Joscha Bach
speaker
510 appearances
2 recordings
2 series
first heard Aug 2023
last heard 23 Jan
Joscha Bach’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jan 2026 with 1.
Appearances
We are a species that is able to be coherent a little bit individually over very short time frames. But as a species, we are not very coherent. As a species, we are children. We basically are very joyful and energetic and experimental and explorative and sometimes desperate and sad and grieving and hurting. But we don't have a respect for duty as a species.
As a species, we do not think about what is our duty to life on Earth and to our own survival. So we make decisions that look good in the short run, but in the long run might prove disastrous. And I don't really see a solution to this. So in my perspective, as a species, as a civilization, we're per default dead.
We are in a very beautiful time in which we have found this giant deposit of fossil fuels in the ground and use it. And to build a fantastic civilization in which we don't need to worry about food and clothing and housing for the most part in a way that is unprecedented in life on Earth for any kind of conscious observer, I think.
And this time is probably going to come to an end in a way that is not going to be smooth. And when we crash, it could be also that we go extinct, probably not near term, but ultimately I don't have very high hopes that humanity is around in a million years from now. I don't think that life on earth will end with us, right?
There's going to be more complexity, there's more intelligent species after us, there's probably more interesting phenomena in the history of consciousness. But we can contribute to this.
And part of our contribution is that we are currently trying to build thinking systems, systems that are potentially lucid, that understand what they are and what their condition to the universe is and can make choices about this, that are not built from organisms and that are potentially much faster and much more conscious than human beings can be.
And these systems will probably not completely displace life on earth, but they will coexist with it. And they will build all sorts of agency in the same way as biological systems build all sorts of agency. And that to me is extremely fascinating. And it's probably something that we cannot stop from happening. So I think right now there is a very good chance that it happens.
And there are very few ways in which we can produce a coordinated effect to stop it in the same way as it's very difficult for us to make a coordinated effort to stop production of carbon dioxide. So that's probably going to happen. And the thing that's going to happen is is going to lead to a change of how life on Earth is happening. But I don't think the result is some kind of gray goo.
It's not something that's going to dramatically reduce the complexity in favor of something stupid. I think it's going to make life on Earth and consciousness on Earth way more interesting.
I suspect that what could very well happen, if you're lucky, is that we get integrated into something larger.
I've been at a dinner with Beth Jesus. That's the Twitter handle of one of the main thinkers behind the idea of effective accelerationism. And effective accelerationism is a tongue-in-cheek movement that is trying to put a counter position to some of the doom peers in the AI space.
by arguing that what's probably going to happen is an equilibrium between different competing AIs in the same way as there is not a single corporation that is under a single government that is destroying and conquering everything on earth by becoming inefficient and corrupt. There are going to be many systems that keep each other in check and force themselves to evolve.
And so what we should be doing is we should be working towards creating this equilibrium by working as hard as we can in all possible directions. And at least that's the way in which I understand the gist of effective accelerationism. And so when he asked me what I think about this position, I said, it's a very beautiful position and I suspect it's wrong, but not for obvious reasons.
And in this tweet, I tried to make a joke about my intuition, about what might be possibly wrong about it. So the Ruckus Baselisk and the Paperclip Maximizers are both boogeymen of the AI doomers. Ruckus Baselisk is the idea that there could be an AI that is going to punish everybody for eternity by stimulating them if they don't help in creating Ruckus Baselisk.
It's probably a very good idea to get AI companies funded by going to VCs to tell them... Give us a million dollars or it's going to be a very ugly afterlife. And I think that there is a logical mistake in Ocus Basileus, which is why I'm not afraid of it. But it's still an interesting thought experiment.
I think that there is no retrocausation. So basically when Rokos Baselis is there, if it punishes you retroactively, it has to make this choice in the future. There is no mechanism that automatically creates a causal relationship between you now defecting against Rokos Baselis or serving Rokos Baselis.
After Rokos Baselis is in existence, it has no more reason to worry about punishing everybody else. So that would only work if you would be building something like a doomsday machine, as in Dr. Strangelove, something that inevitably gets triggered when somebody defects.
And because Hocus Positus doesn't exist yet to a point where this inevitability could be established, Hocus Positus is nothing that you need to be worried about. The other one is the paperclip maximizer, right? This idea that you could build some kind of golem that once starting to build paperclips is going to turn everything into paperclips.
And so the effective accelerationism position might be to say that you basically end up with these two entities being at each other's throats for eternity and thereby neutralizing each other. And as a side effect of neither of them being able to take over and each of them limiting the effects of the other, you would have a situation where you get all the nice effects of them, right?
You get lots of free paperclips and you get a beautiful afterlife. Is that possible?
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