totallyhuman

Same here. I soured on it a bit when I noticed them becoming a bit of a rhetorical stick, "well if you think you're right, go place a bet!". I guess that's good if you want people to only make claims they seriously believe in, but it had a tendency to shut down discussion, and I feel like there's something valuable in being able to discuss and debate without the expectation that being right should be rewarded with money, and being wrong should be punished with same.

The negative second-order effects I expected were more about people concealing information and analysis that they otherwise would have shared, replacing complex but informative discussions with a black-box oracle. Boy was I wrong.

That would be interesting. Probably works best as a non-profit with donations or grants. Be a normal gambling setup, but with the expected value of all the games zero instead of negative. Advertise to existing gambling addicts. You might also be able to invert some of the dark patterns to encourage less addictive behaviour.

I expect the main threat would be that it might be possible to extract money with the system with clever statistical tricks.

That would cause most, if not all, modern tech companies to go out of business (or massively downsize). I support it.

I imagine most people don't give a damn about others' workflows. But they're not posting about it, because they don't give a damn.

Utilitarianism is a moral system. If you disagree with the risk assessment and are utilitarian, you believe that OpenAI got it wrong and is thus doing bad stuff. If a company making bridges, say, or nuclear power plants, was doing risk assessments that appeared to ignore substantial risks in order to get a lucrative contract, I would fully expect engineers to quit and start writing letters talking about ethics.

Agreed on the America-centric view, to an extent. I will note that almost all countries have spied on each other since time immemorial, but serious efforts to spy on their own citizens tend to coincide with uniquely repressive and unpleasant regimes. I think having a norm against spying on your own citizens is good, even if it isn't a perfectly elegant principle. Also, countries can do more damage spying on their own citizens vs other citizens -- as a Canadian, I don't want the American government spying on me, but I'd probably be more worried if the Canadian government was spying on me.

Spying on your own citizens enables certain sorts of anti-democratic abuses (and has been used that way in the past), so I can understand the specific opposition to it. Put somewhat melodramatically, they're okay with spying but don't want to create self-coup tools.

I agree that the killbots red line is somewhat odd, but I guess you have to draw the line somewhere, and I prefer them having that principle to having no principle at all. (Also, it's possible that the AI insiders understand something I don't about why a human in the loop is important.)

If you don't have two weeks of food, you'll be one of those people.

I'm not convinced that "laziness" is a weakness of human nature. Businesses are ultimately a way to specialize production without central planning. Allocating some people to bake all the bread in a factory frees up other people who would otherwise have to spend an hour or two every day baking bread. Or from a market perspective, you're willing to pay a premium for not having to put in the labour. Businesses certainly can be exploitative, but I don't think all or even most of them are by nature.

That the author does not think generative AI can solve social problems shows a serious lack of imagination. Therapy, medical diagnosis, improved machine translation, and better information retrieval are all social benefits. There are social costs, too, but that doesn't mean the technology is a waste of time -- it means the technology needs to be regulated.

It seems to me that this would be life-changing for some people and great for others, but I fear that this is the emotional-intimacy version of refined sugar. It won't be the end of the world, but if everyone can press the intimacy button without gaining many of the less obvious benefits of a close relationship, it may be quite unhealthy.

ChatGPT hallucinated badly when I was trying to learn about generating functions. It took me a good twenty minutes to figure out that I did understand it and the computer was just making things up. I do not use ChatGPT for learning anymore.

I imagine it would be possible to construct the system to substantially reduce the risk, even reduce it to "cosmic rays cause bit-flips which launch nukes" levels of risk. It's not like military nuclear command-and-control, you don't need one person who can push the button at any time. If we spot an asteroid, we'll have some time to deal with it. The system would presumably need to be constructed, which would take a few days even if everything was in storage on standby. Then, to activate it, you could have something like the US nuclear weapons' PAL, but instead of the codes being in the hands of one person, you spread them out. Just before launch it's activated with something analogous to the ICANN key ceremony: a bunch of well-regarded astronomers, rocket scientists, and aerospace engineers use their section of the Earth Asteroid Defence Key, and they press the metaphorical button together.

My first job was at a hydroponics store. I wanted to grow some fresh fruit in my basement over the winter, and wanted to build the system rather than buying an out-of-the-box one. I asked the owner a few questions about building a system, and got some advice from him. When I came back the second time to get more materials, I was offered a job.

There are some "real" games which started with the intention of being fun and then added some in-app purchases to make money. (Angry Birds, Plants Vs Zombies, etc). Then, there are bare-minimum games which basically only exist as a shell for gambling mechanics. Endless Candy Crush clones, incremental / idle games, and so on.

The first type are, indeed, not easy to churn out (at least no easier than any other game). The second, though, are the sort that most third-year CS students could make in a few days of concentrated effort, and individual companies often make many, many games that are basically the same but with different assets. They're then sold with misleading ads in the hopes that a few whales will get addicted. The cost to produce them is so low that even single digits of whales buying lots of in-app-purchases can result in profit.

(There's also a third category: terrible games with a license to beloved franchises, with E.T. being the canonical example. Many of them are microtransaction hell, but more often they take advantage of the brand to sell them for an up-front price. Same strategy, though: minimize production values, market as aggressively as possible within budget, accept a relatively low return which is still net-profitable.)