Exactly :/
Not illegal, but immoral
497 karma · joined July 7, 2017
Not illegal, but immoral
Interesting sales tactic though. Just floating this absurd number out there is classic highball, perhaps will make an investment of “only” 100 billion feel more reasonable to Abu Dhabi or SoftBank.
Yes, there are other sources of sports news online, but I don’t want my kids clutching their iPad and Chromebook every waking minute.
Print journalism/media is an antidote to the distraction epidemic and our capitalist overlords are actively hollowing it all out.
But at the end of the day, we’re the consumers, and we still have the choice to pay for professional journalism if we care about the truth.
His perspective was that (if I may take the liberty of paraphrasing him) there’s nothing particularly special about life from the perspective of physics. What we call life simply correlates to parts of the physical world that have the highest degree of complexity and internal structure.
Life is not binary.
Survivorship bias in the extreme. The only survivors are ones in fringe habitats away from the best productive land. We have no view into the larger, richer, more complex cultures that were the norm back then.
It seemed to be on the frontier of the research at the time the book was published. They knew about the existence of black earth (terra preta) but were really only speculating about how much human effort and over how much time was involved to create it.
For local navigation, first and foremost. The goal is to teach you how to navigate your locale, so you use it less and less. You still will want to ask it for traffic updates, but you talk to it like you would between locals who know all the roads.
As a model for how to do AI in a way that enhances your thinking rather than softens/replaces it.
I see only a difference in degree. It starts with trusting AI to write your emails, then organizing your calendar, then organizing your finances, then establishing financial goals, then making important life decisions. And then you're a pet.
There will be companies actively trying to build this kind of trust. And they will succeed -- at least, they'll be able to deliver this kind of advice for almost no cost, and much of the advice will be considered helpful, much of the time.
But who's going to be on the other side, arguing that listening to the AI advice is a net bad?
My two cents on the post: First of all, in my mind, the Andreessen "Techno-Optimist Manifesto" is such self-serving half-baked neoreactionary junk, that the only appropriate response is just to ignore it altogether. It seems not even worth commenting on. Or at least, if you're going to comment on it, you should just summarily dismiss it, like "yeah, of course VCs are excited about accelerating techno-capitalism because it serves their material interests, and let's not take their philosophical self-justification seriously."
Regarding the substance of the post:
> If we want a future that is both superintelligent and "human", one where human beings are not just pets, but actually retain meaningful agency over the world, then it feels like something like this is the most natural option.
This is on the one hand, totally common sense, and on the other hand, something that (I'd argue) is directly in conflict with the material interests of companies that create and use generative AI. They absolutely want you to outsource your thinking to the machines, to give up your agency. What will the organized forces of resistance to this look like?
[1] https://conversationswithtyler.com/episodes/vitalik-buterin/
> In my view, it is one manifestation (among many) of the exponential growth of the evolutionary process that is technology.
https://www.thekurzweillibrary.com/the-law-of-accelerating-r...
It's Black Friday, maybe 2010. My siblings and I go out for a drink somewhere downtownish. Street parking is tight. So we pull into parking for a corner business center (anchored by a bank, with a few other retail stores, all closed for the evening). There's some tiny "no parking here unless you're a business patron" sign that we genuinely don't see.
After our very happy evening drinking reasonably-priced Chicago beverages, we return to the car.
It's got a boot on it. The guy who installed the boot is just sitting there in his truck, waiting for us to get back. He tells us that we parked illegally and need to pay $150 (maybe more? at least that) to get the boot off.
Something about it felt like society was eating itself alive. Just funneling money into some cynical investors' bank accounts while restricting us from making use of totally available, no-cost resources (an empty lot) that are themselves supported by ux taxpayers.
Why do we do this to ourselves?
From Wikipedia[1]:
> The Stone Age was a broad prehistoric period during which stone was widely used to make stone tools with an edge, a point, or a percussion surface. The period lasted for roughly 3.4 million years and ended between 4,000 BC and 2,000 BC.
