Reasoning about future AIs is hard
“so let’s just theorycraft eugenics instead” is like 50% of rationalism.
Well of course, everything is determined by genetics, including, as the EA forum taught me today, things like whether someone is vegetarian so to solve that problem (as well as any other problem) we need (and I quote) “human gene editing”. /s
This site has had
10 days without a eugenics post. Previous record: 1.Oh good, one more nazi acronym to remember.
It seems to be a nazified reading of “inclusive fitness” which is a refinement of Darwin’s original idea but extended slightly to groups of individuals
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inclusive_fitness
I read somewhere that human genetic evolution essentially stopped once the bicycle enabled people to cycle over to the next village to have sex instead of having to bonk their closest relatives, so I don’t really see the point from an evolutionary point of view to enforce biological kinship by divine fiat, unless you’re unhealthily obsessed with “the purity of the blood”. Also, the obsession with only allowing sex for procreation is weirdly reactionary and goes directly against other evopsych fetishes like “alphas” impregnating more females compared to “betas”.
Edit Genghis Khan is mentioned in the comments, as someone who has maximized IGF but hardly monogamously.
These guys are big on breeding kinks for reasons.
Shorter: “Let’s assume that I’m a godling. I will definitely be an evil god. Here’s how.”
I think people are misreading the post a little. It’s a follow on from the old AI x-risk argument: “evolution optimises for having kids, yet people use condoms! Therefore evolution failed to “align” humans to it’s goals, therefore aligning AI is nigh-impossible”.
As a commentator points out, for a “failure”, there sure do seem to be a lot of human kids around.
This post then decides to take the analogy further, and be like “If I was hypothetically a eugenicist god, and I wanted to hypothetically turn the entire population of humanity into eugenicists, it’d be really hard! Therefore we can’t get an AI to build us, like, a bridge, without it developing ulterior motives”.
You can hypothetically make this bad argument without supporting eugenics… but I wouldn’t put money on it.
It’s not even eugenics to optimize ze genome to make ze uberbabies, OP mostly seems mad people are allowed to have non-procreative sex and couches it in a heavily loaded interpretation of inclusive fitness.
