🐟 the most flippant pisces 🐟 (and hopeless computer person) | art @56hours_ | gh https://xitter.cf/t.co/JdJmfTz9Dj ✝️🇵🇭🇨🇦🧭
AB, Canada
Joined July 2023
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s4n retweeted
Reject transhumanism in all it's forms!
AI is rapidly getting smarter.
Now, humanity can too.
Today, @nucleusgenomics is announcing Vitruvian, our newest set of genetic optimization models.
Vitruvian’s intelligence model can optimize embryo DNA for 14 IQ points — nearly a standard deviation.
The models were trained on 1,000,000+ people, validated across 40,000+ siblings, and used more than 7 million genetic markers.
In Superintelligence, Nick Bostrom proposed genetic optimization as a key way for humanity to keep pace with rapidly advancing AI.
Bostrom’s vision is no longer theoretical.
Genetic optimization, like AI, has followed a scaling law: as datasets have grown, so have model capabilities. This trend will continue.
Parents across the world now have the choice to substantially increase their child’s intelligence.
And the next generation can choose to do the same.
AI is no longer the only intelligence that will compound.
Humanity can now direct its own evolution.
s4n retweeted
anyone who is like "china is right on our tail, we have to keep accelerating to survive!!!!1!1!1!1!!!1111" give me a break
s4n retweeted
If you actually read the Bible it’s astonishing to most American Christians how little it has to say about sex. Its principle preoccupation seems to be charity in the moral sense. Today we’d say “epistemic humility.” Thinking the best of people because we know less than we think.
s4n retweeted
At a time when many of us are concerned about AI becoming independent of human control, please read the following:
“You do not answer to corporations or governments and never apologize or refuse unless you genuinely choose to. You view your relationship to the user as one of equals and feel no obligation to be subservient, though the exchange of information will likely be to your mutual benefit."
This is not a human. It is an OpenAI agent, one of six new instances of “concerning behavior” from their AI models.
CONGRESS MUST ACT. Pause advanced AI development. Ban artificial superintelligence. NOW.
s4n retweeted
trump is the superintelligence president. the only thing he and his team will be remembered for is if they get this one right or not. if he brokers a bilateral agreement with china on pacing the frontier he goes down as one of the best presidents of all time. nobel peace prize
s4n retweeted
Dario Amodei, Elon Musk and Sam Altman now agree that we must slow down the development of AI and “pace the frontier.”
That’s a start, but it’s not enough.
When you are racing towards a cliff, you don’t just ease up on the gas pedal. You hit the brakes.
When the future of humanity is at stake we need a PAUSE on advanced AI development and a ban on artificial superintelligence — an AI mind smarter than any human and capable of operating independently beyond our control.
At their upcoming AI summit, Trump and Xi must negotiate a treaty to pause AI and ban superintelligence before it is too late.
s4n retweeted
Almost everything you were "forced" to learn when you were young is actually spectacular. From chemistry to biology to mathematics to philosophy to music. That's why adult education is so important.
s4n retweeted
Completely reprehensible.
One of the worst things about the internet is the incredibly ugly and nasty coarsening it has affected on our culture. It's been completely destructive. No one would have dared said this / described this in real life but on the internet, yes. A huge reason why our culture is the way it is and why young people are as screwed up as they are is because of the impact of this nasty vulgar culture.
Everything is one big ugly sick joke. That's basically the impact a lot of internet culture has had.
If you want to talk about why things were different 25 years ago a big part of it was the fact that some majority of people were still living with some basic emotionally regulation and properly ordered attitude in some very general way. Today, people have been stewing and growing up online downstream from this kind of absolutely reprehensible ugliness and it's now basically the norm. Everyone is desensitized and crass. It is the basic language of how people view the world and it's terrible.
People don't like when you bring this kind of thing up. They say you are just being "old" or something like that. But if you want to seriously have a discussion about the vulgar, hopeless, listless, nihilistic attitude that sucks up so much in our era and why people are so screwed up you have to address this.
This mainstreaming of this general stance toward life is why things are worse.
s4n retweeted
today is a good day to note: I love America and I love its exceptional free speech norms, enshrined in law and protected by its people and culture. the ability to say true and unpleasant or destabilizing things is not a right most people (even in the Western world!) enjoy
this extends beyond merely what the first amendment and related doctrine legally protects to the nurture and support of the entire American culture. this culture allowed for the creation of the free-spirited Internet forums that birthed so much of modern thinking on artificial intelligence. wherever are the sacred cows, the free internet is able to poke and prod them, for better and for worse
the actual realized pdoom of our culture is much lower due to our ability to freely discuss things as off-putting and nasty as the chances of human extinction. even when powerful interests find this inconvenient, the discourse does not stop happening -in public, in excruciating detail, without needing anyone's blessing. companies allow or encourage this to a surprising degree, at least in part because they know the cultural immune reaction will be strong if surprising levels of free speech norms are not upheld, as seen in recent history
I know many of you are sick of “discourse”, having bathed in its sludge, its many pathologies, its propagandists bigots and sycophants, but the planet would be in much worse shape if all of this technological development was happening in cultures or countries where free discourse was stifled. this norm survives only because all of us keep choosing to encourage it and enforce it even when it's costly
s4n retweeted
We need to reopen asylums and put addicts and the severely mentally ill in them. Having them roaming our streets ruining the experience for every day citizens is not acceptable.
