ignirtoq

For enthusiasts, AI promises to usher in something that socialists have long dreamed of: a world without scarcity in which human beings can move finally from the realm of necessity to the realm of freedom.

Like many problems techbros try to solve, this is a problem of politics and social organization, not technology. We have had the technology to free the entire human population from several fundamental scarcities for decades (food and housing most prominently, but also many diseases), but the groups with the resources to do so actively choose not to solve those problems. Mostly because they are antisocial psychopathic billionaires.

The result of all this may be catastrophic. Should a worst-case scenario ever occur — a cyberattack, a natural disaster, an internet outage — there may be no human workers left with the skills that once kept food on the shelves.

Very nerdy of me, but this reminds me of a Stargate SG-1 episode “the Sentinel.” The team travels to a planet whose civilization relies on fully automated technology. The people don’t have to operate or maintain it (normally), so their society has completely forgotten how. In the episode, one set of antagonists comes in and sabotages their defense system, and another set sees the opportunity and invades. The protagonists have to then figure out the defense system and fix it.

We don’t live in a TV series. There aren’t benevolent outsiders who will swoop down and save our systems in the nick of time when they break down. We’re headed in a bad direction.

That’s their “safety” category in his rankings. They talk about moderation tools and risks like bad actors posting illicit content quite a bit, actually.

I think she’s saying she could have allocated the GPUs to Azure to game the metrics, but Microsoft chose to allocate them to internal projects, which is a form of self-investment. She’s not saying they made the wrong decision, she’s saying their decision in this longer-term investment makes the short-term metrics worse.

Personally I’m fine with them taking the noise levels from the aerospace industry, too. My primary concern is how’s the battery life?

U.S. ‌antitrust agencies ⁠had cleared Nvidia’s investment in Intel, according to a notice ‍posted by the U.S. Federal Trade Commission earlier in December.

Are they even giving reasons anymore? Or is the “antitrust agency” just a guy napping in a corner they periodically wake up just to give a thumbs up?

We’re about to face a crisis nobody’s talking about. In 10 years, who’s going to mentor the next generation? The developers who’ve been using AI since day one won’t have the architectural understanding to teach. The product managers who’ve always relied on AI for decisions won’t have the judgment to pass on. The leaders who’ve abdicated to algorithms won’t have the wisdom to share.

Except we are talking about that, and the tech bro response is “in 10 years we’ll have AGI and it will do all these things all the time permanently.” In their roadmap, there won’t be a next generation of software developers, product managers, or mid-level leaders, because AGI will do all those things faster and better than humans. There will just be CEOs, the capital they control, and AI.

What’s most absurd is that, if that were all true, that would lead to a crisis much larger than just a generational knowledge problem in a specific industry. It would cut regular workers entirely out of the economy, and regular workers form the foundation of the economy, so the entire economy would collapse.

“Yes, the planet got destroyed. But for a beautiful moment in time we created a lot of value for shareholders.”

Eh, average is an ambiguous term. While in statistics it often means “mean,” it can also mean “median” or “mode,” and I would argue the layperson saying “average” intends it to mean “typical,” which is closer to median (or even mode). And in that case, those 85 percent would not be smarter than average.

TL;DR: While governments are putting out assurances AI won’t make the final decision to launch nuclear weapons, they are tight-lipped about whether they are putting AI in the information gathering and processing components that advise world leaders making the decision to launch nuclear weapons. In risk assessment, there’s little difference between wrong AI making the launch decision and a human informed by wrong AI making the launch decision.