91–100 of 147 posts
https://www.decisionproblem.com/paperclips/index2.html
I find idle games odd. My rational mind knows they are traps, but I still want to see what is next. They tap into some kind of need for exploration, progression, and learning. This one at least explores a few ideas and has a set endpoint so I enjoyed going through it.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
By that logic, wouldn't any organization, team or group of people doing things together be an ai? Corporations aren't the only kind of grouping of people together one or more purposes as a unit. This definition also seems to ignore the 'artificial' part of artificial intelligence. If we're going to stretch the definition of ai that thin, wouldn't a school of fish or a flock of birds be considered 'ai'? Or at least an…
If I were to paraphrase the comparison, it might be something like: "An AI is some constructed entity which, starting with a goal, uses its intelligence to make changes to the world in order to bring that goal to fruition. One of the things about AI that is worrying is that its system-of-values might have no relation whatsoever to those possessed by human beings, and the best way for it to accomplish its goals might…
Robert 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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
That assumes an ideal corporation in the physics sense - real world ones have "corruption" in the form of their employees engaging in their own agenda. Take sexual harassment, passing up talent from bigotry, and office politics. They actively harm the profitability and yet they exist at all levels. The incentives are fundamentally what shape the systems including the corporations. Blaming corporations alone is a simp…
> The incentives are fundamentally what shape the systems including the corporations.
These are key observations, and sadly I suspect there's a Prisoner's Dilemma style thing going on which makes corruption, sexual harassment, bigotry, and office politics somehow "rational" and individually maximising behaviours (for corporations, as well as the individuals they're composed of) whenever any of the competing corporations are known or suspected to be behaving corruptly.
Combined with the combative nature of thinking/reporting about corporate results - where for example FAANG stock price performances are compared to each other, assigning winners and losers, without any relevant incentives or accolades for the entire tech industry having grown the value of the entire sector. A corporation with a 15% YoY increase is deemed a "loser" if some of it's competitors manages 20%.
And we've spent well over half a decade demonising anyone who criticises Capitalism - thus deeply entrenching incentives that are poor for society as a whole, but which have "less poor" outcomes for the corporations prepared to be most ethically barren.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Most, if not all, corporations are misaligned to humanity's well-being. That is, they want money, and that's not exactly the same thing as what would be best for humanity. This is okay though because corporations are the same class and kind of intelligence as the rest of humanity and so they can be (somewhat) predicted and constrained by our laws and norms. Because corporations are the same class of intelligence, the…
I think one of the big problems with trying to predict and constrain corporations is that they all basically have OCD. They are obsessed with whatever it is they do and they task all their agents with figuring out how to optimize and achieve that one thing (or multiple related things if they're organized into divisions). While the corporation might not possess superintelligence, trying to thwart it it when its action…
A point I've made on here before is the big near-term risk from AI is not general-purpose artificial intelligence. It's machine learning systems that do a better job of making corporate decisions than humans. Corporations are shareholder value maximizers. There's a powerful school of thought, the Chicago School, which claims that's all they should be, and have no other responsibilities. Machine learning systems are r…
The logic goes that organizations, in general, should focus on what they are good at, while the government should pass regulation to incentivize socially good behaviors.
What we need to work on is having a stronger government that's less influenced (monetarily) by corporations, to set boundaries, set incentives, and police corporations to good behavior.
To be honest, we often highlight all the places this goes wrong, but all the industries that don't get a lot of press are good examples of this working well.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
> Nobody among the intellectual class anticipated Trump's election in 2016. A number of people in the intellectual world did, or at least wrote articles purporting to explain why it was more than remotely possible. The relatively new set of people in the major media trying to play the poll-based mathematical prediction game that Nate Silver started with 538 who weren't Nate Silver undersold the chances of it happenin…
I'm not sure even Jill Stein or Gary Johnson would really be a black swan event, given that I can list it as a possibility, but it's definitely a lot more gray than "either the Democrat or Republican wins".
For anyone with some hours to burn, there is an idle game that lets you play the role of a paperclip maximiser. https://www.decisionproblem.com/paperclips/index2.html I find idle games odd. My rational mind knows they are traps, but I still want to see what is next. They tap into some kind of need for exploration, progression, and learning. This one at least explores a few ideas and has a set endpoint so I enjoyed go…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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
There's a very good argument top be made, I think, that "capitalism" is the biggest and most dangerous ponzi scheme ever invented. Most people will happily participate thinking "this is fine .gif" while untapped suckers/resources keep dropping enough "return" to early "investors", but when the house of cards all collapses there will be no underlying foundation for the vast majority and only the people at the very very top of the pyramid scheme ever actually benefited at all.
Ever stopped to wonder why Musk ands Bezos are so interested in going to Mars???