7,661 karma · joined December 29, 2009
Email: matteo@purecreek.com
This is a technology with an inherent tendency of making up false information AND we don't even understand how or why.
That's enough not to entrust these sytems with critical decisions that could start a war.
The AI either knows what the user wants perfectly and is able to prevent problems, or is a rougue agent that needs to be bound by laws to not misbehave. You can't have both.
What prevents AI from writing an arbitrary calculation that makes sure that sum is always zero while breaking a whole other bunch of assumptions?
If the answer is more laws, then this does not address the parent comment.
It is a mere declaration, as specified at the top of the page, that "is widely recognized as having inspired [...] the adoption of more than seventy human rights treaties"
That does not make it an enforceable law. Moreover, treaties are agreements between countries, not laws, which a country can violate at will.
People might create supranational organizations like the UN or the ECHR, but that has, untimately, no enforcement power because that always belongs to sovereign countries. Violating a treaty can also lead to retaliation by other signatories or even war, but it still does not make a treaty law.
It might well be that the US has specific laws that prevent charging a citizen when they wipe their phone. But that must be a law passed by the US legislature, not a "universal declaration".
However, I would like to play devil's advocate for a moment to brainstorm another issue.
Let's say I build a product that is better than others in the market. We all agree that competition is good becuase it leads to better products and lower prices.
However, the algorithm favors entrenched players. A product that has been bought many times and has positive reviews will be the first in the search results and people usually buy that. Which means I have no way to compete other than paying my way at the top of the list.
I'm not stating this as the ultimate solution or even a good one. But I think it's worth to ask the question.
Globally, Firefox has ~2.2%.
On desktop alone that's still only 6.4%.
Where is the threshold?
First, how likely is it that similar rulings happen in other states or countries? While proportionally to the population the fine is significant, it isn't over Meta's global market. It can be only if similar fines will happen at a high enough rate.
Second, what is the global cost of adapting the whole platform to the ruling? (Assuming they don't build exceptions for users in New Mexico like Apple does)
Both factors have an influence, so if the fine is unlikely to be replicated, which it probably is, and the cost of adapting is exceedingly high, which certainly is, then Meta will continue their practices.
"I complain about some people doing X openly while I ignore others also doing the same X behind the scenes"
is absolutely not equivalent to:
"Complaining that X sucks does not imply I am ignoring that some other unrelated Y also sucks".
Societies that practice(d) slavery and human sacrifice clearly do not share such a "universal" value.
However, from what I have observed, Israeli government officials have often expresses that intent publicly, despite claiming otherwise at the UN.
And 30% of casualties are children. The two are not mutually exclusive and this is the data point currently under scrutiny.
Given that it's the most-voted post, it looks like it already happened.
Granted, that is not the market that would buy a Ferrari, but one of the point of buying luxury cars is the status they grant. There is not much status in a car mocked by the public.
Are there? That's a pretty bold claim.
I'm sure they think the same at Ferrari, but plenty of successful companies create products that flop miserably based on the wrong assumptions.
I would personally think that the public interested in high-performance combustion-engine luxury cars is not interested in generic-looking electric cars even if they come from the same company.
One person learning something is good. At scale, that becomes everyone learning something. That's even better.
Machine learning is not scaling up people learning. It's completely different even if it's called "learning".
As the article argues, it's plagiarism at scale. In that sense, one person plagiarizing content is bad. Everyone plagiarizing at scale by using LLMs is even worse.
I understand that Google is feeling an existential threat from other AI products that provide answers directly. But they must also understand their symbiotic relationship with the web.
The role of the government is to make the laws, and to apply them when violation are reported. It is also to regulate new situations as they arise, for example, if a court decides the law allows a non-profit to become a for-profit and that is deemed as not desirable, new laws can be passed to amend that.
It is the government roles, however, to going around to aks hypothetical questions before they are risen by someone, as there are too many possible hypotheticals, most never materialize, and that would be a conflict of interest. In that case Musk is as good as a vehicle as anyone else because he is bringing to the court a real-life problem that needs to be decided.
The Trump admin is not fond of enforcing regulations as the Biden admin was not fond of enforcing other regulations. That shows you can't expect the govenment to take that role since it's discretionary.
To that extent, what Musk was happy or unhappy with is irrelevant. What is actually allowed by the law is more important.
However, it seems that the lawsuit was not phrased that way and Musk just looked for damages to himself. In that frame it's not much of a surprise that things ended this way.
While you are seemingly not at the moment, some day you might be at the receiving end of that "natural selection" in ways that seriously impact your remainint time on the planet.
In that case you might reconsider your stance, and especially question how natural is the selection of a few powerful rich people depriving others of their way to earn a living and their way to draw meaning from their lives.
The AI revolution keeps getting compared to the industrial revolution, but people keep forgetting the consequences of that one.
Ad hominem. Criticize the argument. Your opinion about Shellenberger or even his other opinions are irrelevant.
I don't particularly like him, but that does not mean all his points are invalid.
> Imo it's stupid to put nuclear waste in a place where you can't get at it anymore.
Things obviously need to be weighed against each other. Burying it in a mountain does make it safe to store indefinitely, but obviously not easily accessible. It can be dug out again, however, if it becomes useful again. It's going to be more expensive, but you pay for the safety.
> As long as all goes well. Fukushima has a slightly different experience.
One of the articles I linked makes the argument that Fukushima is not as tragic as people think.
Quote:
> But now, eight years after Fukushima, the best-available science clearly shows that Caldicott’s estimate of the number of people killed by nuclear accidents was off by one million. Radiation from Chernobyl will kill, at most, 200 people, while the radiation from Fukushima and Three Mile Island will kill zero people.