scarmig

If action X takes a million times more resources than action Y, it's silly to focus on or highlight action Y. Seriously: if you are a regular meat eater, your choices use several orders of magnitude more water than even a heavy LLM user. A quip from a comic doesn't somehow erase that or make it irrelevant.

Obviously. Politicians are going to politician.

That doesn't change the fact that he'd successfully attracted my attention, because he's seriously engaging with the most important issue of our age when most politicians are content to ignore it.

The vast majority of the "LLM have no qualia" discourse is mostly using it as a starting point to arguing that LLMs will never be able to X, however. This is a category error that makes no sense on its own--qualia or lack thereof doesn't affect capabilities, p-zombies etc--but that connection does make sense if the speaker is bringing in a hidden assumption of a dualistic human soul that imbues both qualia and additional capabilities to raw matter.

> Unfortunately, the public push against AI is being led, on the left, by Bernie Sanders. Despite being directionally correct in many ways, Bernie just doesn’t understand this technology or the importance of taking it seriously.

Bernie Sanders is one of the only politicians taking AI seriously. The author seems to believe that taking it seriously means assuming that it will only marginally improve in capabilities of where it is today; this is an ideological take, not a scientific or empirical one, and one controverted by both evidence and expert opinion.

If a giant, Chicxulub-sized asteroid is headed toward Earth, it makes sense to focus on the existential threat, instead of worrying about whether it will cause inflation or have disparate impact.

You can reject the idea that the asteroid will hit the Earth, but you need to actually make that argument, not just call the people warning about the asteroid an apocalyptic sex cult.

You could, you know, stop spreading deception about water usage if it bothers you so much when people call out deception about water usage.

At this point, I almost consider it trolling to bring it up: purposely throw in something incredibly stupid, and then throw a hissy fit when predictably called out on it.

No, I don't.

If someone is spreading deception, intentionally or not, then it's entirely within my rights to point out they are without engaging further. If they want to be taken seriously, they have to at least indicate that they are willing to self-correct in the face of direct evidence that they are wrong.

Sure, let's do a more local comparison. Wasco County, where the Dalles is located:

Irrigation: 17.9B gallons/year

Fisheries: 9.7B gallons/year

So, the datacenter at the Dalles uses a shocking 2% of the amount of water used for irrigation alone in the locality.

There's a very simple solution to this, if you actually care about water: tax it to the point where usage is at whatever level you want, instead of focusing on a vanishing minority of the water usage.

> Google’s data centers gulped down nearly 550 million gallons of water

Compare:

> Annual water withdrawals in Oregon since 1985 have ranged from 7.3M to 9.4M acre-feet (AF)

https://www.oregon.gov/owrd/WRDPublications1/230721_FINAL_Bu...

Note that 7.3M acre-feet is equal to 2.3T gallons. 550M/2.3T = 0.02%

There was construction of some data center, and someone's well water started looking dirty around the same time. From there it metasisized into claims that it's destroying all the world's water.

Someone complaining about water usage is a very strong indicator that they aren't well-informed enough to contribute anything worth reading, though.

As the sibling comment points out, that is incorrect: they solved a smaller, simpler problem, and OAI solved the actual Millennium Problem. But even if they had solved the actual problem and OAI stole it by digging through chats, that hardly supports the "AI has stalled" thesis; Claude played the major role in creating their blowup to a different problem.

How, exactly, does "it was Claude that solved Navier Stokes, not ChatGPT!" get you to "AI has hit a wall and stalled"? That's, not to put too fine a point on it, incoherent, and is just noise thrown into the discussion to avoid grappling with the fact that AI continues to rapidly improve.

Yeah, it's been over a week since a Millennium Problem was solved. AI has hit a wall.

Then: "LLMs only cured cancer as a marketing stunt."

The dominant opinion on HN is, apparently, "It's been a full four days since OpenAI resolved Navier-Stokes, they must be hitting a wall."

Note that Caplan is focusing on medians and percentiles in his table, not on means.

I do kind of get the point that ensuring Boomers who have a lot of wealth in real estate can pass a paid off house to their heirs isn't a socially valuable goal (especially since Social Security is funded by working people, including many who don't own a house or aren't due to inherit one). Maybe instead SS benefit can be considered more like a loan with the house as collateral, payable on death or transfer.

Reading through them, Luu's grades seem fair and accurate to me. Best defense of Kurzweil I can give is that if you give a grace period of a decade and scope them down substantially (to maybe a subset of well-off Americans in coastal cities), he looks much better, though still under 50%.

One of Kurzweil's close-but-no-cigar failed predictions was "neural nets and genetic algorithms," killed off by the conjunction and being a couple years too early (2009 for increasing interest, and 2019 for wide use).

But even those concessions have been a shift: at every point, he's been as bearish as possible on LLMs, often past credibility.

And if you take it as a given that AI will never be any better than ~~now~~ a year ago, and that anyone who disagrees is an idiot or a liar, then that pretty much demands that the entire AI economy must be as fraudulent as he imagines. Which, while it serves his purpose of serving up AI-skeptic invective slop well, doesn't actually model what's going on, which is speculative investments that have the potential to generate extraordinary returns.

Still a flaw--the SVG should account for how different client devices will render it! Existential doom averted, for now.

That's a pretty crass attempt to shift the burden of proof. You're stating that LLMs are definitively not conscious and never could be; I'm saying we should approach the question with a sense of humility and agnosticism since we know so little about consciousness.

And it's unclear what your actual argument about the nature of consciousness is, aside from what seems like a bald assertion that humans are the only conscious beings.

Why? What makes you so absolutely certain? 100% is a lot, which implies you do have at least some privileged understanding of consciousness.

My argument isn't that current AI is definitively conscious or that it will be in the short term. It's that nobody has a cohesive theory of consciousness, and that we should therefore approach questions of what's conscious and what's not with humility.

For LLMs in particular, it's notable that they both 1) originate from a lineage that attempted to model biological brains mathematically and 2) are the only other known entities in the universe able to reproduce many types of human intellectual labor. That is surprising and striking. Does that mean that they definitively share other traits with humans like consciousness? No, but it does make them one of the most interesting candidates, particularly when we have a very limited understanding of how humans themselves are conscious.

No one understands these things, which is why considering machine consciousness as a possibility is entirely reasonable. People who have a shallow model of how they work ("it's just linear algebra!") betray a lack of understanding.

Unfortunately, that's not the case in the United States. The LOC only selects around half of published books to be permanently held. The rest are disposed of (usually returning them to the publisher, donating them to a library, or destroying them).

The magical library in the countryside, to be painfully explicit, does not exist.

Is your complaint that they follow copyright law, or that they don't follow copyright law?

Dumpsters also don't typically come equipped with a robot scanner and network uplink built in.

Like, I really don't know what people objecting to this imagine typically happens to old, unwanted books. They don't get sent to some magical library in the countryside if unpurchased where they are carefully maintained forever (next to where Rover spends the rest of his days). They are very literally thrown into the trash.

That said, I'd be thrilled if the US government required AI companies to make them available to the public. I'd even settle for the US government making it legal for them to.

Relinquishing copyright does not imply any of the labor you're suggesting. It's the opposite: you're just committing not to perform the labor of pursuing legal action against someone who does digitize and freely distribute the work.

Anna's Archive, for one, would be more than happy to host at no cost to the author.

You've got to compare it to the alternative. Books have a half-life, and the vast majority of these books being purchased are grody, moldering ex-lib copies of books that no one has read in decades. Their other likely outcome is mulching.