throwawayoaky

Agree he's kidding though; there's a zero percent chance we'll survive our AI oppressors. Also never listen to infrastructure talk from someone who can't keep their own website up

Doesn't matter if he's kidding; address the people who will take it seriously. folks who think they're smart but lack systems thinking ability are capable of believing anything; they're like early socialist dictators without the power.. which makes sense given the commonality which is the failure of rationalism in the face of large unknowns

Also (and this should be obvious) our own ability to harness primary production is confined to a small number of species; backing these into an adaptive corner could play havoc with our large heterotrophic society, where calorie production from the CHON cycle has very little slack relative to our ability to keep adapting at pace (i.e. R&D doesn't like starvation)

Venus is also a thing. But agreed, (intentional) terraforming will be a good idea at some point. Disagreed on CO2 being the right way to do it; the sun was dimmer 60 million years ago. You can't feel your way into a solution here, you have to do the research and the simulations. You also can't optimize for a genetic milieu that no longer exists. Think of the biosphere as a large and highly redundant CHON pump, where the redundancy is at the population (not individual) level. This pump can function under various climactic conditions but its capacity and robustness depend on the population genetics available on the ground (sea). So the important part of the system is made of information not matter. We literally do not have the information we need to replicate cretaceous conditions, nor do we have a way to get that info at present. Therefore we should continue to cultivate the interglacial genetic repertoire, which is still available to us. Large changes to the system should not be allowed when we do not understand systemic risks and do not have rollback ability-- this implies extreme measures should be pointed at maintaining stability rather than inducing phase change.

I don't know what primary production looks like under different climactic regimes so I can't speak potential to end states, but they all occur long after our deaths so our worst case will be bounded by short term inflection where risk beats adaptation and primary production "temporarily" crashes.

> it's much harder to cram ads into a chat conversation.

why do I feel like this sentence will age poorly

came for unsafe, was disappointed

it's possible we'll be able to blow up the AGI before it's finished with us. Maybe the best possible world is one where an early AGI destroys a huge amount of capital and ruins the reputation of its successors so they're never turned on.

yeh I dunno about this for HVAC. Unless the AI can drive down capital costs for robots, humans will have a distribution and cost advantage

heh in some fields that's exactly how you get a masters in the US

I'm picturing a curve of increasing steepness that we'll all inevitably fall off of eventually, but where the marginal utility of hanging on for one more cycle increases.

for very rich values of "you"

I dunno, it still looks like human bodies will be useful for a while yet, if only because of the massive investment in legacy infrastructure designed for humans. So knowing the trajectory of AI better might help you determine whether to say retool as say a drill rig operator; the crossover point of extractable income in sw eng vs. petrochem could be meaningfully impacted by tech on the horizon. Of course you have to sacrifice your body but that's an expected tradeoff... could always try to pack into one of the gov/admin lifeboats I suppose.

Speaking of children though, what the hell are we supposed to teach them?

I predict the first big crunch is going to happen once we have on-prem models in closed loops with company software. Fwiw looks like writing code will die before reading it will, so maybe get real good at making PR comments and close reading? That might buy a few years.

what if you have children? Not everybody can afford the luxury of shrugging on this one.

Lot of confidence that our careers are going to be OK.. I'm suspicious because if there were sufficient AI to replace us, we would be in the position of our salaries depending on us not understanding that fact.

Seems to me that the only thing stopping AI from doing our jobs in 5 years will be the legal department.. at that point I guess my last job will be to set up the on-prem/cloud infra that runs the model. AI doesn't change the requirement of owning your own data. After that, I dunno. What jobs will be left? AI trainer, mascot at Disneyland, and CEO?

I might have the time horizon wrong but I do think it's going to be a bloodbath. There's nothing about previous industrial revolutions to suggest it would be anything but. And if you think you'll be able to see it coming, have a look at https://intelligence.org/2017/10/13/fire-alarm/ . This problem space is starting to feel less like fusion and more like flight

There's this weird thing where a principal might be deluded about their own intentions. It's useful because it allows them to give inaccurate information about their future behavior without 'lying'. If a sincere/passionate person's actions regularly mismatch their words, suspect this.

Not the OP but yes absolutely. At medium sized USA companies it's common (not universal) for new team members to be discovered and or interviewed and or hired by the team that they will be working with. HR/recruiters are just trying to feed the interview pipeline. Possibly the at-will nature of USA jobs feeds into this. Bad hires are less risky without long term employment contracts.

I'm interested in your experience as well. Even at the largest US orgs there's still the concept of a 'hiring manager', who leads a small team, has a big role in hiring, and can can do meaningful technical work on the system. So the interviewing ability of these people, and the people that they trust, is the main determinant of the engineering hiring decisions that get made. Like a common interview loop would be hiring manager, (2x)senior/staff dev on the team, senior dev on another team, director. Lots of exceptions and opportunities for random consultants/reorganizations from above, but the basic idea of line employees and managers being able to identify their successors is pretty baked in around here. Can't speak for the east coast though

See you guys in five years!

Horrifying pull quote:

"Simply lowering the risks of getting sick—and the costs of paraphernalia, as Flaco from the Bronx articulated—could also incentivise drug use."

Our only hope is that humans are already more intelligent on an individual basis than they need to be, and that coordinating AGIs looks a lot like coordinating/persuading/teaching people. Then we can all become middle managers, which is a small price to pay to avoid some kind of singularity but hey I'm just talking meat

to offer an alterative: write all the code you want and throw it away. Don't get attached to the work of your hands. The code is the water; feel the problem, move towards the value.

real talk though how do you make money at a shop that says no? we just gonna sit around with our hands in our robes and nod?

taste is a tarpit. If your project has enough degrees of freedom to require taste, you're probably going to fail. Geniuses please ignore me. Everyone else, find your audience first.

I mean what do you want em to do, go all FFVII? Seems like the paintings were fine; very strange to see all the triggered in the comments. Guessing it's because young privileged hippies are an easy target for ire.. but idk it's a common trope: "stop protesting like that, you're making us look bad! You're playing the exact role the bad guys want you to play!" which is funny because those lines are right out of the bad guys' playbook. I'm not saying I know the right way to protest, just saying you're all kinda falling in line exactly the way you're expected to when you say that. And you could argue that fine art is a better target than say petrochemical facilities where you're just going to piss off people trying to make a living: fine art museums are strictly optional/luxury/rich spaces.

To those supporting retributive justice against the protesters: weird. But if you're into that kind of thing can't you see the attempt to exact a kind of symbolic retributive justice here? Like, "we can't enjoy nature cause you're blowing it up, so you can't enjoy your precious art safe space."