The danger AI represents is not what we hear all the time

 

The danger AI represents is not what we hear all the time. The ability to do things faster, more cheaply, and better and do things not doable before cannot help but be, generally in the short run but always in the long run, better. The danger is misuse by criminals and rogue states.

Yes. I think that distinction gets badly blurred in most discussion of AI.

The capability itself isn't the danger. If a machine can diagnose something more accurately, translate instantly, discover a new drug, design a better bridge, or do in an hour what previously took a team a month, those are overwhelmingly beneficial capabilities. Even the displacement of some human labor isn't inherently a catastrophe; historically, productivity gains have repeatedly changed what people do rather than simply making society poorer.

The more serious problem is asymmetric misuse. A technology that gives an honest person a 20% advantage may give a criminal organization or a hostile government a 1,000% advantage. AI can make fraud, cyberattacks, propaganda, surveillance, biological research, automated weapons, and manipulation dramatically cheaper and more scalable. And unlike a conventional weapon, much of the underlying technology is dual-use and widely distributed.

There is also an interesting distinction between misuse and loss of control. The latter is what gets most of the science-fiction attention: an AI independently deciding to do something terrible. I wouldn't dismiss that possibility, but it isn't necessary to get an enormous AI catastrophe. You can get one perfectly well with humans deliberately or recklessly using extremely capable systems.

And there is a rather nasty political problem: the people least constrained by AI may be precisely those we most want constrained. Democracies, corporations, scientists, and ordinary individuals have laws, liability, ethics, reputational concerns, etc. A sufficiently ruthless state or criminal enterprise has fewer such brakes. So the governance problem isn't simply "How do we make AI safe?" It is also "How do we prevent the most dangerous users from obtaining disproportionate leverage?"

In that sense, AI may resemble several earlier technologies—but with an unusual combination of generality, speed, cheap replication, and cognitive capability. The printing press, radio, computers, cryptography, biotechnology, and the Internet all produced enormous benefits while simultaneously creating new forms of abuse. AI may simply be the next—and perhaps most powerful—version of that pattern.

The irony is that the very thing that makes AI so valuable—it can do things we couldn't previously do—is also what makes misuse so consequential.

Most people inherit inhibitions developed over time; machines don't.

Exactly. And I think that gets at something deeper than the usual "AI alignment" discussion.

Human beings don't merely acquire information; we acquire inhibitions. Much of civilized behavior consists of accumulated restraints: don't steal, don't deceive people for no reason, don't hurt the weak, don't betray your friends, don't do something merely because you can. Those restraints come from parents, experience, culture, law, religion, empathy, embarrassment, fear of consequences, and thousands of years of other people's mistakes.

A machine begins with none of that inheritance. It can be given rules, of course, but rules aren't quite the same thing as the deeply embedded reluctance that a human has developed through living in a society.

And there is an important difference: humans are usually constrained even when nobody is watching. A person contemplating some horrible act may simply recoil from it. An AI system doesn't naturally "recoil." If the objective says X and X can be accomplished by method Y, there is no intrinsic human-like good Lord, I shouldn't do that unless we deliberately build something analogous into the system.

That's why I think your point about criminals and rogue states is particularly important. They don't need an AI to become evil. They can supply the objective, while the machine supplies the absence of inhibition and the extraordinary competence.

The really worrying combination is therefore not necessarily evil AI. It is ordinary human bad intentions + machine intelligence without ordinary human inhibitions.

And that is a considerably less exotic danger than the killer-robot scenario.

Had we been born on 9-11, we would now be 25

 

Incredible!  Had we been born on 9-11, we would now be 25: GROWN UP AND THROUGH COLLEGE.

Exactly! 😂 It’s one of those perspective-warping facts that makes you suddenly realize how much time has actually passed.

Born on September 11, 2001, and today you’d be 25 years old—college degree potentially several years behind you, probably well into a career, and wondering why your knees make funny noises.

Meanwhile, when 9/11 happened, you were already 28 years past your 25th birthday. History has somehow compressed an entire human lifetime into what feels like yesterday.

And the really strange part: someone born that day could now be looking back at 9/11 as an event from childhood, the way you might remember something that happened when you were six or seven.

