tariqali34

It's as if these people don't even remember that India, China, etc. even exist in the first place. Which is incredibly foolish. If you care about "safety" and you only focus your ire on tech companies that base themselves in the largest economy in the world (according to nominal GDP), then you shouldn't be surprised if the rest of the world produces different AI algorithms that may have different definitions of "safe" - assuming that they're even remotely "safe" to begin with. And yes, I assume that the rest of the world will build AI models of their own, if only to avoid dependence on the United States. Baidu already plan to launch "Ernie Bot" soon.

Which means that when this happens...

>All you end up with is an AI that is so kneecapped that it's barely useful outside of a select number of use cases.

It won't even stop harmful content from being produced. The "fake news producer" will just go to Fiverr and pay someone in India, China, etc. to use prompt engineering skills to manipulate native AI models to pump out article after article of fake news for pennies on the dollar. Or the "fake news producer" will just cut out all the intermediaries and just directly use the AI models.

This is why I don't trust new languages. Everyone starts off as newbies who do not know what they are doing and will struggle to develop best practices. These programmers are just going to make new mistakes...that they won't realize until after the language reaches legacy status and are forced to clean up their mess.

Oh and our "free" nuclear bunkers have to be paid for by the government. There is a chance of the bunkers either being too "basic" to help most people ("Here's your basic income: $30 USD per month! Enjoy!") or being so costly that the program will likely be unsustainable. And what if people don't like living in bunkers, etc.?

We are trying to apply quick fixes to address symptoms of a problem...instead of addressing the problem directly. Slowing down is the right option. If that happens, then society can slowly adapt to the tech and actually ensure it benefits others, rather than rushing blindly into a tech without full knowledge or understanding of the consequences. AI might be okay but we need time to adjust to it and that's the one resource we don't really have.

Of course maybe we can do all of this: slow down tech, implement UBI, and have radical AI transparency. If one solution fails, we have two other backups to help us out. We shouldn't put our eggs in one basket, especially when facing such a complicated abd multifaceted threat.

>Are they though? All I here and read (for example "Superintelligence") is about the "runaway AI", very little is about societal risk.

You are right actually. My bad. I was referring to how AI Safety people has created organizations dedicated to dealing with their agendas, which can be said to be better than simply posting about their fears on Hacker News. But I don't actually hear of anything more about what these organizations are actually doing other than "raising awareness". Maybe these AI Safety organizations are little more than glorified talking shops.

Because at least OpenAI and other "AI Safety" people are attempting to try to stop this 'risk'. They may fail, but at least they can say they tried to deal with "strong AI". How about those worried about current "weak AI"? If the cargo cult spreads and we do nothing...should we get some of the blame for letting the robots proliferate?

Then again. Maybe it is impossible to stop or slow down these future trends. Maybe AI is destined to eat the world, and our goal should be to save as many people as we can from the calamity.

Anyway, this link (http://joelgrus.com/2013/12/24/why-programming-language-x-is...) is decent enough for copying and pasting.

As one of those beginner programmers who had graduated from a development bootcamp, I fell in love with Sinatra much more than I did with Rails. Part of that love may be due to our curriculum...we have to master Sinatra first before you can start learning Rails. But I also liked the finer control that Sinatra provided to me. I suppose you can translate this to the current buzzword jargon of "hating Rails' magic", but writing out simple authentication using Bcrypt is just as much an accomplishment as using the Devise library.

But your bigger point still remains intact. Passion should take a backseat towards choosing the right tool for the job. If you need Wordpress, use Wordpress. If you need Rails, use Rails. And so on and so forth. I may not like a certain tool...in fact, I may hate it, but I should still go ahead and use it anyway. You're here to complete a job. And you should make sure you do it well.

[1]https://quoderat.megginson.com/2006/03/06/programming-langua...

I can imagine a future where the lucky few who still have jobs don't actually do any work. Instead, they speak "New COBOL", a debased imitation of natural language, to machine learning algorithms, convincing them to do the stuff that previous generations would have to do 'manually'. "Please make the shark fiercer", these job-holding people would say to the algorithm, before feeding it huge troves of data that would teach the machine basic concepts such as "shark" and "fierce".

Obviously, some media commenters would claim that programming has been rendered now obsolete by the rise of New COBOL, but in reality, these lucky few speaking 'New COBOL' are the new programmers of that era. In a world where algorithms eat the world, someone still has to babysit the algorithms.

http://www.clock.co.uk/blog/how-to-create-a-private-npmjs-re...

