climatologist

What happened to "sparks of AGI"?

Doesn't law enforcement have access to cell towers and the phones that connect to them along with their GPS coordinates? Obviously paranoid schizophrenics are probably not tracked but it is in theory possible and that's probably what he's fixated on without actually being able to articulate why.

Poster needs some talk therapy but I doubt he's important enough to be tracked so someone needs to acknowledge his fears and dissuade him of his paranoia.

The current model is already destructive and most of the market is managed by artificial agents. Schwab will give you a roboadvisor to manage your retirement account so AI is already managing large chunks of the financial markets. Letting AI manage not just the financial aspects but things like farmland is an obvious extension of the same principle and since AIs can notice more patterns it's going to become basically a necessity because global warming is going to make large parts of existing farmlands unmanageable. Floods and droughts are becoming more common and humans are very bad at figuring out the weather so there will be an AI agent monitoring weather patterns and allocating seeds to various plots of land to maximize yields.

Bill Gates has bought up a bunch of farmland and I am certain he will use AI to manage them because manual allocation will be too inefficient[1].

1: https://www.popularmechanics.com/science/environment/a425435...

Then I don't know what you're arguing about. If you think LLMs are useful continue using them.

The fact is that no neural network can solve sudoku puzzles. I think it's hilarious that AI proponents/detractors keep worrying about existential risk when not a single one of these systems can solve logic puzzles.

Does anyone know if 1B tokens is enough to solve sudoku puzzles?

Ask it to solve sudoku and report back. Not generate code but actually solve a puzzle in the prompt.

You will merge with the machine and live forever in a technological Eden.

The comparison is in terms of energy use since at the end of the day that is the fundamental currency of all techno-industrial activity. The point is that the global machinery that is currently guiding civilizational progress is fundamentally anti-life. It constantly grows and subsumes whatever energy resources are accessible without any regard for negative externalities like pollution and environmental degradation. This is why I don't take AI alarmism seriously because the problem is not the AI, the problem is the organization of techno-industrial civilization and its focus on exponential growth.

It's only going to keep getting worse and the AI alarmism is not doing anything to address the actual root causes of the crisis. If anything, AI development might actually make things more sustainable by better allocating and managing natural resources so retarding AI progress is actually making things worse in the long run.

I get what you're saying but people don't really care. The typical/average person does not know anything about derivatives, backpropagation, or probabilities so to them it all seems like magic and they anthropomorphize what they're seeing as something intelligent.

Some folks that know how this stuff works and do a good job of explaining the limitations are Melanie Mitchel and Francois Chollet. Both have extensive experience in the field and have also written books on AI.

You can spend your time trying to explain to every random person that computers can't think but they're not gonna understand what you're saying because to them it seems like a large enough Markov chain is actually thinking.

Math seems correct but US military also includes conglomerates and companies like Palantir and Anduril (main reason it is described as an industrial complex is because there is no clear distinction between corporations and how their activities are tied up with military spending and energy use).

Seeking profit and constant population growth are already extremely dumb goals on their own. You can continue worrying about AGI if you want but nothing I've said is either cynical or anti-human. It is simply a description of the global techno-industrial economic system and its total blindness to all the negative externalities of cancerous growth. Continued progress and development of AI capabilities does not change the dynamics of the machine that is destroying the biosphere and it never will because it is an extension of profit seeking exploitative corporate practices carried over to the digital sphere. To address the root causes of misalignment will require getting rid of profit motives and accounting for all the metabolic byproducts of human economic activity and consumption. Unless the AI alarmists have a solution to those things they're just creating another distraction and diverting attention away from the actual problems[1].

1: https://www.nationalgeographic.com/environment/article/plast...

Every cancer eventually kills the host so either people figure out how to be less cancerous or we die out from drowning in the byproducts of our metabolic processes just like yeast drown in alcohol.

The AI doomers can continue worrying about technological progress if they want, the actual problems are unrelated to how much money and effort OpenAI is spending on alignment because their corporate structure requires that they continue advancing AI capabilities in order to exploit the digital commons as efficiently as possible.

> According to the 2005 CIA World Factbook, if it were a country, the DoD would rank 34th in the world in average daily oil use, coming in just behind Iraq and just ahead of Sweden.

Sure, the phrasing could be debated but the fact that it even ranks close to actual nation states is already problematic. The US military is basically an entire nation state of its own. This is nothing new if you're old enough to have observed the kind of damage it has done but it demonstrates my point about profit and alignment. Profits are very often misaligned with human values because war is extremely profitable.

