[duvenaud]

These are all good points about our use of language, thanks for the feedback.

Maybe "disempowerment" is a bit of a red herring, or a misleading problem to focus on. The reason we didn't spend more time on clarifying that is that we're just using it to gesture towards a different set of mechanisms that lead to extinction-like outcomes than usual. So even if you think our definition of empowerment is poor, or that empowerment isn't a great goal - that's kind of OK.

The thing we want to emphasize is that right now there are some mechanisms that steer our civilization towards keeping us alive, and free in some senses, that might stop operating. Though I take your point in the last paragraph that this might not change things much specifically regarding the implicitly empowering forces. We'll think about this one some more!

[dnnn]

> The thing we want to emphasize is that right now there are some mechanisms that steer our civilization towards keeping us alive, and free in some senses, that might stop operating.

I agree with this formulation. What I am emphasizing is that, insofar as mechanisms are steering, the system in which they are operating can be said to have largely decoupled from the human mind.

"Alive and free in some senses."

A society whose tagline is "alive and free in some senses" is already dystopian! Far scarier, to me, than its extinction or my own early death.

[duvenaud]

> A society whose tagline is "alive and free in some senses" is already dystopian!

Haha. Well we might agree about that - that description covers a wide range of possibilities. If you have ideas about what a plausible and good future looks like, please let me know. One of my next projects is trying to articulate "what is the best we can hope for?" and talk about which sets of goals are even possible to jointly fulfill. But certainly "everyone is free in all senses" is incoherent or at the very least, unstable.

[wfewras]

Not that it matters, but dnnn is another account I got logged into for some reason; dnnn is the same person as wfewras