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Then society should have the right to end your life as soon as you're no longer useful as you've just reduced yourself to an algorithm, what value do you serve if you're just a next word predictor ?

Reducing your self worth like that is a very stupid thing to do.


How does describing something reduce its worth?

Its a grossly incomplete description. A reductive description.

We use incomplete descriptions all the time. Like I could say "I'm an early riser". Is that reductive?

All statements are reductive because language is injective to reality.

Tech owns the current US admin so they are totally above the law. Vote wisely.

We had decades to avert the worst effects of climate change…batten down the hatches.

Ignorant question but won’t there be much smarter teams if people using LLMs to workout how to mitigate these threats. It seems like more of a problem if only a few people have access.

It seems like there would be a massive attacker bias in multiple ways. Defenders need consent, attacker does not. Defenders have to work with the human body, attackers only have to break it. Defenders have to stick to the law, which may prevent them from releasing anything at all, attackers do not. And so on. I would not surprised if the attacker's task is a hundred times easier here.

I guess any virus that is super destructive is probably not something that can spread very far as it kills its hosts beforehand ?

Yep, you'd want to put it on a timer. Optimally trigger it off some natural event, maybe temperature, so it can achieve universal penetration before activating.

Sounds a little bit sci-fi I don't think there is any viruses that exist that are just triggered off temperature ?

I mean I don't know, I'm not a biologist. But existing viruses are not optimized for sneaky mass deaths.

If one doesn't exist, how do you know one can ?

Well, it's rather more "if you're not a biologist, how do you know it can exist?" Things that don't exist yet are often very predictable. However, it simply seems to me that "Viruses can not condition on environmental temperatures or the side effects of environmental temperature in the body, such as response to UV exposure" is a quite implausible statement, and I have not heard of anything of the sort.

I guess Japanese could say the same thing in reverse ?

Oh, for sure. It's definitely one of these things that's only surprising because our cultural context is very different

Seems like the sort of thing we shouldn't be rushing to develop at all

Buddy, silicon valley is going to ram this down your throat so hard it might even come out your bottom, there is absolutely zero chance anyone is going to be slowing down developing anything if there is a chance it can make more money.


Money money money, must be funny, in a rich mans world...

They asked for a specific example, you've still not provided one, please provide the example.

Why?

1. I didn't say LLMs have made any breakthroughs in math, not because they haven't, but because it's irrelevant to my point. The parent comment is using the same argument academic research opponents have long used against research. The vast majority of research fails to meet their bar. How would your daily life be different if we had no humanities papers published since 2023? Or math?

2. You can google this in 10 seconds and see a dozen results in math. This is not a good-faith demand.


Or you can google and find out that those breakthroughs were not as revolutionary as they are presented.

For the last 60 years, whenever AI achieves something revolutionary, some people immediately say "well that wasn't particulary revolutionary".

Every single time.

It's a tired argument, and we should strive for the intellectual humility to do better in this forum.


Maybe AI isn't that incredible, the more you use it, the more you realize it's a tool, like a VCR, maybe that's why?

What was sold as AI was basically a "computer person". Maybe that isn't the reality so when people are like, "here's the self coding machine" everyone is a bit disappointed because it's not C3PO?


For my the tell tale sign is being obsessed with conspiracies, Candace Owens and Tucker Carlson, constantly talking about Jews, freeing Palestine and being antivax. I can almost guarantee someone is influenced by the twitter algorithm from that alone.

I forgot to add, Russia is good, Ukraine is bad

Yep. And the kicker is they are genuinely confused when all this lands badly.

Absolutely insane how the USA is speed running into Russia.

I was discussing BBQ with some friends the other day and living in Asia there are certain cuts that you basically have to get imported if you want to do it right. Basically every single person in that group, including Americans have decided they wouldn't trust or buy meat produce from the USA anymore as they don't trust it anymore...


> running into Russia.

except they also seem to speed running crashing the world economy, making it feels more like "speed running Russian government structures while speed running a soviet union future"...

which isn't really "that" surprising, if you consider that, while most people will suffer from a sever world economy crash, the ~top 1% or so will long term profit. Mainly because even iff they lose a huge lot they still have enough left to buy up theoretically well working businesses crashed by the large scale economy crash. Sure that would be very evil, but you only need a few of the richest pushing for it while the rest "just" doesn't push against it for this to happen. Or a few of the richest having even way more money then the rest. And given that both (huge differences in wealth of the wealthiest & lack of morals) seem the case it's hard to believe that the current direction is fully accidental.

Which brings use back to the topic of how any proper free market must not allow any to large concentration of money as it will break the market sooner or later. Or how democracies must not allow too much concentration of political power (or it break sooner or later very reliably historically speaking). Or how the one thing a society preaching tolerance can't tolerate is strong cases of intolerance. All the same kind of "naively it looks like a contradiction" cases where if you look into them it kinda start looking obvious that tolerating that is a bad idea.

Problem is while preventing aggregation of power, wealth, etc. is very viable if properly perused by politics, it's to late for prevention.

But also there isn't really a good fix once a country (or more like most of the world) failed to prevent it.

Trying to forcefully size assets is a severely unpleasant idea. More importantly but it's a thing things which tend to end very very badly.

And the ethical issues with that are pretty obvious, too.

Through also this isn't about millionaires, or the top 10%,1%,0.1%, but about wealth "beyond reason". Not sure where that starts but probably lowest in the the 50-100 millions and definitely in the billions (or trillions). I.e. the point where your wealth gives you trivially more political influence then the votes of the majority of people... I mean in the end about protecting democracy and a (proper) free market. It isn't about communism, no matter how much certain propaganda channels will claim that supposedly wanting a working democracy and free market is communism (or socialism). Through iff, and only if, you put the vague limit of when something start being "unreasonable rich" at a much lower point, e.g. inflation corrected 2 million, then _that_ is making it about communism like stuff. So it's a slippery slope. (Sadly too many people seem to have lost the ability (or will?) to have well differentiated discussions or opinions, always falling into extremes, so discussing such things seems often pointless)


It does feel a bit like people have so much money they could basically drive us into extinction (or close too it) by constantly supporting and funding psychopathic lunatics like Trump, helping them stay in power and watching them do nothing to hurt their business, therefore do nothing to stop anthropomorphic climate change.

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