784 karma · joined June 7, 2014
Ie: what will really cause us to treat models as conscious is when we must.
What we _can_ do is invest in detection, rapid response technology (vaccines etc), and attempt to mitigate and stratify the possibilities of this happening in the worse ways.
Today's knee jerk prohibitions, and fanciful notions of prohibition working are not facilitating those changes.
Because you can view today's error prone QCs as analog emulators of other quantum systems without solving error correction, often people reach to such "simulations". Google is equally guilty. Unfortunately most materials you touch reflect the behavior of electrons which are indistinguishable fermions. Their interactions are long ranged and maintain quantum correlations with all the electrons within the screening length. The spins of a flux qubit are distinguishable, and the pattern of connectivity in existing chips limit direct interactions to a handful of such qubits. Both these differences can be emulated away but at nonlinear cost. Ie even for this toy case there is no advantage . The entire thing is a fugazi. Once you also lump in the basis sets needed to make a realistic simulation and the fact that relativity is needed to describe this complex, the simulation might as well be comparing Looney tunes physics to Newton's principia.
When I was a postdoc with Alan people were playing these same games, making the same claims the same way. Even without the required 4 years of grad physics to understand what's happening a smart person could see the lack of impact over decades and reason this is BS.
But the play works to raise more money than you can make as faculty or a software dev, so people will keep running this play, perhaps until Google tires of it. It's not that making better quantum computers is stupid we should invest in the hardware dev, but not at the expense of science and truth.
- Before being ready to leave, make sure you either have, or will have, another opportunity or no need for an employer. VERY often (especially in tech!) employers/managers will have employees, not for their labor, but for vanity, to build a pyramid to themselves, or for image reasons. Such people will immediately send you packing for complaining about non-productivity. Your perception of your superior's alignment can easily be wrong.
Given that precondition... I agree with the premise.
I'd argue that it's pretty clear that lipitor is partially to blame for our present gerontocracy muddle, but the issue there is that lipitor transfers mortality from the heart to many other conditions, some of which impair thinking. Life extension isn't a monolith, nor are the mechanisms of cellular age in animals. It's a blanket for 1000s of possible technologies. Productive conversations about it would be nuanced, and related to details about a particular technology, which these conversations never seem to rise to the level of. Definitely not this piece or fukuyama's either.
I come to HN for nuance.
If this tool could parse drug patents and draw molecular structures with associated data, I know we would pay 200k/yr+ for that service, and there's a market for it.
In my own field, there's an incredibly important application to parse patents and scientific papers, but this would require specific image=>text models in order to get the required information out with high fidelity. Do you guys have plans to enable user supplied workflows where perhaps image patches can be sent to bespoke encoders, or finetunes?
Meanwhile journalists rest more and more on sexual politics to elicit interest in a public who is very tired of what they have to say.
How about we build stuff, and let people worry about their own love lives?
Empirically, I find no improvement in reproducibility between arxiv and journals. The costs are incredibly high too.
Like many things in our world peer review is a short lived extrapolation which doesn't resemble it's origins but is regarded as immutable gospel. It matters most if what you need is the respect of academics.
Unfortunately, I don't think it's this type of visible but marginal nonsense which perpetuates the SF drug economy. There are simply a lot of people making money on the blight. Private equity funds have piled into methadone treatment, even though other treatments are more evidence-based. No matter the customers are penniless wretches, the government is billed astronomical sums to perpetuate their suffering. These are some of the highest profit margin balance sheets I've ever seen. A public which lacks the stomach to account for whether remediations are evidence-based, collaborates with the cartels to keep the whole thing spinning and shambling.
Walk into any hospital waiting room, and count the dollars disappear to "treat" the dopesickness of a victim. Like the rest of the US healthcare system, it's a galactic obvious grift enabled by regulatory capture, operating in plain sight.
Private flights have no security whatsoever. They are also much more climate unfriendly. If commercial becomes more of a headache people will press up towards jetshares...
Really, could anyone explain why I should care about python environment tools at all? Because we do fine without them.