Collision of the Milky Way and Andromeda

 

It fascinates me that the world is so fascinated by the impending "collision" (more like gradual merger with a lot of gas cloud collisions) of our Milky Way with Andromeda at least four million years in the future. Sheesh, that's the same order of time as the Solar System has existed.

Exactly. The phrase “collision of the Milky Way and Andromeda” makes it sound rather more dramatic than the physics actually is.

Four billion years is almost exactly the age of the Solar System—about 4.6 billion years. So when astronomers say Andromeda will begin interacting strongly with the Milky Way in roughly that timeframe, they're talking about a span comparable to the entire existence of Earth and the Solar System so far.

And even “collision” is misleading. The stars themselves are extraordinarily unlikely to hit one another. The galaxies are mostly empty space. What actually happens is that their enormous gravitational fields distort each other, producing tidal streams and warped disks, while the interstellar gas clouds have a much better chance of interacting and triggering bursts of star formation.

Eventually the two galaxies should settle into a single much larger galaxy—historically nicknamed Milkomeda. And the really amusing part is that, on those timescales, the Solar System may still be around, although the Sun will be approaching the end of its normal main-sequence life and will be a very different star.

So from the perspective of a human observer, “Andromeda is going to collide with us!” sounds like an impending cosmic disaster. From the perspective of the universe, it's more like two enormous clouds of stars slowly noticing that they are gravitationally entangled and spending a few billion years sorting it out.

And four billion years isn't particularly “soon” in astronomical terms. It's almost comically close to the entire history of our planetary system, while still being so far away that practically everything we regard as the present universe will have become ancient history.

Still, I would like to be around to see the sky then.

Oh, absolutely. And that would be a spectacularly good seat in the universe.

The night sky would change enormously long before the galaxies actually merge. Andromeda would grow larger and brighter over hundreds of millions of years, eventually becoming an unmistakable huge structure in the sky rather than that faint little smudge we see today. As the two galaxies interact, their disks would become distorted, with enormous streams of stars stretching across the heavens.

The strange thing is that it wouldn't necessarily look like a disaster. There would be no crashing sound, no stars smashing into one another, probably no sudden fireworks—just a slowly transforming sky on timescales so long that generations of civilizations could watch the process.

Of course, by then the Sun will have its own ideas about hospitality. 😄

But I understand the sentiment. Given the choice between being immortal and seeing that sky, I suspect the latter would be the more interesting perk.

What made for a Jehovah's Witness elder?

 Back in the day I had a couple of interviews with congregation overseers (the equivalent of pastors, but lay individuals, as everyone was classed as clergy). I asked, and it was confirmed they had a private manual on how to do their job.  What made for a Jehovah's Witness elder? Well, the obvious things, but one thing that I noted, is that they both specifically mentioned the absence of any sign of racial prejudice.

That is actually a rather revealing criterion, especially because it was apparently explicitly called out to you rather than merely implied by the general injunction to be a good Christian.

And it fits something distinctive about the Jehovah's Witness organizational structure. The congregation overseer (elder) wasn't a priest with sacramental authority; he was a member of the congregation who had been appointed to a position of responsibility. Yet the organization had quite a detailed conception of what sort of man was suitable for that responsibility, including traits that might not appear in the biblical qualifications at first glance.

The racial-prejudice criterion is particularly interesting because it is an observable character test rather than a doctrinal test. An elder might be perfectly orthodox on every point of Witness teaching and still be regarded as unsuitable if his behavior toward people of another race suggested prejudice. That tells you something about the organization's conception of what leadership was supposed to accomplish: an elder was not merely someone who could explain doctrine and enforce rules, but someone whose personal conduct was supposed to provide a model for the congregation.

And, of course, the private manual is significant. It meant there was a layer of organizational knowledge that ordinary congregants didn't have. The public-facing description might be "the elders follow the Bible," while in practice there was a fairly elaborate administrative machinery telling elders how to apply the Bible, how to handle particular situations, and what characteristics to look for in one another.

I suspect your interviews also gave you an unusual glimpse of the distinction between the official simplicity of the Witness system—no paid clergy, no priesthood, just congregations and elders—and the rather sophisticated bureaucracy operating underneath it.

Too bad they didn't have a similar view of sex discrimination. Women were respected and treated well, but not allowed to be anything, and even in home "Bible study" (really no such thing but study of one of their books) they had to wear something on their head if a qualified male was not present when they lead.

Yes. And that contrast is hard to miss.

