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Dude, You Broke the Future (2017)

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Re: Dude, You Broke the Future (2017)

#101

Post by jariel »

dodobirdlord wrote: post #51
pdonis wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, they aren't. Corporations don't magically do things that the group of actors working together don't do.

They literally do. Plenty of legal and regulatory constructs apply only to corporations. Limited liability is a thing that is available by forming a corporation, as is carrying out an SEC filing and selling stock. A corporation can also survive, as a legal construct, the deaths of all founding members.

Those constructs are part of the modern, legal features of corporations, but they are not the essential nature of what corporations are.

Remove those features, and things would change a lot, but you'd still have 'corporations' of a kind.

Corporations are also not primarily profit driven - the owners may are - but corporations themselves 'do things' which will result in a lot of externalities and surpluses generated elsewhere, only some of the profits may come back to the shareholders.

Corporations are:

Shareholders, Debtors, Buyers, Suppliers, Executives, Employees.

Shareholders may very well be the smallest beneficiaries of an endeavour. They have certain rights, but other groups have rights as well: lenders have first rights to the assets, and so do other creditors such as suppliers. Employees have legal rights including collective bargaining.

Buyers may have incredible power over companies such that they suck out all of the profits (see: selling to Apple).

Debtors have all of the power during restructring.

Many companies exist at the whim of the employees - like big Auto, who pay super high wages and benefits relative to the job. Possibly government employees as well.

Some Execs, by virtue of a weak or allied Board, have all the power and suck out vast profits that would otherwise go to investors.

Re: Dude, You Broke the Future (2017)

#102

Post by benlivengood »

pdonis wrote: post #45
einpoklum wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Corporations are literally the something-extra over a "group of actors working together".

No, they aren't. Corporations don't magically do things that the group of actors working together don't do.

Limited liability dramatically changes what groups of actors will do.

Re: Dude, You Broke the Future (2017)

#103

Post by Izkata »

ALittleLight wrote: post #19

I found a couple errors early on that dissuaded me from continuing to read. One was the idea that the author could rule out the singularity because he wasn't aware of progress toward self-motivated AI that would be something like our own intelligence. This seems like a limited view to me because we wouldn't need self-motivation at all in AI to hit the singularity. Humans can supply the self motivation. Suppose I'm us…

> Given the position of my scrollbar it seems I was only starting to read this piece

Tesla is just past 1/3 down, the page has almost 800 comments with no pagination.

Re: Dude, You Broke the Future (2017)

#104

Post by EricE »

hnick wrote: post #91

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…

>I find idle games odd.

Dopamine traps. To bring back to the article, there's a decent ST:NG episode where Wesley saves the day...

Re: Dude, You Broke the Future (2017)

#105

Post by Izkata »

LocalPCGuy wrote: post #61
ALittleLight wrote: post #19

I found a couple errors early on that dissuaded me from continuing to read. One was the idea that the author could rule out the singularity because he wasn't aware of progress toward self-motivated AI that would be something like our own intelligence. This seems like a limited view to me because we wouldn't need self-motivation at all in AI to hit the singularity. Humans can supply the self motivation. Suppose I'm us…

I found an error in the first sentence of your post that dissuaded me from giving the rest of it much credence. Saying you didn't read it, but decided to comment anyways.

Even taking your comment at face value, that's not what the first line of that comment says. It says "continuing to read", indicating a decent chunk of it was read.

The remainder of the comment indicates at least 1/3.

Re: Dude, You Broke the Future (2017)

#106

Post by saalweachter »

Chathamization wrote: post #28
jengleton wrote: post #5

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…

> 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.

There's also neglecting that a corporation can spend millions of person-hours a year on problems.

No individual line of code produced by a FAAMG is superhuman, but producing codebases of billions of lines of code is definitely outside the ability of any lone human. If you find yourself in court facing a corporation, you'll learn they can spend multiple human lifetimes learning relevant precedents, processing discovered evidence, and constructing their arguments.

It may not be runaway ever-improving superhuman AI, but pretending it is only as intelligent as the humans that make it up is missing the forests for the trees.

