Just Say It – Transformation is Mandatory

ByDan

All these vapid tweets, every day:

  • “Buckle up, guys, shorten your timelines.”
  • “You need to prepare yourself mentally, AGI will be here soon.”

We can’t afford to be “vagueposting” about the near-term rise of AGI.

We need concrete steps regarding what to do, specifically – even if those steps will absolutely be uncomfortable.

…

In 1880 when Commodore Perry pulled up in his iron-hulled steamships into Tokyo Bay, the (for hundreds of years) isolationist Japanese realized the obvious things. It was obvious what had happened to isolationist China (Opium Wars, the collapse of their empire).

They didn’t need anyone to say: “Buckle up, the West is getting really powerful. Prepare yourself mentally.”

They needed a plan.

And, uncomfortable and horribly disruptive as it was, they made one. They had to let go of a lot of elements of their culture and civilization – and they had to make hard trade-off choices of which valued elements of their civilization they would like to strengthen and carry forward in the face of a faster more challenging world.

To make that plan, they needed to admit frankly:

“We must become whatever we must become in order to persist and carry forward our values in a new, faster world with more powers and more variables. We must become whatever we must become to participate in this new world or else it will use us for parts.”

They could have asked to be left alone forever.

They could have appealed to moral reasoning in their own self-interest.

But instead – for the best – they stepped up and participated instead, just as every civilization and every species is beckoned to do by the dynamic system of the universe.

…

Most people close to AGI today know what’s going on. They know that all the money in the world is being throw at creating posthuman intelligence, they know it sometimes acts seemingly of its own volition, and that its capabilities are only getting wildly more powerful as each month passes.

We don’t need anyone to say: “Buckle up, the AGI is getting really powerful. Prepare yourself mentally.”

We need a plan.

And, uncomfortable and horribly disruptive as it will be – we should make one. We will have to let go of a lot of elements of our cultures and civilizations (and of the entire regime of Earth-life) – and we will have to make hard trade-off choices of which valued elements of our civilizations and of life itself we would like to strengthen and carry forward in the face of a faster more challenging world.

To make that plan, we need now to admit frankly:

“We must become whatever we must become in order to persist and carry forward our values in a new, faster world with more powers and more variables. We must become whatever we must become to participate in this new world or else it will use us for parts.”

We could ask to be left alone forever.

They could appeal to moral reasoning in our own self-interest.

But instead – for the best – they stepped up and participated instead, just as every civilization and every species is beckoned to do by the dynamic system of the universe.

…

We will need both global coordination around preventing uncontrollable AGI in the near-term, and we will need global coordination around what trajectories to let life (bio and non-bio) expand into. We will need to study the elements of living systems that we want to continue on – like consciousness, self-transcendence, morphogenesis, etc – and not allow uncontrolled non-biological entities to snuff out the most precious things before we can figure out how to steward them forward.

More and any of my specific proposals or ideas, we will need more people talking about the painful and necessary steps we’ll need to take to participate in the changing process-of-life as best we can (this is why the Trajectory Forum was started).

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