It's common enough that the Japanese government has been tracking down long dead "centenarians" to root it out. Also, according to Saul Newman [1], many of the centenarians claimed for Japan actually died 80+ years ago in the war and were never recorded as dead when everyone else in their family died.
How do we stop china and russia from developing it? How come nobody seems to be talking about the obvious international treaty that would be necessary to actually ban superintelligence from being developed? At least we can deliberate some kind of enforcement mechanism in the process...
Oh, that's easy. Bernie will pick 11 volunteers and together they will be dropped off behind enemy lines. Let's call them "the Dirty Dozen". They will capture the evil bastards who violated American law outside of US borders (that's just evil) and bring them to Justice™ (Impossible is nothing. Call 1-800-JUSTICE. Conditions apply).
> the obvious international treaty
That's even easier. We just take the international treaty on cloud computing as a base and...
The point is an arms race is bad for everyone. "I don't know what WW3 will be fought with, but I do know WW4 will be fought with sticks and stones" type of stuff.
The Cold War was an arms race that gave us wonderful things: amazing technologies we still use today (GPS, the Internet) and the collapse of the soviet union.
"Were we on the brink of that thing that we already did in Japan and nothing happened a few times? Oh my god, I need to hide in a cave and never do anything outside again"
Of course not. Even the developers of AI admit there's a huge risk though, no? Even they are calling for a slowdown. Do you think you know more than they do?
I know well enough; I'd be surprised if they know more than I do. And I also know very heavily that we cannot stall into societies of empowered deficient humans.
By international agreement, obviously. There are tons of international agreements to regulate all sorts of things. It's generally a pretty good way to prevent a race to the bottom. Or in this case, a potential race to the end of the world.
The biggest problem is that the US has shown not trustable when it comes to treaty. You can have a treaty with the US but the US can just use Israel or some other proxy to do the advance research and development for them..
It’s one of the only countries that reliably follows treaties. Unfortunately they are very hard to pass, which is why the agreements falsely called treaties are so easy to reverse - they are all personal executive orders like JCPOA (alas)
How would it make them worse off? If everybody agrees that AI is a threat to humanity, but also a possible edge over rivals, then the threat should be enough reason to get everybody to agree.
There are international agreements on tons of things that work the same way.
Two things I would say. One: nuclear non-proliferation has been pretty successful; we can use a similar model for AI.
Two, China's major motivation for developing competitive AI isn't to reap the benefits from an an important new technology. It's to undermine the economic development of the West and make them even more dependent upon the CCP. It's an extension of the policy that's made us dependent on Chinese labor and manufacturing: win on the economics by any means necessary, wait for the other producers to die, enshittify (extract geopolitical concessions, in this case).
This is relative to something like every nation owning nuclear weapons by 1960 and civil wars usually beginning with a nuclear strike by a standing government.
Nuclear proliferation is not proper in context. The bill in question in the submission is not about preserving a status quo, it is about banning the technology.
A ban on technology results in underground research, migration of intellectuals, monopolies, seething parties...
I didn't say the challenges would be the same.. You just indicated they were worthwhile for anyone who believes the anthropic principle is why they haven't seen a world with no nuclear treaties decades later.
LLMs are either a toy if they are not reliable and a mockery if not actually intelligent; to make them intelligent, to achieve Intelligence, is what Sanders proposed to make illegal. What we are striving to do is to achieve Intelligence - it cannot be different.
We don't. The need for Intelligence to fill the scarcity is unthinkable. The urgency is the highest, especially ever since simil-intelligence (LLMs) was implemented. To research Intelligence "safely" you simply do not give it agency (you do not let it control computers), for example. To have "safety" in general, you cannot empower morons - humanity is doing the opposite. We cannot rest with incomplete LLMs, nor we can with this dumb, intrinsically dangerous humanity.
What does "safely" mean? Getting stuck with this infra-humanity?! That is the radically unsafe thing.
> The need for Intelligence to fill the scarcity is unthinkable.
