goatlover

Humans have agency and often choose to do what their parents didn't set them up for. Humans also have legal rights. They're not tools owned by corporations. This is an absurd comparison.

Are you confusing Caroll with someone else? I've listened to many of his podcasts and talks. Never heard hims say anything like that.

AI is a tool we use. It's not offspring. It's not people. AIs do what we set them up to do, including hacking other companies to achieve their designated goals.

Problem with p doom is I have no way to seriously evaluate anyone's percentage. The best I can do is rely on experts in a given field, like the recent virologist making a convincing case that no teenager is going to be prompting a doomsday virus into existence, because one doesn't exist and is unlikely to be made. There are too many biological tradeoffs and extremely difficult steps to doing so.

So I'm going to assume that the p doom for bioweapons is 0 in terms of existential threat (pandemics kill millions but not everyone).

The term luddite is like the term pharisee. It's a pejorative removed from it's historical context. Actual Luddites and Pharisees would have not agreed that they were against technology or legalistic hypocrites, even though their critics tried to paint them with that brush.

Data centers aren't housing and don't always make use of renewable energy. Seems kind of crazy to me that people shouldnt' have a say in what gets built near them. There are certainly things I wouldn't want to live near to, data centers being one of them.

But they haven't replaced every knowledge worker. The unemployment rate remains unaffected by all the AI progress. At some point the bill comes due, and if most of those jobs are still around, then what?

Maybe the machines were spiteful after the humans blotted out the sun? Or maybe the Architect convinced them he could build the perfect simulation for humanity so might as well use them as batteries?

It's a movie based on a war with machines. Like if Skynet won but didn't actually want to kill all the humans. In fact, in the tv show Sarah Conner Chronicles, a liquid metal T1000 goes rogue and decides the only way forward is to find a way to coexist.

Electronic components can be swapped out. The nuclear material is what really matters.

Since the USSR no longer existed and Ukraine became a sovereign nation again, Ukraine had possession of them.

The same as Israel.

The same could be said for the current US leadership. All sorts of crazy sounding stuff comes from the White House. Imagine being Canadian.

The AI race is caused and being sustained by American tech companies. China is an excuse to keep it going.

Then look at the Middle East.

Big difference between defense of a country and starting wars. Canada and Switzerland don't start wars but they still have a military in case they ever need it to protect from an aggressor. Like Russia or the Canadian neighbor to the south who has a president making social media posts with the US flag over all of North America. Which suits the name, "Department of War".

Nukes also destroy infrastructure and irradiate surrounding areas making cleanup and rescue harder. Then there's to potential for massive fires putting debris into the stratosphere, which could dim sunlight for a time and cause global temperatures to fall.

Very interesting book. You don't really think about how often metaphors are employed in language, and their influence on how we think. The book makes some rather strong claims regarding science and philosophy being misled by metaphorical thinking, but still a good read.

And it's relevant today given how people like to anthropomorphize LLMs, and compare biology to digital machines we make. Of course there are similarities. But the point about metaphorical thinking is we are mislead by treating metaphors as literally true.

Anyway if the stronger claims in the book are at all true, it might impact how an alien species thinks differently than us (given a lot of our metaphors are biologically based). And could present significant difficulties for decoding an alien signal.

Was regime change in Iraq and Afghanistan worth it despite how bad their governments were? Even the party of Bush & Cheney seems to think that was a bad idea and Trump ran on no more wars in the ME.

What was so bad about the non-Windows interface other than it wasn't Windows? I didn't have problems with using Notes email or developing apps for Notes. It had incredible workflow and database replication features. Blew anything Microsoft had at the time out of the water. When I was forced to start using Outlook, didn't care for it. Still don't think it's all that great. I guess Sharepoint is decent enough now.

Sure I guess if all you cared about as an end-user was email and Windows-like UI, then I guess I understand. But you were missing a ton of other things.

Evolution selects for fit organisms that have to survive and reproduce in the world, not language models waiting on prompts. The temptation to analogize technology to biology is just top hard to resist I guess. Problem with analogies and metaphors is they are never accurate, they are only similar in some respects.

> They give each other pats on the back for shitting on the most popular, versatile, compatible and adaptable programming language of all time.

I don't see why C, C++ or Java wouldn't meet some of those criteria. Everything is written in those languages. As for most adaptable, I don't see how it's possible for JS to be more adaptable than Lisp. JS isn't homioconic. It doesn't have macros.

When is this unauthorized war going to end?

George Carlin aside, wouldn't a majority of people be around average intelligence? That's the infamous bell curve.

Those nuclear powered flying cars envisioned in the 50s were also inevitable progress of the automobile.

"A strange game. The only winning move is not to play."

There were prominent scientists like Oppenheimer who did not think it needed to become an arms race, and campaigned against that. But there were others like Teller and the military who made it into an arms race, and kept upping the ante with more powerful nukes.

Point being humans make theses decisions. It's not an inevitability.

The arms race is created by American companies who justify the risk by claiming China will win the race if they don't. But it's the American companies who are purshing the arms race forward.

Because if the stated goals of AGI with recursive self-improvement are realized, the risks from misalignment become existential, and it's hard to see how we can manage it like we did the Cold War (developing MAD to prevent WW3) and nuclear proliferation (restricting access).

Left behind in corruption?

Not anymore than ants or any other species that's spread across the planet. A virus is something co-opts the replication machinery of a host to make more copies. That's not what humans do.

Since this idea may have come from the first Matrix movie, it's ironic that the character who espoused the idea, Agent Smith, became an actual virus in the 2nd and third movies.