u/Auriga33

More accurately, I tend to not make very large updates on the basis of studies in certain fields. A lot of people believe that if you have a study making some claim, then you have strong evidence of that claim. But they would be wrong. The mistake they're making is that they're assuming the study faithfully represents the expected data and conditioning on worlds where one would see that data. But this isn't what they should be conditioning on. Rather, they should be conditioning on worlds where they would come across a study reporting that data.

The basic problem is that if thing X has a real effect of Y, studies that try to measure this effect would report findings that cluster around a distribution centered on Y due to differences in methodology, measurement error, etc. Depending on how close Y is to zero, there would be lots of studies reporting negative results while lots of other ones report positive results. It would be very easy then to find a study claiming that X's effect is either negative or positive. So when you see a study claiming to find a certain effect, it's genuinely hard to know how faithful that is to the real one. When the person presenting this study to you has incentives to get you to believe a particular thing about the topic at hand, this is especially true.

Not all fields are created equal in this regard. Some fields are more sensitive to measurement error, methodology differences, and the other factors that lead to this problem. It's specifically in the most sensitive fields that I am as skeptical of studies as I state in the title, though I exercise lower levels of skepticism in other fields as well. So what do I do instead of relying on studies? Well, there really is no substitute for having a good model of the world. If you develop a good model, aggregated through all the observations you've come across in your life, you can get a sense for what is true and what is false that is far more informative than some random study you find.

Despite repeated claims over the past few years that AI will hit a wall any day now, progress continues to happen as fast as ever. By some metrics, it has even accelerated. How anyone can see all that is happening today with AI and not think that something big will happen soon is beyond me. I'm convinced we'll see ASI before 2030, informed by the forecasts of the AI 2027 folks and others.

While all this capabilities progress has been happening, alignment progress has been meager. No good solutions to the hard problems of alignment have been found. And an international treaty to pause AI development seems like a pipe dream at this point. There's little political interest and I have no faith in the current administration to competently implement such a thing anyways.

I've accepted that there are only a few short years left before everyone dies. All the arguments for why ASI isn't happening soon or why it is but we'll manage to align it in such a short timeframe are utterly unconvincing. My focus right now is to just make the best of the remaining time I have in this world.

However, I've found it hard to enjoy the present because of my anxiety over AI. It's like trying to enjoy your last meal before being executed. I also feel a tremendous amount of anticipatory grief knowing that everything I know and love about humanity—the people, the stories, the art, the music, the laughter—are soon to be no more. Almost as if these things are already gone.

I've been convinced of the imminence of ASI ever since ChatGPT came out, but it's only in the past several months or so that it's started to significantly affect me on an emotional level. Developments like the emergence of truly competent coding agents and models as powerful as Claude Mythos have made the threat feel more real to me than ever. We're inching ever-closer to RSI.

I'm wondering if anyone else feels similarly anxious about AI. If you are, how are you dealing with it? If you aren't, why not? Is there something that makes you think things will be fine or does ASI just not feel real to you yet? My apologies is this isn't the right place for this post. I don't know of another place on Reddit where people are willing to discuss these things seriously and not just dismiss it as sci-fi.

I think there should be a scientific effort to create a hybrid between a human and a chimpanzee. Think about how much we could learn by creating and studying such a specimen. And yes, I think it's possible. All the arguments people cite against this possibility are poor and can easily be disproven.

One of those arguments is that humans and chimps have different chromosome counts therefore crossbreeding is impossible. This can be disproven by counterexample: horses and donkeys also have different chromosome counts but they can crossbreed. People also cite the fact that humans and chimps have been diverged for millions of years as if that's some sort of hard limit to reproduction. Again, we can point to counterexamples: Camels and llamas diverged twice as long ago, yet they can crossbreed. Scientists even created a hybrid between the American paddlefish and the Russian sturgeon, a pair of species that diverged 200 million years ago, during dinosaur times.

Another thing people say is that we've already tried and failed. But we haven't actually tried very hard. Skeptics point to failed attempts by a Soviet scientist in the 1920s, but in that case, there were only three attempts. This is not enough to significantly update against the possibility. In many cases, the probability of fertilization is low enough that you should expect to have several failed attempts before one success. For example, with camels and llamas, the probability is roughly 1/6. If humans and chimps have the same odds, then three failures is entirely expected. Furthermore, the odds can be considerably different depending on which species is the father and which is the mother. In this case, all the attempts were to get a female chimp pregnant with human sperm. It says very little about the prospect of getting a female human pregnant with chimp sperm.

Now I'm not saying it's definitely possible for humans and chimps to crossbreed. It may very well not be. But we can never find out if don't make an earnest effort. So someone with the means definitely should. I'm sure it won't be hard to find men and women willing to volunteer for this effort, especially if there's money to be made. Chimpanzees would be harder to acquire but if you can convince someone who runs a primate research facility in the value of this research, perhaps they'd be willing to assist.

If, after numerous attempts, we fail to produce a hybrid, we can stop the experiments and consider human-chimp hybridization to be impossible. If we succeed even once, not only can we say human-chimp hybrids are possible, but we can learn many new things by studying the biology and behavior of this new species. I have so many questions. What would it look like? What would it act like? Would it be capable of acquiring language? Could it participate in human society? I hope to get an answer to these questions one day.