9,795 karma · joined June 2, 2011
They learnt that all they risk is a slap on the wrist a decade later, and a fee that's a drop in their profits.
We have an algorithm that can learn to outperform humans at any deterministic game and learn the rules by simply watching it. We have algorithms that outperform humans at image recognition and OCR. We have algorithm that draw images according to descriptions. We have algorithms that decipher languages just by looking at a corpus of text.
But somehow, as soon as a computer can do it, it is not considered an intelligent task anymore. Kasparov or Champollion used to be considered very smart for what they did, but now apparently that's just considered dumb applied statistics.
Nuclear proliferation: so far so good.
Ozone layer destruction: disaster adverted
CO2 limitations: we would have solved that by now without GWB suddenly deciding that disbelieving in climate change was now a respectable policy position.
> The destruction that nuclear weapons can cause is nothing compared to the potential destruction from self-replicating machines
I think you overestimate the speed at which this will come. We probably could, today, make a self replicating machine from raw materials but it would be the size of a factory and would have a replication cycle of a few months. Going from self-replication to grey-goo will take some time, hopefully we can prepare to it.
911 hijackers were Saudis and Osama Bin Laden was Saudi but it was decided to not look at KSA at all.
This was known to the Bush adminsitration who censored any mention of KSA from the 911 reports: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_28_pages
The GOP has always been a supporter of foreign and domestic terrorism. Them posing as antiterrorists is the biggest con of the 21st century.
And yes, I feel nowadays I devote a CPU core and a few GB of RAM to just text messaging. I hope that Matrix and its bridges can end that at one point.
Most people are not motivated by money, they reluctantly accept that they need to earn a living, but it is not a big driver per se in most people I know.
He was an economist genuinely interested in understanding society's emerging mechanisms. Wealth of Nations is his most famous book because it is the one that contains the most actionable piece of models, but he also wrote a book (The Theory of Moral Sentiments) where he explores all the things we do out of generosity and selflessness. Unfortunately, he did not manage to infer a really useful model for these so it is less known.
An interesting thing to note is that we know how to engineer redundancy and code checking into machines to avoid unwanted mutations. Biology makes us thing this is hard but biological systems do need to evolve, there is no pressure for lower mutations as long as you are at a level that allows a species to survive.
It is a master bullshitter and will never say "I don't understand what you mean" if it can wriggle around.
This is a great step towards a real AI. It is a sort of raw intuition. It now needs to learn to filter its intuition with rationality and epistemological techniques.
Every year, companies add a portion of the GDP to their overall value.
If their contribution to the top 1% increased 400-fold, does that balance out?
If you have a bottle of 1 kg of water and put it on a plank between two stools, what matters to know if the plank will break is the total weight (and torque) of the bottle and the surface of contact. The shape of the bottle is irrelevant.
When you have that image in mind and someone suddenly tells you that actually no, 1 kg of water on a 50 meters high column can actually break things 1kg of water in a bucket can't, it is very counterintuitive.
And the stack of pennies is really unhelpful I feel. Make an inverse pyramid with 1000 pennies, all of them resting on one at the bottom tip, or make a column of these, the force exerted on the bottom one will be the same. The force per area as well. Not so with water.
The difference is that the water molecules move until they find an equilibrium in which there is a gradient of pressure and where molecules push back in every direction equally. Pennies do not, they are content exerting "pressure" in a single direction
Yet you can distribute the weight of a structure on larger bases. If you put two columns on pennies on a steel plate, the pressure under the plate will be higher than if you put only one column.
It is easy to imagine the bottom vessel as similar to such a plate.
I think the key to make this intuitive is to realize a few things:
- pressure in liquids are transmitted differently - water is actually very slightly compressible - atmospheric pressure is also an important part of the system
You have to visualize the atmospheric air pressure to reconcile the result with intuition.
Who wants to call a nurse everytime they need to go to the bathroom? An exoskeleton gives you some autonomy and dignity. The fact it is so uncommon despite a growing aging population with stash of money is a mystery to me
I am the first one to be vocal of US imperialism, but you can't deny that it is US influence that caused several modern countries to be democratic.
Of course China and KSA would never join. And that would give other countries a clear and objective criterion to apply sanctions and international pressure.
Instead, judging what sanction a country deserves is an arbitrary exercise of executive power.
North Korea, China, KSA, are easy cases, but what do you know of Moldova? Of Hungary? Of Malaysia? Knowing that a country is held to some international standards judged independently would be a huge progress for human rights globally.
People have been used to so many cynicism that they have forgotten that countries doing the good thing is a possibility.
There we were, in a world where USSR had collapsed, China not risen yet, with a USA as the uncontested dominant power. It has the unique chance in history to steer the world in one direction or the other.
Building international legal standards, multi-lateral cooperation, ensuring that whoever had the most power at one point would be limited by the world community, was something within US reach, and was a realistic hope. As a bonus, the first thing the community would work on would be tackling the climate change, as it was an obvious field where every country of planet earth had a common interest.
Instead, because of a few hundred "miscounted" votes in Florida, the US president was a zealous anti-intellectual evangelist, who decided that US interests trumps human rights, that denying climate change was a respectable political stance, and instead of spending a mountain of dollars on research, energy transition, diseases eradication, social net improvements, he spent it on invading 2 countries despite experts warning that it would not solve any problem.
The fact that they have to write a paragraph promising that everything is local and that videos don't get sent online, curiously, makes me even more suspicious.
Since then, I have wondered why no companies tried to make the processes separate, like we do in democratic countries by separating legislative, judiciary and executive branches.