nohat

It's exponentially easier to respond to an outbreak the earlier you act, but our early response was hamstrung by the CDC and FDA (and complete apathy from the white house). We could have slowed or halted this in the early stages with better testing. At the least it would have confirmed how much community spread there already was and hopefully prodded the gov, states, and businesses into action sooner. Time matters. I wonder how many people the FDA killed by blocking local tests?

Koch (or perhaps just the reporter quoting him) contradicts himself. Even in his own definition of consciousness a machine architecture merely needs a feedback loop to be conscious, something hardly unheard of in computer programs. Now arguably that definition isn't terrible because human consciousness does seem like a supervisor -- something that synthesizes all the subprocess work and makes sure it has a coherent story.

You argue that because it is impossible for an algorithm to do some tasks perfectly, and humans can do "quite a decent job at these tasks," thus human minds are doing something beyond computation. Firstly this just doesn't logically follow. Perfection is completely different from "okay." Secondly it's far from clear that humans do any better than machines on many of these tasks, which would imply the opposite according to your argument.

Your greater than mere computation mind can makes huge bucks solving any problem since it can see if a program halts. Lets factor out some large primes and crack RSA. Just make a program that would halt if the answer is less than a certain value, then do binary search. A bit tedious, but surely huge piles of money are motivating. I'd do it myself but my mind seems to be malfunctioning.

Basically this is just a silly claim which is a shame because the first half of your response was pretty good.

According to one theory presented they were simply trying to use up the coal in the smoldering bunker, thereby putting out the fire.

I agree most of the time, but sometimes watching someone actually do something lets you observe the little things that the teacher would take for granted or forget to mention in a written format.

> Another phrase which means the same thing refers to getting enough data, or declares that data is king. The latter often implies that what's happening is an automation and repackaging of human intelligence.

I think you are either misinterpreting the common usage of 'data is king' or your meaning of 'repackaging of human intelligence' is much different than mine. AI research (and even generally machine learning) is very interested in the degree to which models can generalize. It's core to the entire endeavour, and saying that AI is just 'repackaging human intelligence' is missing the point. For one thing it apparently entirely ignores unsupervised learning.

> It's not even a funny debate tactic, if no one is actually defending the Chinese Room argument.

If you agree with me regarding the confused nature of the chinese room argument (as stated, not as a complicated meta psychology observation), then I rest my case regarding questioning Searle's understanding of AI given his continued advancement of the argument.

> I think it's very telling that instead of engaging in an analysis of the intuitions and biases which apply to human beings thinking about consciousness, you are merely interested in the dead-horse beating exhortation of the supremacy of arguments which have already been won.

I'm merely keeping on topic. The psychology of biases in people approaching the Chinese Room is not on topic, no matter how fascinating. I think that it's more telling that instead of simply resolving the actual argument you tried to change topics and then implied that a refusal to follow was some sort of failing. The Chinese room ought to be dead, but it keeps on being brought up (and not by its detractors, or as a clever psychology experiment).

Since you really want to discuss the psychology of our intuitions regarding consciousness:

Firstly consciousness is actually tough to study and understand. Our understanding is also biased by our sense of personal identity and religious and cultural conflation of consciousness with the soul. On top of that confusion people don't easily think of the world materialistically. It's unintuitive, and slightly disturbing to think that our consciousness is created by a bunch of neurons connected together. Given that its a simple matter of constructing a thought experiment that hides the thinking part from view to make a (apparently) convincing sounding argument against something merely mechanical from having consciousness.

It's just an anecdote, but I have noticed technical people immediately dislike the chinese room argument, while non technical people don't have a problem with it (tbf less agreement than 'huh, good point'). I suspect that engineers and scientists have more experience with the nitty gritty ruthlessness of physics, and are thus less likely to trust their intuition over the science (or at least have formed more physically based intuitions). They also are more used to criticizing each step in an argument instead of taking it as a whole, having learned that engines and computer programs don't run when you elide a critical step. There's also a certain cultural expectation concurrent to this that (rightly) criticizes spiritual/intuitional/supernatural beliefs like souls.

I get that was his claim, but saying that this is now accepted is just not true. Saying that it is 'smart talk' implies that smart people are talking about it?

Saying that the value in the Chinese Room argument is in showing how we have difficulty overcoming our biases is a clever inversion, but more a funny debate tactic than serious defense of Searle. Unless you are claiming that Searle doesn't actually believe it and invented it as some sort of long con?

I don't think using brain biology and logic over intuition needs to be defended.

What do you mean the 'smart talk' is exactly what he said? That needs clarification and citation to be a meaningful statement.

Inventing the chinese room argument is a point against taking him seriously. It's a very confused argument. The fact that it keeps being trotted out is sad more than anything (not that I'm saying you are doing that).

What percentage of your networth is considered socially acceptable to spend on preparing for disasters? For a billionaire buying a new zealand vacation home is like most of us spending a couple hundred bucks on, eg a water filter, first aid kit, and non perishable food, standard preparations that FEMA recommends.

A social media footprint on Facebook in particular, conveniently enough.

The feed quality drops in a way that makes the shaking antennae explanation seem plausible. I doubt the announcers knew then (why not just say so unless there was some ambiguity?), but it must have been a distinct concern, hence their 'smile nervously' reaction.

It is a bit odd they haven't announced that it was lost yet, but I agree that seems very likely.

Serious question: why are senior discounts not illegal then? Does anyone know? Quick Google search was unenlightening.

Normally moral hazard is a concern for charitable activity, but in this case it would be a good thing because it isn't really encouraging negative behavior. If countries intentionally go into debt to eradicate critical diseases with the intention of getting the debt forgiven or paid by someone else, that would be just fine.