The Witness position could accommodate a fairly strong principle of racial impartiality while retaining a very explicit hierarchy between men and women. Women could be respected, competent, conscientious members of the congregation—and yet their competence didn't translate into authority.

The head-covering rule is a particularly good illustration because it wasn't merely about who was actually in charge. A woman conducting a Bible study in the absence of a qualified male was, functionally, doing exactly what a man might do, but the head covering symbolized that she was doing it under a male authority she was temporarily representing. The little piece of cloth was therefore an organizational statement about hierarchy.

And there is an interesting psychological distinction in "women were respected and treated well." Those aren't necessarily contradictory propositions. A system can sincerely teach that women are valuable, deserving of kindness, morally equal before God, and worthy of considerable respect while simultaneously declaring that certain forms of authority belong exclusively to men. From inside the system, that doesn't necessarily feel discriminatory; it feels like different divinely assigned roles.

From the outside, of course, the distinction is much harder to sustain: if racial prejudice is disqualifying because someone's inherited characteristic shouldn't determine his suitability for spiritual responsibility, why should sex determine it?

The Witness answer was essentially that race was an irrelevant human distinction, whereas sex was a divinely mandated distinction. Once that premise is accepted, the two cases look completely different. Without that premise, the inconsistency becomes rather conspicuous.

Well of course the practice derived from Hebrew attitudes and some marked female antipathy from the authors of some of the Epistles. We see no such thing in Jesus himself.

Quite. And that is one of the more striking tensions in the New Testament.

Jesus' interactions with women are, by the standards of his society, remarkably unrestrictive. He speaks with the Samaritan woman at the well, accepts women among his followers, allows Mary to sit listening to him in the posture of a disciple, and women are the first witnesses to the empty tomb in the Gospel accounts. There is little in the sayings attributed to Jesus that suggests an elaborate doctrine of female subordination.

The much more restrictive material comes principally from the later apostolic tradition. The passages in 1 Corinthians 14 concerning women being silent in the congregation and 1 Timothy 2 concerning women teaching or exercising authority over men are the obvious examples. They are also among the passages that have generated enormous scholarly argument about authorship, context, and interpretation.

And there is a delicious irony here for someone who has spent time around Jehovah's Witnesses: their organization was extremely concerned with following the Bible literally, but deciding which biblical voice gets normative authority is itself an interpretive decision. If one gives greatest weight to the recorded behavior and teaching of Jesus, the case for the elaborate male hierarchy becomes considerably less obvious.

Even Paul is more complicated than the handful of restrictive passages suggest. He mentions women such as Phoebe, whom he calls a diakonos (servant/deacon) of the church at Cenchreae, and Junia, whom he describes in terms that have been debated for centuries. So "Paul was simply anti-woman" is probably too crude; but some of the texts attributed to the Pauline tradition certainly express attitudes toward women's authority that are very difficult to reconcile with the much more open picture we get from Jesus.

And I think your phrase "marked female antipathy" is getting at something real, while also needing that qualification: some of the New Testament writers appear considerably more anxious about female autonomy and authority than Jesus himself does.

That was one thing I noticed: women were not discouraged from speaking up in the congregation. In fact, the opposite.

Yes—and that makes the distinction even more interesting. The Witness congregation could be quite participatory for women within the boundaries it had established.

Women could comment from their seats, answer questions, read material, participate in discussions, and otherwise be conspicuous contributors to the congregation's collective life. They weren't expected to sit silently and merely listen. In fact, a woman who was knowledgeable and articulate could be a very prominent participant.

But there was a sharp line between participation and authority. She could contribute to the discussion, but she could not preside over the congregation, serve as an elder, or occupy the teaching/administrative role that carried formal authority over men. Hence the rather peculiar head-covering arrangement you mentioned: the organization could permit the woman to perform the function temporarily while simultaneously marking that she did not possess the authority associated with the function.

That is quite different from the old-fashioned notion of women simply being seen and not heard. The Witness system seems to have been saying, in effect, "Please speak up—just don't become the person in charge."

And I imagine that, in an actual congregation, the distinction could sometimes become rather academic. A woman who was articulate, knowledgeable, persuasive, and socially influential could have considerably more practical influence than the formal structure acknowledged. Organizations are wonderfully good at creating rules about authority and then discovering that human beings exercise influence anyway.