There are no enemies. The biosphere is a singular organism and right now people are doing their best to basically destroy all of it. The only way to prevent further damage is to reduce the human population but that's another non-starter so as long as the human population is increasing it will compel the people in charge to continue pushing for more technological "innovation" because technology is the best way to control 8B+ people[1].

Very few people are actually alarmed about the right issues (in no particular order): population size, industrial pollution, military-industrial complex, for-profit multi-national corporations, digital surveillance, factory farming, global warming, &etc. This is why the alarmism from the AI crowd seems disingenuous because AI progress is simply an extension of for-profit corporatism and exploitation applied to digital resources and to properly address the risk from AI would require addressing the actual root causes of why technological progress is misaligned with human values.

1: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/jul/24/france-big-bro...

Have you personally seen those construction sites? Just go and observe, the stagnation narrative is overblown.

They're aligned with the military-industrial complex. The US military is one of the biggest consumers of fossil fuels[1] and it's the same with other nations and their energy use. So profitable is not the same as aligned with human values.

1: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_usage_of_the_United_S...

Just speaking from personal experience. The methods that I observed are very modern and very efficient. The parts for the entire building are pre-fabricated and then assembled at the construction site. So the stagnation narrative is more than likely overblown and the folks that think things are slower now should visit some of those Truebeck construction sites and observe for themselves.

What does it mean to address the risk of superintelligence? There is no way to stop technological progress and AI development is just part of the same process. Moreover, the alarmism doesn't make much sense because we already have misaligned agents at odds with human values, those agents are called profit seeking corporations but I never hear the alarmists talk about putting a stop to for-profit business ventures.

Do you know anyone that considers the pursuit of profits and constant exploitation of natural resources as a problem that needs to be addressed because I don't. Everyone seems very happy with the status quo and AI development is just more of the same status quo development, just corporations seeking ways to exploit and profit from digital resources. OpenAI being a perfect example of this.

The reality is more complicated than it appears but I've observed a bunch of construction projects near Millbrae CalTrain station and they finish the buildings extremely fast. A bunch of metal frames go up, then some pipes, then some wires, and then some concrete walls.

The project planning and construction is done by a single company, Truebeck Construction, and they seem to know what they're doing.

I don't know what Patrick's list is trying to illustrate but most construction projects in the US happen very fast.

Doesn't everyone think they're the good guy?

Chomsky? No, but I also like Chomsky's perspective on most matters. He's more often correct than not.

Corporations like Saudi Aramco are already doing that. You don't need a superintelligent AI, corporations that maximize profit are already sufficient as misaligned superhuman agents.

I like Zizek's take on this, being happy is overrated and most people are actually pretty happy with not doing anything other than watching YouTube and playing video games.

Plus, I don't see any way to prevent technological progress. It has a "will" of its own and will continue to advance. Jaques Ellul has already written about this but I think Heidegger and McLuhan are also in the same camp with similar ideas.

Birth rates don't have much to do with the superiority of technology over biology. The most technologically advanced nations will determine the course of history just like they have in the past and right now that's the US and China.

You can't really avoid religion and politics if you are trying to figure out modernity. But if you want to know where the world is heading then there are lots of transhumanists like Ray Kurzweil who have written about what they foresee as the inevitable endpoint of technological developments and I have no reason to believe that his vision is incorrect. Biology will be subverted by software in the very near future and it will look like what Kurzweil has described in his books.

Barring some catastrophic extinction events like supervolcanonic eruptions and meteor strikes Kurzweil's vision seems inevitable to me.

Presumably at some point one of them will achieve singularity and have a self-sufficient superintelligence that will recursively self-improve. I recommend contributing your inputs to the team which you believe is most likely to reach this milestone first because once that happens it is game over for any other AI company.

Ted Chiang has an excellent short story about this situation called "Understand".

So they are going to use 20% of their computational budget to make an alignment AI that presumably can monitor and provide feedback for the other AIs they plan to develop which will use 80% of their budget. I'm not great at math but 80 > 20 so wouldn't it make sense to build the superaligner with 80% of their budget and allow it to control the 20% AI? Again, I'm not an expert but the numbers don't add up.

> Other lawmakers had similarly complimentary things to say about Wang, whose company spent over $1 million on federal lobbying last year

That is a lot of money for a startup to spend on political lobbying but given that AI is already tied up with the military-industrial complex this is pretty sensible. Kid wants to make it big so he's making friends with the right people in the right places.

It's more to do with unrestricted circular self-reference than excluded middle but what you're saying makes sense. Without excluded middle there is no contradiction. There is something called Curry's paradox which is similar. Excluded middle is not involved in Curry's paradox but circular self-refernece is still the culprit for the paradoxical conclusion.