Some people have figured out how to create a private npm repository that isn't just a complete duplicate of the npmjs repository. I don't know how common this approach is though. You can read this SO question for more information: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/14609131/can-i-run-a-priv...

Also, note that even if these download numbers are real, all they indicate is that certain tools that developers have built are very popular with other developers. Developers don't just build tools for other developers. They have to actually use these tools to build stuff that other humans can use. Your competition is with developers within your locality who are trying to prove that they are best-suited towards meeting business needs and building stuff.

All these npm packages aren't your rivals, they're free tools to help you meet business tools (Although whether you actually need to use those tools is another question entirely).

Still, there's differing levels of dystopia. One where humans are still able to help each other is certainly better than most alternatives.

For me, the purpose for humans is to serve other humans, to work. Which we are increasingly unable to do because it turns out that this 'work' can be more easily done by mechanical brutes that happen to be programmed by humans.

Power has always been concentrated in the hands of the few. What we see is that power is being moved from the hands of a human elite to a mob of machines. The loss of work is only a prelude to a loss of purpose.

No need to explain how much we'll pay you per year, how long the interview process is, how likely it is that we'll hire you after the interview, how well we treat work-life balance, whether our company is dependent on venture capital, whether our company is even remotely close to generating profits...or even what the company actually does. We assume that you're desperate...ahem...brave enough for a job that'll you click on our hyperlink and reach out to us.

Disclaimer: I am the OP who built StackAI.

There are probably ways to "cheat" your criteria though by having AI simulate the idea of discovering goals and acting on them, such as building a bot that searches Tweets on Twitter and then writing Tweets based on those Tweets it discovers. But these are "cheats" and won't be universally accepted. We could argue for instance that this bot really has a higher-level goal of finding new goals and carrying them out, and is only coming up with "lower-level" goals based on its initial "higher-level" goal. So, again, you're probably right. We don't know how to have AI create goals on its own...we can only give it to them.

I would say that "dumb slave[s]" or "capricious, self-serving monster[s]" are still threats to worry about though. Just because robots do what we tell them to doesn't mean that they will do what we want them to. Bugs and edge cases can exist in any exist system, and the more complex the system, the more likely it is for those bugs and edge cases to slip by unnoticed. These bugs/edge cases could lead to pretty catastrophic results. Managing complexity when programming AI would be a good place for "AI Advocates" to focus on.

Right now, humans consider intelligence to be "whatever machines haven't done yet" (Tesler's Theorem), but as machine capabilities increase, then there is a real possibility that humans may believe that intelligence doesn't exist at all (after all, if machines can do everything, and if machines are not intelligent, then nothing requires intelligence). [Source: https://plus.google.com/100656786406473859284/posts/Yp83aFwF...]

I do think that intelligence does actually exist and that current AI can already do intelligent things, but that the stuff that current AI can do won't match my vague understanding of the term "strong". If current trends continue indefinitely, then, of course, we won't ever have Strong AI, but we still have machines that do everything. At least, that's one possible way of thinking about intelligence.

But that's the thing, we don't have a good definition of intelligence at all (and I don't have one either) so we don't really know what's going on. We could invent Strong AI and never even recognize it, and maybe even dismiss it because it doesn't resemble what we think of as intelligence (much less "strong intelligence"). There's just so much that we don't know that talking about it is very difficult. AI is not just a field where you get to write pretty algorithms. It is also a philosophical field, and it is a shame that the philosophical and the practical aspects of AI are disconnected.

I can.

Humans are good at coming up with brilliant ideas (such as, say, the concept of translation). But they are absolutely poor at executing them effectively and "at scale" (translating arbitrary works from one language to another). So "AI advocates" can talk about how amazing the brain is in coming up with ideas (as if ideas were all that were needed), but what they really want are mechanical brutes that are able to execute those ideas quickly and effectively.

At least some people hope that the proliferation of AI labor could mean a reduction of human labor, potentially reducing the "suffering of billions of those brains". This, of course, hinges on whether if the gains of productivity can get redistributed fairly (or if they just accumulate to those who already have capital). And then, there's all the social turmoil that occurs during the transition phase: humans may not want to be obsolete, humans may actually like working, AI accidentally becoming an 'exisitenal threat' due to human error, etc. The brains will suffer more in the short-term, in the faint hope that they will suffer less in the future.

EDIT: "The vast majority of automation tasks don't require advanced AI. The vast majority of human work can be removed without recourse to AI."

