lumenwrites

So your suggestion is that we ignore the existential risk until after it occurs?

> literally no A->B->C line drawn to it

Spend a couple of hours to educate yourself about the issue, and make a convincing counterargument please:

https://time.com/6266923/ai-eliezer-yudkowsky-open-letter-no...

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/why-i-am-not-as-much-o...

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/uMQ3cqWDPHhjtiesc/agi-ruin-a...

https://www.youtube.com/@RobertMilesAI/videos

Yudkowsky and many others have been working on this problem for decades, way before there was any financial incentive to speak of.

The incentive here is that they want to live, and they want their loved ones to live.

Honestly if feels like we're living in the "Don't Look Up" movie.

The asteroid hasn't hit the Earth yet, so what are you worried about?

The reason people talk about x-risk from AI before the world-ending AI is developed, is because after the world-ending AI is developed we won't be around to talk about it.

> And why focus on extinction in particular?

> runaway AI is a way off yet, and that it will take a significant scientific advance to get there—one that we cannot anticipate

So an AI that may cause our extinction may be a result of a scientific advance "we cannot anticipate"? And you're having trouble understanding why people are concerned?

All the problems you've listed (COVID, global warming, war in the Ukraine) are considered problems because they cause SOME people to die, or may cause SOME people to die in the future. Is it really that difficult to understand why the complete extinction of ALL humans and ALL life would be a more pressing concern?

Ugh, another one of those not-very-insightful (or very well-informed) think pieces trying to sound interesting by being "contrarian" (even though they're repeating the same idea you can find under many HN or reddit threads).

If you think it's dangerous when bad people control an AI, how dangerous do you think it will be when an AI that has no concept of good or bad controls itself? An AI whose values are more alien than that of any sociopath, completely orthogonal to human values?

If you don't think that is going to happen, then make a convincing argument for your case, the way AI "doomers" provide well thought-out arguments for their case:

https://time.com/6266923/ai-eliezer-yudkowsky-open-letter-no...

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/why-i-am-not-as-much-o...

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/uMQ3cqWDPHhjtiesc/agi-ruin-a...

https://www.youtube.com/@RobertMilesAI/videos

Ads pay for all the content we're enjoying. Something has to.

Because humans aren't powerful enough to completely exterminate each other (even a nuclear war wouldn't kill literally everyone in the world), but an unaligned AI, in the worst case scenario, could just kill everybody (to eliminate humans as a threat, or to use the atoms we're made out of for something else, or just as a side effect of doing whatever it actually wants to do). It could be powerful enough to do that, and have no reason not to.

Corporations are WAY more aligned than an AI could be, and people still complain about them. A corporation might pollute the water, kill the dolphins, or give you cancer, but at least it fundamentally doesn't want all humans to be dead.

An AI can (and is likely to) have goals that are fundamentally incompatible with the existence of humanity.

And, an AI can be way more intelligent and powerful than corporations, so corporations are limited in what they can accomplish when pursuing their interests, but AI might not be.

All of the above (if necessary):

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/oM9pEezyCb4dCsuKq/pausing-ai...

Basically, the idea is that countries sign the agreement to stop the large training runs, and, if necessary, be willing to use conventional strikes on AI-training datacenters in the countries that refuse. Hopefully it doesn't come to that, hopefully it just becomes the fact of international politics that you can't build large AI-training datacenters anymore. If some country decides to start a war over this - the argument is that wars at least have some survivors, and an unaligned AI won't have any.

Can someone who understands these things compare the tech BlueSky is using to Nostr?

Can a technology like this at some point be used for brain uploads? Or like a cheaper and better version of cryonics - to "backup" the brain until it can be resurrected in some way?

Videos - all of youtube, all the movies, everything that's ever been captured on film. Transcribe the audio, automatically describe the images and try to predict the next one.

Wow! Thank you so much for sharing this, this is such a fantastic idea! It will be so much more convenient to use midjourney from now on!

