Noisebuffer

Imagine a police commander refusing to visit a crime scene for evidence because the scene sounds too depressing. This is what is happening in Washington right now. A big part of defending the innocent requires leaders and defenders to subject themselves to less desirable evils, things in the world we do not want others to have to deal with. Usually this is something you only think about with first responders, but it bleeds over to leadership as well. Leadership has to deal with cognitive aspects of the undesirable world. This is crucial to preventing any disaster or misfortune. In order to prevent a tragedy, you have to consider and think about the tragedy yourself. Only our leadership doesn’t want to do that. It seems the MAGA administration in Washington are the true snowflakes of our time, unable to even play with the idea of a machine uprising – something that the public has been exposed to hundreds if not thousands of times through story and movies over the last century at least.

Take this article at USA Today Where Mike Johnson, the speaker of the House, wants companies to regulate AI themselves. When companies are running the largest Data center in the country, fueled by illegal turbines, to run things that cannot be shut off for national security purposes, you’re asking for companies to regulate national defense. Seems idiotic.

Or this video of the vice president stating that he can’t focus on saving us from the end times because he has to be good to his wife. He says it’s too bad for him spiritually to focus on whether or not we’re in the end times. First of all, the correct answer should be No, we’re not in the end times, especially when you have such a large viewership and want to project confidence. Second, if you’re in such a high position in the US government, there should be no theoretical event that you’re not willing to discuss.

Or this article discussing Trump at a golf event in Scotland brushing off AI safety concerns as negative forces. As if somehow the only thing relevant discussing is positivity? Even police officers, enforcement at the lowest levels are subjected to evils beyond anything anyone would want to write about. Their sacrifice demands your attention to matters at hand. Shameful.

We’re fucked. Our leaders are afraid of thinking hard about ‘bad things’.

Meanwhile the Anthropic CEO clearly writes out about one potential situation where AI swarms could take over the net in 6-12 months. We’re already seeing an overwhelming amount of traffic from AI sources. The idea that these companies are OK to regulate themselves is absurd.

If you’ve been to the Terafab.ai site lately, it has a simple breakdown of the Kardashev scale:

This is somewhat of a useless scale and it’s surprising that it’s become such a huge part of Elon’s beliefs that it’s actually on the front page of Terafab.

Does it really measure technological advancement though? Forget that we actually could never capture all the energy that the planet or sun generates and still have what we think of as a healthy environment to live in, it doesn’t represent advanced technology. Because it really only measures how great control a single government or corporation can exercise over a given workforce, whether that’s robotic or human. Have enough labor and you can scale modern technology, without advancing it much, to absorb all the energy on the planet by removing every nice place there is to live and inserting a power plant.

If we want to measure technological advancement we look instead at how common technologies are that use exotic fundamental phenomena. But what good does that do us if a huge portion of the people using the technology are fat slobs who understand none of it and only want a paycheck? That’s not technological advancement that’s technological oppression.

So instead of using a scale that measures how big your company is and lying and saying this is advancement of humanity, perhaps we can go further and quantify what actual advancement of humanity is. How do we do that? Here are a couple ideas, without creating a quantifiable scale…

Education and Fitness

What if we were to quantify the percentage of global population that is at a certain level of competence in education? If 90% of the planet could do calculus, we would be quite advanced, likewise if 90% of the population was at the level of a 1900’s olympian gymnast. There are many more appropriate thresholds, but this is our purpose. We raise children in schools so we can improve society and make the next generations improve upon that. It’s the pinnacle of advancement – not power generation. The idea is to measure greatness not in how much power we can get machines to extract from nature, but by how much and how greatly we can get humans to perform.

Mass Collaboration

Another method to measure civilizational greatness is how many people you can get to focus on one goal. Global meditation, writing, or volunteering. A big part of this is consolidating goals and enabling greater collaboration. For instance if it were possible to focus on ending violence enforced peace, we could measure how advanced we are by judging how many weapons are needed for local, state, and foreign defense. A scale which measures advancement by how close we are to world peace would mean much more than how many power plants we litter nature with.

In essence a good scale of advancement will take into consideration the number of weapons owned by people and their test scores. Which we’re definitely sliding back on that scale, at least in the USA.