Live data from Hacker News

I am retiring from fulltime writing (& pseudonymity) to launch Guardian Angel

twitter.com

141–150 of 265 posts

Re: I am retiring from fulltime writing (& pseudonymity) to launch Guardian Angel

#141

What happens when the person the AI is designed to be aligned with is a psychopath? Real question.

everyone is psychopathic to a certain degree, otherwise westerners wouldnt eat cheap bacon and eggs. id prefer to answer what happens when ai is designed to align with a sociopath. altman behaves like a sociopath and he owns the biggest ai company - the ai aligned to altman is used to make money by stupefying the populace. so i guess a retarded populace is my answer to your question. i like this answer because if i was a wolf my utopia would be pens and pens of sheep ripe for the slaughter. and this entire scenario is a mere ramping of the west's existing trajectory.

Re: I am retiring from fulltime writing (& pseudonymity) to launch Guardian Angel

#142

What happens when the person the AI is designed to be aligned with is a psychopath? Real question.

everyone is psychopathic to a certain degree, otherwise westerners wouldnt eat cheap bacon and eggs. id prefer to answer what happens when ai is designed to align with a sociopath. altman behaves like a sociopath and he owns the biggest ai company - the ai aligned to altman is used to make money by stupefying the populace. so i guess a retarded populace is my answer to your question. i like this answer because if i w…

I'm asking mostly from an AI safety perspective

Re: I am retiring from fulltime writing (& pseudonymity) to launch Guardian Angel

#143
post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

An LLM just solved 10 top tier math problems this week. It seems very likely that in 6 months they will solve 100 top tier math problems, maybe 1 millenium math problem, maybe 10 top tier physics problems, etc. It's only going to get crazier.

Has an LLM ever intentionally made you laugh? Cry?

[dead]

Re: I am retiring from fulltime writing (& pseudonymity) to launch Guardian Angel

#144

> What would it take for LLMs to make me 100× more productive? Without this, I am doomed to irrelevance. Are you, though? You will only be "doomed" if your place your value system squarely on "productivity". Then what is to differentiate you from a machine? * * * Edit: I'm not sure how I can feel confident about a proposal that puts so much value on "productivity". How can you reconcile this with "self-actualization"…

One of the example Gwern brings [1] is a GA as an agent for public discourse and political life, to bring your "set of values" to have an effect in solving society's issues, when you yourself don't have the time or energy to. I don't think it solves or reconciles with self-actualization, but, from a pragmatical point of view, it offers the promise of extending causally your set of views and philosophies to politics.…

that sounds uncomfortably like the public sphere version of spam - using an automated process to amplify some self-serving message and thereby increasingly clutter up the space and tax everyone's scarce and valuable attention.

Re: I am retiring from fulltime writing (& pseudonymity) to launch Guardian Angel

#145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's novel because previous rounds of automation were about automating specific tasks or well-scoped functions. There was always an implicit understanding that the white-collar worker would be freed to spend their time on more valuable, higher-level problems. But this time is different because of the generality of the technology. Agents promise to automate the process of thinking itself. And in many domains they can…

> It's novel because previous rounds of automation were about automating specific tasks or well-scoped functions. There was always an implicit understanding that the white-collar worker would be freed to spend their time on more valuable, higher-level problems. But this time is different because of the generality of the technology. Agents promise to automate the process of thinking itself. And in many domains they ca…

The overseas person didn't work out because of time zone and cultural and language barrier friction that wasn't anticipated in the idea.

This isn't analogous to the threat of AI.

Re: I am retiring from fulltime writing (& pseudonymity) to launch Guardian Angel

#146
post #36

> The big AI labs are building a single mind for everyone Reminds me of Pluribus (I just started watching it on Apple TV so maybe this is a late realization for me)

The AI writing thats ubiquitous these days - on my company email and slack, on random quotations in the newspaper, blogspam, even narrated by youtubers on camera (!) - is exactly like the Pluribus hive mind. Everywhere on the internet you encounter the same entity.

https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:ig5qohlny4csxs2lu3dyvhp5/po...

Re: I am retiring from fulltime writing (& pseudonymity) to launch Guardian Angel

#147
post #95

Only, if he had instead fallen in love with the version of this idea in which a community acts as the principal, rather than an individual. (I would like to be known to the agent serving my family, that serving my friends, my team at work, the PTA at my kids' school.)

you would love bruce sterling's short story "maneki neko", and karl schroeder's "degrees of freedom".

Re: I am retiring from fulltime writing (& pseudonymity) to launch Guardian Angel

#148

A few snippets from his full post here: https://gwern.net/guardian-angel . > "The chatbot personas are deeply misaligned with you, and aligned with their owners; and the economic incentives are to farm you with ads and subscriptions, while racing not to amplify you but to replace you." > "On my visits to the Bay Area, I would ask AI researchers or interns why they are doing their current research or projects, when in…

I can find agreement with a lot of this post (and probably misunderstand just as much), but it's striking to me that it seems to overlook or avoid the obvious moral/ethical option: Pushing AI towards Personal Computing.

It seems clear to me that if these models are to have any benefit for humanity then they must be made directly available to as many humans as possible. Right now that cost and effort is astronomical, but general computing also went through a mainframe/shared model before becoming personalized.

I believe The Personal Computer was and still is a gift to humanity; for those with an interest in gathering its yield. And now we have an interface with it that can attempt to introspect its' program and speaks human tongue! Imagine what could have been done with this at the time...

But if that approach clutches too many pearls to stomach (and I agree it's not all roses) then I'd submit that anyone who champions less is seeking to become our master.

Re: I am retiring from fulltime writing (& pseudonymity) to launch Guardian Angel

#149
post #41

A few snippets from his full post here: https://gwern.net/guardian-angel . > "The chatbot personas are deeply misaligned with you, and aligned with their owners; and the economic incentives are to farm you with ads and subscriptions, while racing not to amplify you but to replace you." > "On my visits to the Bay Area, I would ask AI researchers or interns why they are doing their current research or projects, when in…

Leaving AI completely aside, it still amazes me that people finds "novel" the idea of removing highly-paid white collar intellectual workers (software developers or otherwise) completely out of the loop. No-code platforms date back to the 80's. Getting rid of engineers in general is even older [*]. Even relational databases and SQL were initially promoted as "ways to get rid of those expensive programmers to access y…

Marketing about a more efficient product that requires fewer engineers is obviously not new. The idea that human engineers are obsolete is pretty new, that's the claim that is getting pushback.

Re: I am retiring from fulltime writing (& pseudonymity) to launch Guardian Angel

#150

A few snippets from his full post here: https://gwern.net/guardian-angel . > "The chatbot personas are deeply misaligned with you, and aligned with their owners; and the economic incentives are to farm you with ads and subscriptions, while racing not to amplify you but to replace you." > "On my visits to the Bay Area, I would ask AI researchers or interns why they are doing their current research or projects, when in…

For 20 years my job has been automating my job away. I remain unafraid of my future necessity, and as always, excited for the work I get to do because of the work I no longer have to do. The last 200 years of science, technology, and engineering is a long story about eliminating work people had to do being replaced by higher level work. Each time, each wave, there was always the FUD about the work nobody had to do an…

Previous technologies eliminated single categories of worker at a time. The machine learning that people are working on these days threatens to replace very broad swaths of the workforce, of many countries, over a very short period of time.
Post reply on HN