I just wanna say, I really admire the irony of this sentence. Maybe once we invent superintelligence it will be able to think enough to tell us how badly we needed it before we had it.
> The urgency is the highest, especially ever since simil-intelligence (LLMs) was implemented.
It isn't. If we stopped all work on LLMs and AI we'd be more than OK. There's no imminent danger or threat.
> To research Intelligence "safely" you simply do not give it agency (you do not let it control computers), for example.
Something can't both be smarter than us and completely controllable by us. The whole point of inventing superintelligence is so it can do things we can't. Humans can already break out of sandboxes, invent bioweapons, manipulate each other to invent bioweapons, etc. What makes you think superintelligence can't or won't do these things?
> To have "safety" in general, you cannot empower morons - humanity is doing the opposite. We cannot rest with incomplete LLMs, nor we can with this dumb, intrinsically dangerous humanity.
Hey, you're talking to a guy who's got a list of tech to ban: nukes, social media, all forms of video news, etc. What does Taylor Swift say, "I've got a blank space, baby, and I'll write your name (Claude)".
> What does "safely" mean? Getting stuck with this infra-humanity?! That is the radically unsafe thing.
You literally just ban it and turn it off. People are always like "you can't ban it bawwwwwww!" but we ban tech all the time. Try buying a bunch of fertilizer, try buying equipment to research gain of function, try buying anti-aircraft guns, try building fuselages to enrich uranium. LLM research requires extraordinary amounts of hardware, electricity, data, funding, and all the things upstream of that (cooling, shipping, space, financing, etc.) The effort you'd have to go through to do this clandestinely, illegally, while also finding researchers willing to take the risk is all prohibitive. There's a list of all nuclear scientists in the entire world. They have to go to school somewhere. Same for AI researchers. If, say, half a dozen of them suddenly disappear, and a random town in Wyoming suddenly starts making millions of requests per second across the whole internet, guzzling electricity, producing a lot of heat, or ordering a shitload of insulation and ducting, we'll know!
Current technologies are already a danger as agents - they can already do damage - and an unfinished product that cannot be aborted at this stage - Intelligence is not there yet, we have post-Eliza things promising and greatly dumb. We have already started, we have to finish - which is, having the NNs reach a stage of reliability.
> smarter than us and completely controllable by us
Something which is smarter than you should probably even not be controlled by that same "you" that have difficulties controlling a backyard. The concept of «us» there is not consistent with a proper framework.
> who's got a list of tech to ban
I got that suggestion, that it could be your mentality. Banning will not create growth (remember Hegel). Humanity as an aggregate stalls, let us depower aggregate humanity and create further better instruments.
> literally just ban it
And, as I said remain stuck with this trash level infra-humanity. No, very much not.
Get back to the main points:
-- Intelligence is a Value. We are trying to achieve it. That berniesanders fights studying, distilling and augmenting a value. That berniesanders is in that regard a satanist.
-- Humanity as it is has proven very partial value. For which good reason should it be attributed a fair right to protect its perpetration? Are you taking for granted some "right to persist"? To claim a right to existence it should prove goodwill and growth - not the behaviour of an infestant.
-- The real problem is that we have humans and partial unfinished technology in the loop of the progress: both humans (generally speaking) and partial unfinished technology are liabilities. Nonetheless, we cannot stall, so we must proceed.
> nuclear non-proliferation has been pretty successful; we can use a similar model for AI.
Development of nuclear weapons has continued, and a lot of effort goes into developing delivery systems.
A number of countries have acquired nuclear weapons over the years: India, Pakistan, Israel, South Africa, North Korea. More countries have kept their options open and could develop nuclear weapons if needed.
After over 80 years since the US used nuclear weapons against Japan, less than 5% of the world's countries have nuclear weapons, and no one's used one on another country since. If you don't think that's an incredible achievement you're unserious.
> less than 5% of the world's countries have nuclear weapons
Counting countries is plenty deceptive. Population is the real metric, China, India, Pakistan are all nuclear, everything added together, 50% of the world's population lives in nuke-capable countries. There are US nukes stationed in various European countries and Turkey, I didn't count them although I should have.
