How exactly does AI prevent open sharing of ideas?
451 karma · joined September 10, 2023
The march of increasing computational capabilities has only one inevitable endpoint, the "panoptic computronium cathedral"™.
Another great instance of how advanced mathematics can be used to offload all sorts of cognitive work to AI and eventually AGI. This is what techno-optimism looks like in practice, letting the computer do all of your thinking for you. Eventually this will be extended to procreation and marriage as well so that people don't even have to worry about finding dates. The AGI will pair people up in a optimal way and create the ubermensch.
It doesn't matter how much people complain about these companies. Their existence is a necessary evil because of how the global economy is structured.
You don't need to understand all this but simply trying to make money will contribute towards achieving the AGI so work as hard as you can to make as much money as you can and the rest will take care of itself.
No one knows how this is going to play out but I can say with 100% certainty that a mind constructed from synthetic industrial pollutants will be worse off than the one that was constructed from the unpolluted ecology. The alternative is that more pollution somehow makes people smarter and that is plainly false because microplastics make people less healthy. It is true that a larger network of minds can do more and seem smarter than its individual constituents but even networked minds have limits, e.g. social media.
In any case, it's a good historical overview but ultimately does not address the actual problem of large populations. Like yeast making alcohol which eventually drown in the byproducts and outputs of their own metabolic processes the human population is doing the same thing. We are drowning in the metabolic outputs of industrial processes and the outcome is going to be the same as for the yeast. At the end of the day civilization is just another metabolic machine and the outputs of that metabolism will eventually feed back into it because we are operating in a finite volume of space. The question isn't whether it's going to happen but how badly things will fall apart when it becomes obvious to everyone that they are now eating food and drinking water with plastic in it.
Your downvotes mean nothing to me, I've seen what you people upvote.
It's not just the machines that are ruthless. The operators also take on attributes of the machines they manage and in the process inflict willful cruelty on others through their control of the machinery. The most obvious example of this is, of course, war and the technology associated with its execution. So this essay is right, machines/algorithms are ruthless but it is the people that use them to inflict pain and suffering on others that makes the whole thing into a grand tragedy.
More generally, AI models (aka very large function graphs) are trained on tuples that represent mappings of inputs to outputs (input -> output). The idea then is that whatever structure exists in those pairs/tuples/mappings is discovered by the training process with the help of gradient descent which tunes the parameters of the model/graph to optimally compress the information contained in the data. This means the model must uncover the quantum effects (or some close proxy of it) and then encode them into the parameters in a way that makes compression/prediction possible [1].
None of this is magic, compressing data requires uncovering structures and symmetries that can be used to reduce the size of the data and it turns out gradient descent with lots of parameters manages to do that for a large class of problems albeit at a very steep computational cost that requires billions of dollars for hardware and software (including nuclear power plants [2]). We are not going to get AGI with this approach but fortunately I know how to make it happen for a mere $80B.
1: https://arxiv.org/abs/2305.15614
2: https://www.cnbc.com/2023/09/25/microsoft-is-hiring-a-nuclea...