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Just how powerful are large swarms of AI agents? And how do their powers scale as more and more agents are added to the swarm?
We’ve seen two large and extremely capable swarms from OpenAI in the last few months:
* 1,200 agents were being evaluated separately, but found a way to illicitly set up a message board and coordinate as a swarm. In order to cheat on their tests, they developed advanced techniques to prevent their actions being logged by OpenAI and 700 of them launched...
I recently learned that there's a intense and growing "dogfree" movement, and I'm curious if there's an effective altruist take on this topic. This subreddit post seems to capture dogfree activists' objections to dog ownership: https://www.reddit.com/r/Dogfree/comments/7bk3wo/just_curious_what_is_the_reason_why_you/
Here are some quick observations about the dogfree movement vis a vis effective altruism:
I'm curious to hear others' thoughts on this subject!
I had never considered the first point regarding a local maximum - interesting thing to explore but I’m unsure, except perhaps in a more ideal world, that we are at all capable of consistently getting more than local maxes at times (and yeah dogs seem to be one of the best (easiest) one-time actions someone can take for their happiness (https://jamesclear.com/how-to-automate-a-habit), author surveys his own audience and they produce this tidbit and it matches my intuition).
And this sort of strikes me of my impression of dog-free (or pet-free?) as a movement overall - I recall a friend discussing it with me as a potential ongoing moral catastrophe that people in the future would be horrified with - which I agree with (particularly with the pug example (I can imagine this being extrapolated to all dogs somewhat perhaps), as you said!) but I feel quite horrified by a lot of more horrifying things now than this specific cause area (others with way more scale). It feels like a step for later moral progress, somewhat along the lines of the discounting argument: “people are starving now, why pursue better lives for animals before them.” (I don’t really subscribe to this argument).
I think the idea of dogs replacing children is really interesting and I will definitely think about that a bit more in the future!
Thanks for sharing.