N0b8ez

I love the idea of the comic villainy of someone who deliberately chooses to organize a team to find ways to circumvent Ozempic in order to keep their buyers unhealthy and addicted. Could such a schemer have an internal monologue, and what would it consist of? What do they see when they look into a mirror? Their experience of reality must be utterly fascinating and alien.

They said other things besides just filtering, like writing responses.

But then why would you need to buy it?

Isn't that just like taking a phone call? I'm not sure what you're trying to imply.

The article mentions youtube as a source of training data, but seems to only be talking about audio transcriptions (text). But, isn't youtube more useful for multimodal training on the video data itself?

Centralizing and industrializing food production has its own famine hazards, like if a strong solar flare were to happen.

It's true that general-purpose robots have made little progress, compared to general-purpose AI, but the reasons for that might just be financial. AI has become a self-justifying busines model whereas generalist robots are still academic projects, kind of how deep learning was a decade+ ago. Maybe making tactile-aware robots that can navigate random environments will end up being subsumed by ML algorithms using cheapo hardware, kind of like this:

https://mobile-aloha.github.io/

AFAIK this is the current for-profit SOTA robot, which goes for $16,000:

https://www.unitree.com/images/Unitree%20G1%20EN%201080p%20%...

My guess is that it's just an expensive toy, only useful to robotics researchers. But I can imagine in 10 years the big LLM+vision models could somehow pilot them, perhaps very slowly compared to a human, but as long as they can finish the job at 0.1% of a human's wage, it might not really matter how much slower they are.

>but there is little progress in robotics. Replacing "somewhere" work is many years away.

I agree there's little progress in robotics, relative to AI. But "many years away" might mean just 10 years away. You can buy this robot for 16 grand USD:

https://www.unitree.com/images/Unitree%20G1%20EN%201080p%20%...

To me, it feels like the barrier now is more on the software end than the hardware end. Is this your impression too, or do you disagree?

> AI is not far superior at every job that exists today.

I wasn't claiming that. I was responding to what you wrote: you quoted the part of my comment that said "[An AI that is able to replace humans at every currently existing economic activity] is probably going to be able to replace humans in whatever new industries are created in the process", which you called an assumption. When you quoted me, were you referring to something else?

It is an assumption, but hypothetically, can you give examples of something that such an AI won't be able to do, assuming that it's already far superior to you at every job that exists today?

What types of jobs do you think humans will remain superior at forever? Or are you only commenting on the short-term improbability of humans becoming generally outcompeted?

Because there were other jobs, since there were still jobs that humans could do better or cheaper than machines could. An AI that is able to replace humans at every currently existing economic activity is probably going to be able to replace humans in whatever new industries are created in the process. What's left for humans to do, but receive UBI?

I agree in the short-term the argument that AI puts people out of work isn't very strong and would also have told us to not invent word processors like you say. But some people envision a future where all jobs will be done by AI, without humans being able to compete at all.

>but on real world maps, there are enclaves - little islands that belong to a country that they have not connection to. And if those shall have the same color as their parent country, then 4 colors is not enough...

Can you give an example of one that can't be colored with 4 colors?

I actually don't understand why it's significantly better for the landfill to be arranged in one way rather than another. Can you explain why it helps future generations?

How about a paper tape writer/puncher? Anyone made one of those?

Weren't there something like 5 glacial maxima in the past 200 thousand years? I had the impression they were more regularly occurring than "hundreds of thouands of years apart".

> The changing climate killed more, but the humans were the differentiating factor, so which one do you point the finger at?

If we're the differentiating factor, I'd have to blame us. Am I right in understanding that these species were normally being thinned during each glacial maxima, such that it was already a set part of their evolutionary environment? If that's right, then aren't we the ones to blame?

Otherwise, is a murderer merely a "contributing cause" to someone's death if the victim happens to be sick at the time of the killing?

It seems to cut both ways. If words are powerful, restricting words is also powerful. It's not clear why this leads to a pro-censorship stance, any more than to an anti-censorship one.

Well, if we're taking the stories at face value, Socrates knew what he was getting himself into when he chose to die, even when he could have easily escaped. He died to prove a point. If Nietzsche thinks this is silly, it's one of those times he's at odds with his own philosophy.