So, 3.4 million years out of (generously) the last (3.4 million + 6,023) years were the Stone Age. 99.82% of "human" history (of course appreciating that modern homo sapien didn't appear until 300,000-ish years ago).
I have seen a few therapists over the years, but that always stuck with me. I'd take good conversation with a trusted friend or family member over a therapist any day. It might even serve us better to do away with the credentialing process altogether and sort of lift the veil on actually what happens in therapy.
The one really great therapist I had didn't even "do therapy" but instead helped with all sorts of practical advice when I was navigating a complicated divorce.
As far as I'm concerned, you sort of have to address the big, tough points in Bostrom's Superintelligence[1], and probably Yudkowsky's List of Lethalities[2]. They have to do with intelligence explosions, with instrumental convergence, and with orthogonality of goals, and all kinds of deceptive behavior that we would expect from advanced AI. Throw in Bostrom's "Vulnerable World" thought experiment for good measure as well[3]. If you're not addressing these ideas, there's no point in debating. Strawmanning "AI will kill us all" out of contexte will indeed sound like wacko fear-mongering.
What surprises me is that everybody's familiar with the "paperclip maximizer" meme, and yet I'm not hearing any equivalently memey-yet-valid rebuttals to it. Maybe I'm missing it. Please point me in the right direction.
Aaronson certainly does not address the core theoretical fears. Instead we get:
> Would your rationale for this pause have applied to basically any nascent technology — the printing press, radio, airplanes, the Internet? “We don’t yet know the implications, but there’s an excellent chance terrible people will misuse this, ergo the only responsible choice is to pause until we’re confident that they won’t”?
We did not have any reason to believe that any of these technologies could lead to an extinction-level event.
> Why six months? Why not six weeks or six years?
Implementation detail.
> When, by your lights, would we ever know that it was safe to resume scaling AI—or at least that the risks of pausing exceeded the risks of scaling? Why won’t the precautionary principle continue for apply forever?
The precautionary principle does continue to apply forever.
On the "risks of scaling": we're hearing over and over that "the genie is out of the bottle," that "there's no turning back," that the "coordination problem of controlling this technology is just too hard."
Weirdly pessimistic and fatalistic for a bunch of "utopic tech bro" types (as Sam Altman semi-ironically described himself on the Lex Fridman podcast, where, incidentally he also failed to rebut Yudkowsky's AI risk arguments directly).[4]
Where's the Silicon Valley entrepreneurial spirit, where's the youthful irrational optimism, when it comes to solving our human coordination problems about how to collectively avoid self-destruction?
There are a finite number of humans and heads of state on earth, and we have to work to get every single one of them in agreement about a non-obvious but existential risk. It's a hard problem. That's what the HN crowd likes, right?
The people opposed to the Future of Life letter (or even the spirit of it) seem to me to be trading one kind of fatalism (about AI doom) for another (about the impossibility of collectively controlling our technology).
We simply must discount the view of anybody (Aaronson included) employed by OpenAI or Facebook AI Research or whose financial/career interests depend on AI progress. No matter how upstanding and responsible they are. Their views are necessarily compromised.
[1] https://www.amazon.com/Superintelligence-Dangers-Strategies-... [2] https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/uMQ3cqWDPHhjtiesc/agi-ruin-a... [3] https://www.ted.com/talks/nick_bostrom_how_civilization_coul... [4] https://youtu.be/L_Guz73e6fw?t=3221
AIs can do science, write code, impersonate people, and manipulate people. We’ve already got AlphaFold and ChatGPT and Copilot. People are moving full steam ahead with AI software developers and scientists who have access to deploy code and spend money and communicate with humans autonomously.
I don’t think it takes a whole lot of imagination to see these things improving and coming together in way that an AI agent could feasibly design and execute a plan to develop a bio weapon or deadly nanotech. His points are about how hard it is to prevent that with our current AI training regime.
His analogy, for example, between the human “inclusive fitness reward function” (we evolved with the role purpose of survival and reproduction) and RLHF-style human feedback for AI is apt, and not obvious. Just because we “evolved to survive” didn’t prevent groups of humans from developing the exact opposite capacity to make us extinct.