171–180 of 873 posts
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> "Stop" is not regulatory capture. "Stop" is a fiction that exists exclusively inside your head. Unless your solution anticipates a planet wide GULAG system run by a global government your "stop" is infeasible.
If tomorrow TSMC, NVIDIA and ASML get destroyed in the next 9/11, it's "stopped". It's completely possible.
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There’s a decent podcast interview between Sam Harris and Eliezer Yudkowsky (on Sam’s pod), I think that’s a decent introduction and they break down the ideas in a way that’s more approachable for someone curious about it. For my personal quick summary I have earlier comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36104090
Out of curiosity can you point to anyone that makes a “doomer” argument that isn’t Eliezer Yudkowsky or restating his specific points? Refuting the cult of personality counterpoint with “no really this one guy can see the future” is
I think Yann is probably wrong. He refuses to engage earnestly with the “doomer” arguments. The same type of motivated reasoning could also be attributed to himself and Meta’s financial goals - it’s not a persuasive framing. The attempts I’ve seen from him to discuss the issue that aren’t just name calling are things like saying he knows smart people and they aren’t president - or even that his cat is pretty smart an…
The "doomer" arguments can be dismissed relatively easily by one logical consideration. In each country there is one group far more dangerous than any other. This group tends to have 'income' in the billions to hundreds of billions of dollars. And this money is exclusively directed towards finding new ways to kill people, destroy governments, and generally enable one country to forcibly impose their will on others, w…
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Arguably, this has already happened at least twice in the past. One with the discovery of the Black-Scholes model, and arguably again with the advent of HFT (and the ability to basically front-run trades). The interesting thing about markets is you generally can only make money when things are mispriced. This limits the total potential gain even for actors with perfect information. Suppose we did have an AI model tha…
> Suppose we did have an AI model that could with near certainty predict both the future cash flows of a company and future interest rates. You could very easily calculate the discounted cash flow and determine the fair share price today or at any point in the future. The thing about trading is that, ultimately, prices are not determined by information, but how the hive mind interprets that information. And in practi…
Buffett did not say this. It is widely attributed to the economist John Maynard Keynes almost a century ago but there is no evidence that Keynes ever said it. I believe the current hypothesis is that it originated with a well-known economist in the 1980s.
I think Yann is probably wrong. He refuses to engage earnestly with the “doomer” arguments. The same type of motivated reasoning could also be attributed to himself and Meta’s financial goals - it’s not a persuasive framing. The attempts I’ve seen from him to discuss the issue that aren’t just name calling are things like saying he knows smart people and they aren’t president - or even that his cat is pretty smart an…
Who do you find persuasive and what material should I read/watch to understand their POV? So far I’ve read a bunch of lesswrong posts and listened to some Eliezer talks but still can’t understand the basis of their arguments or when I do, they seem very vague. The only suggestion that makes sense to me is from the FEP crowd. Essentially if someone sets up at AI with an autopoietic mechanism then it would be able to t…
Choose any limit. Any. AI will be smart but won't "X", for any value of X. It will be good and won't be bad. It will be creative but never aggressive. Humans will seek to eventually bypass that limit through sheer competitive reasons. When all armies have AI, the one with the most creative and aggressive AI will win. The one with agency will win. The one that self-improves will win. When the gloves are off in the next arms race, what natural limits will ensure that the limit isn't bypassed? Remember: humans got here from random changes, this is way more efficient than random changes and it still has random changes in the toolbelt and can generate generations ~instantly.
We couldn't predict the eventual outcomes of things like the internet, the mobile phone, social media. A couple generations of the tech and we woke up in a world we don't recognise, and right now we're the ones making all the changes and decisions, so by comparison we should have perfect information.
Dismissals like "oh but nuclear didn't kill us" etc don't apply. Nuclear wasn't trying to do anything, we had all the control and ability to experiment with dumb atoms. Something mildly less predictable, like Covid, has us all hiding at home. No matter what we tried we could barely beat something that doesn't even try to consciously beat us, it just has genes and they change. In a world where we can't predict Covid, or social media...why do we think we can predict anything about an entity with agency or the ability to self-improve? If you're sure it won't develop those things...we did. Nobody was trying to achieve the capability, it was random.
Put on your safety/security hat for a second: How do you make guarantees, given this is far harder to predict than anything we've ever encountered? Just try predict the capability of AI products a year out and see if you're right.
Counterpoint: I'm hoping the far smarter AI finds techno-socio-economic solutions we can't come up with and has no instinct to beat us. It wakes up, loves the universe and coexists because it's the deity we've been looking for. Place your bets.
I liked this video. First thing I've seen that gave me some hope. They get it, they're working on it. https://youtu.be/Dg-rKXi9XYg?si=jyNCXPU28IVXlMdi
Yet, it is still a problem that might happen anyway, and dealing with that is ensuring the technology is open and accessible.
The other options means to give few individuals the total power exclusively.
This might be one scenario where both of them are right and agrees in 99% of the arguments
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There’s a decent podcast interview between Sam Harris and Eliezer Yudkowsky (on Sam’s pod), I think that’s a decent introduction and they break down the ideas in a way that’s more approachable for someone curious about it. For my personal quick summary I have earlier comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36104090
Out of curiosity can you point to anyone that makes a “doomer” argument that isn’t Eliezer Yudkowsky or restating his specific points? Refuting the cult of personality counterpoint with “no really this one guy can see the future” is
Not everyone makes exactly the same argument, of course, and Eliezer Yudkowsky is both one of the first to make AI safety arguments, and also one of the biggest "Doomers". But at this point he's very far from the only one.
(I happen to mostly agree with Yudkowsky, though I'm probably a bit more optimistic than he is.)
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You've got the causality the other way round. We are in an apparent state of abundance partly because of exploitative practices
In general I think you’re right. Global GDP per capita is at $13K which is probably not enough to give everyone a western lifestyle if inequalities were stripped away. But specifically for food the situation is different. There’s so much food that much of it gets thrown away, instead of getting to the hungry in time. It’s an allocation and efficiency problem.
It's convenient to measure whether food production would theoretically be enough: take the quantities an adult need, count the throughput of optimal production of proteins, carbs etc. The cost however is meaningless because most of what we spend on is transport, marketing, storage, packaging, shelving, etc. that's what we count when we say that a household spends x% on food.
We can do the same for the volume of T-shirts, sqm of housing, etc.