Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Monthly Roundup #16: March 2024, published by Zvi on March 20, 2024 on LessWrong.

AI developments have picked up the pace. That does not mean that everything else stopped to get out of the way. The world continues.

Do I have the power?

Emmett Shear speaking truth: Wielding power is of course potentially dangerous and it should be done with due care, but there is no virtue in refusing the call.

There is also an art to avoiding power, and some key places to exercise it. Be keenly aware of when having power in a given context would ruin everything.

Natural General Lack of Intelligence in Tech

Eliezer Yudkowsky reverses course, admits aliens are among us and we have proof.

Eliezer Yudkowsky: To understand the user interfaces on microwave ovens, you need to understand that microwave UI designers are aliens. As in, literal nonhuman aliens who infiltrated Earth, who believe that humans desperately want to hear piercingly loud beeps whenever they press a button.

One junior engineer who hadn't been taken over and was still actually human, suggested placing a visible on-off switch for turning the sound off - for example, in case your spouse or children were sleeping, and you didn't want to wake them up. That junior engineer was immediately laughed off the team by senior aliens who were very sure that humans wanted to hear loud screaming beeps every time they pressed buttons.

And furthermore sure that, even if anyone didn't want their microwave emitting piercingly loud beeps at 4am, they would be perfectly happy to look up a complicated set of directions for how to turn the sound on or off, rather than needing a visible on-off switch.

And even if any humans had trouble remembering that, they'd be much rarer than humans who couldn't figure out how to set the timer for popcorn without a clearly labeled "Popcorn" button, which does a different random thing in every brand of microwave oven.

There's only so much real estate in a microwave control panel; it's much more important to have an inscrutable button that says "Potato", than a physical switch that turns the sound off (and which stays in the same position after power cycles, and which can be inspected to see if the sound is currently off or on).

This is the same species of aliens that thinks humans want piercing blue lights to shine from any household appliance that might go in somebody's bedroom at night, like a humidifier. They are genuinely aghast at the thought that anyone might want an on-off switch for the helpful blue light on their humidifier.

Everyone likes piercing blue LEDs in their bedroom! When they learned that some people were covering up the lights with black tape, they didn't understand how anybody could accidentally do such a horrible thing - besides humans being generally stupid, of course.

They put the next generation of humidifier night-lights underneath translucent plastic set into the power control - to make sure nobody could cover up the helpful light with tape, without that also making it impossible to turn the humidifier on or off.

Nobody knows why they insist on hollowing out and inhabiting human appliance designers in particular.

Mark Heyer: A nice rant Eliezer, one that I would subscribe to, having been in the information design business. However, I have an interesting counter-example of how to fix the problem.

In the 90s I worked at a rocketship internet startup in SV, providing services and products nationwide. As the internet people were replaced with suits, my boss, a tough ex-Marine, called me into his office and asked what my future was with the company. I channeled Steve Jobs and told him that I wanted to look at everything we did as a company and make it right for the users. He pounded his fist on the desk and said "Make it happen!"

After that I was called into every design and process meet...