johnaspden

Programmers will be replaced by whatever the superintelligence makes out of their atoms.

Fancy a fuck? Fancy a fight? My tree! My tree!

JPI Modula-2 was my first proper compiler on my childhood PC! I loved it, it was nicer to use than either Turbo Pascal or C.

I actually bought my first ever hard disk (a mighty 10MB as I remember, more storage than I'd ever be able to use), for something like £200, an absolute fortune to an adolescent in 1986, just so that I could install modula-2 permanently in the machine and could stop swapping compiler floppies and program floppies all the time.

But when I first got access to UNIX boxes as a postgrad there was C but no Modula-2, so I switched to C, which could do everything Modula-2 could do except it was a bit more fragile and treacherous.

Who cares? And how would we tell?

Apparently not. And I am slightly surprised by that.

Oh God, yes! I'm old enough to remember when people thought it was important to have quiet and privacy to think.

I used to love my job. All my life I've loved programming, and I used to love being able to solve other people's problems for them by doing the thing I love.

And I used to love being surrounded by other people who were interested in the same things as me, all collaborating on a project to make something useful.

The open-plan curse killed it for me. For years I've done as little paid work as I can get away with because I hate trying to think in an open-plan horror so much. It's like having my brain in a blender.

I still program, and think, a lot, but I only do it for other people when I need the money.

Christ, this is supposed to be for people with no spoons, and yet one of the recipes is: "Peanut Butter On A Spoon". Could they not be bothered to get someone to proof read it?

Presumably he doesn't care. How's his poetry?

> To learn CNNs at the deep-dive level you need calculus, at least differentiation and integration.

Oh the poor dears, imagine needing schoolboy maths to do science.

Am Eliezer disciple, can confirm.

Back in the day when Eliezer was optimistic about AI (there's a reason why the SIAI/MIRI logo looks like an angel), I wrote him a very silly e-mail warning him that, despite being Jewish, he was falling for the Christian rapture narrative in a new form!

It seemed to me that his ideas, which I think are all correct, straightforwardly implied the destruction of all things, with very little hope.

I bite that bullet, and I always have.

Over the years, Eliezer has lost all hope, and things have happened much faster than either of us thought they would, and now he's making one final roll of the dice, burning his reputation by saying out loud what he thinks, in the hope that someone might listen.

I'd be very surprised if he thinks this will work. He's trying to get a warning out to the general population, in spite of this meaning that no one inside AI will ever trust him again. He thinks it no longer matters.

Me too.

I want to say that I completely endorse this. The whole thing in all its details.

I don't have any reputation to sacrifice, and I don't expect my endorsement to convince anyone, but I want to set a precedent that it's ok to believe this.

It's true, as far as I can see. And I've been thinking about this for something like fifteen years.

And if other people who think it's true are ashamed to say it out loud, then I want to let them know that at least one other person on the planet has said so too.