DrScientist

Remember playing this on the spectrum.

Does anybody else remember the item that reversed the control ( up becomes down, left becomes right? ).

What I found rather amazing about the human brain was, with a little practice, I was able to switch seemlessly as the controls flipped one way and then back.

There are too many people in the world currently that think that security is through absolute technical/military dominance, when the reality the thing you really need for security is other people or countries not wanting to harm you.

In fact the rise of things like cheap killer drones or robots makes that truth more real, not less.

> And good luck withholding your labour when 80% of people can't even find paid employment.

So those 80% are either being supported somehow to live a life at a level where they don't resort to violence or crime or they aren't. ie you keep them happy at some level or you fight. Note if you let them die/kill them, then you will likely lose the support of the 20% as they can see which way it's going.

On your second point, that rather assumes those 'unless' people will willing to just 'go away'.

That's typically not what happens - you either get bloody revolution or people just ignore the rules that aren't giving them a fair shot ( ie turn to crime - ie state disapproved activities ).

This is what has traditionally held back the elite from their worse excesses - they don't want to live in a world where either of those things happen.

ie what's the point of being rich if you are constantly worried about yourself or a member of your family is going to be violently kidnapped etc.

As to your first point - it's a bit like the first - if there is no social safety net, then it you could happen to you - you could get ill, lose your job etc. Even if you believe the system is created by total self-interest - then the past has shown that the equilibrium involves looking after everyone to some extent as:

1. It could be you one day.

2. Having lots of desperate people, even if it isn't you, is in no-ones self interest.

> Apart from coding.....

But let's take the one you've accepted - it can write code. It can translate from intention to code quite effectively - then they can do anything that you can do by writing code.

Also while you dismiss ML that drives cars as 'not LLMs' - it's part of the ecosystem - these task specific models ( the ability to process images, sounds, drive cars, synthesize speech etc ) - extend what is accessible to a computer programme that can write code.

Look at what's happening in the world of robotics. You have lots of specific ML models that allow the robot to move, see etc.

Then the LLM allows it to convert a human command in the form of arbitary speech ( rather than fixed preset commands ) into action.

While I agree the numbers don't make any sense, for reasons too numerous to enumerate, what matters for the valuation is not how it works, but what it can do.

So if an ML model can do real time language translation or drive a car - that has value - whether it's remixing or thinking or whatever doesn't really matter.

Not sure my loose use of the term thinking is the important thing here.

The point is you can justify almost anything on the basis of defining yourself as the 'good guy'.

Take the US recent assassinations of Iranian leadership. Objectively unilaterally assassinating other countries leaders is wrong - but somehow it's fine if you have a good guy/bad guy lense.

One of the problems here is huge swathes of material that the AI will have ingested includes this kind of exceptionalism thinking - it's particularly deeply rooted in Western culture generally and US culture in particular.

The problem isn't so much whether the good guy/bad guy allocation is corrrect - rather that it's very existence in the training set is deeply dangerous - as all it takes is one single classification to happen and suddenly everything is for the greater good.

Indeed.

Take the classic NSA encryption logic - if you build some capability with a backdoor only you can exploit then you are building your own future capability - and if you think you are the 'good' guy - what's wrong with that?

I've seen this - I was part of a large company that threatened to move everything, not to open source, but to google docs, and MS sales team moved heaven and earth to reverse the decision.

It's not just that they don't want to lose a customer - they don't want lots of examples out there of how it can be done.

> Hand-counting the ballots instead of scanning would be expensive in terms of time and money, and error-prone.

Why?

It's not that expensive - what price democracy? And in terms of error rate - if there is a very close vote, in the UK they just do a recount - sometimes more than once - the variation between recounts is very very small - single digit ( votes not percent ) at most.

to be fair, I guess one difference between the US and the UK is the distributed nature of the vote - in the UK it's broken up into constituencies of ~70K voters - so any recount is scoped to that ( ~ 50K actual votes ).

I'd argue ff you have thuggery at that level in public then you have bigger problems than voting systems.

And if that's country wide then the country isn't a democracy so the voting system is moot.

In terms of voter fraud, it's the very inefficiency of paper in person voting that provides the large scale protection - it's incredibly hard to do what you describe at a national level.

On the other hand, it's much easier for organised crime to influence voting machines nationally - in an undetected way - you probably only need to intimidate a handful of key people.

In person, pure paper voting, in local community halls etc, run by volunteers is the best voting system.

Incredibly resistant to influencing at scale, resistant to voter coercion, transparent, and invokes a sense of occasion and community spirit.

The problem with electronic systems is the public can't see the piles of votes, can't get involved in the count, and ultimately it's the perfect system for being able to tip the scales subtly.

Even vote counting machines for paper ballots are a mistake in my view.