic, but alas) where humans may not even want to control AGIs and posthuman life should flourish. But he rightly points out that: a) We have no idea what we're even building now, so hurling posthuman life into the world is ridiculous, and b) We should focus on understanding the tech and obtaining global coordination and human benefits as a near-term step While my timelines for when a posthuman transition will happen are vastly more near-term than Max's, the argument AGAINST "rushing to posthumanism" is one I wholly agree with. ... What do you think of Max's takes? Anything else I should have asked him? (Links in post below)
Daniel Faggella16,348 views • 1 year ago
No more content to load