> To die proudly when it is no longer possible to live proudly. Death of one's own free choice, death at the proper time, with a clear head and with joyfulness, consummated in the midst of children and witnesses: so that an actual leave-taking is possible while he who is leaving is still there

(Twilight of the Idols, 1888)

> A huge amount of what I suffer with is not physical pain.

It's not just physical suffering that she's supposedly immune to. She's also immune to all psychological suffering as well. And she is married, has kids, and is perfectly healthy. If she's in fact the real deal (I don't know this myself, but I haven't seen anyone debunking her) then dismissing her as an outlier would be a remarkable form of complacency. If the effect can be understood and replicated, suffering will become fully as needless as it deserves to be, with its final eradication mourned probably as much as the death of smallpox.

> If LLMs are beating humans in theory of mind tasks, your theory of mind is incorrect.

Or, LLMs have better theory of mind than most humans do, which is the finding of that study. Is it metaphysically impossible? If your mental image of how LLM cognition works is the same type of expert system that Searle was writing about back in the day, it's refreshingly bizarre to read how LLMs appear to work:

https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/god-help-us-lets-try-to-und...

Where is the Chinese Room in this? I don't see one. Just a lot of complex and vague conceptual associations mediated through neural connections. Whether or not these models are conscious or have an inner life, they seem to be doing just fine understanding concepts.

>AGI would have to suffer to become general enough to warrant the use of the word general.

Jo Cameron doesn't have general intelligence? This seems absurd. Intelligence is orthogonal to phenomenology and affective states. People aren't worried about AGI because it might have a Cartesian theater, the worry is that it might be more competent than humans and put humans out of a job. The semantics of whether it "truly" has intelligence is irrelevant.

>Suffering is part of our intelligence and we’d be nowhere without it.

It might be part of our intelligence, but why would it need to be part of machine's intelligence? GPT4 is already beating humans at theory of mind tasks[1], and I doubt that it suffers. Our suffering is an evolutionary stroke of bad luck. It has nothing to do with intelligence itself, and it would have been better if we had evolved some other way that didn't need it.

[1] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-024-01882-z

I tend to admire that Socrates used arguments in the process of that, unlike both of us right now.

> But more saliently, I think it's absurd to think our brains, or brains in general, do polynomial curve fitting in any meaningful sense.

Why would an AI need to use the same mechanisms as a human to think? Most machines we create are quite different in character from their natural counterparts (what bird has a propeller?)

Is the Wittgensteinian problem that the AGI wouldn't understand concepts like we do, or is the problem that it wouldn't be able to use them better than a human?

Are you thinking of Searle's Chinese Room or another famous thought experiment? Is your issue that an AGI wouldn't really "understand" concepts, despite being better at using them than a human?

>and as a trained philosopher, I don't buy into the whole AGI nonsense

It's hard to imagine Socrates using this form of argument.

> silicon sentience

Sentience is the ability to have experiences like pain and tasting sweetness. People usually use the word "sapient" or terms like AGI to describe an AI with advanced reasoning ability. This might sound like nitpicking since I was still able to understand your meaning, but the distinction between sentience/sapience is a useful one to keep around and preserve in common usage, at least for the sake of ethics (e.g. a newborn baby isn't sapient, but is sentient).

That makes sense to me. However, I live in an area with very little crime, so I might be biased towards an approach that centers on the legitimacy of the rule of law, without me needing to worry much about law and order being the result of that commitment. I wonder if you consider El Salvador to be an exception to your rule, or if you think Bukele is actually restoring effectual rule of law. Ecuador is another similar case.

Do you think Bukele is a "good leader"?

I would have guessed the primary argument for armed police would be to scare criminals and dissuade them from violent crime. I'd guess some people would argue that having N fewer incidents of cops murdering suspects isn't worth having X% more crime overall. But I'd also expect it's really hard to build a statistical model for how cause and effect would work.

Would you say that this is a topic where there's a clear utilitarian winner, or not?

Things that are political or politics-adjacent often mean different things to different people (e.g. "defund the police"). Someone asking someone else for a definition of their own meaning helps prevent a shouting match.