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Have you ever regorge and had diarrhea at the same time ? I have , and when it happened , I was listen to a fan - made audiobook version ofHarry Potter and the Methods of Rationality(HPMOR ) , a fan fiction spell by Eliezer Yudkowsky .
No , the dual - ended bodily horror was not stir up by the fanfic , but the two experience are inextricable in my mind . I was dismayed to discover years by and by that the 660,000 - word fanfic I marathoned while sick has some bizarre intersections with the ultra loaded technorati , include many of the bod involved in the currentOpenAI walloping .
Case in point : In anEaster egg spotted by 404 Media(which was too pocket-size for anyone else — even me , someone who ’s in reality record the thousand - odd page fanfic — to remark ) , there is a once - name Quidditch player in the straggle fib namedEmmett Shear . Yes , the same Emmett Shear who co - founded Twitch and was just call interim CEO of OpenAI , arguably the most influential fellowship of the 2020s . Shear was a fan of Yudkowsky ’s work , following the serialized story as it was published online . So , as a birthday present , he was gifted a cameo .
Shear is a longtime fan of the writings of Yudkowsky , as are many of the AI industry ’s key players . But this Harry Potter fanfic is Yudkowsky ’s most popular work .
HPMOR is an alternate universe rewriting of the Harry Potter series , which begins with the assumption that Harry ’s aunty Petunia married an Oxford biochemistry prof or else of the abusive dolt Vernon Dursley . So , Harry grows up as a have intercourse - it - all kid haunt with rationalist cerebration , an political orientation which prize experimental , scientific thinking to solve problems , shun emotion , religion or other imprecise measures . It ’s not three pages into the account before Harry quote the Feynman Lectures on Physics to attempt to clear a discrepancy between his adoptive parents over whether or not magic is real . If you thoughtactualHarry ceramist could be a slight frustrative at times ( why does n’t he ever necessitate Dumbledore the most obvious enquiry ? ) , get ready forthisHarry Potter , who could give the eponymic “ Young Sheldon ” a rill for his money .
It makes gumption that Yudkowsky run in the same circles as many of the most influential people in AI today , since he himself is a longtime AI investigator . In a 2011 New Yorker feature on thetechno - libertarians of Silicon Valley , George Packer cover from a dinner party political party at the home of billionaire venture capitalist Peter Thiel , who would later on co - found and enthrone in OpenAI . As “ blonde in black dresses ” pour the hands wine , Packer dines with PayPal carbon monoxide - founders like David Sacks and Luke Nosek . Also at the party is Patri Friedman , a former Google engineer who got fund from Thiel to start a not-for-profit that aims to make floating , anarchist sea civilisation inspired by the Burning Man festival ( after 15 class , the constitution does not seem to have made much progress ) . And then there ’s Yudkowsky .
To further link up the parties involved , behold : a 10 - calendar month - old selfie of now - ousted OpenAI CEO Sam Altman , Grimes and Yudkowsky .
Join us at TechCrunch Sessions: AI
Exhibit at TechCrunch Sessions: AI
pic.twitter.com/j3LUDyDO3U
— Sam Altman ( @sama)February 24 , 2023
Yudkowsky is not a household name like Altman or Elon Musk . But he tends to dress up repeatedly in the stories behind companies like OpenAI , or even behind the great romance that brought us children named X Æ A - Xii , Exa Dark Sideræl and Techno Mechanicus . No , really — Musk once desire to twitch a caper about “ Roko ’s Basilisk , ” a thought experiment about contrived intelligence information that originated on LessWrong , Yudkowsky ’s blog and community forum . But , as it turned out , Grimes had already made the same joke about a “ Rococo Basilisk ” in the music television for her song “ Flesh Without blood line . ”
HPMOR is quite literally a recruitment tool for the rationalist movement , which discover its virtual home on Yudkowsky ’s LessWrong . Through an true entertaining story , Yudkowsky uses the familiar world of Harry Potter to illustrate rationalist ideology , shew how Harry work on against his cognitive bias to become a master problem - solver . In a final showdown between Harry and Professor Quirrell — his wise man in rationalism who turns out to be evil — Yudkowsky break the fourth wall and gave his readers a “ final exam . ” As a community , reader had to present rationalist theories explaining how Harry could get himself out of a fatal plight . Thankfully , for the sake of happy endings , the residential district passed .
