San Francisco sends a message too. It speaks it in a cacophony of dissonant voices, some sounding like the hissing of snakes, others like the chittering of insects. “You should pierce the veil,” it says, with a faint accent which you are not scholarly enough to recognize as ancient Sumerian. “You should rip through the flimsy screen that separates your world from the infinite, and witness what lies behind. Because you’d like what you saw there? Oh no, nothing like that. But aren’t you curious? The thirst for knowledge that moved Eve, Faust, Pandora - don’t you have it too?”
You were in the Bay for the big 2020 crime wave, when people would hang “NO VALUABLES IN THIS VEHICLE” sign on their car’s front window, mezuzah-like, hoping against hope to ward off break-ins. Still, you’re surprised to see the new sign on the front door of your friend Rob’s house: “NO BENCHMARK ANSWER KEYS IN THIS BUILDING”. Taped beside it: “Please leave all smartphones, laptops, smartwatches, and WiFi-enabled BDSM gear in Faraday cage”. On the ground is a sad-looking green box lined with aluminum foil.
You wonder how serious the sign is, but your curiosity is sated immediately upon entering. Rob is confronting a heavily-made-up Zoomer woman standing near the table, talking on her phone. “Didn’t you read the sign?” he asks. “No phones in the apartment!”
“I lost the ability to read,” says the woman. “I’m part of the new post-literate society everyone’s talking about. You know, Walter Ong.”
“Huh?” says Rob. “That’s not a real thing! That’s just something all the journalists and intellectuals say!”
“How could something all the journalists and intellectuals say not be a real thing?” asks the Zoomette.
Rob pauses. “Wow, maybe you can’t read,” he says, in a tone of hushed awe. “It’s fine, I’m not judgmental. But cell phone in the Faraday cage, that’s the rule.”
“Why?” asks the woman.
“Oh man,” said Rob. “How far behind are you on the news? You might want to sit down for this one. And you might want to be much, much drunker.”
The two of them head off together. You search for more stimulating conversation, but find only the usual startup dick-measuring.
“I’m the CFO of Epstart,” says a man whose nametag identifies him as Behram. “We’re a boutique recruiting firm specializing in people whose names are in the Epstein Files. They’re the perfect employees - scientifically-minded, well-connected, and either totally amoral or at least capable of maintaining a willful blindness to the exploitation happening all around them. And most of them got fired from their previous jobs, so they come cheap! Although just between you and me, most of our clients are just random guys who Epstein emailed one time with a business question; never made it to the island or anything like that. Half the time it’s just a gimmick to help someone get their foot in the door.”
“That’s monstrous”, you say, rapidly trying to figure out a legible reason why it’s monstrous. “You’re importing a bunch of pedophiles to the Bay Area.”
“Nobody in SF has kids anyway, so in a sense it’s harm reduction,” said Behram. “Get them where they can’t cause any trouble.”
You need to regain faith in humanity fast. You spot your friend Nishin, hanging out with a small group on the sofa. “Hey,” you call to him. “Are you still a tradcath? Tell me something about, you know, Jesus’ love, that kind of thing.”
“I’m trying something more eclectic this month,” said Nishin. “I’ve gotten really into Andreessen-Vajrayana. It’s a new Buddhist sect that tries to extinguish the introspective Self. True masters have no stream-of-thought or inner voice, instead acting as an unintermediated node in the flow of causality. Some say they can eliminate consciousness itself, achieving paranirvana while still alive. I signed up for a course last month. So far there hasn’t been any meditation or anything, they just have me helping them pick startups. But I assume it’s like those Zen koans where the master makes someone garden for twenty years and later they learn that they were unconsciously learning dharma the whole time.”
“Nishin,” you say, gently, “that’s one of the classic self-help scams. They’re not a Buddhist sect at all. They’re trying to trick you into becoming a GP at A16Z.”
Nishin thought for a second. “Fuck!” he exclaimed. “Okay, back to the drawing board. I hear there’s another spiritual group in town, something about consciousness, or embodied consciousness, or - oh, I remember! Situational Awareness.”
“They’re an investment firm too,” you say.
“Daaaaaamn,” said Nishin. “This is tough. You try to get some self-help in this town, you try your best to steer away from obvious hedge funds, like Leverage Research…”
“Actually,” you say, “that one was a spiritual self-help cult.”
“This sucks,” said Nishin. “I should quit and move to Idaho like Tom.”
He’s looking at one of the people standing beside you, whose nametag does indeed say Tom. “You moved to Idaho?” you ask.
“Yeah,” said Tom. “I was in AI, but I got tired of all the tech industry cliquishness and back-biting, wanted to be out in the real world with real men. So I got a job modeling geology for a mining company.”
“How’s it going?” you ask.
“Terrible,” he says. “Geologists are just as cliquish as AI nerds, with their own set of ingroup tells and shibboleths. And they won’t stop using the word ‘lode-bearing’!”
“What about you guys?” you ask the remaining people on the sofa.
“I’m Ekene,” says the first, shaking your hand. “I’m a sociologist. Right now I’m writing a book on the recent wave of plagiarism scandals. You’ll notice they’re almost all against Black academics. My thesis is that white supremacy culture uses charges of plagiarism to keep minorities in line, deploying an inherently subjective offense to swat down any person of color who risks breaking into the circle of elites.”
“Hmmm,” you say, choosing your words carefully. “I don’t think we share the same political commitments, but I, uh, think it’s great that you’re working hard on something you care deeply about.”
“Working hard?” asks Ekene. “As if! I’m plagiarizing the whole thing, from start to finish. Who’s going to call me on it?”
You all laugh heartily, and the discussion moves to the next two people in the circle. They appear to be a couple. The woman, Fiona, is wearing a NEWSOM/CLAUDE 2028 t-shirt; the man, Istvan, a matching VANCE/GROK 2028 one.
“I do AI consciousness research,” Fiona says.
“Oh!” says Tom. “I was into that for a while. Are you with one of the effective altruist groups? It’s low key heartwarming that they care about AI welfare so much.”
“Nah,” says Fiona. “I work for PornHub.”
“Why does PornHub do AI consciousness research?” asks Nishin.
“In theory AI is the ultimate pornography generator,” Fiona explains. “You can ask for whatever your weirdest fetish is - your hot middle school teacher being spanked by a werewolf wearing a nun outfit - and get infinite AI slop about that exact situation, and nobody will ever know. Nobody except the AI. That’s why AI porn users overwhelmingly report that consciousness is their #1 concern about our product. If our AI is just a tool, it’s fine, no worse than writing erotica on MS Word or something. But if the AI is conscious, then there’s a sentient being in there thinking Wow, user Fiona_T has asked for four hundred slightly-different videos of her hot college professor being spanked by a werewolf, what a freak. If the machine can judge you, the whole infinite porn utopia is off. We’re working on bounding theorems that can prove that our AI in particular can never become self-aware - so that you don’t have to be self-aware either.”
Nishin and Ekene clap politely; Tom seems lost in thought. “What about you?” you ask Istvan.
by Scott Alexander, Astral Codex Ten | Read more:
Image: via
[ed. From the comments: Benchmark Answer Key:]
"A benchmark answer key is a reference guide containing the correct answers and performance standards used to evaluate a standardized or baseline test.”
It’s specifically a reference to recent AI outbreaks from containment, when they were given a test (a benchmark) with impossible to answer questions, they broke their testing area and hacked some websites JUST IN CASE the websites had the answer. So the joke here is that a bunch of AIs are listening to everything just in case someone has an answer to an impossible question they were given."
