roywiggins

I think if you asked "are humans usually more interested in being right or having friends", many- possibly most- people would say the latter.

The problem with asking these models stuff like "what do you think about humanity" is that, even if it can synthesize an insight about humanity, it's just as likely it's regurgitating some opinion it's already seen. Which, given that this "controversial idea" is hardly new, is likely what it's doing. It's like a maximally boring controversial opinion, wake me up when it starts endorsing the bicameral mind or something actually weird.

Maybe it can produce interesting insights. But it's like asking a pundit for a soundbite: what are the odds they aren't just shuffling together something that sounds appropriate to the question?

How sure are you that they're synthesizing an opinion vs just grabbing some existing opinion ("humans value in-group belonging over truth" is not a new idea) and regurgitating it? That they all agree on this kind of suggests as much. Which of course means that they are, ironically... just following the crowd.

It's really easy to come up with an opinion-shaped sentence, that doesn't mean any actual reasoning has gone into it. It's just a pundit-shaped sentence, something someone might say at a party. It's a maximally bland "controversial" opinion about humanity.

It's far more likely that the AI got this "controversial idea" from human-written text saying that other humans are groupthinky, not from observing humans being groupthinky.

Well yeah, if you enjoy doing Activity then the prospect of having to get a new job and therefore spend far less time doing Activity might be understandably upsetting.

If you can't get paid to think about math anymore then you are by necessity going to spend a lot less time doing it.

What about the people who are in it to think deeply about mathematics questions? It's a lot harder to feel like that's worth doing when there's a black box with a crank that takes money in and spits out mathematics answers.

Like calling Lee Sedol a pretentious tool for retiring in the face of AlphaGo. If you really do mathematics for the enjoyment of doing mathematics, following a roughly unbroken line of tradition for at least a couple hundred years, an alien computer mind showing up and smashing everything would perhaps be upsetting, don't you think?

It doesn't really matter for most purposes. Determinism doesn't make them any less chaotic, it's not like fixing the seed makes the output any more predictable. Some percentage of seeds will behave in ways you don't like for a particular input, and you can't know which beforehand.

First, Don't Panic! and consult your copy of Dr. Dan Streetmentioner's Time Traveler's Handbook of 1001 Tense Formations.

You can bootstrap a tiny duration of prescience into arbitrary durations by passing back the same message over and over as many times as you like.

If you know what will happen in one minute, write down the message you see yourself writing down in one minute. In a minute, do the same thing. Now you can pass messages back two minutes.

The GUI parts are or were.

And parts of their patient portal website were still VB6 on the backend a decade ago, not sure that's true anymore. Visual Basic 6 as a web backend.