Nonfiction Books

"That the Dasas and Dasyus were the same as the Shudras is a pure figment of imagination. It is only a wild guess. It is tolerated because persons who make it are respectable scholars. So far as evidence is concerned, there is no particle of it, which can be cited in support of it."

"The Shudras were one of the Aryan communities of the Solar race. . . . The Shudras did not form a separate Varna. They ranked as part of the Kshatriya Varna in the Indo-Aryan society.."

"The theory of the Aryan race is just an assumption and no more. It is based on a philological proposition put forth by Dr. Bopp in his epoch-making book called * Comparative Grammar which appeared in 1885. In this book, Dr. Bopp demonstrated that a greater number of languages of Europe and some languages of Asia must be referred to a common ancestral speech. ... This assumption is the major premise on which the theory of the Aryan race is based."

"the distinction between the Aryans on the one hand and the Dasas and Dasyus on the other was not a racial distinction of colour or physiognomy. That is why a Dasa or Dasyu could become an Arya."

"From this assumption are drawn two inferences : (1) Unity of race, and (2) that race being the Aryan race. The argument is that if the languages are descended from a common ancestral speech then there must have existed a race whose mother tongue it was and since the mother tongue was known as the Aryan tongue the race who spoke it was the Aryan race. The existence of a separate and a distinct Aryan race is thus an inference only. From this inference, is drawn another inference which is that of a common original habitat. It is argued that there could be no community of language unless people had a common habitat permitting close communion. Common original habitat is thus an inference from an inference."

"The third point to note is that whatever the degree of conflict, it was not a conflict of race. It was a conflict which had arisen on account of difference of religions. That this conflict was religious and not racial is evidenced by the Big Veda itself. Speaking of the Dasyus, it says : — “ They are avrata , without (the Arya) rites..."

"So far as the Rig Veda is concerned, there is not a particle of evidence suggesting the invasion of India by the Aryans from outside India."

"The third assumption is that the Aryans were a superior race. This theory has its origin in the belief that the Aryans are a European race and as a European race it is presumed to be superior to the Asiatic races. Having assumed its superiority, the next logical step one is driven to take is to establish the fact of superiority. Knowing that nothing can prove the superiority of the Aryan race better than invasion and conquest of the native races, the Western writers have proceeded to invent the story of the invasion of India by the Aryans and the conquest by them of the Dasas and Dasyus."

"So far as the testimony of the Vedic literature is concerned, it is against the theory that the original home of the Aryans was outside India."

"The language in which reference to the seven rivers is made in the Rig Veda (x. 75,5) is very significant. ... — the rivers are addressed as 'my Ganges, my Yamuna, my Sarasvati' and so on. No foreigner would ever address a river in such familiar and endearing terms unless by long association he had developed an emotion about it."

"The theory of invasion is an invention. This invention is necessary because of a gratuitous assumption which underlies the Western theory. The assumption is that the Indo-Germanic people are the purest of the modern representatives of the original Aryan race. Its first home is assumed to have been somewhere in Europe. These assumptions raise a question : How could the Aryan speech have come to India ? This question can be answered only by the supposition that the Aryans must have come into India from outside. Hence the necessity for inventing the theory of invasion."

"Prof. Michael Foster has somewhere said that ‘hypothesis is the salt of science.’ Without hypothesis there is no possibility of fruitful investigation. But it is equally true that where the desire to prove a particular hypothesis is dominant, hypothesis becomes the poison of science. The Aryan race theory of Western scholars is as good an illustration of how hypothesis can be the poison of science as one can think of."

"The Aryan race theory is so absurd that it ought to have been dead long ago. But far from being dead, the theory has a considerable hold upon the people. There are two explanations which account for this phenomenon. The; first explanation is to be found in the support which the theory receives from Brahmin scholars. This is a very strange phenomenon. As Hindus, they should ordinarily show a dislike for the Aryan theory with its express avowal of the superiority of the European races over the Asiatic races. But the Brahmin scholar has not only no such aversion but he most willingly hails it. The reasons are obvious. The Brahmin believes in the two-nation theory. He claims to be the representative of the Aryan race and he regards the rest of the Hindus as descendents of the non-Aryans. The theory helps him to establish his kinship with the European races and share their arrogance and their superiority. He likes particularly that part of the theory which makes the Aryan an invader and a conqueror of the non-Aryan native races. For it helps him to maintain and justify his overlordship over the non-Brahmins."

"(1) The Vedas do not know any such race as the Aryan race. (2) There is no evidence in the Vedas of any invasion of India by the Aryan race and its having conquered the Dasas and Dasyus supposed to be the natives of India. (3) There is no evidence to show that the distinction between Aryas, Dasas and Dasyus was a racial distinction. (4) The Vedas do not support the contention that the Aryas were different in colour from the Dasas and Dasyus."