But the lesson of HPMOR is n’t just to be a better rationalist , or as “ less haywire ” as you may be .
“ To me , so much of HPMOR is about how rationality can make you implausibly effective , but implausibly effective can still be incredibly evil , ” my only other friend who has read HPMOR told me . “ I feel like the whole point of HPMOR is that reason is irrelevant at the end of the twenty-four hours if your alignment is to evil . ”
But , of class , we ca n’t all agree on one definition of goodness versus wickedness . This get us back to the upheaval at OpenAI , a caller that is trying to ramp up an AI that ’s smarter than human being . OpenAI wants to align this artificial cosmopolitan tidings ( AGI ) with human values ( such as the human value of not being killed in an revelatory , AI - stimulate effect ) , but it just so materialize that this “ coalition research ” is Yudkowsky ’s specialty .
In March , thousands of notable figures in AIsigned an heart-to-heart letterarguing for all “ AI science lab to immediately pause for at least 6 months . ”
Signatories include Meta and Google engineers , founders of Skype , Getty Images and Pinterest , Stability AI founder Emad Mostaque , Steve Wozniak and even Elon Musk , aco - founder of OpenAIwho stepped down in 2018 . But Yudkowsky did not sign the alphabetic character , and instead , pennedan op - erectile dysfunction in TIME Magazineto argue that a six - month pause is n’t radical enough .
“ If somebody ramp up a too - potent AI , under present conditions , I expect that every unmarried member of the human species and all biologic life on Earth dies shortly thereafter , ” Yudkowsky wrote . “ There ’s no proposed architectural plan for how we could do any such thing and survive . OpenAI ’s openly declaredintentionis to make some next AI do our AI alignment homework . Just hearing thatthis is the planought to be enough to get any reasonable person to panic . The other head AI research lab , DeepMind , has no plan at all . ”
While Yudkowsky debate for the doomerist approach when it descend to AI , the OpenAI leadership disturbance has highlight thewide range of unlike beliefsaround how to pilot technology that is possibly an experiential menace .
Acting as the interim CEO of OpenAI , Shear — now one of the most knock-down the great unwashed in the world , and not a Quidditch quester in a fanfic — is posting memes about the dissimilar factions in the AI debate .
wake up babe , AI faction compass just became more relevantpic.twitter.com/MwYOLedYxV
— Emmett Shear ( @eshear)November 18 , 2023
There ’s the techno - optimists , who support the growth of tech at all costs , because they intend any problem cause by this “ turn at all monetary value ” mentality will be work by tech itself . Then there ’s theeffective accelerationists(e / acc ) which seems to be kind of like techno - optimism , but with more language about how growth at all costs is the only way forrad because of the second law of thermodynamics say so . The safetyists ( or “ decels ” ) suffer the ontogeny of technology , but only in a way that is regulated and good ( meanwhile , in his “ Techno - Optimist Manifesto , ” venture capitalist Marc Andreessen decries “ trust and base hit ” and “ tech ethical motive ” ashis enemy ) . And then there are the doomers , who think that when AI outmanoeuvre us , it will kill us all .
Yudkowsky is a leader among the doomers , and he ’s also someone who has expend the last decades running in the same circles as what seems like half of the board of OpenAI . One democratic hypothesis about Altman ’s ousting is that the board want to constitute someone who line up more closely with its “ decel ” values . So , go in Shear , who we know is inspired by Yudkowsky and also study himself adoomer - slash - safetyist .
We still do n’t experience what ’s pass on at OpenAI , and the storey seems to change about once every 10 second . For now , techy circles on societal media extend to oppose over decel versus e / acc political orientation , using the backcloth of the OpenAI chaos to make their arguments . And in the midst of it all , I ca n’t assist but find it fascinating that , if you squinch at it , all of this traces back to one really wordy Harry Potter fanfic .
Effective accelerationism , doomers , decels , and how to flaunt your AI prior
https://techcrunch.com/2023/11/21/a-timeline-of-sam-altmans-firing-from-openai-and-the-fallout/
