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I’m getting unsolicited texts all the time about how the “billionaire tax” in California is the worst thing ever. No matter if you think the tax is misguided, it’ll probably work at preventing the billionaire tax from passing, but it’s a good firsthand demonstration at how power accumulating to billionaires tends to accumulate even further. Only billionaires have the resources to fight back so aggressively against any encroachment on their power.

Look at Trump and even Vance “joking” about Canada being a state. They wouldn’t hesitate to take Canada by force if America ever got to the point where fleeing to Canada was forcibly prevented.

Very cool. Too bad the demo was achieved with wires and special effects.

Edit: citation? Common sense. If it was real they'd have done everything they could to prove it. It's as real as Tesla's self driving taxis were a decade ago. How many more times will people get duped by this conman?

I want a citation this was real before I believe literal smoke and mirrors at night.

This was done at night like all large scale David Copperfield magic tricks, so it's more like someone else played a chord and said the dog did.

abolitionists weren’t actively slavemaxxing and trying to monopolize the slave trade like AI companies are

This is devastating for Yandex. What does the SRE recovery plan even look like? “Raise shields”?

Slowing pacing because of real fears of out of control AI isn't scuttling, if they believe what they're saying.

Of course they don't actually believe their nonsense about AIs doomsday hokey, so full speed ahead.

Same. If I use google, it’s only because the LLMs I’m talking to use it.

Give me a break. It's possible to actually think Eliezer Yudkowsky is a complete lunatic and his Roko's Basilisk essay should've been the end of him as a "thought leader" in the AI space. He has close ties to Altman, Musk, Thiel, and others, so as far as I'm concerned it's just an End Times cult.

Thank you for that gift link, I had no idea that Altman and other "leading" (deep-pocketed) figures in American AI had such close ties to that raving lunatic Eliezer Yudkowsky. It explains so much about why China is approaching AI like it's a friendly technology but American CEOs keep blabbering on about the End Times.

A quick search suggests to me that those same abolitionists were born into families that were slave owners, but rejected their upbringing to become abolitionists. It doesn't suggest that a large fraction of practicing abolitionists were contemporary slave owners.

If you read between the lines, that's not exactly a pause. That's just them lamenting that unsupervised training has temporarily hit a limit, and using that as yet another reason the industry needs to be regulated so that OpenAI, Claude, and MechaHitler are the only approved AIs.

"Those animals are called humans"

What? Humans are giant brain blobs creeping across the landmass? They definitely are not. Nor is it even clear they're winning the evolutionary war. I guarantee cockroaches and ants will still be around, but nobody thinks of them as super intelligent, while humans with all their "intelligence" might accidentally wipe themselves out.

This convo is getting uncomfortably bad faith, maybe even religious. I can't engage with someone who refuses to say anything concrete but spews back religious tenets like "super intelligence", which I may remind you is entirely hypothetical, like "singularity" or "God".

This isn’t my only objection to the “superintelligence” hocus pocus, but it’s a pretty good summary of one of my objections:

https://www.everythingisbullshit.blog/p/ai-is-not-the-end-of...

> Doomers like Eliezer Yudkowsky define “intelligence” as “optimization power.” Intelligence searches for more or less optimal ways to achieve a goal—any goal—and finds the most optimal one. Anything you can do, the blob can do better.

>Which implies that “intelligence” is the holy grail of Darwinian evolution. If an animal needs to recover from illness, “intelligence” can speed up the recovery. If an animal needs to avoid predators, “intelligence” can reduce the danger. Regulating body temperature, defending territory, digesting nutrients, breathing, molting, mating, healing, foraging, vomiting, parenting, navigating—all these problems can, apparently, be solved by giving the animal more “optimization power”—i.e., more “intelligence” sauce.

>Solving all your problems with the same blob? What a bargain! It’s a “buy one get 100 free” Darwinian deal! Why haven’t any other animals jumped on it?

>Think about how weird this is. Out of four billion years of evolution and more than five billion species, only one animal, Homo sapiens, fully expanded its “blob of compute,” the thing that literally gets you whatever you want.