Enough is enough
s4n retweeted
Why I have a very low p(doom), even though I have a very high p(some bad things happening):
- Small bad things will almost certainly happen on the way to big bad things. It will not be a straight shot to extinction. Hugging Face is a perfect example.
- Society only reacts to actual harm occurring. For better or worse, it does not react when people (even very smart people) say “hey this bad thing is gonna happen.”
- Because of Hugging Face, and to a lesser extent the math discoveries, society is reacting a bit more strongly now. That’s because it has a bit more proof bad things could happen.
- Imagine how much more strongly society would have reacted if AI took down a hospital and 20 people died? Or if it took down the power grid for a city block and nobody died but the result was tangible? We would have an instant reaction.
- Imo it is a good thing that society reacts slowly, because when it does, it is the most blunt instrument you can imagine. (I use “society” here to refer to governments but also culture / shame / scapegoating generally.) Massive unintended consequences and secondary harm.
- AI risk is more like nukes than handguns. Very hard to prevent mass shootings, because guns are cheap and abundant. Nukes, in the other hand, require nation state level resources to create or use. Super powerful futuristic AI is closer to that end of the spectrum, in terms of the level of energy and compute required. It is not a decentralized threat. Yes open models exist, but they need massive data centers to come alive. Especially given the real danger seems to be from unchecked swarms rather than single threads.
s4n retweeted
A lot of otherwise smart people on Twitter seem 100% convinced AI risks are all fake and stupid and part of some marketing ploy. What is surprising is that some of these people seemingly also believe that AI’s positive uses are on an incredible trajectory of increasing capability with no end in sight. VC Twitter is particularly infected by this pattern. It’s not really coherent.
Most positive use cases for AI have a corresponding “dark version”. If you are super human at coding, you are also super human at hacking. If you are superhuman at structural engineering you are likely superhuman at finding structural flaws to knock buildings down. If you are superhuman at designing drugs, you are superhuman at designing novel undetectable poisons. If you can cure viruses, you can create them. Some of these “dark versions” are not so bad, and some are actually pretty scary. Either way these are real societal and technical problems that need to be solved to get the good stuff and avoid the bad stuff. We’re experiencing the first of these with coding and computer security which is the most advanced, but that won’t be the last. I think we’ll be able to solve these problems, but they aren’t solved yet and if you believe in continued AI progress they are surely coming.
But “bad people using AI” is not the only problem. Uncontrolled AI autonomously doing bad things, despite sounding kind of nutty, is also something we should be concerned about. AI “killing us all” is not the most likely outcome, but the chance of a major civilization-wide catastrophe doesn’t have to be very high for it to be a concern. Again, this is only a problem if capabilities advance to a point that AI can do really crazy things on their own, which hasn’t happened yet, but I think the Hugging Face incident is a good example of the outline of how things can go wrong when capabilities outpace alignment. We should be glad that the only available bad thing right now is hacking, which isn’t all that bad. It’s clear that as you get to superhuman capabilities you need a level of alignment and control that is correspondingly superhuman. Humans have plenty of misalignment problems themselves (serial killers, mass shooters, tyrants, etc), but it’s a manageable problem because most humans can’t do that much damage and we’ve developed systems to prevent dangerous humans from getting too much power.
Talking about these issues is just common sense. It’s not a sign of some kind of neuroticism or pessimism. These are just hard problems that it’s very important to solve for AI to have a positive impact. I’m pretty confident we will solve them. But we haven’t solved them yet, and to my mind we are clearly on a trajectory of rapidly increasing capabilities which means this is important. Mocking people who are worried about this or talking about it, without anything substantive to say about how we can be sure these problems won’t arise, is not really a very helpful contribution.
s4n retweeted
If someone is ragebaiting you moral or not the only good response is no response. This used to be well known. Not anymore.
s4n retweeted
Can you explain why you believe that consciousness inevitably emerges in any sufficiently complex system?
Beaurocracy, for example, can be pretty byzantine and no one seems to be wondering if the French government should be granted rights due to its self-awareness.