Re: Dude, You Broke the Future (2017)

#107

Post by benlivengood »

pdonis wrote: post #87
dodobirdlord wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They literally do. Plenty of legal and regulatory constructs apply only to corporations. Limited liability is a thing that is available by forming a corporation, as is carrying out an SEC filing and selling stock. A corporation can also survive, as a legal construct, the deaths of all founding members.

> They literally do. None of the things you describe make corporations magically able to do things without the group of people that make up the corporation doing things.

Limited liability allows companies to take risks that no sane individual or group of individuals would take on their own.

Limited liability is precisely the factor that lets corporations act as agents instead of extensions of individual or group human goals.

Re: Dude, You Broke the Future (2017)

#108

Post by bigiain »

flir wrote: post #54
zaphar wrote: post #9

Earlier 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.

Ok, but in that case, isn't there a better analogy with a plague, rather than an AI?

Intelligence (artificial or human) as a plague - is an idea that's spun out interesting storylines already.

On a geological timescale scale, it's very likely that's what the historians of the hyper-intelligent shade of the colour blue will write about us:

"There was once a virulent disease emerging on a single watery planet 1/3rd of the way along a spiral arm in some uninteresting galaxy. Fortunately the Universe's immune system never even needed to take action. It was greedy and short lived and starved itself of resources and died out before it had even metastasised much beyond it's own gravity well, it barely made it to it's next closest planet, and sent nothing out of that solar system's gravity well but a couple of primitive machines and all that daytime TV that was fashionable for a brief period a few Type-O main sequences ago..."

Re: Dude, You Broke the Future (2017)

#109

Post by Izkata »

jhomedall wrote: post #80
Stierlitz wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

@ALittleLight: “.. One was the idea that the author could rule out the singularity ..” Your consciousness uploaded and then downloaded into a synthetic human like body isn't ever going to be you. As the man said “transhumanism is a warmed-over Christian heresy”.

Why would it not be you? If I replace a single one of your neurons with a mechanical replacement, are you still you? What if I replace half? All? If you walk across a room, are you still you? What if I break you down, and reassemble you at the other side of the room, using the same atoms? What if I only use half the original atoms? What if I freeze you, move you across the room, and then dethaw you?

It's the question of what is consciousness.

As far as I (crudely) understand it, we don't know what exactly the cause is, other than it's tied extremely tightly to the brain and seems to be an accident of evolution/an illusion.

My guess is that as long as the neurons keep firing continuously and the illusion is unbroken, the "you" that is you right now will remain you. So you may well be able to go full ship-of-theseus and piece-by-piece completely replace the physical layer without breaking the consciousness, but if you stop it completely with an upload/download* , continuity is broken and the new "you" will be an exact duplicate while the "you" right now will cease to be. Because it's an exact duplicate there would be no way to confirm this, though - the new "you" would think it had continuity due to how complete their memories are.

* I'm thinking of switching to a robotic brain all at once here, instead of piece-by-piece. I'm not going to touch a transporter as suggested in your comment, as that probably depends on technical details of the transporter for what exactly is going on.

Re: Dude, You Broke the Future (2017)

#110

Post by SquishyPanda23 »

Chathamization wrote: post #28
jengleton wrote: post #5

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…

> 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.

> In what sense?

This is covered in the video.

He breaks down efficiencies of large corporations (or really any organization) into two types of gains:

(1) gains from parallelism, and (2) gains from synergy (e.g. people having better ideas by working in groups).

For (1) his argument is that while you get a much larger amount of work done, the maximum quality is just the max over the parallel units. E.g. if your R&D department consists of N scientists working independently, you'll get N times the work done, but the quality of each unit will be at best the quality of your best scientists.

For (2) his argument is essentially that the quality of ideas generated by human organizations is gated by the ability of people within the organization to recognize that the idea is good. He then does a simple simulation where he argues that if even if you have everyone in your company brainstorming great ideas, after a certain number of people, say 1000, you have diminishing returns on how good an idea you can generate and recognize as good. His claim is then, in contrast, an AI is not constrained by this limitation.

He doesn't seem to account for "standing on the shoulders of giants" effects where institutions build up knowledge over decades. That seems to me to imply a model similar to compound interest, at least over some time period before the corporation becomes stagnant and dies off.

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