I don’t think you can really accuse the lesswrong crowd of being in it to hype up OpenAI.
They don’t profit from it (well at least the current doom crowd), they have been saying that this is super-risky since “forever” (15 years), they strongly argue against e.g. OpenAI going private … I really don’t understand where this whole strand of thinking of hidden ulteriour motives for AI doomers comes from, AFAIK there was never a single clear case where this happened (and the arc of people invested in AI is they they become less of a doomer the more financially entangled they become with AI, see Elon or Altman).
It's so common for people to throw out those accusations, despite zero evidence from the lesswrong crowd, because they need explanations that are way more comforting than facing down the scary implication that lesswrong "doomers" are right.
One thought path leads to business-as-usual comfort, happily motivated by trillions of $ in market cap and VC.
The other is dread.
It makes sense why people take the easy road. We're still battling climate change denialism after all.
They could be be playing into such a narrative, even though they have different motivations.
Certainly Altman has had a few moments where he is saying "this stuff is getting so good it is society-scale dangerous". His motivations are to create FOMO with investors and users, and to try to form the regulatory landscape in their favor.
I just don't understand the line of reasoning at all. It sounds to me like postulating that oil executives have started admitting climate change is real in order to create FOMO. Investors and users live in society, why would they fear missing out on destroying it?
> like postulating that oil executives have started admitting climate change is real
The subtext isn't "our product has bad side-effects and can be avoided with known alternatives", but more like: "Our product's core benefit is too awesome at what it does; If we don't pursue it then someone less-enlightened will do it anyway; Whether you love it or hate it the only way to influence the outcome is to support us."
So the oil-executive version would be something like "worrying" that petrochemical success will quickly bankrupt every other power-generation or energy-storage system overnight, causing economic disruption, and that eventually it will make mankind too satisfied and too comfortable so that it falls into existential torpor... But at least DinoCo™ has a What If It's Too Awesome working group to study the issue while there's still time before our inevitable corporate win of All The Things.
Why would the oil executive benefit from saying that if it's not true? Wouldn't it be better for his stock price to say that disruption will be limited, and the DinoCo takeover will usher in a golden age like Amazon has for shopping? If anything, that's my criticism of the guy; as OpenAI revenue has risen, he's become much more vocal about the benefits of AI and much more confident that the risks and costs are solvable.
If enough people believe it is true and act on this belief, it will become true (to a larger degree, at least). There is a massive shift of the direction of money happening right now, away from workers into "AI" (LLM based systems). The more of that shift can be produced now, the stronger the AI companies will be in the future. Because they need massive capital investments in compute, engineering investments in efficiency, and to reach economies of scale, to be able to really compete with human-based workforce.
Yeah it's partly a "this is the inevitable winning team" - join before it is too late. The earlier the better! There are some parallels to how MLM and ponzi schemes are sold.
One of the ways it can work is that people may reject the most extreme case (say end of humans beings in control), but accept some milder version (most jobs will be done by AI, or most jobs will be AI assisted). The fear of an extreme can cause people to rationalize the "milder" outcome - independently of whether there are good arguments for that outcome, or even whether the outcome is desirable, or better than status quo.
The investor class are not dependent on wages, so their livelihoods are not at stake. Same with big corporate partners, they are hoping to improve competitiveness by having fewer employees and CEO take a bonus for that.
Regular users in fear of their jobs may act on that, in hope that they can reskill and transition by being AI savvy.
I do not agree with the argument they make, but I understand what they are are playing at, and that unfortunately it can be effective.
Another aspect is for distraction. OpenAI for example have had periods where they talked a lot on existential risk (humanity is doomed due to AI overloads, yadda yadda). This can serve as a very useful distraction to avoid talk about more plausible risks in the foreseeable future - such as massive concentrations of wealth, increased inequality, large amounts of unemployment, large scale personalized psychological manipulation, etc.
I'm hoping that's intended as: "That group exists, but for clarity I want to say the lesswrong crowd aren't part of it", as opposed to my initial reading of: "Your 'generality' is a false covert accusation, you cad."
I am not saying that you shouldn’t build trust with your kids (it’s important and only fair to them … they rely on and usually adore you, you should in turn be kind and reliable to them and love them back).
But: the null hypothesis for anything which correlates childhood behavior, childhood environment and adult behavior should be that everything is 100% genetic. From my glance at the studies, the marshmallow experiment was instead always done with the null hypothesis that kids and their parents are only connected by living in a common household (aka “shared environment” in the sense that it’s shared between siblings).
I would still imagine that some effect of the household on the “delayed gratification” would persist, but it would probably be weaker and I am not sure it would predict much about outcomes as an adult.
I don’t know if I understand you correctly but I’d argue genetics don’t play that big of a role in preparing your kids for their life as an adult. In my experience as a parent I am frightened daily by how influential I am in my role as a father. They pick up thousands of small things by copying the behavior and messaging of their parents. Even now they’re teenagers.
Also interesting: Kreisky totally didn’t resign after the vote ended against Zwentendorf…so the whole thing was for nothing in the end.
The operator of the plant assumed that the politicians would get to their senses at some point and kept it in operational shape for some years even though it wasn’t producing any power. Then they went bankrupt because pretend-running a nuclear plant is expensive.
Can‘t you do it the old-fashioned way and call the phone? If it’s on silent, it might make it harder, but it still makes a buzzing sound since it vibrates.
