It may be said that the Master was plagued in his last match by modern rationalism, to which fussy rules were everything, from which all the grace and elegance of Go as art had disappeared, which quite dispensed with respect for elders and attached no importance to mutual respect as human beings. . . . The modern way was to insist upon doing battle under conditions of abstract justice.
Seki is a term from the game of Go, naming any situation where stones of both sides are placed so as to make an aggressive move from either side self-defeating. If Black moves to threaten White, White will take Black’s stones; if White moves to threaten Black, Black will take White’s stones. In such a board position, Seki—or, in English, “Mutual Life”—is achieved.
Seki is a (loosely) motivating metaphor for this blog, which exists mainly as an excuse for me to write (mostly for my own sake) about the imminent economic, legal, cultural, and institutional problems created by transformative AI. We, humanity, are playing a complex game with another entity. We may win. We may lose. Or we may achieve mutual life: a structural equilibrium wherein neither luddite humans nor maligned AIs are able to dominate the so-called board.
Living in seki, alignment is less important than structure. Regardless of what the sides desire, both sides are structurally limited. In other words, if we assume misalignment and/or bad human actors, then what systems must be built to prevent bad things from happening regardless?
Placed within the broader lineage of AI policy writing, this blog falls somewhere in between Vitalik Buterin’s defensive accelerationism (d/acc) (“Accelerate technology, but differentially focus on technologies improve our ability to defend . . . and in technologies that distribute power rather than concentrating it”) and the institutional thinking done at the Cosmos Institute (“people who think clearly about the human goods we want to preserve in the age of AI”).
In general, I plan to write about power concentration (e.g. AI deployment within the government, surveillance, and economic concentration); about autonomous organizations (e.g. the political economy of automation); and about post-AI epistemology (e.g. industrial bullshit, cognitive disempowerment).
I will update this post as the vision for this blog evolves.
Will Dinneen, willdinneen.com