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Elon Musk AMA

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Re: Elon Musk AMA

#71

Post by jebus989 »

jacquesm wrote: post #69
Cogito wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, I've been following r/spacex for a little bit. When they started trying to work out some good questions a day ago someone suggested that everyone upvote the resulting questions but the mods there quickly shut that down. [1] The reasons given for deleting the comments was specifically what everyone was trying to avoid, that is voting brigading. As far as I can tell no one was asking for votes, simply working tog…

That's the attitude that they say murdered wikipedia. Rules are there to foster a better community, not to kill off good community initiatives. As soon as the adherence to the rules becomes more important than the quality of the product you've basically lost it. The whole trick is to know when not to apply the rules. AMAs are an exceptional item and a different ruleset for AMAs would not be all that hard to imagine.…

"Murdered" Wikipedia whose fifth pillar is "ignore all rules"?

Re: Elon Musk AMA

#72

Post by vidarh »

Kiro wrote: post #63
simonh wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is true, but if we can make an AI even slightly smarter than a human, then it will be better at designing AIs than we are. It then designs an AI even smarter than it, and so on. That is the progresion that leads to the singularity. How smart could AIs go? There may be no practical upper limit. If you have a super-genius AI, massively more intelligent than any human, how do you know you are not being manipulated…

> We could never know if we were safe from such a machine. But wouldn't it be an awesome thing to experience? Even if it meant the demise of mankind.

And this is one of the reason why the AI doom scenario is a real concern: Intellectual curiosity means that even some people who understands the risks are likely to be prepared to take it.

There's also many others. One of the scarier one is that if you believe that strong AI will eventually take over, then it may be a rational response to act to get on its good side (whether to save yourself, save your family, or hope it takes pity on all of humanity if we're nice to it instead of fight it). And that may perversely mean working to aid its takeover.

Combine that with the simulation argument, and you have some really nasty scenarios:

If you are in a simulation, then any act you take against strong AI could lead to spending an eternity in simulated hell (alternatively such punishment might be inflicted on your loved ones) if said AI wanted to.

Whether or not that is actually likely does not matter. What matters is whether enough people believe it to be a plausible scenario that a strong AI may run simulations, and may use our actions in the simulations to determine whether or not to punish us in the simulation, and whether or not said people believe that the number of simulations is sufficiently high to make it likely for them to be living in a simulation.

Any person who believes they are more likely to live in a simulation than not, and that it is more likely for strong AI to punish actions taken against the interest of a strong AI takeover than not, will have a rational reason to consider acting in the interests of a strong AI takeover even if they know it is malign on the basis that they may decide the alternatives (whether to themselves, their family or their entire world) to be worse.

So if an AI takeover becomes possible at one point in our subjective future, then chances are it has already happened.

Re: Elon Musk AMA

#73

Post by grondilu »

eru wrote: post #41
grondilu wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Throughout history men have probably lived through worse conditions, either while being prisoners of war, stranded on a desert island and whatnot. The way to cope with such harsh conditions is, I suppose, always the same : hope of escaping and returning home.

In this case, the coping strategies of martyrs seem more apt. "You are doing it for the cause."

That seems to work with Mars One, for instance.

Re: Elon Musk AMA

#74

Post by jacquesm »

jebus989 wrote: post #71
jacquesm wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's the attitude that they say murdered wikipedia. Rules are there to foster a better community, not to kill off good community initiatives. As soon as the adherence to the rules becomes more important than the quality of the product you've basically lost it. The whole trick is to know when not to apply the rules. AMAs are an exceptional item and a different ruleset for AMAs would not be all that hard to imagine.…

"Murdered" Wikipedia whose fifth pillar is "ignore all rules"?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6612638

http://www.gwern.net/In%20Defense%20Of%20Inclusionism

And many others like it.