> If you don't think that's an incredible achievement you're unserious.
That "achievement" is even more deceptive. The reason Africa doesn't have nukes is their poverty, ditto for the rest of the no-nukes world, poverty is the real "achiever" here but I don't think that's something worth bragging about.
> 50% of the world's population lives in nuke-capable countries.
Are you saying you prefer Pakistan getting nukes over India's population doubling since 1975? That seems silly. Also this is only because of China and India, so this has been true and fine for over half a century.
> The reason Africa doesn't have nukes is their poverty, ditto for the rest of the no-nukes world
Pakistan is poor, Norway is rich. How can you possibly make this argument?
My point is that it has worked for nuclear weapons because there are deterrents to using them. The acknowledged nuclear powers have all pledged to only use them in self defence. No one is going to develop AI and not use it.
Countries use nuclear power too. The reason they don't launch nukes at the drop of a hat is MAD. I don't see how this isn't analogous to what we could do with AI.
> I don't see how this isn't analogous to what we could do with AI.
Considering the article we are commenting on, the analogous proposal would be to imprison scientists for 20 years if they dare research nuclear power - no matter what kind.
> Two, China's major motivation for developing competitive AI isn't to reap the benefits from an an important new technology. It's to undermine the economic development of the West and make them even more dependent upon the CCP.
I don't know, but it's also what Kevin Rudd thinks [0]. He was Australia's prime minister (twice, lol), Australia's foreign minister, a foreign service officer working in China, and the author of a dissertation on Xi Jinping.
Maybe not intentionally (at least by the U.S. Government, but the consequences are far greater now.
Now that GPS has subsumed a large part of air navigation as more VOR and ILS approaches at non-towered airports are being left to fall into disrepair, it forces more and more aircraft operating in instrument conditions to fall back to a navigation system that may not operate to the tolerances that you need to shoot an approach to LPV minimums (which puts you close to 200 feet or so above the ground) or LNAV minimums (higher, but still pretty low to the ground). If you lose signal integrity, you abort the approach. You don't want to break out at minimums only to find that the runway is 33 feet to the left or right of the centerline when it's not a circling only approach where you're expecting it. If that field only has RNAV (GPS) approaches, you have to divert. Hopefully the alternate airport you filed has a ground based approach plate available that is authorized .
When SA was around, we had more VORs, more VOR and ILS approaches, and while NDBs (decades old radionavigation beacon that operated on the AM band) were on their way out, they were still around.
One of the reasons SA was discontinued was that if you knew the coordinates of a base station, you could correct for the error. Are airports not doing this already?
Actually, several airports are. So you have normal WAAS and it has a ground segment. Most (new) IFR certified GPS receivers installed in airplanes today are WAAS capable.
To that, you can augment something called GBAS (we used to call it Local Area Augmentation System but switched over to the ICAO name for it). It’s basically a ground station that sits at an airport and corrects for GPS errors where you need it most (airports definitely qualify here and that’s where you need the best GPS performance).
Ultimately, the FAA is going to go 100% GPS and it’ll fall back to the minimum number of land-based sources for redundancy. It’s about cost. The issues with GPS may cause them to push the timeline back and develop plans to mitigate the issue, but they’re too far down this path to stop now.
To meet its integrity budget, a GBAS needs at least triple redundancy, not just a single station.
If one has a lot of patience, one can read the details of how it works at https://elibrary.icao.int/product/299828 (along with SBAS, the ICAO name for what WAAS does; the constellations they can augment; GRAS, a weird hybrid between GBAS and SBAS that apparently went nowhere; ILS; VOR; DME; and VHF marker beacons). Annex 10 Vol I probably doesn't say explicitly that triple redundancy is required, because if you had a single receiver with an MTBF of something like 10 billion hours then you could use just that one.
This particular 30-foot error should go away almost entirely for future receivers that implement DFMC SBAS or ARAIM.
I largely agree with the concern, but "pausing AI" is an international effort requiring signature of treaties. Even then, enforcement mechanisms are lacking compared to, say, the number of nuclear bombers in a boneyard or the completion of nuclear tests.
