Most useless link ever?
I am retiring from fulltime writing (& pseudonymity) to launch Guardian Angel
201–210 of 267 posts
Re: I am retiring from fulltime writing (& pseudonymity) to launch Guardian Angel
#202> 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)
Pluribus is a collective intelligence/virus which forcefully (leads to hundreds of millions of deaths) injects itself into biospheres and then blissfully experiences itself without, of course, hurting itself in any way. Then it might eventually start starving to death because of that prime directive.
That is positively utopian compared to AI where 99.9% of humanity gets to experience a hall of uncanny valley mirrors until they are shipped off to the scrapyard or get artificially augmented with some AI mindfuck and start thinking “you’re absolutely right!” themselves. (I mean that’s the dystopian version. But if you are comparing AI to that show then presumably you think that AI is at least a little bit dystopian.)
The virus in Pluribus can even be talked with and reasoned with like a distinct entity that is real and has its own thoughts. Oh boy, much better than a million pastiches of a million echoes of the past where there is no original thought to be traced back to after 2022.
The motivation for the virus is also completely different to the motivation of the AI Overlords.
But it’s that pretty typical lack of popular imagination. Some individual/collective narrative is presented. The flawed but autonomous individual rebelling against the flawless but enslaved collective. But dang it, I’m an American and I value my freedoms. Released forty years ago and people would rave about how it aptly critiqued the Soviet Union.
Re: I am retiring from fulltime writing (& pseudonymity) to launch Guardian Angel
#203gwern sells out to ride the llm schizo-train, the post. agi any day now.
Re: I am retiring from fulltime writing (& pseudonymity) to launch Guardian Angel
#204Allowing someone to create my persona which they control sounds like a fever nightmare to me. I'm not touching this with a stick until I can host it - and control it - myself
Re: I am retiring from fulltime writing (& pseudonymity) to launch Guardian Angel
#205A 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…
I don't think the no-code comparison is valid, it's always been fundamentally flawed since its many leaky abstractions sitting on top of systems programming code
LLMs can't replace developers but its foundationally different because it can operate on systems code instead of building abstractions on top
Re: I am retiring from fulltime writing (& pseudonymity) to launch Guardian Angel
#206Earlier quoted context omitted.
I can nod along when I hear and read people talking about the dangers of these technologies and the endgame of their creators; and then suddenly very weird when everyone except me is nodding along that the answer must be similar (but different) technology! It's as if technologists are stuck in a room of mirrors, unable to imagine a world in which "solutions" don't ultimately just continue to feed technology's increas…
Technologists don't drive decisions though. The shareholders do. Edit: I mean technically shareholders don't decide any operational choices but their shallow interests are what everything is decided around.
> Technologists don't drive decisions though. The shareholders do.
Yes, but technologists get sniped into identifying and defending them. They're the mouth pieces and the hands. Shareholders by themselves out to add my uniqueness to their assets would just be helpless randos who can't even make eye contact. Think of what "hiding behind screens" does to people, multiply that by infinite and you get shareholders hiding behind technologists.
Re: I am retiring from fulltime writing (& pseudonymity) to launch Guardian Angel
#207> 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.…
If someone lacks the time and energy to stand behind their views, how much of that is a result of those views? If you care about the world and justice, if you love life and living things, that's your source of energy right there. If you have half-assed ideas that sound good in the bubble and zero charisma, you have no energy, and interacting with you doesn't give anyone energy.
So much of this just strikes me as "now that I've taken a wrong turn and am in a dead end, what deus ex machina could make this work after all and turn a shitty personality into something grand?", but that will never, ever work. Whatever problem you try to solve that way, now you have two.
Re: I am retiring from fulltime writing (& pseudonymity) to launch Guardian Angel
#208A 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…
Mods, please replace submission with this more accessiable link.
It's just restricted for me, even with X account I can't view it.
Re: I am retiring from fulltime writing (& pseudonymity) to launch Guardian Angel
#209LLM psychosis claims another victim... A reminder for anyone reading this: talk to people. Real humans[1]. They will remind you there's more to life than what ChatGPT can offer you. They might even remind you, for all their stupidity and flaws, what intelligence looks like as compared to a program that predicts tokens. Forums like these always get philosophical in high-minded discussions about intelligence, but there…
I totally understand the sentiment, and I generally agree. Something so strange I'm noticing is how AI-pilled regular people are becoming. My sister-in-law is a totally non-technical person, but everything is chatgpt this, chatgpt that. My wife, my kids, various friends — they're all talking about generative AI with way too much regularity. On the bright side, they're disclosing when information comes from AI, but a…
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Re: I am retiring from fulltime writing (& pseudonymity) to launch Guardian Angel
#210Earlier quoted context omitted.
Technologists don't drive decisions though. The shareholders do. Edit: I mean technically shareholders don't decide any operational choices but their shallow interests are what everything is decided around.
Maybe that's truer in other industries, but the history of Silicon Valley is at great odds with such a claim.
Silicon Valley was originally funded by the military industrial complex.
Today it’s dominated by the military industrial complex and advertisers like Google and Meta.
The hippies were never in charge, only for a brief period were they well compensated and allowed to make noise(1990s).