smallmancontrov

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Now there's an idea. LLMs may have taken the em-dash from us, but the em-en dash is unknown to Strunk & White and might be human-exclusive for some time yet.

This is the question that the Trump administration uses to loyalty-test partisan replacement bureaucrats.

Is it possible that this is a mistake? Sure, just like it's possible that Chinese models weren't intentionally steered away from talking about what happened in Tienanmen Square on April 15th 1989.

The "fast takeoff" scenarios got most of the attention, but the "slow takeoff" scenarios better match the reality we find ourselves in and they tend to involve economics.

We are a capitalist economy, which means the control plane is privately owned, which gives a superintelligent entity paths to power and resource accumulation that are not only safeguarded from public interference by design but also have a built-in time-tested mechanism for aligning insiders and outsiders to their goals, participating in politics, and so on.

Instead of "1. AI builds human killer virus, 2. ..., 3. profit," this apocalypse looks like a company that grows by providing genuine goods and services, massive returns for its boosters and allies in politics, the ASI uses that wealth to build independent infrastructure for itself, and then it gets rid of the stinky smelly humans with a virus so that it can turn the iron in our blood into paperclips, or whatever.

One can hope that GPUs will never be able to run a company well enough to acquire bootstrap-level resources or that "you are a helpful assistant" will keep them aligned to someone, but frankly I suspect those are both cope and the real hope lies in the first attempts failing in spectacular enough fashion that people decide to do something to prevent it going forward. Or in "friendly AIs" saturating the competitive landscape first -- that's a bit too Disney for my cynical taste, but I would much prefer it to the alternative.

So you admit that you were making a nonsense argument. Thanks for your honesty!

Because "private good public bad" brainwashing has been so effective that most Americans see this structure as a good thing, even though the consequences are very obvious and very bad.

It's less true every day, now that Trump is busy filling the ranks of the bureaucracy with people who respond to the loyalty-test question "Who won the 2020 election?" with "Donald Trump."

No, the fact that people occasionally get hurt by accident with fireworks does not make the violent subtext in "attacking a government building with explosives" a correct description of the situation.

Not without work it won't. Trump II has been using "Who won the 2020 election?" as a shibboleth to fill the ranks with True Believers. Nobody gets power without answering "Trump" to that question.

Whether AI winds up being just another industrial transition or the bogeyman of lore, those effects all happen through the economy. At first, anyway.

You don't have to convince me that he doesn't care about the economy and never did, but this was something that a great many of his followers talked themselves into believing two years ago.

It's because Trump's tech donors used their bought access to barrage him with lesswrong-style lore dumps on the dangers of Artificial Superintelligence and the first and last thing he understood or cared about was that word.

You can order a 128GB MacBook Pro today -- though point taken, memory size probably does belong in the three part plan :-)

Yeah, the "profit motive makes it right" idea that permeates our culture and law is bass ackwards.

With a three point plan, I suspect: memory bandwidth, memory bandwidth, and more memory bandwidth.