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OpenAI and Elon Musk

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Re: OpenAI and Elon Musk

#421

Post by hef19898 »

WalterBright wrote: post #375
danans wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What has failed are completely "collectivist" or "individualist" societies. Societies that balance the two (like the post WWII US) are the ones that have advanced their standard of living the most.

The US became a superpower long before WW2. The US was the deciding factor in WW1, and the Germans were shocked at how well-fed and well-equipped the US soldiers were, even with having to ship everything across the ocean. The US saw the most spectacular rise in the standard of living from 1800 up to WW2 the world had ever seen. This was all due to the free market, not collectivism. During WW2, the US supplied its all…

The US were much less a factor in WW1 than WW2. If anything, the US entry forced the Entente's hands to start the planned 1919 offensive early in 1918 and ending the war. The USA did not contribute a large amlint of troops, relative to the armies already deployed, nor did they contribute significant amounts of gear. Lend-Lease was a WW2 thing, in WW1 the majority of US tanks for example were actually French.

The US were a economic power prior to WW1, they only became a true super power during WW2, in particular after Pearl Habour. The full mobilization of society, industry and science made sure of this. This, and the fact the US won the Pacific.

I know it is a popular view of WW1, that it was only the US entry that won it for the Entente. Simply not true, WW1 is not WW2. And even WW2 was not won by the US alone.

Finally, the US war economy of WW2 was decidedly not free, is was a complete structured war eceonomy with production goals set by the government. The implementation of those goals was capitalistic, but not free.

Re: OpenAI and Elon Musk

#423

Post by ben_w »

enriquec wrote: post #208
ajisiekskaiek wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are advocating here for an unresolvable set of ethics, which just happens to be one that conveniently leaves abuse of AI on the table. You take as an axiom of your ethical system the absolute right to create and propagate in public these AI technologies regardless of any externalities and social pressures created. It is of course an ethical system primarily and exclusively interested in advancing the individual a…

[flagged]

It's way more complex than that.

The Communist Manifesto was published during the Great Famine in Ireland, and that famine was much worse than it needed to be because the UK government didn't intervene.

And a big part of the growth in capitalist societies is related to corporate structures, which are small scale collectives, with bosses who make decisions for all.

When the US civil war happened, that resulted in the North collectively imposing the decision that nobody had the "business freedom" to own slaves; much to the dismay of the south and I presume joy of the enslaved.

USSR famously bad, but (a) even though it started from very poor conditions thanks to the Tsars, developed to beat the USA to orbit, (b) the collapse of it, replacing communism with capitalism, regressed their economy and living standards.

And that's why no country is entirely either collective nor individualist, and also separately neither capitalist nor communist (both anarcho-capitalists and anarcho-communists are a thing, just as both can be dictatorial).

My opinion is that as both capitalism and communism were formalised over a century before Nash game theory, both are wrong — they assume that people, when free, make choices that are good for all.

Re: OpenAI and Elon Musk

#424

Post by flohofwoe »

BlueTemplar wrote: post #407
flohofwoe wrote: post #382

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The internet will be fine, social media platforms will be flooded and killed by AI trash, but I can't see anything bad with that outcome. An actually 'open internet' for exchanging ideas with random strangers was a nice utopia from the early 90's that had been killed long ago (or arguably never existed).

E-mail has *not* been killed long ago (aside some issues trying to run your own server and not getting blocked by gmail/hotmail). It is under threat now, due to the increased sophistication of spam.

Email might already be 'culturally dead' though. I guess my nephew might have an email address for the occasional password recovery, but the idea of actually communicating over email with other humans might be completely alien to him ;)

Similar in my current job btw.

Re: OpenAI and Elon Musk

#425

Post by hef19898 »

goatlover wrote: post #396
boringuser2 wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They literally created weapons of mass destruction. Do you think they thought they were good guys because you watched a Hollywood movie?

I think they thought it would be far better that America developed the bomb than Nazis Germany, and the Allies needed to do whatever it too to stop Hitler, even if that did mean using nuclear bombs. Japan and the Soviet Union were more complicated issues for some of the scientists. But that's what happens with warfare. You develop new weapons, and they aren't just used for one enemy.

