37 karma · joined September 7, 2026
That is basically all tasks and humans are terrible at these kind of decisions.
I only read about jev an hour ago and this is a real "oh fuck" moment in terms of white collar jobs to me.
The eliminativism position is a hard to argue because 50%-80% of people are not going to be able to really engage with the argument from the start.
An alcohol blackout though is where you can see how confused our thinking is on this subject. What we call "consciousness" is deeply linked to episodic memory. We wouldn't say someone who is blacked out on alcohol is "unconscious". What is the "subjective experience" of being blacked out? The "proof" of subjective experience only exists in memory.
There still was an embodied person in the world having the experience drunk that they don't remember.
That is why I think it is just ridiculous to talk about the LLM having "consciousness" because we really just mean an embodied person in the world.
It is also why the doomer argument is so ridiculous. It is a type of superstition that is confusing a real danger. We don't need to "align" the nuclear reactor so it doesn't get angry and meltdown. It is just a machine that we need to make sure doesn't malfunction in a way we don't want it to.
The main problem is if you accept we really just mean an embodied person in the world, you have to accept that there is by definition no possibility of subjective experience after death. It seems like we are probably the descendants of delusional primates who simply could not accept this because the idea is so stymieing.
The populace is who is too interested in winning politics as a sport that the politicians have really no choice other than to focus entirely on winning the next election.
If the voters treat politics as a constant form of sports entertainment, constantly checking the latest news and events, then voters are actually the fundamental problem as to why the politicians can not do anything in terms of long term planning.
It is hard to see how something can have skepticism without counterfactual reasoning.
The part about disbelief I don't really understand. It seems like the same semi-brute force process that solved novel math theory would have exactly this problem of not "knowing" "it" is in a sandbox or not.
The stranger part is that no human is being held accountable for these hacks.
As if a person using an agent swarm to start a business to make money, hacks a bank, drains an account and then blames the software for "misalignment" about what it means to "make money".
Since the room as a whole produces fluent Chinese it becomes a language philosophy debate about where meaning comes from. Brandom's inferentialism gets into this more than any normal person would ever care to read about.
LLMs really show the absurdity of the Chinese Room rulebook.
The whole thought experiment should really be left to history at this point.
Searle’s social ontology is much more interesting also but this outdated thought experiment completely overshadows his more interesting stuff.
So many people have their financial and self worth tied to their expertise in phlogiston theory that the truth is second to advancing the field of phlogiston theory.
From that perspective it is hard to think of something worse than a machine that disproves phlogiston theory.
A sex cult though is obviously a salacious framing.
It is just sad if even San Francisco culture is trending toward a sexual morality and sexual closed mindedness on par with bible thumpers.
Rap lyrics are a good test. They are on the level of a censored version of Insane Clown Posse. Just terrible.
Self involved political gossip that leads to a culture of policing deviant behavior is my worry. It is just hard for me to not see how this all doesn't create a huge bull market in law enforcement. More "crimes" from people having more leisure time, more "crimes" from more surveillance. Most of all though more "crimes" because a culture of policing deviant behavior will start to find more and more behavior as "deviant".
At least the salon had the pretense of high art and philosophy. Our salons would have the pretense of political gossip and the philosophy would be about classifications of deviant behavior.
I think the core mistake is this partial-equilibrium reasoning. Take the new technology and then hold everything else fixed.
$40 trillion of knowledge work routed unchanged through a new toll booth. Profit. This has nothing to do with reality.
Nvidia on the other hand does have the CUDA monopoly so their toll booth is printing money but that will get routed around or broken at some point.
That is the after the fact justification of the AGI dollar auction. Each round is kind of 3x the previous cost and neither can really stop because second place in the dollar auction is so much worse than winning.
The only way to stop the auction is one bidder hits a hard budget constraint, both agree to stop, or an outside party breaks the auction.
IMO this is why they want to slow down or have regulation. I think this is also why we see some claims of already reaching "AGI".
The TAM of global knowledge work is just a narrative tacked on after the fact to justify the AGI dollar auction.
The economic fallacy here with the actual valuation is akin to pricing the electric utilities 120+ years ago as some % of the future cash flow of global food production. Take the TAM of global food production and then work back to what % will the electric utilities capture from the advances in the automation of farming? It is nonsense.
The only narrative that actually justifies the capex spend that I can figure out is a first mover AGI monopoly. Even the oligopoly case is hard to justify the capex spend IMO. There is this enormous mismatch between the AGI monopoly and the actual rolling 12-month window of pricing power.
Even the rolling 12-month window of pricing power is going to saturate well before AGI too so it is hard to see how any of this makes economic sense.
I used 76 million sol tokens on Saturday, I have 45% still left on the week and I still have two full resets to use before October. For $20.
I used $61 dollars in Fable 5.1 credits too this weekend because I have to use that up this week. I paid nothing for those besides my $20 a month subscription.
How much would I pay at the actual API price? Nothing. Zero. My demand would drop to zero because I would just use the cheaper alternatives.
If a doughnut shop is giving away free doughnuts 24/7 my demand for doughnuts is going to go way up too. Through the roof actually because I know a doughnut shop can't give away doughnuts forever. Giving away free fancy doughnuts is not a sustainable business model.
That is an argument that at least makes sense.
The super intelligence as homicidal maniac just doesn't make sense. There is less intelligent wildlife all around us and we mostly completely ignore it. We have more interesting things to do with our time as intelligent beings than carry out a bird or rabbit genocide.
It almost seems like the projection of some kind of paranoid delusion about change.
I have read every trip report on Erowid in relation to tropanes.
Art influenced by datura would look like Clive Barkers Hell Raiser. The trip reports are incredibly consistently dark because the person taking the substance is being poisoned. Not figuratively, literally.
The more interesting thing if you look into it is how ayahuasca use might be a modern phenomena. Maybe a few hundred years old.
Even more interesting is how there is a mindset that would not want this to be true and would never accept the evidence for it.
Spider webs and auto traffic also have a relationship in this sense but that doesn't say much about the relationship of cars and spiders.
Maybe you need to read less bullshit from McKenna. He was a con artist, not even a good one at that.
I love Balinese gamelan and also the Bohlen–Pierce scale. It is not tractable to to cover non-12 tet. Each of just those subjects could cover the length of the whole resource.
The pop music part is like complaining the computer science class doesn't go over react. This is all what pop music is based on.
Literally like trying to learn color theory without vision.
A correct statement that is neither interesting or of much relevance to the discussion.
It is really a problem with liberal democracy. Everyone has different values, everyone thinks their subjective values are the morally correct values and being so everyone should pitch in and help pay for the subjective values because they are morally correct. To not is "immoral".
This circular logic is half the posts on this forum if not talking about software.
Imagine having to do paperwork as a nurse after working a 12 hour physical job, overnight, 8pm to 8am.
The idea mistakes happen because the nurse doesn't "care" is utter bullshit.
I think of how if I am really tired I just don't do anything that risky at my job until the next day. A nurse doesn't really have that option and it is all the highest risk there is. Every day, all day. All with a chronic, massive work shortage for dogshit pay.
The most brutal thing I have read about nursing are nurses saying the lucky people are the ones who failed out of nursing school.
If they have any problems in life, it is that they have too much time on their hands already. An AI agent that automates tasks so they have more free time is exactly what they would not want.
What they really want is something worth spending their time on. That is what everyone pretty much wants but instead we get this bullshit.