Joined 6 years ago
It’s completely optional and you only might want to use it if you change the recipe.
Some of these users are overreacting ridiculously to ai.
Truly I dislike the guy and everything he did in government but I don’t think that buying a used Tesla is any endorsement or direct benefit to Elon.
Slap an “I bought this used” bumper sticker on it and your fellow anti-fascists should leave you alone.
If you ban online advertising, every publisher you know and like will either exit the market or need to use a paywall (which are famously… popular and successful for niche publishers? No.)
You can call online advertising loathsome if you want (indeed a lot of it sucks - no argument!) but it pays for content that everyone consumes. (Unless you only use HN, which is 99% of the time a collection of links to other sites with ads or paywalls or both.)
Regulate online advertising - fine. But “banning” it (what would that even involve?) is not a serious suggestion.
I expect it will remain true into the future (10+ years). I have moderately high confidence (75% or higher) in this prediction.
I use frontier AI models in my work all the time. I think they accelerate my work by helping me understand faster and prompt better.
The models are most useful and most productivity-enhancing in the hands of experts and in the area of their expertise.
I don’t expect a jobs apocalypse, not even in math.
With nuclear weapons you could conceivably go to a small list of specific places to inspect stocks of weapons. You can watch for tests from outer space or measure the quakes they create.
My read of the “deep seek moment” was that a lab came out of nowhere and trained a very powerful model with vastly less power than was previously required.
The AI labs are private, not owned or run by the government. They are distributed widely within and across countries. The barrier to entry is much lower than that for nuclear weapons.
It’s just a complete non-starter.
(And yeah I’m deliberately ignoring the obvious incentives Dario has to recommend this course of action as the owner of a leading lab himself.)
The “worst case” with 6 is potentially very bad but I think we are currently using advanced AI models to harden systems and patch vulnerabilities more aggressively than anyone is trying to bring down the whole power grid (for example).
I think it’s a potentially harmful case but my take is defensive capabilities are scaling as fast as offensive capabilities but defense is being implemented faster than anyone is going on offense?
Example 7 is Russia and Ukraine right now according to public information. It sounds like entirely autonomous weapons are deployed to the battlefield already. I put this in the “not likely to be a widespread problem” category for now.
I just don’t see any evidence yet that whole categories of jobs are being eliminated, with the single exception (so far!) of the end of “professional essay writing services for cheating college students,” and similar services.
That used to be a big business in Kenya, but is now effectively gone. (Covered in the New York Times this weekend if anyone is looking for the discussion.)
The environmental impact seems either very overblown (e.g., water usage just isn’t that high) and the part that isn’t overblown is totally abatable (e.g., noise and emissions from gas generators). Nuclear or solar/renewables with batteries wouldn’t pollute.
I’ve seen no estimates of the additional deaths due to extra emissions specifically from power generation for AI purposes. If you have some, share them.
I’m willing to bet that they are a small rounding error against preventable deaths due to emissions from transport and non-AI-related power generation (which is an important and urgent issue worth spending a lot on, to be clear!). I’m happy to update that belief given evidence.
I really, really disagree with that statement.
I don’t think ai models come close to nuclear weapons or to run-of-the-mill, everyday carbon emissions in terms of danger to humanity.
What’s the most dangerous thing that’s happened with an LLM so far? (This question is serious - maybe I don’t know the right examples.)
Example 1: I’m aware of a small number of people killing themselves in some kind of AI-facilitated psychosis. That is very unlikely to be a widespread problem.
Non-example 2: There are worries about AI-facilitated biological weapons. I haven’t seen any evidence that’s happening.
Non-example 3: I’m not interested in wild theories about AI driven labor market disruptions leading to widespread starvation. There’s no evidence for that.
Non-example 4: all the even-wilder Rationalist speculation about basilisks and the like is entirely divorced from reality.
I am looking for better reasons (supported by actual evidence!) to be more concerned than I am now: right now I am not concerned at all.
No one on the internet likes paying for access to content. After 35 years we have not found a way to monetize except ad tech.
Is that so hard to understand?
Every time someone links an article on this website from an expensive print publication, there is immediately a link in the comments to a paywall-evading site!
The dialog around ads on HN is extremely low quality, highly focused on costs and with no attention at all paid to benefits.
I’d love an estimate from you (or anyone) about the marginal effect on the profession’s “legitimacy” (which is what? and how’s it measured?) from having the prize include Nobel’s name vs. not including it.
Really we don’t care.
Mokyr’s northwestern website has links to a lot of his papers.
An extremely crude selection rule:
Anything published in the American economic review, quarterly journal of economics, journal of political economy has the profession’s “highest stamp of approval”. It’s really hard to publish anything there. (There are two journals im not listing in that “top” category but he has no papers there on his website.). On aghion or howitts websites, look for the above journals but also econometrica and the review of economic studies. Those are the “top five” in the field.
There are surely papers in good history and Econ history journals on mokyr’s website but I don’t know the journals!
Standards for any chapter in a “handbook of X economics” or “handbook of the economics of X” are high - those should be good surveys.
Similarly a paper in the “annual review of economics”
Also mokyr has a bunch of work on Amazon. “The lever of riches” is a classic. “A culture of growth” is well regarded.
Finally he has a forthcoming book called “two paths to prosperity” with two other distinguished guys - one Econ historian (greif) and one political economy guy (tabellini). It’s coming out in about three weeks. Good timing, Princeton U Press!
Aghion and howitt have a growth textbook at the advanced undergrad level called “the economics of growth.”
They have a much more advanced work called “endogenous growth theory” which is for specialists (or at least anyone with first year PhD macro)
Aghion has a book called “the power of creative destruction.”
Barro also has an old undergrad macro text which is good
The gap between undergrad macro and professional macro is extremely large. That shouldn’t dissuade you it’s just a note.
An unexpected (to me!) prize but definitely a good one.
What’s notable is that mokyr’s research is very, very accessible to a layman. You can read his books and understand them nearly perfectly without needing substantial technical background. (Of course there’s a huge existing literature in economics and history he’s engaging with which you won’t know, but I’m not an economic historian either so a lot of it is unfamiliar to me too.). Try it! Hopefully you learn something.
Also the committee always releases a good non-technical summary of the laureates work and an even better “more technical” summary. You can start there for an overview.
As for the point which will be raised endlessly here that this is “not a real Nobel” - whatever. No one in the economics profession cares. Alfred Nobel doesn’t have a monopoly on prizes or priority to decide which fields are worth recognizing. It’s our highest prestige prize. Call it what you want.
