[dead]
Dude, You Broke the Future (2017)
31–40 of 147 posts
Re: Dude, You Broke the Future (2017)
#32> Nobody in 2007 was expecting a Nazi revival in 2017, right? Is that actually true? I seem to remember people predicting that usa has been edging towards facism for a while now, especially in the aftermath of 9/11. For example here is an article from 2003 predicting usa is heading towards fasicism https://secularhumanism.org/2003/03/fascism-anyone/
There is no Nazi revival.
That some small neo-Nazi groups exist is normal, and I would say, healthy. They are not Nazis, true Nazis have disappeared after WW2. They are just groups of people who are dissatisfied with current politics and believe that some ideas from Nazi Germany would solve problems. Especially since it is so demonized by the current system that is must be good: the enemy of your enemy is your friend.
They are the result of a free society, we all at some point in life, wanted to change society. You can be a hippy or a nazi, but it usually doesn't last. Most people realize that neither LSD nor the third reich is going to solve the world problems and then become more reasonable.
Re: Dude, You Broke the Future (2017)
#33Robert Miles has an interesting response to the claim that corporations are AIs: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L5pUA3LsEaw To paraphrase: yes, corporations function as agents, but their maximum performance is limited by the capabilities of their employees. A corporate AI may have a much broader set of skills than any single person, and may be able to tackle many concurrent tasks, but as an "intelligent agent" its d…
> In the sense that a corporation's maximum intelligence is likely to be in the same ballpark as the smartest humans, it can't be seen as a true superintelligence. In what sense? Certainly the ability of large groups of people to research and create new technology exceed the ability of a single individual. The R&D capabilities of a large corporation are going to vastly exceed that of a lone hermit in the woods.
So I think the question is: when a group of people work together on something, can they generate ideas which are better than the best idea of any member of the group? If so, how much better? How does the effect scale as the size of the group increases?
An R&D lab certainly can do more work than any single person could do in their lifetime, but are the ideas fundamentally better? Can you point to an idea and say: "no person could possibly have thought of that"?
Re: Dude, You Broke the Future (2017)
#34Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't think the comparison was to AI as a super intelligence. AI doesn't have to be a super intelligence to be AI or to be dangerous.
That's fair. I interpreted the comparison as being between "AI implemented as a property of human organizations" and "AI implemented as a powerful search algorithm". While corporations can certainly be dangerous, they're still made of people and thus are unlikely to want to do things like "convert the entire mass of the solar system into dollar bills" (and even if they did, they'd have a hard time doing it). A suffic…
How is "converting the entire mass of the solar system into dollar bills" conceptually different from "converting the habitability of Earth into dollar bills" or "converting the health problems of human beings into a maximal amount of dollar bills", which is precisely what many corporations _actually do_?
The "corporation as AI" metaphor isn't about some abstract future possibility, it's an explanatory mechanism for how the world is so thoroughly messed up _right now_.
Re: Dude, You Broke the Future (2017)
#35Robert Miles has an interesting response to the claim that corporations are AIs: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L5pUA3LsEaw To paraphrase: yes, corporations function as agents, but their maximum performance is limited by the capabilities of their employees. A corporate AI may have a much broader set of skills than any single person, and may be able to tackle many concurrent tasks, but as an "intelligent agent" its d…
> In the sense that a corporation's maximum intelligence is likely to be in the same ballpark as the smartest humans, it can't be seen as a true superintelligence. In what sense? Certainly the ability of large groups of people to research and create new technology exceed the ability of a single individual. The R&D capabilities of a large corporation are going to vastly exceed that of a lone hermit in the woods.
Well there is also a "quantity vs quality" aspect of tasks akin to the difference between a group of house painter and a skilled artist. The single skilled artist would lack the throughput.
It is possible to some degree "team stack" to boost quality over any component larger group but it is inefficient and tends to have worse results than a smaller scaled more skilled one.
Of course in the real world many things require a mix of both effectively - too much labor for one or a small group of experts but too complex for an amateur horde to handle.
Re: Dude, You Broke the Future (2017)
#36Robert Miles has an interesting response to the claim that corporations are AIs: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L5pUA3LsEaw To paraphrase: yes, corporations function as agents, but their maximum performance is limited by the capabilities of their employees. A corporate AI may have a much broader set of skills than any single person, and may be able to tackle many concurrent tasks, but as an "intelligent agent" its d…
The buzzwordhood of "AI" has reached a new peaked. If any complex system can just be labelled as AI, then the term is essentially meaningless.
Personally I saw it as a semi-sarcastic equivalence noting the lack of differences and a note about the Chinese Room. It is like describing human capabilities as equivalent to a black box algorithm - we might not know how our brain parses 2 + 2 = 4 but we know that it calculates and must follow some sort of procedure.
