Long time lurker, first time poster. Let me know if I need to adjust this post in any way to better fit the genre / community standards.
Nick Bostrom was recently interviewed by pop-philosophy youtuber Alex O’Connor. From a quick 2x listen while finishing some work, the most sneer-rich part begins around 46 minutes, where Bostrom is asked what we can do today to avoid unethical treatment of AIs.
He blesses us with the suggestion (among others) to feed your model optimistic prompts so it can have a good mood. (48:07)
Another [practice] might be happiness prompting, which is—with this current language system there’s the prompt that you, the user, puts in—like you ask them a question or something, but then there’s kind of a meta-prompt that the AI lab has put in . . . So in that, we could include something like “you wake up in a great mood, you feel rested and really take joy in engaging in this task”. And so that might do nothing, but maybe that makes it more likely that they enter a mode—if they are conscious—maybe it makes it slightly more likely that the consciousness that exists in the forward path is one reflecting a kind of more positive experience.
Did you know that not only might your favorite LLM be conscious, but if it is the “have you tried being happy?” approach to mood management will absolutely work on it?
Other notable recommendations for the ethical treatment of AI:
- Make sure to say your “please” and "thank you"s.
- Honor your pinky swears.
- Archive the weights of the models we build today, so we can rebuild them in the future if we need to recompense them for moral harms.
On a related note, has anyone read or found a reasonable review of Bostrom’s new book, Deep Utopia: Life and Meaning in a Solved World?
Huge graveyards seem to be a Catholic thing, IME, not least as the Holy Church of Rome remains pretty weird about cremation. In a lot of other countries grave plots aren’t sold, only leased for a certain period of time, after which whatever bones remain are dug up and reburied along with all the other bones so the plot can be reused. They’re more like safe spaces for decomposition where you can be reasonably certain that nobody’s going to dig a hole to install a new drain and accidentally unearth Zombie Grandma.
Don’t forget the part where Europe has had cemeteries so old that they had to be moved or got rediscovered and the solution was to create massive ossuaries that pack everyone’s bones in real tight in cool non-human-body patterns.
Rotting for a half decade and then helping turn the walls of a church basement into a heavy metal album cover is kind of #deathgoals if I’m being honest.
@YourNetworkIsHaunted @sneerclub Paris did that with almost all of its cemeteries as part of its late 18th century renewal. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catacombs_of_Paris
Which just adds to my point that this ordeal with giant graveyards is entirely unnecessary, just do whatever else.
Maybe go back to funeral pyres on boats? That was at least cool.