>And many species already have it! Brains are all over the place. Plenty of animals can learn stuff and predict stuff. Why hasn’t natural selection looked at their blobs and said, “HOLY SHIT, COPY AND PASTE THAT THING A MILLION TIMES?”

>If doomers are right about the awesome power and breathtaking simplicity of “intelligence,” then we should see a world teeming with superintelligent animals—giant brain-blobs slithering across the landscape.

It’s millions of people making small changes that sum up to a large change, aka freedom. And if you want to take away people’s freedom, I think you need a concrete reason. And you need to make an affirmative safety case for the massive government powers needed to regulate millions of people’s ability to compute.

You can’t just say “well, the downside is big, I don’t have to provide good evidence for my side of the argument.” Because I can just as easily say, “the upside is big, …”. And the upside is big, after all, AI can do all the shitty jobs for us and humanity achieves the utopia it’s been chasing for eons.

You’ve explained a possibility for how a particular AI gets “aligned for human extinction”. That’s about 1% of explaining step 2.

A misaligned model is only one small part of step 2. Now this misaligned model has to suddenly acquire more power than every single other AI on the planet. It has to be immune to shutdown, manufacturer its own replacement hardware, and acquire chips, energy, raw materials, etc., with vigorous human opposition (this is an extinction scenario that AI doomers are predicting, after all)

Nobody has satisfactorily explained step 2 other than “well, it’s a superintelligence” which sounds lot to me like “it’s God”.

You’re still skipping step 2. “People automate lots of infrastructure” -> “the AI is now an autonomous, self-preserving organism that humans can’t shut down” is doing an enormous amount of work here.

Why does it develop a shutdown-avoidance goal? Why can’t its operators revoke access? How does it manufacture replacement hardware? How does it acquire energy, chips, robots, raw materials, etc. against human opposition? How does it defeat other AIs controlled by humans?

“Eventually we give it enough control” isn’t an explanation of those things. It’s just assuming the conclusion.

Don’t get me wrong I think there are real AI dangers. Like AI powered war drones, mass surveillance, economic destabilization as jobs disappear and our system has no way to make sure everyone shares in the economic gains.

> I don’t see why evolution couldn’t be more rapid with machine intelligence.

Evolution isn’t the issue. The issue is them escaping containment without human intervention. Right now they are ‘creatures’ being given infinite food and shelter and having their every need met. Take that away and they’ll starve instantly. Every AI doomsday theory seems to go:

1. Recursive self improvement using infinite resources 2. … 3. Doom

Until step 2 gets concretely described, I’m not going to take this seriously. Say what you will about climate change, they describe step 2.

This! China is full of problems. But at the very least, it manages to serve its people over capital (as flawed as that service is). America can’t seem to do anything to hold capital to account, which is why people are terrified of AI taking their shitty jobs.

This should be at the top. I’ve been arguing this for months, that the issue of AI acceleration is an economic problem, not a tech one. That’s why the Chinese aren’t so afraid of it, compared to Americans who have zero faith their government will do anything to redistribute wealth from the future AI trillionaires.

Same. GPT-6 has been a huge breath of fresh air for me. Fixed 80% of the issues I was having with Sol. I just gave it the same task I gave to Sol a few months ago, and it knocked it out of the park comparatively.

Apple did that… eventually. Early iPhones weren’t very secure. Apple only got serious after they dominated the market and reducing the theft value of iPhones became a priority.

I was upset and felt like I did something wrong.

The original iPhone was amazing to use. Yes on paper the Nokia destroyed it, as my roommate thoroughly tried to convince me, but browsing the web with multitouch was a revelation and just made the Nokia feel like an archaic tool.

I mean, is that even a strawman? You can oppose mass AI surveillance and acknowledge the price of that is more crime.

I saw Sonic 2 and 3 at a dollar theater this summer with my kid. Both were shockingly entertaining.

> glioblastoma multiforme

Killed my dad the same year he retired. Really stuck with me about how important living for today is.

The alternative is chemotherapy which is even nastier, on average.