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artificially-flavoured is also a tic unless the author was trying to make fun of load-bearing, but it’s a bit too subtle to make the point

This isn’t moral panic, it’s saying “hey, all these influential people are intimately connected across the strongest possible dimensions (money, sex, belief and legal grey areas), we should probably pay attention to that”

>all these influential people

And by all you mean 1-2 big names and a bunch of unknowns, with all other big names having no connection to this.


Pretty funny how the author fails to identify what the new jobs will be like and then immediately follows it up with the answer but in a way that is oblivious to what is of value in a post scarcity world: AI cannot be human.

The flop is that he jumps to the assumption that being human means hand carving wood or some other nonsense.

The thing that people desire above all else when all their material needs are met is human connection and involvement. Whether that is friendship, love, conversation, rivalry, companionship, gossip, play, competition or even just the silent presence of others. Honestly, just use your brain, why else do extremely wealthy people have multiple large houses, yachts, clubs, etc.? It’s not so they can just sit in them alone and admire their grandeur. Those things are for entertaining their friends and embarrassing their enemies, for hospitality, for lending while not in use to curry favour, to rise in social circles. It’s all about people.

This has been the case all throughout history for the wealthy. Ample documentation everywhere and no one sees it. Instead everyone is dumbfounded about what they’re going to do when they can’t spend all day turning a wrench or typing on a keyboard. Have you never entertained the idea of what you would do if you won the lottery tomorrow?


This is the same description as any other technology including fire.

Yep. Fire is actually a great example, its both useful and dangerous. And so we have probably 10s of thousands of fire regulations for products, buildings, vehicles. We have fire departments, we have regular fire drills, we think about fire safety constantly and for the very good reason that if we don't fire can kill us and destroy vast of amount of stuff.

So, hell yes. Let's treat AI with the same degree of care we treat fire.


Cool as long as I can still have my own firepit in my backyard, have a campfire when I go camping, have a gas stove, a furnace, birthday candles, etc.

All of those things are regulated too, at least in the US. No open fires on red flag days. Furnaces have product certification requirements.

I mean yeah. In this analogy you can do all those things. Though some may be subject to restrictions. Like you can't always have a campfire because sometimes the risk of burning down whole forests is too great.

It should be easy to calculate this for your own needs based on your playlists. The advantage of buying is that you build up your own catalog of artists that you listen to regularly which means you don’t have to keep paying for them. So, at first, buying the albums would be more expensive but after a few years it would become much less expensive. The exception would be if you are always looking for the latest tracks by a large number of artists but I don’t think that’s most people.

Older popular music can be purchased second hand or as a various artists album which also saves money.


You’re leaving out some options for sure. Not everyone would need to live under the conditions of a police state, you could theoretically screen everyone and assign them to various levels of risk which would determine their level of supervision.

While true, I'm not sure this is much better. There are many genetic traits which are correlated with increased criminality, risk taking, obesity, heart disease, unemployment, etc. IQ in particular is the most well correlated metric we have for criminality, for example. This would imply that some people are just born with fewer freedoms. That's probably a good thing for society in aggregate, but something about this doesn't feel quite right.

There are genetic traits correlated with virtually anything, including things that can't possibly be mechanistically linked to biology, so those correlations are saying less than you'd hope they would.

However strongly genetic marks predict criminality, zip code does it better.

Any solution to crime that starts with eliminating types of people instead of poverty is just a form of fascism.


I didn’t specify genetics

Gattica disagrees.

This is why utpoias are actually police state hellscapes. Who decides what risk means? Our current administration has declared that simply being anti-facist makes you a terorrist.

That just sounds like a police state with extra steps.

Development and improvement of nuclear weapons was an entirely American project until the technology was exfiltrated and then it became an instant arms race. That cat is already out of the bag with LLMs. Distillation is just the fastest way to keep pace but that in no way prevents other countries and actors from doing it the hard way.

An arms race doesn’t imply one side winning, it’s not a race with an end goal, it’s a race to keep pace or retake the lead position which can oscillate between the parties involved indefinitely. The other option is to agree to make no further progress or to disarm.


>an entirely American project until the technology was exfiltrated

No it wasn't. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tube_Alloys

Post WW2 the USA (for a bunch of quite interesting reasons) excluded the British. But, of course, the British had acquired a lot of knowledge from the program and were able to develop their own bomb.


There were leaks before the Manhattan project even concluded:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Klaus_Fuchs

Sure, non-US nuclear arms would have most certainly happpened either way, but exfiltration did presumably at least accelerate the timeline.


My point was more that it wasn't an entirely American project.

There were prominent scientists like Oppenheimer who did not think it needed to become an arms race, and campaigned against that. But there were others like Teller and the military who made it into an arms race, and kept upping the ante with more powerful nukes.

Point being humans make theses decisions. It's not an inevitability.


It was an inevitability. Unfortunately Oppenheimer was a fool when it came to politics. In game theory terms, the perceived benefits of "defecting" were too large.

The military mostly only developed more powerful nukes because early delivery and guidance systems were so inaccurate that they needed a large blast radius to hit anything. Once enabling technologies improved, R&D shifted from power to accuracy.


Nah, it’s just a deliberate setup for a false flag attack by “rogue AGI” which will necessitate widespread crackdowns on internet access and computer ownership so that control over communications can be centralized again.

I can’t help but laugh at this, it’s like a comedy skit with two people with different European accents accusing each other of being American.


We need an attestation platform so you can prove non-american-ness.

Cheers from Canada


Meanwhile, the brightest engineer they know left to work for a startup in San Francisco.


Oh no! He was detained by ICE and send off to Uganda.


Oh no! He took some bad peptides at a party and now has $500k in medical fees


We’re watching a repeat of the arguments against Chess and Go engines.

It’s all computation, humans just can’t always experience or explain the computation they are doing at the time so we call it creativity instead.


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