mitthrowaway2

> Maudslay also devised an ingenious method that used two imperfect screws to guide the tool cutting a third. Equal gears turned both guide screws at the same speed. A bar joined their two nuts, with the tool fixed at its midpoint, so the tool's position was the average of the two nut positions. Where one guide ran ahead and the other lagged, their errors partly cancelled. Each guide contributed only half its error to the new screw.

Actually, this invention is Leonardo Da Vinci's! Here's what his screw-copying machine looked like.

https://cdn.britannica.com/39/60539-050-BCB3019D/machine-Leo...

https://media.sciencephoto.com/image/c0661830/800wm/C0661830...

The screws can also be taken out and flipped end-over-end, averaging out the errors even further.

What predictions has LeCun made that were vindicated by events?

What? That doesn't make any sense. A political party can't threaten to take away anything when you stop voting for them. Instead, you simply get the policies of the party you elected in their place. If UBI is popular then there's nothing stopping the opposition from offering it, or even promising to double it. But even if they said "elect us and we'll take away your UBI", then that's just not getting a hamburger because you ordered the pasta.

And what aspect of that arrangement looks like servitude? I don't usually associate servitude with the idea of getting paid a stipend regardless of whether I choose to work. Do you know who has historically enjoyed such a stipend? The Lords and Ladies who had all the servants!

Also, there are plenty of implementations of a grocery subsidy that don't have the state giving money directly to big agro-business. For example where I am, groceries are exempt from sales taxes; this is equivalent to a flat tax plus a specific grocery subsidy applied at point of sale to the consumer. This benefits any food producer, large or small.

Why not subsidize the groceries instead, then? And let the market find efficiencies with reduced transportation distances. Or better yet, just subsidize the poorest among us, or even everyone via UBI. Why settle on diesel trucks as the thing to subsidize above others?

Can it perform valuable services in exchange for currency? Hack poorly secured accounts to obtain control oftheir money? Start a GoFundMe pretending to be a noble cause? Make some well-timed investments? Run a viral YouTube channel? Elevator-pitch a gullible VC?

There's lots of ways to pay for electricity, and many of them don't even require a body.

Yeah, so the ones who have credibility are probably the ones who said "you know, it's really hard to anticipate timelines, but here's the general directions that I see things will go..."

Then we miscommunicated, so let me be clearer. I'm worried about ~20 years from now (plus or minus), when AI decides to kill us all because it's misaligned and is capable of doing so because it's super intelligent. And then we all suddenly die without any idea what happened. I don't want that to happen to me or my daughter and I would prefer all AI capabilities development stops until alignment research catches up and figures out how to robustly prevent AI from ever trying to achieve such outcomes. If that means pausing AI capabilities development forever, I'm fine with that. If that means Anthropic and Nvidia lose all their value in a stock market collapse, I'm fine with that. I just don't want us to all die, I want the world to keep existing for humans.

I believe that other harms from AI, like criminals abusing them, or unemployment, or copyright infringement, or deepfake disinformation, are valid real harms that it's important to be concerned about, and I support efforts to deal with those, and I agree that they're already happening today, but my main concern is AI killing everybody.

My read is this puts me in the same boat as the authors of If Anyone Builds It Everyone Dies, and yet, I don't get invitations to Berkeley sex parties. Am I doing something wrong? At any rate, please don't discredit my opinions about AI based on the sexual preferences of random people who happen to share those opinions about AI.

I apply more of a penalty to people who are confidently wrong, and who don't, In retrospect, notice that they were wrong and analyze why they got it wrong . LeCun is very confident and doesn't seem to have done much introspection.

The rest of us seem to be talking about the people like me who view the AI safety issue as "an unsafe AI will kill all humans". And the main article is about a guy who quit AI because it wasn't being careful enough, not because it wasn't moving fast enough to accelerate AI. So why would anyone be bringing up the "we must accelerate faster" people as the safety people in such a context, while trying to discredit them as a sex cult? I struggle to understand.

Yes, I am describing a tragic outcome that I hope we can be wise enough to steer away from. Also, as a human, I can't help but keep our interests close at heart.

When I think to scenarios that no human would survive, I think of the end-Permian mass extinction event, which wiped out most complex plant and animal life in both land and sea.

One speculated mechanism for this was a mass release of hydrogen sulfide gas from the oceans, which is acutely toxic. Not only does this kill most air-breathing life, it also strips the ozone layer and irradiates the surface. The planet is then left to cook in this manner for some centuries.

