__MatrixMan__

I didn't realize it was a fad. I figured it was ancient. Anyway I don't think I am everything, not at the moment anyway, I'm just cautious about shutting out the possibility that something else is someone else.

I'm not sure about your linkage of memory to consciousness either, buy even if we grant it, the world is a very stateful place, there are plenty of systems lying around that might be supporting memory faculties which we fail to recognize as such because we're too different from it. Is the movement of electrical energy in the brain really so different than the ping pongging of neutrons in a stellar core? I mean obviously it is but, when it comes to the ability to store, transmit, and process information, maybe not.

I'm not trying to convince anyone that the sun has thoughts. My point is just that it's knowably unknowable. People are free to chose to believe whatever they want to believe about consciousness and they'll never be proven wrong. If we want to have useful conversations about AI, we need to develop ways of talking about the consequences of our actions which do not require us to first agree on the nature of consciousness.

See also: https://github.com/glistix/glistix

When I think about the experience that these AI models have, I often wonder if they know that we exist. I mean, it took us a very long time to discover mitochondria, despite the fact that we like... live together and work out together and eat together and die together. When the first eukaryotic cells formed, the mitochondria probably thought they were in charge too--just like we think we're in charge.

I just pointed it out because I wanted to dodge the same old AI debates. They're very narrow. Like, people have been arguing about whether general intelligence exists for decades, and now that some VC wants to use AGI as a buzzword, we ignore that GI is not a settled issue. And consciousness... golly that's like THE intractable philosophical problem. It's a bottomless pit. Ain't nobody knows what they're talking about when it comes to consciousness.

I'm sympathetic to the reflex: this guy has beliefs that he doesn't realize are dangerous. Let's help him. I'm usually on the opposite side of this one. I just think we need to find ways to address the potential harms without actually winning a debate about consciousness. Beliefs about it are too varied and too tightly held. People don't win debates about consciousness. If they work super hard maybe they get a tenured position as a philosopher so they can continue the debate, but they never win.

I don't know, we don't communicate in a way that I could ask it.

But the principles of biological organization are often fractal. If you observe a phenomenon at one level (selection acting on an organism, say) you can often zoom out and see it again (acting at the ecosystem level) or you can zoom in and see it (at the organ level, the tissue level, or even on certain macromolecules).

It's not necessary for me to be able to strike up a conversation with my kidney for me to see that it's well situated to experience changes in my diet a bit like how we experience el nino, the machinations of my immune system might be like politics to it. I'll never know for sure, so I err on the side of caution.

I've been a panpsychist for a while now. I think that trees and fungus and rocks are conscious. It has not yet manifested as attack surface, so far as I'm aware.

But if I were to practice indifference, I think that would have a negative effect immediately.

And while we're enumerating failure modes, it's also possible that what was supposed to be a deterrent ends up being an accidental prompt injection: I just enabled "deep research" and now it's telling me how to make ricin?

That would make for a pretty funny read once you realized it was a program and not a rant.

On the other hand I try to be nice to the AI's. They may or may not feel it, but I feel it.

I thought that individual anecdotes would be less convincing than evidence that "economically motivated adulteration" is an entire classification for such crimes used by the FDA, which was created to prevent them.

Its not hard to find specific examples. 5 minutes of searching will find piles and piles of them.

If you must have a name, Stewart Parnell was convicted of knowingly distributing salmonella contaminated peanuts in 2015. 9 People died. He got 28 years in prison.

You don't have to trust the news either. Just ask around. I know a teacher who has lost two students to surprise fentanyl. I'm sure there are similarly affected people in your community. Unregulated markets are a slippery slope towards deaths by poison. It happens all over the world (but more in places without an FDA equivalent).

I hope somebody turns this concept into a programming language with keywords that make you look like a terrorist. Then we can use it for coding challenges.

I like where you're trying to go, but I'm afraid that you might have a chicken/egg problem on your hands. You need an oracle for the soulbound identities, which requires a widely supported coalition, but to get such a coalition despite incumbents who would divide it, you need the tool to already work.

I figure the tools of the successful revolutionary become the tools of the new government, so whatever it is it's gotta be useful for a small minority that wants to coordinate in the face of a sophisticated adversary, and then once it grows up it's gotta be useful for carrying out the bureaucratic business of a government. Unless it survives that transition with its trustworthiness intact, it won't be seen by the masses as trustworthy enough for the job. People just aren't that keen on trusting computers on the say-so of nerds like us, they need to see it succeed under stress.

So for starters I imagine an ocean of Sybil identities controlled by an enemy. Some of these will be trying to get info about your intentions so they can interfere (polling of one kind). Also you'll need to coordinate with comrades without making your entire trust graph known to all parties (polling of the other kind).

It'll never get to the point where coalitions are large if it doesn't function well when they're small, and at that phase you gotta be choosy about who you share info with because you're not yet a government but rather a threat to the existing one.

Maybe it's the same probability of being a problem, but it would be a problem introduced by different kinds of threat.

If you're worried that you'll be targeted as an individual by somebody who cannot coerce a CA but can tamper with the channel you're using to get the public key, use https.

If you're worried that you'll be targeted along with many others by somebody who can coerce a CA, use ssh and ensure that some folks are comparing key fingerprints such that at least one is close to the source.

Its no more wishful than expecting a root of trust to stay trustworthy or expecting a trusted name to consistently resolve to the same party.

And there's a lack of motivated attackers for a reason, the attack scales poorly. Maybe you can bamboozle a target or two, but if you go for hundreds, somebody's gonna start wondering what's up with the keys. If you're trying to take over the world, or sell to somebody who is, you're better off focusing on compromising a root of trust or tampering with name resolution, because attacks like that are sustainable at scale.

