joshtbradley

Personal blog about engineering and startups. My old article on LISP made it to the HN homepage once. I’ve learned much since and would love to update it.

https://joshbradley.me/thoughts/understanding-the-power-of-l...

Turns out printing t-shirts isn’t that different from printing silicon. Now Taiwan produces 90% of the world’s advanced chips and NVIDIA is the most valuable company in the world.

Boom’s founder, Blake, comes from a e-commerce background. What a legend for this innovation.

My issue is these things boil down to class. There should be a legitimate, high quality alternative for those who can’t afford it.

Yudkowsky wrote a 250 page book to say "we must limit all commercial GPU clusters to a maximum of 8." That is terrifyingly myopic, and look at the reviews on Amazon. 4.6 stars (574). That is what scares me.

But I also think we should consider the broader context. Suicide isn’t new, and it’s been on the rise. I’ve suffered from very dark moments myself. It’s a deep, complex issue, inherently tied to technology. But it’s more than that. For me, it was not having an emotionally supportive environment that led to feelings of deep isolation. And it’s very likely that part of why I expanded beyond my container was because I had access to ideas on the internet that my parents never did.

I never consulted AI in these dark moments, I didn’t have the option, and honestly that may have been for the best.

And you might be right. Pointed bans, for certain groups and certain use cases might make sense. But I hear a lot of people calling for a global ban, and that concerns me.

Considering how we improve the broad context, I genuinely see AI as having potential for creating more aware, thoughtful, and supportive people. That’s just based on how I use AI personally, it genuinely helps me refine my character and process trauma. But I had to earn that ability through a lot of suffering and maturing.

I don’t really have a point. Other than admitting my original comment used logical fallacies, but I didn’t intend to diminish the complexity of this conversation. But I did. And it is clearly a very complex issue.

But the problem you surface is real. Companies like porn AI don’t care, and are building the equivalent of sugar laced products. I haven’t considered that and need to think more about it.

But you’re right. This article specifically argues for consumer protections. I am fully in favor of that.

I just wish the NYT would also publish articles about the potential of AI. Everything I’ve seen from them (I haven’t looked hard) has been about risks, not about benefits.

It’s not that we shouldn’t worry, we should. But humanity is also surprisingly good at cooperating even if it’s not apparent that we are.

I certainly believe that looking only at the good or bad side of the argument is dangerous. AI is coming, we should be serious about guiding it.

What I’m really after is thoughtful discourse, that acknowledges we accept risk in our society if there is an upside.

To your point about the internet making people more lonely, I’d say on balance that’s probably true, but it’s also nuanced. I know my mom personally benefits from staying in touch with her friends from her home country.

I think one of the most difficult things to predict is how human behavior adapts to novel stimulus. We will never have enough information. But I do think we adapt, learn, and become more resilient. That is the core of my optimism.

What I’m resisting are one sided views of AI being either pure evil, or on the verge of AGI. Neither are true and it obstructs thoughtful discussion.

I did get into what aboutism, I didn’t realize it at the time. I did use flawed logic.

To refine my point, I should have just focused on cars and other technology. AI amplifies humanity for both good and bad. It comes with risk and utility. And I never see articles presenting both.

Development coupled to DAUs… I’m not sure I agree that’s the problem. I would argue AI adoption is more due to utility than addictiveness. Unlike social media companies, they provide direct value to many consumers and professionals across many domains. Just today it helped me write 2k lines of code, think through how my family can negotiate a lawsuit, and plan for Christmas shopping. That’s not doom scrolling, that’s getting sh*t done.

Really my broader point is we accept the tradeoff between technology/freedom and risk in almost everything, but for some reason AI has become a real wedge for people.

And to your broader point, I agree our culture has distanced itself from death to an unhealthy degree. Ritual, grieving, and accepting the inevitable are important. We have done wrong to diminish that.

Coconut trees though, those are always going to cause trouble.

8 million people to smoking. 4 million to obesity. 2.6 million to alcohol. 2.5 million to healthcare. 1.2 million to cars.

Hell even coconuts kill 150 people per year.

It is tragic that people have lost their mind or their life to AI, and it should be prevented. But those using this as an argument to ban AI have lost touch with reality. If anything, AI may help us reduce preventable deaths. Even a 1% improvement would save hundreds of thousands of lives every year.

I’m not one to think in conspiracies. But here is a clear, structural issue. The reward to NGOs should be granted upon reintegration, not upon crises.

The ethical dilemma is deep. Is forcing someone into an asylum—where they can be sheltered, monitored, and treated—more ethical than giving someone the self-determination to self-destruct on the street?

I don't have the answer, I'm not Kant. But it's a question we have been unwilling to face because it is deeply unsettling. It goes against our liberal instinct.

But open-air drug markets are not regulated supply. They are a scourge. America's problem with fentanyl is unique in it's scale and it is not something that can be solved with permissive policy. It must be systematically dismantled.

I do think decriminalizing all drugs for use in clinical settings would be a healthy step forward. I don't think allowing illicit markets for the most dangerous substances helps anyone except criminals.