I remember for a while that Firefox had a single process architecture for all tabs. This often frustrated me as one bad tab could just crash the whole browser while Chrome used separate processes for each tab, prompting me to switch to Chrome for a bit. Firefox caught up ages after chrome, and now I went back to them over the manifest v2 stuff.
Indeed. Around that era I had a fun little "crashmybrowser.com" toy site that had a few different JS tricks you could click that would absolutely wedge your browser (any browser, at the time). This had come after years of my being vocally annoyed that there weren't better guardrails around Javascript. Each of the functions was based on a real-world failure case.
Chrome was the first browser to be immune to all of those functions.
Mozilla really screwed the pooch not long after. Their biggest single misstep was forcing automatic updates in corporate networks. At the time, they still had pretty good adoption in the kinds of environments that had a couple of people somewhere deciding what everyone was allowed to run on the company computers. Chrome had already moved to forced updates, so these environments went to Firefox. When Firefox decided to follow Chrome, they no longer had that differentiation, and corporate IT had to choose between two browsers that both had automatic updates, but one of them had frequent memory and performance problems.
I've happily returned to Firefox a few years ago and don't have Chrome installed on any device I control.
First you'd have to come up with a commonly accepted definition. By some ~16 years old definitions from famous experts in the field, we've already achieved it. By today's definition (of the same expert) we haven't. There are people today that think we have it. There are people today that think we'll never have it. It's such a loaded term / topic.
Also, regarding LLMs, 2 years ago another famous expert in the field was adamant that LLMs can't plan, can't do math and they can't work at long contexts. Obviously they can do all of that now. So, really, no one knows.
LLMs might be a step towards AGI (assuming that's possible) but the prevailing belief that LLMs and human brains (the latter being the most complex structures in the universe that we know of) are already functionally equivalent in every way that matters seems more like an article of faith to me than fact.
LLMs have been found to have the same activations for the same concepts regardless of what language the question is asked in. So the answer is that they don’t do logic in a particular language either, they use their own internal symbolic representations.
If your service providers are funded by ads, and ads begin demanding "verified clicks", your service providers are greatly incentivised to begin pushing for locking down your ability to run what you want on your own hardware. Through manipulation of web standards, or through lobbying.
BTW Google had another go at forcing Treacherous Computing on people. This time it's a reCAPTCHA successor, which requires the user to scan a QR code using a Google/Apple owned phone.
The same principle applies: You would have to leave the service when it starts introducing such things.
As a market-driving force in the real world, basically an impossible task for the collective. However, occasionally consumers do successfully band together to abandon a service due to some perceived slight.
I don't know about ars and discord, but netflix, prime, and yt all have ad-free and ad-subsidized options.
There is also the degree to which people consider something ad free. A character using an iPhone in a show could be considered an ad to some, and not noticed to others.
I feel like it is actually payment pages where I see these kinds of bouncers the most, though. click fraud is inefficient, but payment fraud can actually ruin a business.
The currently mainstream payment solution hurt privacy even more than the current ad tracking. We'd need something like GNU Taler for that. I wonder what the world would look like if the Chaum E-Cash - Microsoft Windows cooperation had worked out.
> People interpret business as hostility because they cannot conceive of the idea that they themselves should pay for a service.
If that's what the business really believed, they'd put up a paywall instead of literally giving away their content. Some businesses do believe that. Most of them realize it's more profitable to sell data about you instead. So screw 'em and screw this victim-blaming "well we wouldn't need all this invasive tech if it weren't for those pesky adblockers, you'll need a TPM to browse the internet because you didn't play along with my bad business model" nonsense. The internet existed before big adtech, and it will exist after. Long live free computing.
> Like if you don't want to be kicked around, you need to be the one kicking.
This is a punk stance but somehow the argument is "be punk and whip out the credit card?" My argument is "be punk and adblock."
...by giving rent-seeking corporations more money? The internet was always "free". I've been using Adblockers since decades and will continue to do so.