Then they end up racing to build an AGI we're not prepared for, and we all die.

The faint hope is that people are not crazy or suicidal enough to build a world-ending technology, that humanity will manage to see ourselves as being in the same boat, where we all live or all die as one. And just-not-do the thing that causes our extinction.

It's not a very realistic proposition, because even smart people often fail to understand these arguments (or just disagree with them), let alone the politicians (who are incentivized to ignore them), or the rest of the people. There's a lot at stake for the "winner" of the AGI race, who could build an AGI and align it successfully (which they can't do). And many countries are ruled by people who are clearly willing to do crazy and suicidal things for power.

That's why the author of this post doesn't put a lot of hope into the idea of his daughter growing up.

I think the idea is that it doesn't matter who builds the AGI first if we all end up dying anyway.

And the first step to prevent that from happening is for us to stop, and then hope that the other powerful countries will see that and stop as well. And everyone who's left can be forced to stop by the powerful countries who agreed to the treaty.

This is an inaccurate and ignorant comment that does not engage with the arguments people on LessWrong are making. If you have something smart to say about why these people are wrong in their beliefs, please do. Name calling a group of people a "cult" or "apocalyptic religion" is not an argument that contributes anything interesting to the conversation.

If anyone is actually curious about what these people are saying, here's a list of their arguments for why AI is extremely dangerous and extremely likely to kill us all: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/uMQ3cqWDPHhjtiesc/agi-ruin-a...

If anyone has a coherent counter-argument to any of that, I'd really love to hear it.

I have a bunch of those.

https://writingstreak.io - a tool for developing a daily writing habit.

https://screenplays.io - a library of free screenplays.

https://startupideas.io - a newsletter where I research and analyze startup ideas, opportunities, and trends.

https://rpgadventures.io - a discord community where we a group of Game Masters brainstorm, create, and publish adventures for roleplaying games together.

https://improvgames.io - a discord community where I run free weekly improv workshops.

Yeah, this is helpful, thanks for sharing!

> I know this because I'm subscribed to lots of newsletters in multiple fields. They contain one gem after the other. There's a wealth of top notch content that does contain said wisdom. As in, read just this article and skip the 100 other ones. Because it is so damn good.

Can you recommend your favorite ones?

I'm particularly interested in startups/tech/programming/AI topics, but if you know some great examples from other fields, please share them as well!

I'm working on a similar project:

https://writingstreak.io

In the developed countries, average life expectancy is about 70-80 years. So you've got 30-40 years left, a lot can be done in that time. You're healthy, have the money, and an opportunity to live in the US - sounds like a dream to me.

The world is getting increasingly more interesting, with all the crazy new tech, AI on the horizon, and just simple enjoyable things (new books, awesome movies and TV shows, cool new software and games to try out). Plenty of things to look forward to, very interesting to see how it'll all turn out.

I was mildly (not very seriously) suicidal in my early 20s, I'm really glad that I didn't go through with that. Life changes in unpredictable ways, sometimes for the worse, sometimes for the better. I think it's worth seeing it through for as long as you can.

There are more opportunities than ever to learn new skills and build new businesses. All of that feels overwhelming and hard at times, but it's a fun journey to step on, and to see where it goes.

It's a meaningless waste of time to compare real life to hypothetical alternatives you can build up in your imagination, comparing yourself to other people is a recipe for unhappiness.

I recommend aiming to compete with the yesterday's version of yourself, try to take steps forward and not have zero days, when you inevitably fail (as we all do) - pick yourself up as quickly as you can and keep going.

Try to clarify what you specifically want to accomplish, and what stands in your way. From there it's problem solving, like debugging code, trying to figure out how to take the next step, how to do the next right thing (without getting too freaked out and overwhelmed by all the work that's left to get done).

I have no idea if any of this is useful, or if it sounds like empty platitudes, but hopefully it helps.

