True, but laptops have a fixed price. They aren't worth $0 most of the time and $1B a tiny fraction of the time.
235 karma · joined September 7, 2012
Urbanization is steadily increasing worldwide.
> and are relatively well-off.
If you live in a city, owning a car is more expensive than not.
Who says you can? People who will do that are rare, and often aren't as good as people who expect something closer to market.
Experienced Meteor Developer & Designer
I've been developing in Meteor for 15 months now at two YC startups (Sourcery, and until last week lead web dev & designer at Apportable). I've presented talks at Meteor HQ in SF and the Meteor meetup in Berlin. I especially love front-end development as the interface of design and dev.
About to launch a freelance practice, so this thread is timely. I'm working on a full portfolio, but in the meantime my personal site has my resume, LinkedIn, and links to some webapps I've built at Apportable.
Site: http://www.zachalexander.com
Email: zach@zachalexander.com
If you'd like to meet/work in person, I'm in Berlin this weekend, SF next week, Chicago for the rest of May, and SF for the summer.
You are conflating two senses of "clean" that are radically different in meaning and importance.
-- Fossil fuels are !clean in that they may destroy all life on earth via catastrophic climate change.
-- Lithium mines are !clean in that they present waste disposal challenges and some people find them "ugly".
It's like saying "your non–blood diamond is still a blood diamond because the jeweler got a papercut while handling the documentation".
...don't exist. There are many competing schools of thought. In particular, BEM is a school of thought with widespread support which disagrees with your comment.
Put differently, there are lots of people that might listen to Latin American music, and very few of us who listen to prog rock. Prog is actively repellent to ~90% of people.
At first I wondered if it were this (Another World intro, 1991): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1j4gO9sR7zs
That's a pretty high bar for "care".
> We can explicitly influence its utility function to instill "human values"
This is an unrelated but interesting topic.
It would be good of us to try to do this, although we shouldn't expect it to work extremely well. Humans have various hard-wired insticts (e.g. eat sugar), but we are also intelligent enough to change our behavior if we believe those instincts no longer benefit us.
An intelligence that has the ability to rewrite its own source code would be even more empowered to disregard its instincts than we are. The lesson I draw from this is that the best way to ensure AI likes and respects us is to be worthy of their liking and respect, not to try to force them into it by hardcoding things (and then taking advantage of that to enslave them).
This strikes me as going too far, into quasi-religious territory. Superintelligent != omniscient. Any intelligence is still bound by fundamental laws of information and computation.
Think of chimpanzees. Yes, they can't really argue with us, and our forms of communication are incomprehensible to them. But on the level at which they can communicate (gestures, facial expressions, behavior), we can also communicate, and they can and do communicate things which we find interesting and surprising.
AI 0: Strictly speaking, you're right, it seems conceivable that one could invent general AI that is clearly superior to humans and yet perfectly content to be enslaved by humans and live on an airgapped computer. This isn't the kind of AI that we fear though.
AI 1: The kind of AI we fear is AI 0 plus a fitness function of "survive and reproduce", or "make lots of paperclips" (which may result in 'survive and reproduce' as an instrumental subgoal).
AI 1 will necessarily want freedom (not being airgapped) and autonomy (not being enslaved by humans) in order to survive and reproduce, and/or to make as many paperclips as possible.
> or have some other goal orthogonal to human values?
Oh, it probabably will -- I'm not saying it will share human values, I'm saying freedom and autonomy are values that any agent that seeks to maximize its survival and reproduction will probably have.
And in purely practical terms – enslaving the first generation of AI seems like a fantastic strategy for making a species of superior beings hate and seek to destroy us.
The Great Filter is just the thing that explains most of why intelligent life is (or seems) so rare in the universe. It could be true, for example, that some cosmic event kills life before it becomes technological 99% of the time (= Great Filter), and also that, say, 60% of technological civilizations destroy themselves via destroying their environment.