Earlier quoted context omitted.
> High-tax Sweden has as many billionaires per capita as the US The first thing they all did was move their incorporations out of Sweden
All the more reason for leveling the playing field.
And that reason is . . .?
Superintelligence: The Idea That Eats Smart People
421–430 of 607 posts
Re: Superintelligence: The Idea That Eats Smart People
#422Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
What matters is the total size of the market and the total size of the labor pool. If the Hyperclass have more wealth than all of humanity had prior, they don't need to sell to the masses to make money. If the labor pool is mostly machines they own, they don't need to pay the masses, or even a functioning market among the masses to enable it. In the degenerate case, where a single individual controls all wealth, if t…
In such case what stops the masses to create a parallel economy of their own?
Re: Superintelligence: The Idea That Eats Smart People
#423What the author is actually talking about is of course the mythological techno-singularity event, which is of course bullshit. Have you ever programmed any piece of software that suddenly implemented features of its own? Did your program become sentient? Laughable. These are child-like fantasies belonging in 50s sci-fi. What I do know for a fact, is that when it comes to AI fear mongers, there is not much intelligenc…
>Have you ever programmed any piece of software that suddenly implemented features of its own?
I'm not sure what particular fear mongers you're talking about, but Bostrom and the like are talking about software that's specifically made to change and improve itself on a fundamental level.
Re: Superintelligence: The Idea That Eats Smart People
#424Earlier quoted context omitted.
What matters is the total size of the market and the total size of the labor pool. If the Hyperclass have more wealth than all of humanity had prior, they don't need to sell to the masses to make money. If the labor pool is mostly machines they own, they don't need to pay the masses, or even a functioning market among the masses to enable it. In the degenerate case, where a single individual controls all wealth, if t…
In such case what stops the masses to create a parallel economy of their own?
I imagine that would happen, but as soon as the size of their economy was large enough to attract the notice of the Hyperclass, or even just one member, it would be completely undercut by them. I don't know what an equilibrium state would look like.
Re: Superintelligence: The Idea That Eats Smart People
#425Earlier quoted context omitted.
By this measure, I would say Bostrom is not a crank. Yudkowsky is less clear. I'd say no, but I'd understand if Yudkowsky trips some folks' crank detectors.
Einstein's paper on the photoelectric effect is a bit less than 7000 words. It is part of the foundation of quantum mechanics. Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies is in the range of 100,000 words (348 pages * roughly 300 words per page). I'm not familiar with it, but looking around it isn't even clear if it even lays out any sort of concrete theory.
Bostrom's book is wordy, boring, filled with weak parables, analogies, lacking concretization of a theory.
Like always, alarmist material sells better than realism.
Re: Superintelligence: The Idea That Eats Smart People
#426Earlier quoted context omitted.
Calfornia is mismanged to hell. The bay area has some of the worst roads in the nation with very mild weather and a wealthy tax base. It cost $8billion to make 1 or 2 miles of central subway and only €11 billion to make the worlds longest tunnel under the alps. I have the same income tax rate as I did in canada yet there isnt universal healthcare and far more economic inequality. It goes on and on. If you trippled th…
You lost me on your rant about taxation without universal healthcare when the vast apportionment of that tax (and mis-spending like on the Iraq Occupation) is Federal not CA. The problem is one of regulatory capture - corporate vested interests control the governance process and that means peons are getting less and less each day for their tax revenues.
My rant did not stay at California alone. What makes California mismanaged is a combination of the state itself and the federal government.
And the problem you state is not unique to any government in the world. Germany is better run than Italy and there are many reasons behind it.
Re: Superintelligence: The Idea That Eats Smart People
#427What the author is actually talking about is of course the mythological techno-singularity event, which is of course bullshit. Have you ever programmed any piece of software that suddenly implemented features of its own? Did your program become sentient? Laughable. These are child-like fantasies belonging in 50s sci-fi. What I do know for a fact, is that when it comes to AI fear mongers, there is not much intelligenc…
>Have you ever programmed any piece of software that suddenly implemented features of its own? I'm not sure what particular fear mongers you're talking about, but Bostrom and the like are talking about software that's specifically made to change and improve itself on a fundamental level.
I'm saying that's the pipe dream. Software won't change on its own.
Re: Superintelligence: The Idea That Eats Smart People
#428Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm getting kind of sick of people who haven't read 2% of the stuff imagining what they think we've never talked about over the last 16 years. https://intelligence.org/files/IEM.pdf
I haven't had time to read the entire thing, so I've skimmed over lots, but there doesn't seem to be much mention of complexity theory in the way I believe idlewords is talking about. I'm very curious: What happens if the algorithms for general artificial intelligence, and the ability for an AI to improve itself are all NP-Hard problems? Is that covered? It might be similar to the "intelligence combustion" scenario o…
As it says in the paper, the evolution of hominids doesn't look like this; population genetics says that if hominid brains got larger, the marginal fitness returns on neurons went up.
Re: Superintelligence: The Idea That Eats Smart People
#429Earlier quoted context omitted.
I haven't had time to read the entire thing, so I've skimmed over lots, but there doesn't seem to be much mention of complexity theory in the way I believe idlewords is talking about. I'm very curious: What happens if the algorithms for general artificial intelligence, and the ability for an AI to improve itself are all NP-Hard problems? Is that covered? It might be similar to the "intelligence combustion" scenario o…
As it says in the paper, the evolution of hominids doesn't look like this; population genetics says that if hominid brains got larger, the marginal fitness returns on neurons went up.
Or in a more intuitive sense, humans didn't seem to need brains 1000x as large to get one unit of improvement in practical effectiveness over chimpanzee cognition. But yes, this stuff is complicated, hence the paper not being two paragraphs long.
Re: Superintelligence: The Idea That Eats Smart People
#430Earlier quoted context omitted.
Exactly. The "Terminator" scenario of a rogue malfunctioning AI is a silly distraction from the real AI threat, which is military AIs that don't malfunction. They will give their human masters practically unlimited power over everyone else. And AI is not the only technology with the potential to worsen inequality in the world.
Human beings have been extremely easy to kill for our entire existence. No system of laws can possibly keep you alive if your neighbors are willing to kill you, and nothing can make them actually unable to kill you. Your neighbor could walk over and put a blade in your jugular, you're dead. They could drive into you at 15MPH with their car, you're dead. They could set your house on fire while you're asleep, you're de…
It's about power imbalance and inpersonality.
Killing people when neither they nor their friends can retaliate is easier. Being able to say do X or I kill you, without the other party having a defense that will even inconvenience you gives you a shitton of power.
Military AI would basically be nukes without the fall-out or collateral damage.