Wow, even the Pope is opposed to photography! It's wild how much hatred cameras are getting

Even if AIs were conscious, it wouldn’t follow that our current treatment harms them. Meanwhile, we inflict industrial-scale horrors on animals whose capacity to suffer we scarcely dispute. Recognising consciousness clearly doesn’t ensure taking welfare seriously

I tend to assume Scott Alexander had the right idea with the Archipelago model for post-scarcity: slatestarcodex.com/2014/06/0…

I think a post-scarcity Utopia would probably be the most wildly xenophobic experience of my life. People want to live around similarly cultured people, and the Singularity removes all the usual obstacles, and the inequality concerns.

"Does it think?" Well, what predictions are you trying to make? If you want to know if it can synthesize that A+B implies C, then... yes, probably more reliably than humans, although tempered by humans being better at "I am aware of a D that negates this supposition" If you want to write a best selling novel about what it means to be human? Not yet, but I'd really recommend keeping an eye on the best seller list - they're already making progress in the "cheap commercial novel" tier! Etc. etc. So far I have not really found a situation where "they definitively cannot think, nor do anything that can reasonably be termed thinking" leads to a better predictive model, though. If I were a better Rationalist, I would think like this a lot more often, but I was raised a Philosopher and I love arguing definitions. This logic generalizes beyond "Can LLMs think" - a lot of arguments over definitions ignore how useful the resulting model actually is. The most beautiful definitions are tautologically true, and predict nothing

Tangentially, the idea that humans are "drop in workers" (i.e. AGI) is ... really wildly false? Even "unskilled labor" usually includes a day or two of training. I've had "unskilled" jobs that required weeks of training.

Argumentum ad Indignance; I am indignant that anyone would reach such a conclusion, therefore their argument must be spurious.

You know who else hung out with sluts with no concerns for the optics? That's right, our lord and savior Jesus Christ.

In 'well when you put it like that' news, here's the Florida Attorney general asking for a preliminary injunction to stop OpenAI from doing more AI R&D.

Gotta go fast. We really do. Race. Race!! 🏎 Eventually Moore's Law catches us. Every year, it becomes twice as easy to build something dangerous, it takes half as much skill for dangerous people to abuse this technology. Right now, no one can keep up - and that's GOOD actually

the base rate of warning shots seems incredibly high and the social response to warning shots seems to be calibrated or a little bit over which is all in all very bullish and makes me optimistic

That was a fun walk through memory lane. Hard to pick just nine.

Always amused by the people concerned AI regulation would "stifle new competition" You mean new entries into the most competitive field ever, with only 2 real serious players despite Google, Facebook, and China all trying to join the race for years? They've already got a moat!

I feel like a lot of people miss how much the payoff matrix rewards "Treating Things Well" no matter what, but especially if they act emotionally. "Conscious" only really matters if it doesn't act emotional, AND we want to treat it badly.

It's useless to say "don't use X" unless you provide a replacement. If AI does not "think", what exactly should we call this process whereby it deduces that A+B implies C? Bonus points if you explain why we don't use that word for humans

human cultures are not able to metabolize this amount of change this quickly. when you zoom back out to a big picture of history, it’s remarkable how glacially slow everything is. the first industrial revolutions took 80 years (very fast by the standards of previous revolutions), and the writings of Marx happen at the very end as working class politics arises. it takes about another 150 years after that for the great ideological struggles of post-industrial times to be completed in the 90s in what fukuyama called the “end of history” today you see a compression of decades of technological change into a matter of months or years. there’s no wonder yann lecun (the respected inventor of the ConvNet and ex-chief scientist of Meta) wonder whether the hugging face incident was staged, and mathematicians whose minds are far more powerful than my own are nonetheless coping about training on their data or something while models begin to display superhuman mathematical capability it would take a century or more to fully metabolize and legitimize the level of changes that have happened even in the past 20 years, to say less of the remarkable scientific revolution we will get over the next five should we avoid the doom of misalignment. I do not suspect any current form of science academia, or even political order will survive without great transformation, except through the course of slow evolution over decades - and of course, technology will keep moving too

I'm glad we already learned from Covid that even natural disasters can now be politically polarized, and quite rapidly. Hopefully we can avoid the mistakes and actually thread the needle on AI. At a minimum, it's now a lot clearer who cares about threading needles.