Thank you! Parr, Pezzulo & Friston looks like the kind of book I'm after - love cross-disciplinary works. After all, knowledge and nature are continuous. It's humans who like to chop them up into subfields :)
343 karma · joined September 24, 2019
(a) Top labs quietly signing deals for military deployment of frontier models in unmanned strike weapons?
(b) Top labs agreeing to license LLMs for social engineering/propaganda ops?
(c) Models that vastly exceed human intelligence and have capacity to pursue own agenda (i.e. runaway intelligence)?
(d) Something else?
It looks like dangers of AGI are overblown (perhaps partially due to grant funding and ability to get political traction/investment/competitive advantage), while (a) and (b) are severely underdiscussed. Would love to get other perspectives.
It's likely that Google will not be the last search company. What business model could a successor use to generate revenue without falling into the ad trap? Why didn't early search engines choose other models like subscription, revenue sharing with telecom companies, or turning queries into marketing signals for manufacturers/merchandisers?
[~14:30] Although the search companies were having great success, they were turning into something quite different than what they started out to be. They lost the sight of what brought users to them in the first place: The need to find things. The search engine companies stopped caring about search.
When it came to actually locating relevant information on the web, Yahoo, Excite, and the rest of the so called search companies, frankly, stunk. You could spend all day typing various combinations of keywords that you were looking for. Most of the results were links to sites trying to sell you something you didn't want. The world was hungry for a radically better way of searching the web.
In other terms, out of 4.5 million suggestions about 80% were off, yet there is 91% positive reception. That's 3.6 million rejected suggestions that potentially distracted programmers from doing their work. Yet users are happy. Is there a contradiction in these figures?
Do you know of specific places in Europe that capture that spirit? With both diversity and depth of knowledge in different disciplines?
To make it a low-cost effort, we could (a) prepare a list of relevant politicians (b) create a template of the letter. Then our non-technical friends need only sign and mail this. And if we put this all up as a one-pager on GitHub pages, it's suitable for sharing on social networks too ;)
What are some simple and practical actions any EU citizen can take now to stop this from going forward?
However, this isn't universal advice. There are people who don't want/like risk. They want a safe and steady job that gives them status, preferably without too much stress and a good salary. In exchange they agree to play corporate office games and doing less exciting work. And that's ok.
The key is (a) figuring out what you want and what kind of person you are, (b) accepting that life is a probabilistic endeavor and you can't take risk out of it. Why do you want to go into ML? Are you hacking something in your spare time? Is it because it seems cool and trendy? Can you go into an ML role at your current workplace?
How much could you trust media content previously? Staged footage, false narration, biased coverage are nothing new. A counter-intuitive side-effect of opening the Pandora's box could be a realization that media is a form of simulation. Perhaps this will lead more people to filter what they see through a prism of critical thinking.