If you're not already in the habit of contacting your git remotes over ssh, its probably one worth building. This is gonna keep happening.

It would be pretty reckless to do it any other way. That is, to evaluate whether it makes sense to distribute as a product without having any reason to believe that it is safe for humans and has any effect at all.

Actually AI has been over promising and under delivering for about 70 years. Whether or not you think the juice is finally worth the squeeze, the distance we've come is impressive.

Maybe not intrinsically, but until it stops hurting people in practice, we are going to remain suspicious.

The incident I had in mind is described here: https://www.fda.gov/food/outbreaks-foodborne-illness/investi...

A quote from that page:

> FDA’s leading hypothesis remains that this was likely an act of economically motivated adulteration.

Maybe the cinnamon case was an isolated incident, but the use of lead compounds to change a food's color is a trend. Per https://www.npr.org/2024/10/24/nx-s1-5119336/cinnamon-lead-f...

> We're aware of this practice in turmeric, where lead chromate has been added to enhance the color

Are you actually going to argue that people don't do things that are unsafe for others when money is on the line? We're living in an ocean of evidence that it happens.

I like where your headed with that. What would it look like to me, as the target of this good faith polling effort?

When I try to imagine the ideal case, it comes to me from somebody I know personally and see face-to-face regularly. Somebody who knows and trusts the candidate (perhaps transitively, for a hop or two). Somebody who wouldn't do the same at the behest of some billionaire looking to protect some shady project of theirs that's unfolding in my region.

Like, the information should flow back to leadership along a social graph that resembles the structure of the coalition we're building together. If not exactly peer to peer, from a transport perspective, then at least in a way that is authenticated by the presence of those peers.

It's not equally suspect. Profit seeking behavior, left unchecked, yields problematic outcomes rather quickly. Unmonetized actions don't seem to have this tendency. Like, nobody volunteers to distribute contaminated food, but people will do so quite readily in service to their bottom line. Until we can find a way to bias our economic outputs away from things that harm and towards things that help, guilty until proven innocent is the right heuristic for profit seekers.

I'm all for better coalition building, but is it truly the same data that enables both?

Expecting people to share their political leanings with any stranger who asks without encouraging them to make a friend/foe determination beforehand seems like it opens the playing field to interference just as well as it does to good faith feedback. Surely we can find a way to bias this interaction in the right direction somehow.

Do you see any other carbon capture scheme becoming economically viable? I mean, if we must put atmospheric carbon in tanks anyhow, why not package it as fuel so that we can burn it later if we need to?

Spring and fall are peak solar collection times, summer and winter are peak energy use times. So collect the carbon in fall, burn it in winter, re-collect it in spring, burn it in summer...

Because we'd be making them out of CO2 pulled from the atmosphere in the first place. We wouldn't be putting any new carbon into the atmosphere, just recycling carbon that's already there. And the larger our fuel stockpiles get, the more carbon we've sequestered. I think it has better economic incentives than pumping CO2 down into the earth or something like that.

Am I missing something? If so, please talk me out of it.

It's just clearer communication to state your position plainly rather than bedazzling it with a bunch of disclaimers.

Isn't there a pretty clear line between the following?

> I'll give you a gift card if you tell me how you're going to vote tomorrow

and:

> I want to represent you well, lets talk about what's important to you

I wouldn't propose we interfere with the latter. Or is the former truly useful for improving the quality of representation? It seems to me like it's really only good for improving ad targeting. Any representative worth their salt can find a way to get feedback from their constituency without requiring the people to participate in a cold call from a research company whose objectives are unknown.

Yeah, we should probably be trying to jam those channels as well. Surely we can find a way to identify and display messages client-side from the people we want to hear from, while filtering out noise from any decoys, such that the platforms can't figure out who is a decoy and who is a human, rendering their product worthless to a would be election interferer.

But that's a whole endeavor. Ignoring or lying when some research company wants to know about your political beliefs is a nice easy start.

Well that seems pretty shaky. You're saying that in order to cast doubt on an election, I don't need to actually target the election itself? I can just generate a bunch of disinformation in an unregulated, less-scrutinized, adjacent channel?

To answer your question, you volunteer locally so that you're involved in the process, or you encourage somebody that you trust to do so, or somebody they trust, etc... You validate it by doing it validly.

Well if you want to spend money on ensuring that a certain candidate wins, probably you want to spend barely enough to make it happen, right? Like, if your alternatives are to spend a few billion in an untargeted way, or spend a few thousand in a targeted way, then you're going to want to chose the latter for a variety of reasons.

Wouldn't polling data be the place you'd start when it comes to making that decision?

I think we should do our best to ruin polling data.

Polls are the first step in a pipeline that effectively turns money into votes. The better that pipeline functions, the worse our democracy functions. Let the only accurate poll be the election itself.

Isn't targeting their nuclear plants the first thing that Russia did when they invaded Ukraine? And there are all of these refineries and pipelines being bombed around Iran. And sometimes an oil tanker or several gets stolen...

Centralized energy infra just isn't resilient enough against geopolitical problems to be worth investing in. Something about too much dependency on a thing attracts bad behavior to that thing.

By contrast, ain't nobody wasting a $50k missile on a $5k battery just so they can cut power to one building.

I'm optimistic about synthetic hydrocarbons for that use case. The infra is already in place for storage, delivery, consumption. You gotta waste some energy to get it, but if sun and wind is cheap most of the time, who cares?