Re: Dude, You Broke the Future (2017)
#37> Nobody in 2007 was expecting a Nazi revival in 2017, right? Is that actually true? I seem to remember people predicting that usa has been edging towards facism for a while now, especially in the aftermath of 9/11. For example here is an article from 2003 predicting usa is heading towards fasicism https://secularhumanism.org/2003/03/fascism-anyone/
Nobody among the intellectual class anticipated Trump's election in 2016. Much like physicists hypothesized dark matter to account for the apparent greater mass necessary to stabilize galaxies and such, the political intelligentsia hypothesized an enormous, hidden body of "dark Nazis" to account for their chosen candidate not winning the election. It is unfathomable to them that enough people in the center, center-ri…
This is very untrue, even if we take nobody as a little overstatement, half of the election prediction models had him above 10% chance of winning (FiveThirtyEight had him at 29%, https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/upshot/presidential...).
WBUR, Boston's NPR news station, published in their blog "Cognoscenti" an article titled "Why Donald Trump will Win in November" in May of 2016 (https://www.wbur.org/cognoscenti/2016/05/06/election2016-tru...). I can't think of anything more representative of what people think of as the left leaning intellectual class than a Boston NPR blog with a Latin title.
This idea that him winning in 2016 was inconceivable to media/intellectual circles is a bit of revisionist history.
Re: Dude, You Broke the Future (2017)
#38Corporations are nothing but a group of actors working together to achieve some outcome, part of which may be profit, and it's absurd to think that they are a 'Modern Era', or even Western concept as every single land-owning farmer, artisan, banker, merchant in history was de-facto a form of 'corporation'. Moreover, many institutions with origins in antiquity (schools, governments, NGO's) are close enough to the orga…
Corporations are literally the something-extra over a "group of actors working together".
I should have added 'with a charter' - and then, corporations are literally just that - formalised groups working together with some ostensibly stated purpose.
The legal enfranchisement of such organisations is something contextual to the establishment of broader legal frameworks, which happened later in civilisation (i.e. Modern Era), but even then, one could apply the same ideal to Noble Houses, which derived their 'charters' from various agreements with the Sovereign. Like for example in the Magna Carta.
These 'more fine grained legal articulations' of groups did not change the nature of what such groups were, they just put some boundaries around them.
Merchants were merchants before they were codified as 'Corporations'.
If anything, the modern notion of 'Corporation' actually does not derive very well from such organisations at all! Corporations with 'shares' are a neat legal construct to allow several businessmen to invest in something like a voyage from Venice to somewhere in Asia, whereby the surpluses will be divided upon return, and the corporation would cease to exist. Which is where we derive the term ''Executive Officers' -> of ships!
The 'economic entities' that produced large warships in Antiquity for example, are in every practical sense - corporations - and certainly for Charlie's purposes of comparison to AI, it's exactly the same thing.
There was no aspect to Charlie's 'formalised, legal' definition of a corporation which had anything to do with his AI comparison. He focused entirely on the organisational aspects, which predate the legal definition of corporations.
Re: Dude, You Broke the Future (2017)
#39Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's fair. I interpreted the comparison as being between "AI implemented as a property of human organizations" and "AI implemented as a powerful search algorithm". While corporations can certainly be dangerous, they're still made of people and thus are unlikely to want to do things like "convert the entire mass of the solar system into dollar bills" (and even if they did, they'd have a hard time doing it). A suffic…
How is "converting the entire mass of the solar system into dollar bills" conceptually different from "converting the habitability of Earth into dollar bills" or "converting the health problems of human beings into a maximal amount of dollar bills", which is precisely what many corporations _actually do_? The "corporation as AI" metaphor isn't about some abstract future possibility, it's an explanatory mechanism for…
The fact that you're alive proves there is a pretty big difference, whatever it is
Re: Dude, You Broke the Future (2017)
#40Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's fair. I interpreted the comparison as being between "AI implemented as a property of human organizations" and "AI implemented as a powerful search algorithm". While corporations can certainly be dangerous, they're still made of people and thus are unlikely to want to do things like "convert the entire mass of the solar system into dollar bills" (and even if they did, they'd have a hard time doing it). A suffic…
How is "converting the entire mass of the solar system into dollar bills" conceptually different from "converting the habitability of Earth into dollar bills" or "converting the health problems of human beings into a maximal amount of dollar bills", which is precisely what many corporations _actually do_? The "corporation as AI" metaphor isn't about some abstract future possibility, it's an explanatory mechanism for…
Yeah, I agree. My original post was bringing up what I thought was an interesting comparison between hypothetical software AI and the corporations-as-AI metaphor presented in the talk.
Corporations _are_ acting as misaligned optimizers. Solving that problem is hugely important. However, the "AI" comparison breaks down somewhat when you start thinking about how we might actually fix the problem. With corporations, we (i.e., states) have tools that we can use to regulate bad actors. Software AI, however hypothetical at the moment, seems likely to be a different game all-together.