I would argue that when you get to the point when we have automation tasks and human work unnecessary, that we already have AI. We may never reach the stage of Strong AI because it turns out that what we actually do is not intelligent enough to require Strong AI.

It is absolutely boring for a normal person though.

Here is an article about how some scientists taught robots how to protect themselves from sadistic humans (i.e. little kids).

That being said, robots do not really care what happens to them. If you program a robot to go in an infinite loop, sure it might get physically hurt, but it won't complain about it. The only reasons you would express concern about a robot's welfare is because you either show empathy to it or because you view the robot as your property and you don't want your property getting damaged.

Source: http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/01/how-ne...

INPUT

Quick character description - Users specify some character traits to be associated with a character. The program then will pick words associated with that trait to be used with that character. Words could be pithy sayings, actions, or even adjectives.

https://github.com/tra38/Skynet (Disclaimer: I wrote this as part of my original attempt at narrative generation, but the results was panned. Handling character descriptions was one of the highlights...in the sense readers never complained about my characters. At the same time, people never seemed to noticed or cared about the characterization at all, so it's possible that this approach may have been unnecessary and a less heavyweight solution should be preferred.)

Setting - When writing the story templates the computer will end up using to generate the story, set aside some spaces for describing the setting. You could attempt to just plug in just the name of the setting ("EwanG's Glorious Emporium") into those blanks, or maybe you could have the computer look up information in a database such as Wikipedia or WordNet to give it more flavor. This approach was used in the computer-generated novel "Around the World In X Wikipedia Articles" that uses Wikipedia to describe its settings (https://github.com/dariusk/NaNoGenMo-2015/issues/142) and in a series of simulations fantasy novels that uses WordNet to describe its settings (https://github.com/dariusk/NaNoGenMo-2015/issues/40).

Alternatively, you could generate descriptive and evocative phrases associated with your setting name. This can add more flavor to your story. (This was done in the computer-generated novel "Our Arrival": https://github.com/dariusk/NaNoGenMo-2015/issues/25)

General Outline Of The Story - The 'story compiler' approach, invented by Chris Pressey, starts off with a "null story" (characters meet each other and then characters leaves). The compute starts filling in the outline by adding in plots to this "null story", but each plot has a wildcard that can allow for plots to be nested within plots. After it finishes adding plots to the story, it then goes through each scene of the story and then "flesh" it out.

The Story Compiler approach was used to generate "A Time of Destiny". Here's an issue that gives you links to the theory, the code, and the actual novel: https://github.com/dariusk/NaNoGenMo-2015/issues/11

Now, you want to specify the plot, not let the computer randomly decide, so you may want to skip the first few steps, while instead focusing on having the program handle your unique array of scenes. This is going to be the hardest part of your program (writing up the different plots and all the individual scenes within each plot). And you don't want to write up too many plots, because then it will be seen as you writing your stories, not necessarily the computer. You could have plots reuse different scenes to reduce your workload.

OUTPUT Output of Couple Hundred Pages - Every year, programmers all around the world attempt to participate in National Novel Generation Month, where the goal is to generate 50,000 words. This is both a very easy problem (set the program up in a loop until you get over 50,000 words) and a very hard problem (once people see the pattern within the generated story, they will get bored pretty fast and stop reading...or even skimming...how do you prevent readers from getting bored when reading the novel?). Still, if you can build a program that can handle one of your arbitrary input, then you can build a program to handle hundreds of arbitrary inputs. Whether you want to read all of the resulting outputs however is a different question...but then you're planning on 'lightly' editing the output, right? Maybe it might work.

Every link that I gave you was an entry in the latest NaNoGenMo competition (https://github.com/dariusk/NaNoGenMo-2015), with the exception of the Skynet link that I gave you. Skynet, however, was intended to be be used in an entry in that competition.

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So yeah, what you say is doable, and can be done. If you want to take this as a challenge to produce your own lovely program to generate your 85 wonderful stories, go right to it. (Or just find somebody's novel generator and just modify that to produce your lovely 85 stories).

But don't limit yourself to conventional understanding of stories. For example, one of my actual entries to NaNoGenMo involve randomly shuffling the paragraphs of an article, thereby generating a brand new article (https://github.com/dariusk/NaNoGenMo-2015/issues/180). The result was rather surprisingly effective, and I ended up using this similar approach in generating a blog post (https://gist.github.com/tra38/8a6bf3743cd89687151c) and a short story (https://gist.github.com/tra38/02b03745e7da37789ed2). Experimentation can lead to new insights, especially about creativity.