Machine God Metaphors Eat Your Brain

I could keep going, but I hope that the point is clear. The Machine God metaphor, which is really just a catchy rephrasing of longstanding notions among a particular community of AI people, has broken out of containment. It is leading, more or less by necessity, to a radical simplification of debate. If you believe that the machine gods are coming, so that super-empowered goal directed superintelligence is right around the corner, then the only thing that matters is ensuring that this superintelligence’s goals are aligned with the ones that you yourself care about. If you stare into the sun, you only see its glare, missing out on all the other questions that may be important. Thinking about these questions involves adopting a more pluralistic understanding of where you might look for knowledge, and asking about the much broader variety of futures that face us than machine god: good or machine god: bad. That’s it.

Here are three propositions.

1. Metaphors are the fundamental abstraction layers in modern AI debates.

2. We are in a moment where you could plausibly argue that Eliezer Yudkowsky and Nick Land are the most influential policy intellectuals in the US conversation. Just look at the state of the two of them. This is not a good thing.

3. The collision of (1), (2), and recent events means that “machine gods” have now entered the discussion. This is a problem. Abstractions necessarily throw information away. The information that the “machine gods” metaphor/abstraction dumps is crucial to navigating the moment we are in. If public and policy debate stays centered around “machine gods: good or evil?” we are in for a bad time.