What did Lehrer (?) sing about von Braun? "I make rockets go up, where they come down is not my department".

Re: OpenAI and Elon Musk

#426

Post by hef19898 »

leereeves wrote: post #368
Judgmentality wrote: post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you really think you're fighting evil in a war for global domination, it's easy to justify to yourself that it's important you have the weapons before they do. Even if you don't think you're fighting evil; you'd still want to develop the weapons before your enemies so it won't be used against you and threaten your way of life. I'm not taking a stance here, but it's easy to see why many Americans believed developin…

The war against Germany was over before the bomb was finished. And it was clear long before then that Germany was not building a bomb. The scientists who continued after that (not all did) must have had some other motivation at that point.

I kind of understand that motivation, it is a once in a lifetime project, you are part of it, you want to finish it.

Morals are hard in real life, and sometimes really fuzzy.

Re: OpenAI and Elon Musk

#427

Post by posix86 »

This letter seems to adress why they're not open, but not whatsoever why they're selling out to Microsoft, which was Musk's primary criticism, or am I wrong?

Re: OpenAI and Elon Musk

#428

Post by advael »

gitaarik wrote: post #359
advael wrote: post #113

Like most airing out of drama, this doesn't really materially change anything aside from making everyone involved look extremely bad But also, all entities involved looked bad already to observers who weren't so deeply rooting for them already that nothing would change their minds, so this is basically tabloid fodder drama in terms of importance as far as I can tell

Well, isn't it good that the public learns more about the bad stuff they're doing?

Yes, transparency is perhaps the most important check against power. We are constantly told by governments and corporations alike that there is some dire safety reason they have to do so much secretly, and while rare exceptions where this may actually be true for some temporary situation do exist (often the case in wars, perhaps, though not decades after the fact as governments so often allege), it's clear that this is often a lie told for the obvious reason that this secrecy allows powerful people to act without this check. We only get told the lie in the first place because this secrecy breaks expectations of transparency; often - as with openAI - breaks promises that were previously made

So we have them airing their dirty laundry because a billionaire sued them for his own petty reasons, having planned to break the promises the organization made that he's now suing them over in a similar way. Billionaire is hypocrite, news at eleven. This doesn't exonerate the organization. I hope this suit makes people angry. I hope it makes it harder to get away with this facile and infantilizing line about keeping people in the dark to protect them

Re: OpenAI and Elon Musk

#429

Post by hackerlight »

Zambyte wrote: post #233
Reubend wrote: post #13

Their evidence does a nice job of making Musk seem duplicitous, but it doesn't really refute any of his core assertions: they still have the appearance of abandoning their core mission to focus more on profits, even if they've elaborated a decent justification of why that's necessary to do. Or to put it more simply: here they explain why they had to betray their core mission. But they don't refute that they did betra…

> They're probably right that building AGI will require a ton of computational power, and that it will be very expensive. Why? This makes it seem like computers are way less efficient than humans. Maybe I'm naive on the matter, but I think it's possible for computers to match or surpass human efficiency.

Scaling laws. Maybe they will figure out a new paradigm, but in the age of Transformers we are stuck with scaling laws.

Re: OpenAI and Elon Musk

#430

Post by consumer451 »

adamors wrote: post #333
KTibow wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At this point most people didn't think Elon was a good guy even before these emails leaked

Yes, he has shown his true self when he called the British diver, who was rescuing kids out of cave in Thailand, a pedophile. That was more than 5 years ago.

Morals, ethics, and not being a jerk aside, Musk has now proven that he is just plain not thinking things through, when he:

1) Released the original Boring Company idea about tiny tunnels under LA to alleviate road traffic, which could easily be shot down by anyone modeling it on a single paper napkin.

2) Got caught up in ontological (theistic) arguments about alien scientists who had surely created a computer simulation in which we all live.

3) In an effort to prevent the inevitable AI overlords from controlling us, bought a company to create a ubiquitous neural interface so that computers have read/write access to our brains, of which somehow the AI overlords will not take advantage.

This was all as of 2018.

I still give him credit for previous accomplishments, but in aggregate, it is arguable that Elon Musk's new found ability to avoid thinking things through might be our "Great Filter."

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