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More Everything Forever

nytimes.com

281–290 of 321 posts

Re: More Everything Forever

#281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Idk, a few years ago when chatgpt came out he was saying things like "if we're still alive in 3 years (...)" where chatgpt 3.5 was still a glorified transformer. And modern llms still are. It's the constant fear mongering that stings my nerves. And well, I'm not surprised nobody knows which generation of Ai could undergo an increase causing our extinction, it's not even sure if there could exist such a thing, let alo…

He has been saying for a couple of years that it is possible any day now, but in the same breath he has always added that it is more likely 10 or 20 or 30 years from now than it is today. It is not a contradiction be confident of the outcome while remaining very uncertain of the timing. If an AI is created and deployed that is clearly much "better at reality" than people are (and human organizations are, e.g., the FB…

Ok, I think I might get a heart attack sooner or later, it's a possibility, although not very high.

If I said so, you might ask me if I saw a doctor or something similar to make me suspect that, and that's my issue with him. He's a Sci fi writer that's scared of technology without a grasp of how it works, and that's OK. He can talk about what he fears, and that's OK. It still doesn't mean we should take him seriously just because.

My pet peeve is that when trying to make laws regarding Ai - at least in Europe - some considerations were done regarding how it worked, what it was (...), how it's being talked in academic literature. I had a lawyer in a course explaining that, and while not perfect you eventually settle on something that more or less is reasonable. With yudkowsky, you have a guy that is scared of nanotech and yada yada. Sure, he might be right. But if I had to act based on something, it would look much more the eu process to make laws and less the "Ai will totally kill us from now to 30 years trust me". Perhaps now I'm more clear

And don't get me started with the rationalist stuff that just assumes pain is linear and yada yada

Re: More Everything Forever

#282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He has been saying for a couple of years that it is possible any day now, but in the same breath he has always added that it is more likely 10 or 20 or 30 years from now than it is today. It is not a contradiction be confident of the outcome while remaining very uncertain of the timing. If an AI is created and deployed that is clearly much "better at reality" than people are (and human organizations are, e.g., the FB…

Ok, I think I might get a heart attack sooner or later, it's a possibility, although not very high. If I said so, you might ask me if I saw a doctor or something similar to make me suspect that, and that's my issue with him. He's a Sci fi writer that's scared of technology without a grasp of how it works, and that's OK. He can talk about what he fears, and that's OK. It still doesn't mean we should take him seriously…

Eliezer has written extensively on why he thinks AI research is going to kill us all. He has also done 3-hour-long interviews on the subject which are published on Youtube.

Re: More Everything Forever

#283
post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You have to find the same event in a lot of other books beyond Matthew to be able to find a tiny whiff of historical information The same event is described in the book of Mark (10:32-34) and the book of Luke (18:31-34). There are two other predictions that appear in all three books: Matthew 16:21-23 Mark 8:31-33 Luke 9:21-22 Matthew 17:22-23 Mark 9:30-32 Luke 9:43-45

I mean a lot of other books, not just slightly different accounts.

> I mean a lot of other books

Such as?

Re: More Everything Forever

#284
post #213
post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And Zeroly, there's absolutely 0 reason for people to go to Mars, AT ALL. This whole idea is the stupidest thing I've heard people seriously discuss. What would be the point? If you want to experience "life on Mars", bury a cargo container in your back yard, and live in it for a year. If there's some burning need to go live underground, as you would on Mars, why not just do it in Nevada? The grocery store is a lot cl…

And Zeroly, there's absolutely 0 reason for people to go west, AT ALL - Portugal, 1490

there were lots of reasons to go west, since Europe was desperate and starved for spices and goods from the Silk Road.

the Ottomans had cut them off following the Fall of Constantinople in 1453 (or where they didn't they taxed the hell out of them).

they knew for sure there was good stuff over there, and just wanted a new way there.

we know for sure that Mars is blasted, toxic, rock ball with less metal than Earth. what great and grand spices will future explorers be returning with? the Portuguese could prove that nutmeg and silk existed...