Also, very important - make sure to do all you can to take care of your physical health. Diet, exercise, sleep. It sounds boring, but it's very easy to confuse messed up brain chemistry with bitterness/anger/depression caused by other things. Going for a run on a sunny day in a park won't fix all your problems, but I notice that every time I do this consistently, life feels a lot brighter, and challenges in front of me a lot more solvable. Some of it is because exercise is rewarding and feels like taking a step forward, some of it simply comes from better health and brain chemistry.

Regarding kids/family/wife - guys don't get a lot of actionable help, advice, or support in these matters these days. I'm going to risk recommending something most people will find inappropriate - "Blueprint Decoded" by RSD (you can find it on torrents). It is an old pickup course that was absolutely life-changing for me (and was one of the few things that really helped me with the whole not-killing-myself thing). I know how society looks at these things nowadays, but it would be wrong not to recommend something that was so incredibly helpful to me, something that had so much positive influence in my life. It is a place where you can look if you notice that the mainstream ideas and advice on dating aren't working too well.

If not that - then take a class, or find a hobby that involves interacting with people (improv and roleplaying games are my favorite, but there are plenty of other options). Look at meetups in your area (meetup.com). That's a great way to expand your social circle and meet people.

Shouldn't people be free to make up their own minds and make their own choices?

If someone likes that work environment - great, let them work very hard on interesting and meaningful projects, these are the kind of people Elon Musk seems to want to leave at twitter. People who don't like this kind of work environment are free to leave for companies more focused on work-life balance.

Personally, I'm really excited about this. For two reasons:

1. I love using Discord and building communities there. But it does take a lot of work. A way to monetize some of this stuff is very welcome. Even if I won't end up doing this for my own projects, I like that there's an incentive for people to put a lot of effort into building high quality communities (which I'd be happy to pay to participate in).

2. If this works well, Discord will finally have a good monetization model. Many social networks start out awesome and useful, but then go downhill when it's time to start making money and extracting value from users (think Medium, Quora, etc). Discord is one of the most useful and fun tools I use day to day (both for my work and for my hobbies), and it was kind of concerning that I didn't see a way for them to make money. If they have a way to make profit without turning into an ad-riddled user-hostile dark-pattern-filled mess, it'll be great for everyone.

Can you somehow fine-tune GPT3 on a dataset? I just assumed the OP generated them using a prompt like "top hacker news threads" or somehing like that.

It'd be so fun if you could generate comments for each of the threads as well.

I'd love to read it when it's published!

She seems like a really nice and smart lady, and this is a topic I'm really curious about and want to get better at, but her speech/presentation itself didn't work for me at all. Completely failed to grab my attention, I started speeding up the video, and then skimming, and finally ran out of patience and closed it without having learned anything new.

Getting to the point quickly, skipping to the most valuable and insightful points, and talking in such a way that grabs people's attention and gets them excited to hear what you have to say are essential public speaking skills, but very hard to learn.

The most captivating public speakers can speak with cadence and energy that makes every sentence entertaining, makes it impossible to stop listening (for great examples, see Max Landis' Superman pitches on youtube, or Dan Harmon's Harmontown podcast, or any good stand up comedian).

I really wish I could learn to do THAT.

That's amazing, thank you for sharing!

If not a secret, how are you marketing it?

Great project!

I have a question - how can you afford to run this? I looked at the server costs on google compute and runpod.io, and the ones with GPUs powerful enough to run SD are pretty expensive. I'm guessing you don't have a lot of paying users at the beginning, so I don't think you have enough revenue to cover the costs (at least when you're just getting started).

Do you just spend a lot of money to fund this, and hope that once you have enough users it will pay for itself? Or did you find some affordable way to run a server? If yes, and if it's not a secret - where are you renting the server, what are its specs, and how much does it cost?

Great research direction you guys!

If I may propose some other project ideas for you:

- What if we could teach gorillas to wield machetes?

- What if we could figure out how to craft a nuclear weapon out of common office supplies?

- What if we could make AIDS airborne and contageous?