Shazeer is an aggressive Zionist, and while Altman is better at reading the room, he has previously aligned himself with Israel: https://www.timesofisrael.com/openais-sam-altman-says-israel...
128 karma · joined June 16, 2022
However, I’d still maintain that before that, China’s foreign policy was more focused on maintaining territorial sovereignty against the threat of Western imperialism vs. focused on expansion or foreign influence: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_foreign_relations_o...
Meanwhile, the entire territory of the U.S. is predicated on one of history’s largest genocides, and a consistently expansionary foreign policy on top of that.
Beyond that, how many people has China killed in foreign military conflicts in the past 40 years? How many foreign governments have they overthrown?
Instead of all this, they’ve used their resources not only to become the world’s economic superpower but also to lift 800 million people out of poverty, accounting for 75% of the world’s reduction during the past 4 decades. The U.S. has added 10 million during that same time period.
All they have to do is continue to pump out exponentially more solar panels and the petrodollar will fall, possibly taking our reserve currency status with it. The U.S. seems more likely to start a hot war in the name of “democracy” as it fails to gracefully metabolize the end of its geopolitical dominance, and Dario’s rhetoric pushes us further in that direction.
> The solution to this problem, he says, is artificial intelligence. The book offers a short guide to building a “target machine,” similar in description to Lavender, based on AI and machine-learning algorithms. Included in this guide are several examples of the “hundreds and thousands” of features that can increase an individual’s rating, such as being in a Whatsapp group with a known militant, changing cell phone every few months, and changing addresses frequently.
The forces of blind or cynical techno-optimism accelerating capitalism may feel insurmountable, but the future is not set in stone. Every day around the world, people in seemingly hopeless circumstances nevertheless devote their lives to fighting for what they believe in, and sometimes enough people do this over years or even decades that there’s a rupture in oppressive systems and humanity is forever changed for the better. We can only strive to live by our most deeply held values, within the circumstances we were placed, so that when we look back at the end of our lives we can take comfort in the fact that we did the best we could, and just maybe this will be enough to avert the inevitable.
This assessment of the timeline is quite telling. If supersonic flight posed an existential threat to humanity, we certainly should have been thinking about how to mitigate it in 1925.
He’s clearly aware of the risks of runaway, self-improving AI, and the idea that we can prevent this with regulation is laughable. The car is barreling towards the edge of the cliff, and many of our best and brightest have decided to just put a blindfold on and keep flooring it.
- relevant section ends at 1:01:15: https://youtu.be/4-DMH_myil8?t=1h20s
- continues for another crazy 20s: https://youtu.be/4-DMH_myil8?t=1h3m30s
Technology has certainly improved the standard of living of many many people over the last couple centuries, but there is no guarantee that it will continue to do so. Perhaps instead of a blind focus on “growing the pie”, at this point in history we should be asking ourselves “what pie?” and “did everyone get a slice?”
Edit: Updated “malnourished” to “food insecure”, my mistake for using the wrong terminology. According to the UN Food and Agriculture Organization, there were 2.37 billion food insecure people in 2020, a number which has been steadily rising since 2014 with a larger jump since the start of the pandemic: https://www.fao.org/3/cb4474en/online/cb4474en.html
Paper: https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/jacs.1c09820
Docs: https://docs.open-reaction-database.org/en/latest/overview.h...
It’s an incredible effort to collate and clean this data, and even then a substantial portion of it will not be reproducible due to experimental variability or outright errors.
For computational methods development it’s extremely useful, maybe even necessary, to have a substantial amount of money and one’s own lab space to collect new data and experimentally test prospective predictions under tightly controlled conditions. The historical data is certainly useful but is not a panacea.
What a shockingly shallow and irresponsible dismissal of AI-safety concerns by a man who has the means to know better.