Re: More Everything Forever

#285

Without the hope of technological progress, human expansion and economic growth the world becomes zero-sum. In such a world, humanity will soon arrive at their self-imposed limits, after which no-one can hope to create wealth and prosperity but only to take it from someone else. The pre-industrial world was like this and it is characterised by millenia of warfare and slavery. Human suffering on a scale that we strugg…

bollocks. nature has found equilibrium for millions of years. things like the Nash Equilibrium or game theory also find healthy balances.

what you're talking about is capitalism becoming unsustainable

Re: More Everything Forever

#286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ok, I think I might get a heart attack sooner or later, it's a possibility, although not very high. If I said so, you might ask me if I saw a doctor or something similar to make me suspect that, and that's my issue with him. He's a Sci fi writer that's scared of technology without a grasp of how it works, and that's OK. He can talk about what he fears, and that's OK. It still doesn't mean we should take him seriously…

Eliezer has written extensively on why he thinks AI research is going to kill us all. He has also done 3-hour-long interviews on the subject which are published on Youtube.

And perhaps YouTube is the appropriate place to talk about the probabilities he pulls out of thin air such as chatgpt 5 killing us with less than 50% chance, the badmath he showed to us a few years ago on reddit, and him proposing to trust bayes rather than the scientific method

At least he could learn to use some confidence intervals to make everything appear more serious /s

I'm very much in favor of research in Ai safety, maybe done with less scare and less threats of striking countries outside of the gpu limit agreement (and less bayes, God)

Re: More Everything Forever

#287

I will say that our discourse is weighted pretty heavily towards people who don’t deserve it. Most genuine experts are careful to only talk about things they know, not bloviate about everything under the sun. I am sure Marc Andreesen is a very intelligent person but he built and sold a web browser. He isn’t an expert on every tech topic. Same with Peter Thiel and the rest of the PayPal mafia. PayPal isn’t revolutiona…

Its not just tech bros though, anyone who's made lots of money from business is treated like they're the smartest person in the room by many people. The person who made millions from making a sugary drink and marketed it as something healthy is not necessarily pretty smart and more than likely isn't someone you want in charge of anything.

> The person who made millions from making a sugary drink and marketed it as something healthy is not necessarily pretty smart and more than likely isn't someone you want in charge of anything.

Quite literally in the case of former Apple CEO John Sculley.

Re: More Everything Forever

#288
post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'm an advocate of exploration and science, and in the modern world we have effective automation. There is NO need to send people to Mars, absolutely not in any large number. Can you write this with a straight face? This feels like the opportunity of a life time for someone who wants to push the envelope on what is possible. Yes it will be expensive, but the tech and lessons we learn will surely be worth more. Cons…

A rover is expendable, a human much less so. The PR cost of having a human smash into the surface of Mars the way it happened with a rover would easily outweigh the PR boost of having a human successfully land on Mars. And even if we managed to actually land someone, they'd most likely die there before we could bring them back. A rover runs mostly on solar power. Humans need breathable air, food, potable water, medic…

I agree that automation and robots are a good proxy for exploration. And yes it will be tough. That won't stop people from trying.

PR or not, there are still skydivers and wing suit people pushing the envelope. I really don't agree with the doomerism/well actually crowd on these sorts of things, there is still the indomitable human spirit, no matter how irrational it seems. We still have field scientists that get sent to the edges of the earth to explore and find things, even when we think they have completely been explored. A friend of mine is an arctic botanist that spends 3-4m a year in the high arctic tundra doing research on plants in that biome.

There is no rational reason to want to cross the entirety of Antarctica, and yet humans have done it.

Re: More Everything Forever

#289

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The "Kingdom of Heaven" was not a contemporary concept in first-century CE Judaism, to my knowledge.

Not that term, but a Messiah that will establish / lead a powerful Jewish nation was

Sure, but that was believed not only literally but very literally, as referring to the political liberation of the Jews from Roman rule.

Re: More Everything Forever

#290

I am surprised this obviously correct take is so controversial! The problem, essentially, is that the "more everything forever" crowd wants to get paid for the idea of the future today and then will never actually deliver what they promise. They are selling snake oil for the new millennium. Yes, of course I support space travel and settling on mars. I expect that, if we doubled or tripled NASA's budget, we could get…

Climate change can near certainly be served with technology, if society didn't stand in the way. We could all switch to nuclear - France did it decades ago, technology is not a problem, society is - hence the subjects of these articles. Looks at solar in China or even Texas vs California. Everything is like that.

Putting humans on Mars is purely a technological problem.

Inequality is not a real problem.

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