The speed of bootstrapping would be greatly increased by the knowledge we have. Even a very serious nuclear war would leave significant caches of scientific and technological knowledge. Galactic timescales are so large that we could easily afford to spend thousands of years rebooting, even do so many times. Of course if there's some technology that is even more damaging (and easier to make) than nuclear weapons, we might have a good great filter candidate.

Cowardice in the form of running away from battle was definitely a cause for decimation.

> Both Newegg and ASI were in on the scheme, the banks say, because Moneual priced the computers that were supposedly ordered at 300 times their actual market value.

If true, this does sound pretty bad, though depending on the percentage of the order its possible newegg could claim typo. I do have to wonder why the banks didn't notice this during the loan check. Unless the contents of orders is typically kept secret in loan checks like this?

I feel like Scott Alexander's thoughts on openai when it was first announced are still relevant now. I can think of strategic reasons for what openai has done, but I also feel like their tactics and 'democratization of AI' credo focus more on the short term economic and political dangers of a monopoly or oligopoly on AI than existential threat. In fact it probably increases existential risk, seeing as a competitive race (providing no time for caution) to be the first to finish GAI is surely the most plausible and possibly the most dangerous scenario.

http://slatestarcodex.com/2015/12/17/should-ai-be-open/

Meditations on Moloch. In which coordination problems are incarnated as Ginsberg's Moloch. http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/

I'm actually nostalgic despite not using Theano for all that long. Theano really was groundbreaking and excellent, though, like many, I've moved on. Thanks to the developers!

Honestly 'data wrangling' is indeed an unfortunately large part of ML work, so I'm interested. I have wondered how tractable making a data transformer that simply shaped and filtered the data based on example and a few constraints would be. Remains to be seen how good a job this has done.

To potentially clarify: the test is just a form. It's a form with some questions about mood, and is currently being used to diagnose bipolar disorder (inappropriately, the author believes).

In at least a few cases most of terrorism's damage to a society is from the auto immune response.

Bostrom is in no way in charge of people who happen to agree with him wrt ai risk. For the book he mostly collected and organized a lot of existing thought on ai risk (not that he hasn't made his own novel contributions). That's very valuable, largely because it makes for a good reference point to contextualize discussion on the topic. Unfortunately the critics don't seem to have read it because (in my experience) they repeat the same objections without reference to the existing responses to those objections.

People do sometimes overblow alphago/ dqn playing Atari, but it's not meaningless. These systems (and other deep learning based systems) can truly learn from scratch on a decent variety of environments. One of the most important unknowns is exactly how difficult various cognitive tasks will prove to be for a machine. Each task accomplished is another data point.

Better quality than most such posts, but still seems to be missing the point. The remarkable thing about Bostrom's book is how well it anticipated the objections and responded to them, yet no one seems to bother refuting his analysis, they just repeat the same objections. I actually agree with a decent bit of what he says on these points, though his application of these observations is kinda baffling. He makes a lot of misguided claims and implications about what proponents believe. I'll sloppily summarize some objections to his points.

1. This doesn't really bother making an argument against superhuman intelligence. Yes, of course intelligence has many components (depending on how you measure it), but that's not an argument against superhuman intelligence. I'm reminded of the joke paper claiming machines can never surpass human largeness, because what does largeness even mean? Why it could mean height or weight, a combination of features, or even something more abstract, so how can you possibly say a machine is larger than a human?

2. Mainly arguing about the definition of 'general' without even trying to consider what the actual usage by Bostrom et al is (this was in the introduction or first chapter if I recall correctly). I agree that the different modes of thought that AI will likely make possible will probably be very useful and powerful, but that's an argument for superhuman ai.

3. Well he makes his first real claim, and it's a strong one: "the only way to get a very human-like thought process is to run the computation on very human-like wet tissue." He doesn't really explore this, or address the interesting technical questions about limits of computational strata, algorithm efficiency, human biological limitation, etc.

4. Few if any think intelligence is likely to be unbounded. Why are these arguments always 'x not infinite, therefore x already at the maximum?' He also seems to be creating counter examples to himself here.

5. Lots of strong, completely unbacked claims about impossibilities here. Some number of these may be true, but I doubt we have already extracted anything near the maximum possible inference about the physical world from the available data, which is basically what his claims boil down to.

Is it just me or is this actually genius? Mutually assured destruction has been the name of the game for big companies for a while now, but that wasn't practical for small players. If Microsoft is willing to take small companies under its umbrella, it could be quite effective and helpful. Seems like what they actually do is provide you the opportunity to buy a hand selected legal weapon, but that threat may well make azure a little safer for small companies and startups. Will Google and Amazon feel pressured to follow suit?

Of course this doesn't work against patent trolls, because they have no products to sue over. As long as Microsoft doesn't start threatening to sue companies that use aws or something, I have to applaud this move.

>Using automated tools to search the whole database, as security researchers subsequently did, turned up no hits.

This sounds so serious and involved, but probably took 10 seconds and just involved ctrl-f or (even) grep.

It's a reasonable heuristic for when you just don't have the time or energy, but if you are giving a 45min keynote speech on the topic I think you are expected to make the effort to judge an idea on its merits.

The data is anonymized too. Numerai could be playing a shell game, but it would require submitting their own solutions, or publishing confidential information, both presumably illegal (and particularly indefensible if caught).

Interesting that Obama is particularly concerned with specialized ai for cyber security/warfare applications. I thought he had a fairly balanced and knowledgeable viewpoint on these issues, though I think both he and Ito underestimate the impact and timeline.

Not much to say on the general AI question, but that's understandable.

Humorously the poster of that clip is apparently using it to argue for his conspiracy theory about fluoride.