161–170 of 607 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Here's a response about why complexity theory may not constrain AI that much: https://www.gwern.net/Complexity%20vs%20AI It is something "AI alarmists" think about.
What's his reason? I got halfway through that and realized I didn't understand.
While I agree with Maciej's central point, I think the inside arguments he presents are pretty weak. I think that AI risk is not a pressing concern even if you grant the AI risk crowd's assumptions. Elided from https://alexcbecker.net/blog.html#against-ai-risk : The real AI risk isn't an all-powerful savant which misinterprets a command to "make everyone on Earth happy" and destroys the Earth. It's a military AI that…
I'll push back against the idea of smart factories leading to "a vast chasm between a new, tiny Hyperclass and the destitute masses." I mean, if the masses are destitute, they can't afford the stuff being made at those fancy factories, so the owners of those factories won't make money. Income inequality obviously benefits the rich (in that they by definition have more money), but only up to a point. We won't devolve…
I think that's beside the point. Why would the "aristocracy" owning the factories care about money, when they have all the goods (or can trade for them with other aristos)?
It's not like they need money to pay other people (the destitute masses are useless to them). With their only inherent "capital", --the ability to work-- made worthless by automation, the destitute masses have no recourse-- they get slowly extinguished, until only a tiny fraction of humanity is left.
While I agree with Maciej's central point, I think the inside arguments he presents are pretty weak. I think that AI risk is not a pressing concern even if you grant the AI risk crowd's assumptions. Elided from https://alexcbecker.net/blog.html#against-ai-risk : The real AI risk isn't an all-powerful savant which misinterprets a command to "make everyone on Earth happy" and destroys the Earth. It's a military AI that…
I'll push back against the idea of smart factories leading to "a vast chasm between a new, tiny Hyperclass and the destitute masses." I mean, if the masses are destitute, they can't afford the stuff being made at those fancy factories, so the owners of those factories won't make money. Income inequality obviously benefits the rich (in that they by definition have more money), but only up to a point. We won't devolve…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
What percentage of people are Navy SEALs? If I were a tiger, I'd probably think this island sounded like an excellent place for a fun adventure holiday with my tiger friends, and I'd be right to do so. Most likely outcome: good food, some exercise, and we can take some monkey heads home for our tiger cubs to play with.
Fun, until the navy seal appears. It takes only one. The same thing with AI, it takes only one, no matter how many dumber ones we entertained ourselves with before.
Moore's Law (on a single CPU core) effectively ended around 2009. Our programming idioms for parallel processing are still so crude, hardly anyone can write maintainable parallelized code for anything but toy problems. Until we can restart Moore's Law again, this is all academic. http://www.globalnerdy.com/2007/09/07/multicore-musings/
Earlier quoted context omitted.
SR and GR explicitly allow time-travel into the future. Which isn't a fully general Time Machine, of course, but is a huge change from 19th-century physics. If SR had just been invented today, and someone who thought it was crazy and didn't know the math was writing a blog post about it, I 100% expect they'd call it "the time travel theory" or some such thing.
> SR and GR explicitly allow time-travel into the future. I presume you're talking about time dilation here. That's... a little bit true, but not really? At a minimum, it's sure a strange way of looking at it.
"The second premise is that the brain is an ordinary configuration of matter, albeit an extraordinarily complicated one. If we knew enough, and had the technology, we could exactly copy its structure and emulate its behavior with electronic components, just like we can simulate very basic neural anatomy today." We could have a computer program that perfectly simulates the brain, but has some nasty O(2^N) complexity a…
I don't buy the AI quasi-religious stuff. But your argument here is flawed. If protein folding can do the process in constant time, we may be able to find another process (but electronic rather than wet chem) that can also do it in constant time.
While I agree with Maciej's central point, I think the inside arguments he presents are pretty weak. I think that AI risk is not a pressing concern even if you grant the AI risk crowd's assumptions. Elided from https://alexcbecker.net/blog.html#against-ai-risk : The real AI risk isn't an all-powerful savant which misinterprets a command to "make everyone on Earth happy" and destroys the Earth. It's a military AI that…
I'll push back against the idea of smart factories leading to "a vast chasm between a new, tiny Hyperclass and the destitute masses." I mean, if the masses are destitute, they can't afford the stuff being made at those fancy factories, so the owners of those factories won't make money. Income inequality obviously benefits the rich (in that they by definition have more money), but only up to a point. We won't devolve…
This article explicitly endorses argument ad hominem: "These people are wearing funny robes and beads, they live in a remote compound, and they speak in unison in a really creepy way. Even though their arguments are irrefutable, everything in your experience tells you you're dealing with a cult. Of course, they have a brilliant argument for why you should ignore those instincts, but that's the inside view talking. Th…
> The problem with argument ad hominem isn't that it never works. It often leads to the correct conclusion ... You immediately self-contradicted here. If a decision heuristic often leads to the correct conclusion, then it's a good heuristic (if you are under time constraints, which we are). Of course, given unlimited time to think about it, we would never use ad hominem reasoning and consider each and every argument…
So, is it a good heuristic to conclude that since crime is related to poverty and minorities tend to be poor, minorities qua minorities ought to be shunned?