Basic health insurance in Switzerland is “private” but very regulated:
All companies offer completely exchangeable plans and are only allowed to take age, municipality and desired copay into account when calculating your premium. Every resident of Switzerland is also obligated to have this basic health insurance (if you don’t, the government just picks a random insurance for you and signs you up retroactively).
I would say it’s a great system…but Swiss health care costs are also among the highest in the world (and rising steeply), so it’s not a silver bullet.
To be fair, this particular system is probably not to blame for the high costs, but it also didn’t prevent them (though it leads to a bit of innovation around e.g. telemedicine, which is great).
> but Swiss health care costs are also among the highest in the world (and rising steeply),
But relative to GDP Swiss healthcare spending is lower than in Germany or France. Adjusted by PPP they aren’t even that much higher in absolute terms than in most other richer European countries. Of course there are some outliers like Denmark but if we consider income levels and outcomes healthcare in Switzerland seems relatively “cheap”.
> But relative to GDP Swiss healthcare spending is lower than in Germany or France.
But, sure, healthcare is a mix of labor and materials like most things, and the labor cost should scale loosely with local GDP per capita, but to the extent tradeable the materials cost shouldn't and should follow the law of one price, so Switzerland, with almost twice Germany's per capita GDP (and more than twice France’s) should have lower healthcare costs as a share of GDP, all other things being equal, because for the same mix of goods and services, the per-GDP materials costs is naturally lower.
They'd have to be doing something really wrong [0] for that not to be the case.
The high costs can be easily traced to the insurers lobby. See their late huge profits while at the same time raising the prices because muh costs... all passing basically unchallenged even at the recent elections - not even by the left parties. While it's better than in many other places in the world, still we should complain, if only for awareness.
Health insurer profit margins are 2% to 6% (objectively not huge). Their medical loss ratios are 85% to 90% (the proportion of their revenue that gets paid to healthcare providers).
Let’s suppose they are eliminated completely. You save 15% at most from not paying insurers, and let’s say doctors’ offices spend 10% on all the paperwork dealing with insurance.
However, government employees have to do some of the same jobs as the insurance company employees, such as identifying overcharges/fraudulent charges, etc. Add 10% back for that work (5% on government side, 5% on provider side since it should be less paperwork since it’s only 1 entity they are dealing with).
So all in, that is 15% savings, in an ideal case. With 90% medical loss ratios, it is 10% savings (more likely).
If a lack of capital investment (or skilled companies) is the problem, that’s a great solution.
But that’s not the reason for expensive rents in big cities.
It’s because many (rich) people want to live there … and due to physical and regulatory limits you can’t build more housing, even for piles of money it would be worth.
I don’t totally get this point. The main problem in big cities is the quantity of housing as well as the distribution of it.
For a train system, a non-state actor will have a hard time getting one of the ground (huge upfront costs, will often make a loss, cooperation of politics super important) and if they do … they will have a monopoly (which also sucks). So having transit publicly owned in some way makes a lot of sense.
But for housing, none of that is true. It’s being built (the amount built mostly depends on government approval, there is no shortage of capital investment), there is no monopoly… what is the problem that more public housing would solve?
The (admittedly outrageous) rent prices in Zürich come from a mismatch of demand and supply. And since Zürich has a lot of rich inhabitants, enough of them are willing to bid up the market rent prices to the current level.
Having a non-market solution for this might lead to cheaper rents, but introduces a lot of other losses and crucially also strangles the supply even more (look at what happened in Berlin when they introduced their moronic rent control law).
Just because the population of SF is rich doesn't mean SF is rich.
Cities have very weak abilities to raise revenue, and are relentlessly politically attacked whenever they try to raise more revenue via higher property taxes and other things.
Our cities are actually starved of revenue and especially post pandemic at risk of bankruptcy without bailouts from higher governments.
It is true that heating should be electrified … but it’s important to note that this makes the Dunkelflaute problem more serious, not less.
Because now your inflexible base-load has increased. And while spreading generation over a wider area helps, it rapidly reaches limits (unless your power grid extends close to the equator).
It makes it less serious in the north where shortage of electricity would mean freezing indoor temperatures. Heat pumps have reduced the amount of electricity needed (compared to direct electric heating) for heating a house and thus the amount of imports/storage needed. Also, if the heat pumps are a part of a district heating system, a heat storage solution can be included in the system.
In a country where heating isn't yet electrified, it's a way to reduce fossil fuel use and carbon emissions (the ultimate goal) without necessarily reducing the fossil electricity production. So even if it doesn't solve Dunkelflaute alone, it's a part of solving the climate and energy crises.
Germany is complicated, because they mostly use gas for heating, not electricity. So switching to heatpumps will require more generation. And for now this means new natural gas plants.
This is not _too_ bad in itself, using gas for generation and then powering heat pumps is more efficient than burning gas for heating. But the capital requirements for new power plants will cement Germany's dependence on fossil fuels for at least another 2 decades.
They don’t profit from it (well at least the current doom crowd), they have been saying that this is super-risky since “forever” (15 years), they strongly argue against e.g. OpenAI going private … I really don’t understand where this whole strand of thinking of hidden ulteriour motives for AI doomers comes from, AFAIK there was never a single clear case where this happened (and the arc of people invested in AI is they they become less of a doomer the more financially entangled they become with AI, see Elon or Altman).