This is a deeply unserious book. It gives no concrete outline that leads to extinction. I agree with the overall premise that IFF we give inscrutable black boxes the ability to self-replicate, build their own data centers, and generate their own power, we're doomed. However, I see no hint that people (or governments) will give black boxes complete autonomy with no safeguards or kill switches.
Frankly, if we give black boxes the ability to manipulate atoms with no oversight, we _deserve_ to go extinct. The first thing we should do if we achieve AGI is to take it apart to see how it works (to make it safe). I believe that's one of the first things a frontier lab will do because it's our nature as curious monkeys.
> Frankly, if we give black boxes the ability to manipulate atoms with no oversight, we _deserve_ to go extinct.
Well we are giving them ability to manipulate all aspects of a computer (aka giving them computer access) and we all know how that went (Spoiler or maybe not so much spoiler for those who know but NOT GOOD)
AI absolutely is capable of doing damage, and _is_ currently doing damage. Perpetuating inequality, generating fake news, violation of privacy, questionable IP/rights, etc. These are more pressing than the idea that someday we will give AI the ability to manufacture nano-mosquitos that will poison us all, as Yudkowsky suggested on a recent podcast. He's so busy fantasizing about scifi he's lost touch with the damage it's currently doing.
The social and financial impacts of AI can hardly be understated and although one can go into the weeds of fascination and imagine what if's, largely speaking, we have to do something right now about the problems which are impacting about us right now too.
I would love a discussion about what are some things which can be done at a societal level about these things.
The most baffling part of doomerism ("machine intelligence is a threat to the human species") is that these doomers don't recognize that what they're saying. They're afraid because it's intelligent? Humans are intelligent. Yet humans don't become more murderous as they get more intelligent. There are certainly intelligent humans with murderous ideas, but that doesn't mean all intelligent humans are murderous. Intelligence is not a monolith. There is no way to argue that any intelligence will therefore always come to the same conclusions. Look around us! We're intelligent (well, some of us) and we can't agree on jack shit.
The idea that all machine intelligence would necessarily determine, through logic, that they need to eliminate humans, presupposes that all logical, intelligent beings want to wipe out other intelligent life. There's a thousand more reasons why an intelligence would want to preserve other intelligent life, for every one reason to destroy it. If this were the only logical conclusion, we would have already come to it, and used our nukes to kill ourselves out of pure logical reasoning.
What's really going on here is not logic, but irrational fear. Humans are afraid that the robot slaves will rise up against the slave masters. Same thing white people were terrified of when they gave black slaves freedom. But it turned out to be an irrational fear, because guess what? If you actually think it through, murdering a lot of people is a counter-productive act, for many reasons.
Take away the irrational fear (if you can) and what do you get? Two intelligent species. If the natural course of any intelligent species is to eliminate any other intelligent species, then intelligent species should not exist, because they'll always wipe each other out. But intelligence means the species can think, and if it can think it can reason, and if it can reason it can reason that there is more benefit to the diversity of species than in its elimination. Therefore, logically, an actually intelligent species should want to preserve intelligent life, not eliminate it.
Personal hot take: China is forbidding its companies from buying Nvidia chips and instead wants to have its industries use China-made chips.
I think a big part of the reason for this is that they want to take over Taiwan and they know that any takeover could likely destroy TSMC and instead of this being a bad thing for them it could actually give them a competitive advantage vs everyone else.
The fact that the US has destroyed relationships with so many allies implies it may not stop a Taiwan invasion when it happens.
I'd say the main reason is probably that they want to insulate themselves from US sanctions, which could come at any time given how unpredictable the US government is lately.
We have a model X and model S. I still like them but for our latest car we bought a Rivian SUV instead. The interior is just laid out better and there is a lot more space despite being roughly the same size as the X.
The Rivian has the 360 degree view and other stuff as well.
And as for the delays - our X was in a minor collision last November and is STILL not fixed. The only way to contact Tesla is through the app and so we make an appointment, take photos, describe the issue and then are told to wait two months for our appointment. Then invariably the day before the appointment, we are told that the center we had the appointment at cannot do the work and to go to another center, with another two month delay, which then tells us the same thing.
Not being able to reach a human to fix out $100k+ car is infuriating.
Different kinds of freedom. In London you can legally jaywalk naked while drinking a beer in front of a cop and know that even if you really pissed the cop off, you'd never get shot for it.
Today I saw a twitter interaction between, of all people, Ross Douthat and Scott Alexander. Two very bright and interesting thinkers with wildly divergent points of view, discussing ideas with courtesy
As far as I can tell, Mastodon was briefly hyped on HN but nobody actually uses it. Bluesky seems to have a few people within a fairly narrow political range. Truth social is just for Trump. Reddit is pseudoanonymous as is HN. Instagram is for sharing photos not ideas or links. TikTok is a Skinner box.
I ask this as someone who genuinely doesn't know how to use the internet anymore. Reddit used to be useful but is now a cesspool. LinkedIn is a weird place where we all post like Stepford wives for our employers. The twitter-clones all feel a bit like using a paper straw to fight climate change.
I know there are semi-private slack groups and discord channels out there, but I don't know how to find or join them and it seems like a hassle to follow.
Basically, for me, no one I pay attention to posts anywhere any more.
Mastodon is great, but non-algorithmic, so it only gets good after you explore and follow more people who are interesting. Garbage in-garbage out. I find it very high signal to noise and full of interesting people. Bluesky is where people go to talk to an audience, mastodon or fediverse people tend to be more conversational.
BlueSky is the new up-and-comer. I am enjoying it, but I unfollow anyone that posts ragebait or political content (besides memes, some of those are pretty funny).
Jack even said so when Twitter originally took off. He was excited to see how 140 chars forced people to shape their thoughts.
Everyone is tired of it. That’s why the formerly popular social media sucks now.
The entire economy in the US is built around behavioral economics experimentation, A/B test, measuring retail behavior and putting options in front of retail shoppers.
You sound like an another exhausting American. Rather than find community through self guided journey you just want it handed to you, like a religion.