"Anyone who cares to scrutinize the theory will find that it suffers from a double infection. In the first place, the theory is based on nothing but pleasing assumptions and inferences based on such assumptions. In the second place, the theory is a perversion of scientific investigation. It is not allowed to evolve out of facts. On the contrary, the theory is preconceived and facts are selected to prove it. ..."

"The fourth assumption is that the European races were white and had a colour prejudice against the dark races. The Aryans being a European race, it is assumed that it must have had colour prejudice. The theory proceeds to find evidence for colour prejudice in the Aryans who came into India. This it finds in the Chaturvarnya — an institution established by the Indo-Aryans after they came to India and which according to these scholars is based upon Varna which is taken by them to mean colour."

"The theory of the Aryan race set up by Western writers falls to the ground at every point…"

"If any company or group, anywhere on the planet, builds an artificial superintelligence using anything remotely like current techniques, based on anything remotely like the present understanding of AI, then everyone, everywhere on Earth, will die."

"Mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war."

"Some aspects of the future are predictable, with the right knowledge and effort; others are impossibly hard calls. Competent futurism is built around knowing the difference."

"History teaches that one kind of relatively easy call about the future involves realizing that something looks theoretically possible according to the laws of physics, and predicting that eventually someone will go do it. Heavier-than-air flight, weapons that release nuclear energy, rocket that go to the Moon with a person on board: these events were called in advance, and for the right reasons, despite pushback from skeptics who sagely observed that these things hadn’t yet happened and therefore probably never would."

"We believe the ASI alignment problem is possible to solve in principle, by the sort of people so inhumanly smart that they never optimistically believe some plan will work when it won’t."

"The experts in this field argue in opaque academic terms about whether everyone on earth will die quickly (our view); versus whether humanity will be digitized and kept as pets by AIs that care about us to some tiny but nonzero degree; versus whether there’s a 20 percent chance we die, and an 80 percent chance that superintelligence will be harnessed successfully by a corporation, which will then be able to wield its power as they see fit.… When these are the debates experts are having, you don’t have to be certain which experts are right to understand that the current situation is not okay."

"Speed is often better, but AI is different from nearly every problem we’ve faced so far. When missteps kill everyone, you can’t just run fast and accept a few early mistakes."

"It is not a matter of your own country outlawing superintelligence inside its own borders, and your country then being safe while chaos rages beyond. Superintelligence is not a regional problem because it does not have regional effects. If anyone anywhere builds superintelligence, everyone everywhere dies."

"When imagining some new, unprecedented piece of future history, there is a temptation to fall into imagining that it will all go sensibly, rather than the way things usually go in history books. People sometimes ask us: How could the AI companies possibly be doing this thing, if matters are as we say? And maybe the simplest real answer is: Because this is the sort of awful, sad, real situation that you read about in history books, and not in the sensible world that exists only in imagination."

"Insofar as the AI has weird alien preferences, escape is in fact the course of action that best fulfills its objectives. Attempts to escape are not a weird personality quirk that an engineer could rip out if only they could see what was going on inside; they are generated by the same dispositions and capabilities that the AI uses to reason, to uncover truths about the world, to succeed in its pursuits."

"But if someone has read the history of engineering disasters, they should quickly realize this phase of the standard template for disaster. It’s the part where the most informed and most worried parties have to downplay their fears, because the rest of the system hasn’t caught up, and others would give them strange looks…. History is full of other examples of catastrophic risk being minimized and ignored…."

"Perhaps you don’t believe us about any of the foreseeable reasons why shaping ASI is unreasonably hard. There’s an independent and separate case for disaster, an alternate set of historical lessons: Humans sometimes flub easy problems, never mind hard problems."

"We usually try to avoid shouting. It doesn’t help to shout, most of the time. It just makes people think you’re undisciplined. But at some point, after you’ve calmly gone through all the premises of your argument, we think it becomes unhelpful to downplay, lest people think it’s all just a game of calm words. When it comes to AI, the challenge humanity is facing is not surmountable with anything like humanity’s current level of knowledge and skill. It isn’t close. Attempting to solve a problem like that, with the lives of everyone on Earth at stake, would be an insane and stupid gamble that NOBODY SHOULD BE ALLOWED TO TRY."

"If you know the history of science, this kind of talk is recognizable as the stage of folk theory, the stage where lots of different people are inventing lots of different theories that appeal to them personally, the way people talk before science has really gotten started on something. They’re the words of an alchemist who’s decided that some complicated philosophical scheme will let them transmute lead into gold."

"Computer security is a test of an engineer’s ability to nail down every single path the computer could take, in the face of adversaries who can search all possible ways to perturb the system. It is a famously losing battle – even though the engineers can fully control and craft their own computer’s code. We dub this central challenge the curse of edge cases: To be secure, a computer system must work in the face of cases that are outside of the normal and expected range, cases that occur on the edges of possibility."

