watercooler_guy

Zuckerberg did state, for this interview back in July (https://www.theverge.com/22588022/mark-zuckerberg-facebook-c...), that

> ...just like you have the W3C that helps set standards around a bunch of the important internet protocols and how people build the web, I think there will need to be some of that here, too, for defining how developers and creators can build experiences that allow someone to take their avatar and their digital goods and their friends, and be able to teleport seamlessly between all these different experiences.

I'm sure Facebook is looking to have a big and profitable presence in the metaverse, but the point is that it's not one big walled garden like Facebook, but more like the Web as a whole.

You can't become part of some crazy ideological group unless you start believing and spreading their rhetoric -- the crazies on both sides don't "own" the action of getting a vaccine. If you're already willing to get the vaccine, you may as well get both doses (assuming you're talking about a two-dose vaccine). You can keep living normally, instead of just surviving as you say, while affording yourself and others around you the maximum protection possible.

I think people are generally aware that the fundamental issue is experience of suffering, as you say. It's just that since that can't be measured directly, people talk about intelligence and pain reaction since that's what is studied and observed in order to infer about experience of suffering.

But for synthetic intelligences, I think we need to be extra careful because the suffering can be there without any means to notify humans, if those means were never programmed in. If an AI has self awareness and self preservation goals comparable to humans, but no comparable e.g. English language subroutines, being shut off at random times would probably cause it to suffer psychological distress in silence.

This is all to say that for the sake of both AI and animals, we need to learn how to directly detect brain activity corresponding to pain, in different types of brains.

>I said “You believed them when they told you it would be 14 days to flatten the curve and then you could go back to normal. You believed them when they said if people would wear masks for a couple of months that would end coronaplague. You believed them when they told you we just needed one more shutdown. Now you believe them when they say that the restrictions will end once everyone is vaccinated?”

Whoever this "they" was, who was saying that two weeks of lockdown would end the pandemic, was certainly not a medical authority. The word from authorities was always "we don't know yet," and the idea that we were lied to about the length of restrictions is just an uninformed complaint from social media. It was never a secret that this was unknown territory.

And this "they" is not the group now saying that vaccines will help curb virus spread and end the pandemic -- that's doctors and scientists, with qualifications.

I understand the negative reactions, but I think the fact that new software can emulate the old would be a good reason for young people to not start retrocomputing; it’s not a good reason for an old person with years of experience to suddenly change workflows.

That would require first figuring out how to disable the modern bells and whistles, and then learning to use the new software. Faced with having those productivity interruptions vs not, I’ll probably do the same as Martin when I’m his age.

I think what they are saying is that you would not continue to perceive and have experiences through that digital mind; it may as well not even be a duplicate of your mind, as far as you’re concerned.

Unless there’s some yet unknown quality of consciousness that says if your brain system stops, and another brain system just like it arises, that’s enough to have continued perception through that new mind. Is that what you meant?

I have to disagree with the author that optimizing compilers are "a useful precedent for thinking about the idea of an intelligence explosion". Such compilers are designed to do one thing, and they are designed to do it some fixed amount better than their predecessors. An AI that can improve itself will instead probably have to be at the level of a human thinker, who can be "creative" and adapt/produce results in a wide variety of situations -- the fact that our brains exist show that such a machine is possible. Those who anticipate an intelligence explosion are picturing these general "thinking machines", not advanced optimizing compilers.

Also,

> I.Q. represents the idea that intelligence can be usefully captured by a single number, this idea being one of the assumptions made by proponents of an intelligence explosion

I have never heard this assumption in a technical discussion in the modern age, and the author provides no source here. I'm overall unconvinced by this article.

I really like your site, especially Nightwave Radio. Are the names of the songs available somewhere? If not, I have no problem coming back to your website to listen!

The concern with machine learning systems seems to be that they are fooled by silly things that a human wouldn't be fooled by in the same situations. Probably just an emotional/sense of normalcy thing, but easy-to-create visual designs being enough to cause a fatal car crash is disturbing when a human behind the driver's seat would not fall victim to that. That's not a "reasonable" mistake, but expecting there to be a thin wire stretched across the road when there are several people acting like there is, is more "reasonable."

There might also be the expectation that for problems easily solved by a human, any competent AI should be able to do "at least" those things.