Engineering an event like this would require immense industrial capacity, as well as a deliberate objective of wiping out humanity. But I don't think it's beyond our ability, if we were both clever and stupid enough to try it. There are likely chemical compounds that would do the job more efficiently than hydrogen sulfide.

Would you like me to design the pathogen for you?

I see. No, my safety worry is that my 3-year-old daughter won't see her 23rd birthday because the AI that gets put in charge of running big conglomerates decides that killing off the human race with a coordinated release of a million tonnes of nerve gas is a sensible way to boost share prices the following quarter.

I'd be happy if we all create the AI more slowly.

That said, are you sure you're talking about the same people the GGP was talking about? Because the whole thread reads as a non-sequitur then.

For what it's worth, I don't live in Berkeley (not even California) and my sex life is very vanilla and monogamous. I'm also quite concerned about AI safety, so I guess there goes your argument.

I know some humans smarter than me, but even the smartest of them still want there to be abundant air to breathe and food to eat.

Black Mirror is helping us prevent all sorts of dystopian outcomes. Every time they depict another way technology could result in bad things happening, we can rule it out as fiction!

I don't know where you are, but when I hire mechanical engineers, I hire them from universities with accredited engineering programs. It's actually a legal requirement for the job in my jurisdiction. And if those engineers decide they want to become daycare teachers or knee surgeons, they do have to go back to university and re-train, even though they already learned how to think the first time.

Napster was a fantastic and disruptive product, the likes of which arguably has no equal to this day. But eventually the hammer came down from the courts and it was replaced by streaming services like Netflix, which pay to license materials from their creators.

The original definitely could refuel midair.

I don't think most prototypes are serious software.

Actually reading it, it seems like they say both the geoengineering and pandemic pathways could cause human extinction, but that the AI would have to be doing it to kill us on purpose, not by accident.

That doesn't seem too comforting to me? I'm not sure what this article's author was expecting us to take away from it.

I'm not certain. In an aging society, the thing they'd need are young laborers. People with 30 years of savings are unlikely to be either young, nor laborers.

Maybe those wealthy immigrants are very talented people who are very good at, say, managing an insurance company or researching pharmaceuticals, but Japan has a glut of 55-year-olds who can do that stuff very well. They're running short of young people who can be nurses, junior machinists, and construction workers.

In a macroeconomic sense, wealthy people might be able to pay for the services they need from their own pockets, but functionally it's not that different than being unemployed (unless they choose to work). They would be almost purely adding demand to the economy. The wealth they are bringing represents supply that they added into the economy in the past and abroad, and now they have a wallet full of paper with which they can buy services for the next 30 years in Japan without having to do any further productive work.

Declaring Dominos a supply chain risk means that Boeing cannot order a Dominos pizza for their board meeting in Arlington, because Boeing sells F-35s to the Pentagon, and Dominos wouldn't agree to deliver pizzas to a war zone.

Declaring Anthropic a supply chain risk means that Boeing can't use Claude to draft a poster informing people about the board meeting.

Maybe the military should just seize the technology and nationalize the company then? Because clearly, paying a private party voluntarily entering into a contract on mutually-agreed upon terms is now a polite fiction that can be done away with.

It's funny, I buy some software and the license says "for student and non-commercial use only", which lets me get it for $50 instead of the $5000 that an enterprise would pay. But I can just ignore that clause or declare them a supply-chain risk if they try to hold me to it, because now that they've taken my $50, who are they to dictate how I use it? I can do whatever I want, not just what the vendor thinks I should, right? A contact is just paper, right?

They're offering a service, with contractual limitations that the Pentagon agreed to.

It doesn't seem any different to me than Dominos pizza offering to deliver pizzas to the Pentagon but not to the strait of Hormuz. If that somehow makes the military subordinate to Dominos Pizza, just because Dominos is able to dictate the terms of their own delivery service, then sure, ban anyone in the military supply chain from being able to order pizzas. It would make the same amount of sense.

The previous power plant manager had, of course, already signed a contract agreeing to those terms; the power plant is subsequently under new management and upset about being bound by this contract, so they designate that none of their suppliers of parts and fuel are allowed to have any commercial dealings with the pen manufacturer or use these pens for any purpose, even writing.

The universe cares about dimensional analysis because it is invariant under changes of units-of-measure, which are human constructs.

What's an example of a completely novel problem?

... Huh?

No, I'm saying -- and I can't believe I have to spell this out -- that pedestrians should be rolling around inside giant steel spiked balls like sea urchins.