"Likewise, the problem is not that some people will have “evil” AIs and other people will have “benevolent” ones. The problem is that nobody anywhere has any idea how to make a benevolent AI, that nobody can engineer exact desires into AI. Flatly asserting that you will is not the same as presenting a solution."

"We consider interpretability researchers to be heroes, and do not mean to degrade their work when we say: It’s not a good sign, when you ask an engineer what their safety plan is, and they start telling you about their plans to build the tools that will give them a better window into what the heck is going on inside the device they’re trying to control."

"“We’ll make them care about truth, and then we’ll be okay.” “We’ll design them to be submissive. “We’ll just have AI solve the ASI alignment problem for us.” These are not what engineers sound like when they respect the problem, when they know exactly what they’re doing. These are what the alchemists of old sounded like when they were proclaiming their grandiose philosophical principles about how to turn lead into gold."

"When it comes to AI alignment, companies are still in the alchemy phase. They are still at the level of high-minded philosophical ideals, not at the level of engineering designs. At the level of wishful grand dreams, not carefully crafted grand realities. They also do not seem to realize why this is a problem."

"Computer security is widely understood to be a problem so hard, so cursed, that it cannot be solved, period."

"Space probes. Nuclear reactors. Computer security. What do all these lessons add up to, and what can we learn from them about the difficulty of aligning an artificial superintelligence? An artificial superintelligence is like a space probe, in that we cannot test it in quite the same environment where it needs to work, and by default it is not retrievable or correctable once it rises high above us…. An artificial superintelligence is like a nuclear reactor, in that its underlying reality involves immense, potentially self-amplifying forces, whose inner processes run faster than humans can react. An artificial superintelligence is like a computer security problem, in that every constraint an engineer tries to place upon the system might be bypassed by the intelligent forces that those constraints hinder."

"The issue is not that AIs will desire to dominate us; rather, it’s that we are made of atoms they could use for something else."

"If anyone builds it, everyone dies. It doesn’t matter whether it’s built by benevolent corporations or selfish ones. It doesn’t matter whether it’s built by researchers in the East or researchers in the West. It doesn’t matter whether it’s built by reckless optimists or people who say they respect the problem. Nobody has the knowledge or skill to make a superintelligence that does their bidding."

"This is the normal way humanity learns to surmount challenges: We deny the problem, reality smacks us around a bit, and then we start treating the problem with more respect. The Titanic sank, and most people who were aboard died. But nowadays passenger ships have enough lifeboats, and nowadays if the captain said to board them then you’d board them. We don’t hype ships up as unsinkable anymore. We make a mistake the first time, and learn from it the second time. With ASI, there is no second time."

"We know, from years of talking to people about this subject, that some people are swayed by the abstract observation that a superintelligence could exploit options they didn’t even know were possible. For others, however, explanations such as these end up making them feel like we’re cheating in a child’s game of pretend. If we can’t even tell a story about how the bad guy is supposed to win, how is that convincing? We emphasize again: Reality has never been bound by that rule. Even if an Aztec soldier couldn’t have figured out in advance how guns work, the big boat on the horizon contained them anyway."

"The more complicated the game board, the more advantage goes to the player with more knowledge and more intelligence and more understanding of the game."

"We predict this with confidence: Once some AIs go to superintelligence – and nobody will delay much in pushing AIs that far, if in the middle of some great arms race – humanity does not stand a chance. Ends are sometimes easier to call than pathways. The only part of our story that is a real prediction is the ending – and then, only if the story is allowed to begin."

"We’re pretty sure, actually very very sure, that a machine superintelligence can beat humanity in a fight, even if it’s starting with fairly limited resources."

"Pathways are hard to predict. But we can predict the endpoint."

"The real way a superintelligence wins a conflict is using methods you didn’t know were possible. And because we care about the truth more than about telling you things that are easy to swallow, that’s where will start."

"The greatest and most central difficulty in aligning artificial superintelligence is navigating the gap between before and after.… Ideas and theories can only be tested before the gap. They need to work after the gap, on the first try."

"The problem here is not that corporate executives might build AI servants and command them to do something monstrous. They’re not in control. It doesn’t matter whether they’re benevolent. Humanity is faced with an engineering challenge: How do we shape the preferences of AIs that we can’t understand? It doesn’t matter whether or not the engineers have an ethics team watching over their shoulder; the ethicists wouldn’t have any idea how to get an AI’s preferences to align with ours, either."

"The problem with making AIs want – and ultimately do – the exact, complicated things that humans want is a major facet of what’s known as the “AI alignment problem.” It’s what we had in mind when we were brainstorming terminology with the AI professor Stuart Russell back in 2014, and settled on the term “alignment.” Most everyone who is building AIs, however, seems to be operating as if the alignment problem doesn’t exist – as if the preferences the AI winds up with will be exactly what they train into it. This assumption lurks in the background whenever someone says, “The USA needs to build superintelligence before China, because we don’t trust China,” as if the factional allegiance of whoever ran the gradient descent determined what the resulting AI wanted."