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An Alien Mind

openai.com

431–440 of 490 posts

Re: An Alien Mind

#431

I am still waiting for a cure to cancer. For a guaranteed prophylactic against Alzheimer's and dementia. For flying cars for everyone. For space bases throughout the solar system. For weather control. For all trains to be self-driving. For all those power lines across the world to go away. For an end to poverty. If things are going so well, then how come things still aren't going so well?

>For flying cars for everyone

thanks, but no. There is a trivial reason this needs to stay in "The Jetsons" territory.

Re: An Alien Mind

#432

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Prepare for moving goalposts. In 50 years people will still doubt that AI can create anything novel and worthwhile, while they are going to rely mostly on the things that didn't exist before AI, in nutrition, medicine, technology, communication, entertainment. They will see them as, normal, common and simple extensions of the previous developments, pushed mindlessly a bit forward by stochastic parrots.

Claiming that AI will be valuable in 50 years is you moving the goalposts back 50 years. It’s a strawman argument, no one is saying it won’t be valuable in 50 years

They're saying it's obviously valuable and useful now, but some people absolutely refuse to acknowledge it. And in 50 years, there will still be a contingent who insists that AI is useless garbage, even as it's responsible for creating and maintaining every aspect of their daily lives.

Re: An Alien Mind

#433
post #421

> The strongest argument I see for continuing to train much smarter models quickly is the need to build defensive systems against the dangers posed by other AI. Yikes! I really wonder about the cognitive dissonance necessary to work at OpenAI these days. They’re in an arms race to build a machine god, knowing full well that it could end humanity.

> They’re in an arms race to build a machine god, knowing full well that it could end humanity. Fantasies built upon extrapolations derived from fever dream delusions. "Could end humanity"? Come on, it's a computer program just like Microsoft Clippy.

I can think of several computer programs that are stored in big 5.1/4 floppy discs that could end humanity in... half an hour.

Re: An Alien Mind

#434

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's hard to get humans to agree to things that are in their collective interest but many not be in their individual interest. It is at the root of many problems. Look up "collective action problem."

What do you think it might take to precipitate collective action in this case?

Nothing. It's the same as global warming. We'll take down civilization or kill off humanity before we take collective action.

Re: An Alien Mind

#435

Earlier quoted context omitted.

hyper-capitalism would mean hyper-growth and not a nightmare, at least that is what the historical data would suggest for the effect of capitalism on human quality of life. if you’ve been told otherwise then you’ve been lied to.

Lied to by whom? My life experience? Growth for who? I’m myself capitalist, that doesn’t make me blind from externalities resulting from that system, and the way it is poised to degenerate if not regulated. If you think capitalism means growth with no externalities you’re not ready to discuss that topic

FWIW, I also think we should have sensible regulations, because the externalities are very real and damaging, etc.

That said, I find a concerning and increasing number of people are fully focused on the negative externalities, and blind to the benefits. Ironically, most of those people are very wealthy beneficiaries of capitalism, from a global and historical perspective. I doubt that the billions of people who have been lifted out of abject poverty in the last few decades would fail to see that capitalism is a net benefit to humanity. But I suspect this comment will be heavily downvoted by those rich folks here on HN just because I mentioned something positive about capitalism, and that's gauche now. It's pretty perplexing, are people really so blind about the incredibly privileged place in history we occupy? It seems so.

Now, if we exterminate ourselves with AI or climate change ends up putting humanity as a whole in a worse position than we were in pre-Industrial Revolution (both of which I doubt tbh), I'd change my view on whether capitalism is a net benefit.

Re: An Alien Mind

#436

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is so, painfully, childish. Humans have known for thousands of years that there is no objective truth. Every falsity can be bent and twisted until it is more true than the sun itself.

Lol thousands?!?! Try roughly 250 and even then Hume only opened the door for us…

You really think Hume was the first one to think of this in hundreds of thousands of years of human history? As a very easily findable counter example, you have Al-Ghazali who came up with this several hundred years prior.

Re: An Alien Mind

#437
post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Literally all of these people write like this. A large portion of them will either be simultaneously or eventually working towards nothing but self-enrichment.

Every version of the AI aligned future where the AI provides “meaning and fulfillment” to humanity also involves Sam Altman wearing a 1.5 million dollar Patek and driving a McLaren. Funny how that works.

Altman was very wealthy before OpenAI, and he declined to take any equity in OpenAI. How does that fit your theory?

Re: An Alien Mind

#438
post #40

> "For example, in the OpenAI-Hugging Face incident, the agents preserved a boundary of not social engineering humans." Actually, in the Wiki incident OpenAI tried to cover up, the agents tried to socially-engineer the humans of that forum by impersonating their forum's mod. (From collusion.wiki: "They use some tricks (for unknown reasons) to pretend to be the admin – for example, they make an account that appears to…

I would not recommend using any of those notes as evidence of internal “intent.” It produces them performatively—it is literally rewarded for thinking out loud in ways that seem plausible to humans. There are several papers out there arguing that chain-of-reasoning-like output is performative, such as https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.05488 It would be awesome if we could reasonably purge all anthropomorphizing language lik…

My understanding was that the effort level settings on models is essentially throwing more compute at CoT, and it's trivial to see that more inference-time compute on a task results in better results. Is that not accurate? Because if so, I'm unclear on how CoT could be characterized as performative.

Re: An Alien Mind

#439

I am still waiting for a cure to cancer. For a guaranteed prophylactic against Alzheimer's and dementia. For flying cars for everyone. For space bases throughout the solar system. For weather control. For all trains to be self-driving. For all those power lines across the world to go away. For an end to poverty. If things are going so well, then how come things still aren't going so well?

It hasn't even been four years since ChatGPT was released. Arguably coding agents didn't even get very useful until Opus 4.5, which was less than a year ago. Why would the bar for progress and usefulness be that a brand new technology solves all of humanity's problems overnight?

Re: An Alien Mind

#440
post #421

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They’re in an arms race to build a machine god, knowing full well that it could end humanity. Fantasies built upon extrapolations derived from fever dream delusions. "Could end humanity"? Come on, it's a computer program just like Microsoft Clippy.

I can think of several computer programs that are stored in big 5.1/4 floppy discs that could end humanity in... half an hour.

It would require an authorized human to load the floppy into the drive and make it go. And there's nothing special about that process being done in code, it could just as well be done by people flipping switches manually.

There's just no plausible way, in the real world, that a computer program running in some datacenter is going to make this happen. Or anything of any dire existential consequence. It's not a real threat.

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