Re: Elon Musk AMA

#75

Post by kbart »

lukeqsee wrote: post #25

I found his comment regarding learning to be the most insightful. It is a more developed explanation of what I have found to be an effective strategy for me: > One bit of advice: it is important to view knowledge as sort of a semantic tree -- make sure you understand the fundamental principles, ie the trunk and big branches, before you get into the leaves/details or there is nothing for them to hang on to. Without th…

Definitely. When I'm learning some new discipline, the first thing is usually reading definitions of the most common terms, then some basic introduction and only after that going deeper to the direction I originally needed. It doesn't always work with highly specific knowledge (you can't expect to be an expert just after reading few books), but generally I find it the best way to learn.

Re: Elon Musk AMA

#76

Post by DanBC »

Cogito wrote: post #29
mason240 wrote: post #28

The moderators of r/IAMA apparently deleted several of the highest voted questions. http://www.reddit.com/r/teslamotors/comments/2rgzgo/official...

Yeah, I've been following r/spacex for a little bit. When they started trying to work out some good questions a day ago someone suggested that everyone upvote the resulting questions but the mods there quickly shut that down. [1] The reasons given for deleting the comments was specifically what everyone was trying to avoid, that is voting brigading. As far as I can tell no one was asking for votes, simply working tog…

One of the few things you can do that will get Reddit admin attention is to "manipulate" votes. It's not surprising that mods are cautious when people say "get this whole sub to upvote the post".

From a first reading that screenshot sounds like vote-brigading, not like using a single thread of questions within a sub to organise a list of great questions.

Re: Elon Musk AMA

#77

Post by rwallace »

sillysaurus3 wrote: post #35

Does anyone know why Musk believes so strongly that robot overlords are a serious threat? I don't understand how wasting any time worrying about AI taking over, Terminator-style, is productive. We're not going to be developing Strong AI any time soon, so it's simply not a problem worth worrying about. And if we do, the Strong AI won't be in any position to "take over." It probably won't even want to take over. That's…

It boils down to the deeply ingrained human psychological need to believe in higher powers, in a universe governed by the struggle between the forces of good and evil that are fundamentally human. The same thing happened with space exploration: as soon as we discovered - even conjectured - the existence of other worlds, the first thing we did was people them with imaginary elder civilizations. Real life threats don't fire the imagination to the same extent. Even if we end up going out in a nuclear war, it's more likely to happen by stupidity than malice.

Re: Elon Musk AMA

#78

Post by programmer_dude »

ojbyrne wrote: post #31
ChuckMcM wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I saw that, great quote. I also love its corollary, "If you are digging yourself into a hole, first stop digging."

Not sure what the word is, but I don't think its "corollary." Its the anti-corollary.

Converse?

Re: Elon Musk AMA

#79

Post by DanBC »

jebus989 wrote: post #71
jacquesm wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's the attitude that they say murdered wikipedia. Rules are there to foster a better community, not to kill off good community initiatives. As soon as the adherence to the rules becomes more important than the quality of the product you've basically lost it. The whole trick is to know when not to apply the rules. AMAs are an exceptional item and a different ruleset for AMAs would not be all that hard to imagine.…

"Murdered" Wikipedia whose fifth pillar is "ignore all rules"?

Wikipedia has spent many megabytes of text to argue about hyphen, minus, en-dash, and em-dash.

These arguments (different arguments among different people) spread over diffferent pages and different spaces. They happened on article talk pages; in meta space (village pump, the WP manual of style); in admin spaces (ANI); even with some ARBCOM case.

There's easily 500,000 words about hyphen, minus, en-dash and em-dash on wikipedia.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8600342

Re: Elon Musk AMA

#80

Post by jebus989 »

jacquesm wrote: post #74
jebus989 wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Murdered" Wikipedia whose fifth pillar is "ignore all rules"?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6612638 http://www.gwern.net/In%20Defense%20Of%20Inclusionism And many others like it.

Sure editor numbers are in decline, that doesn't support your point. Ignore All Rules is one of the fundamental principles the site was founded on.
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