kwamenum86

I’ve spent a lot of time studying opinions coming out of the frontier labs, and talking directly to employees. This won’t necessarily result in Skynet. But life as we know it will be a thing of the past within two years unless there’s a huge course correction. I think we’re cooked for the following reasons

- Everything connected to the Internet will eventually be hacked. For decades, we’ve slowly migrated all of our critical systems to devices connected to one giant network. Misaligned agents have mounted increasingly sophisticated explorations/attacks by infiltrating systems that are completely unprepared to deal with this kind of threat.

- We have a poor understanding of the impact of LLMs, which is inhibiting our ability to protect ourselves, create the right guardrails, and stand up policies quickly enough. We’re still wasting time debating. We’re moving quickly toward a punctuated equilibrium moment and won’t have time to waste

- We’re at the beginning of a runaway evolutionary process. At some point soon, someone is going to invent recursive self improvement. Any policy will at best serve as a mild disincentive. It’s happening.

- In the very best case, someone will exploit the confusion and chaos of this situation for their own gain. There are many examples littered throughout history, including the last several years of course. The utopian vision is not happening. Like all other resources, we’ll compete. We haven’t devised a good approach to orderly distribution of resources for large groups of people.

- No one has demonstrated that they understand how to build AI safely. Not a single entity. These companies are not even being scaled in a way that’s conducive to building AI safety. Hyperscale orgs struggle with scaling basic consumer apps. How on earth are they going to scale AI? Based on my firsthand observations of their internal workings, I have zero confidence they can.

Check out The Case Against Reality for more color

https://www.bondcap.com/report/pdf/Trends_Artificial_Intelli...

So nah.

“One person sets a goal: become a best-selling author. Another imposes a constraint: write every day, but never write what bores me. The first may spend years pitching, networking, contorting themselves into marketable shapes. The second may accidentally build a following simply because the work sustains itself.”

Jupyter Nbconvert: Jupyter Nbconvert is a command-line tool that allows you to convert Jupyter notebooks into various formats, including HTML, PDF, and Markdown. You can use the nbconvert command to convert your Jupyter notebook into an HTML file, which you can then upload to a web hosting service or a file-sharing platform like GitHub or GitLab. To use this method, you will need to have Jupyter installed on your computer.

Binder: Binder is a free service that allows you to turn your Jupyter notebook into a live, interactive website that can be accessed by anyone. Binder creates a virtual environment that includes all the dependencies required to run your notebook and launches it in a web browser. To use this method, you will need to upload your Jupyter notebook to a GitHub repository and provide a link to your repository to Binder.

Google Colab: Google Colab is a free cloud-based service that allows you to create and run Jupyter notebooks in a web browser. You can create a new notebook in Colab, write your code, and then export it as an HTML file using the nbconvert command. You can then download the HTML file and upload it to a web hosting service or file-sharing platform.

Really great book that touches on the meta-analysis in this article and much more

You make some valid points about what constitutes active/passive resistance and your comment made me think. I don't think everyone is obligated to come up with better solutions but I do think if you're going to participate in the dialog, focusing solely on attacking existing solutions is counterproductive and makes me question your motives.

I think an even more subtle problem is people who attack ineffective policies as opposed to focusing on the primary objective, which is coexistence. In other words, people focus on attacking solutions as opposed to helping create better ones. That behavior is pervasive, insidious, counterproductive, and seems to be picking up steam.

To the extent possible, I've always tried to shape my identity based on what feels right for me instead of what's expected of me, even from my own race. With practice, divorcing yourself from other peoples' opinions of you becomes second nature. When you don't adopt that mindset you're allowing other people to write your story, which some people are fine with but I personally find that intolerable. I can definitely relate to feeling like you have to disown part of your identity but I just can't accept that. It happens in many subtle ways we don't think about. For example, when we sense someone else's self doubt if evokes feeling of self doubt, anger, or sadness in ourselves. In reality, other peoples' flawed opinions don't pay my rent so I try to live in reality and disregard ignorance unless it affects the outcomes I care about.

I chose tech (over politics!) because it seemed like more of a meritocracy and, although I've dealt with some race-related challenges, focusing on doing my best work, creating value, and writing my own story has led to pretty good results.

I do still get distracted wondering whether my story would be different if I weren't black - it's tough.

In the ideal world, we all work together to find something that works. In reality, we're prone to change resistance so when we disagree with a new policy (regardless of whether it really has implications for our own lives) we tend to reject the policy, the premise, the authorities, and any groups that support said policy. There's lots of evidence that suggests that's an inherent dynamic of social systems. When policies have implications for social groups things turn explosive quickly, but beyond that I think the reaction we see to diversity conversations is just run of the mill change resistance. I often find it helpful to highlight the inarguable, universal truths in those situations as a starting point for finding a better way forward but...it's never easy.

That pretty much sums up the state of the dialog in the industry and it's pretty sad that you can't even find thoughtful comments on Hacker News. Regardless of your politics, everyone deserves a fair shake. I'm a black engineer and manager with experience at several tech companies, including Facebook. At every company I've worked for I've heard jokes about African-Americans (overheard, to my face, from managers and ICs alike) and dealt with people assuming I'm a junior engineer at the beginning of every encounter despite the gray hairs lining my chin. At the conclusion of my tech talks and even technical interviews people routinely ask me if I have an engineering background! These things may seem insignificant ("they're just jokes") but we're social creatures want to feel recognized and accepted. That hasn't stopped me from building a career I'm proud of and I don't lose sleep at night. But I'm an outlier in that regard.

The larger subtext of the entire diversity conversation is learning to coexist. It's not about black people, women, the LGBTQ community, or any other single group. It's about a better working environment for everyone indefinitely. Being against that is literally pathological.

Based on the quality of discourse on this site lately, I'm sure many of you will take my words out of context and make broad assumptions about my beliefs. For the sane ones, please reflect on the words I actually wrote.

No words.

That said whenever I see something on raganwald.com I'll still read it :)