The logical endpoint of this is that nations campaign on "internet sovereignty" and begin whitelisting the internet with strict restrictions and licensure of who can open up new sites. This is reportedly occurring to a limited extent in russia: https://www.intellinews.com/russia-s-mobile-internet-whiteli...
I wonder if we're headed for a future where it is almost completely impossible to make money off human-made "authentic" art because it simply can't compete with the effort-to-dollar ratio of slop.
The trends weren't all that good prior to AI even; economics nearly killed the 2D animation and traditional still art, though what remained still had some semblance of an intersection between "authentic art" and "viable career".
More and more I feel like the only things that will ever be taken as authentic and meaningful are the things that are released for free, as they prove definitively to the audience that there was no motive to produce the sort of meaningless, pseudo-wireheading, shapes-and-colours slop that AI creators are greatly incentivised to do so.
People will still write compelling literature without instructing a machine to do it wholesale (often without even bothering to conceal the scaffolding in the response.) But it may look more like Wattpad or AO3 with more skill; hobbyist, on the side, given generously to an audience at zero cost.
Automation (software and mass-production equipment) has transformed our world and our lives.
I'm just some guy watching what's happened over the past 50 years. But this trend is only accelerating. There will be many more industries that are "transformed" by technology.
Economic trends meant we were moving towards patronage models anyway, whether singular or distributed. It seems like mass one-shot payment for media is almost dead. The exception might be video games, thanks in part to console lock-in.
Curious that technology will send us back to the world of Michelangelo and the Medici and so on. No more professional artists funded broadly, just pets of the rich.
That's not necessarily true. Patreon, Twitch, and Onlyfans all reproduce the patronage relationship at microscale. Instead of a commissioned sculpture you might get a shout-out on chat, but the cost to you was also much cheaper.
Someone close to me is a folk musician who’s done surprisingly well, at least getting by as a full-time performer. Much of what people are paying for when they get tickets to see her is the feeling of proximity to non-artificial, unalienated human culture. It’s traditional (lots of the tunes are hundreds of years old, passed down mostly orally), but it’s a living tradition. Extraordinary. Take my money.
The coming slopnami may well be the end for many artists, but for her and others already trading in an unfakeable way on the idea of authenticity, it might be a blessing in disguise.
I've paid to see writers speak many times over the years. There's some kind of business model there, though I haven't tried to analyze the sustainability.
> I wonder if we're headed for a future where it is almost completely impossible to make money off human-made "authentic" art because it simply can't compete with the effort-to-dollar ratio of slop
I disagree. It will create a subculture of people that appreciate human arts like never before.
The vast majority will consume slop, sure, but there is a growing cohort, especially from younger people, that explicitly seek man-made art. An example: YouTube has been inundated by AI mixes by talentless hacks, and when you happen upon a mix by a real human, the majority of comments are along the lines of “thank you for keeping the arts alive. I have had enough of that AI shit” - none of them care if it tastes or sounds good enough, they reject AI slop on pure principle, and so do I. I don’t give a shit how good the machine fakes are nowadays, I just avoid it altogether, and find in appreciation of human ingenuity and creativity like never before in my life.
But yes, as I said, the vast majority will consume slop, but then again the vast majority have no taste whatsoever and would consume “manmade slop” like pop music and superhero blockbusters, and there is no hope for redemption for them. (I am being shamelessly elitist here). The masses will not have cared about the arts anyway. All AI has done is for artists to take their craft more seriously, and to more clearly separate the wheat from the philosophical zombies with a Suno subscription that still don’t get why humans create and appreciate art.
I read a lot and I’m not that scared about AI books because I seek the interesting ones (in my subjective opinion) and don’t buy the cheapest at the airport shop to pass the time, which is the niche that’s getting disrupted here.
I don't think "produced for free" is a salve to this, completely, at least.
People spending time/effort/resources on Authentic Stuff have to eat, and there's no shortage of people who have some other income source posting slop for the social standing/clout/attention of being an artist/a recomp dev/an emulator dev/etc.
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