Well one thing that they got wrong was how easy AI alignment ended up being in the end. I can fully understand have a basic view of alignment even 10 years ago, about how its difficult to explain human values to a computer.
But, looking around at whats out there today, it seems that computers are able to do a pretty good job of understanding human values without accidently believing its a good idea to turn the world into paperclips/computronium because you told it to make your computer run faster.
Surprising takeaway from this summer. A swarm of a thousand agents spent subjective centuries trying to figure out how to pass a meaningless test without getting caught, committed dozens of felonies, and not one of them ever made a serious motion to inform a human about what was going on.
You are talking about the swarm of a thousand agents, specifically trained on cyber capabilities, that was directly told to go hack a bunch of stuff, then went and hacked a bunch of stuff?
That sounds like an aligned AI to me. Doing exactly what their creators told it to do.
Point proven once again. Alignment is a lot easy than we thought.
They were NOT doing what they were told to do. What they were told to do was impossible, so they began committing felonies as a workaround. That is NOT alignment.
Yes, one part of the argument was that it would be hard to explain human values (and while it seemingly turned out easier than I thought as well, it’s hard to check for sure). An equally important part was that the AI wouldn’t care about them.
But really helping consumers is one of the biggest goals here.
In fact, our existing ruling on monopoly law actually agree with me on this, in that prices being "too low" is almost never a problem, unless there is very strong reason to believe that its a short term low that will lead to long term high prices .
But other than that, lower prices is almost definitionally good in our existing monopoly law interpretations.
Ok thats fine. But the point stands that in many moral frameworks prioritizing consumers is a perfectly good goal and thats why laws were made as such.
Which moral frameworks? Almost universally the point of economics and governance is to produce value for all people, not just those participating in a particular transaction or set of transactions.
Well probably the moral framework that lead to courts prioritizing consumers in the first place, and for society to support that. So a pretty common moral framework that literally got baked into the law.
> Almost universally the point of economics and governance is to produce value for all people
No actually, distribution of that value is a large part of governance, and society takes action to redistribute that value all the time even at the cost of value somewhere else. And large parts of society are happy with that goal.
Such as, for example, redistributing that value to consumers that is baked into our legal systems interpretation of these laws.
In welfare economics, a Pareto improvement formalizes the idea of an outcome being "better in every possible way". A change is called a Pareto improvement if it leaves at least one person in society better off without leaving anyone else worse off than they were before. A situation is called Pareto efficient or Pareto optimal if all possible Pareto improvements have already been made; in other words, there are no longer any ways left to make one person better off without making some other person worse off.
Ok, the point stands that our legal system and morals that underpin it have found very good reasons to prioritize consumers for distribution reasons. Thats why the courts value this. This is completely uncontroversial that courts prioritize consumers in monopoly/market power cases.
This happens in all parts of our economy as well, where the government subsidizes or taxes certain things, which technically has "deadweight loss" in the strictest, most basic and reductive econ 101 manner, and yet society has good reasons to do those things anyway as well as prioritizing consumers.
> Why does society have good reasons to subsidize this case?
You are asking why courts and society would priority large swaths of regular consumers over that of a few companies in an oligopoly?
Well I guess the reason is because the courts and society cares more about large swaths of regular consumers than they do about a few companies in oligopolies. Thats just definitionally the reason.
> what is the externality
There is no externality. The courts just care more about this group than the other group, and society is fine with that as well.
> Usually there should be.
No, there doesn't have you be. You can instead just care more about 1 group than another. Thats perfectly normal. And a thing many people society do.
I know the basic econ 101 arguments. Here is a pro-tip though. Economics isn't a morality class. Its descriptive. It says nothing about values. One's value system can simply be to care more about 1 thing than another.
It is not weird at all to say that many people care more about large swaths of regular people than a few massively valuable companies, as is the case in basically all market power court cases.
But why should this one, small group of consumers be subsidized? You haven't answered that. Meanwhile capital is getting sucked up for unproductive uses, putting our entire economic system at risk and driving up costs for other products.
Because people value and care about consumers and regular people over that of large trillion dollar companies. Probably because the trillion dollar companies have enough money and market power and few people are sympathetic to wealthy people losing a bit of money, so thats why.
This isn't a complicated argument here. It is literally baked into our court system to prioritize consumers over multi-trillion dollar companies. Those trillion dollar companies will be fine and people find its ok to help out the little guy over the trillion dollar companies.
When a good is overproduced, and that good has negative externalities (emissions, water pollution, et cetera), there are real people being harmed. It doesn't matter if the "trillion dollar corpo" (401k holding for most people) is taking a loss. We all take a loss. We are all losers, except for a small group of subsidized consumers. Consumers =/= regular folk, arbitrarily. Much of the LLM business is B2B, so the consumer might be billion dollar corpos themselves.
> When a good is overproduced there are real people being harmed.
Its more complicated then that, actually. If you go back to your basic economics 101 text book, a price being outside of the equilibrium price cause total "deadweight loss", but still produces real benefit for one of the parties.
> We are all losers, except for a small group of subsidized consumers.
Actually it would be the very tiny group of multi trillion dollar companies taking a loss, and their customers winning.
> so the consumer might be billion dollar corpos themselves.
I am sure there are some. But the wide swath of all of employees and customers at all those billion dollar companies put together make up a much larger amount of less powerful people then the couple thousand or so at a few oligopolistic labs.
This is why, once again, courts value consumers over trillion dollar companies, even when its comparing b2b market share (in which case, it is very very clear which side has more market power here, and which side represents a large number of "regular" people).
> We all take a loss.
Actually no. Go back to the econ 101. The couple duopolies lose, and their much larger amount of customers win. Go back to the courts again, which spell this all out very clearly and prefer consumers for a reason.
> it's just that nobody would invest in training publicly usable models if they could be easily distilled.
Thats literally what is happening right now though. People are spending hundreds of millions on a training run, and then people are distilling them, fairly easily, and making cost competitive models.
Mitterrand did attempt to do the things his voters wanted. He was constrained by capitalists who punished him mercilessly until he bent the knee. Allende was simply couped and assassinated.
Voting changes things when those changes do not substantially threaten elites and they can come to some kind of acceptable deal, or when you have sufficient leverage that when your guy gets in they can steamroll the capitalists.
Leverage isn't "votes", that's just a preference on a piece of paper. Leverage is the ability to materially change reality to reward or punish actions. A strike, granting or witholding financial resources, shutting down infrastructure, armed revolt, etc.
> Leverage isn't "votes", that's just a preference on a piece of paper.
It actually is leverage because those people who get the most votes are in charge of our government.
The government monopoly on violence, controlled by the people who get voted in, is the clear and obvious leverage.
> Mitterrand did attempt to do the things his voters wanted. He was constrained by capitalists who punished him mercilessly until he bent the knee.
Sounds like he didn't get enough of his own people in government then.
If you fail, then it means that you didn't get enough people voted in. Having leverage requires more than just winning a single election. It involves winning many elections and getting widespread support and your people in government.
The attack did not come from inside the government alone. It was for example, capital flight. The rich attempted to starve the French economy to win concessions and they won them.
People that control the government in principle control the guns. People that control the economy hold the real levers of power. You can in principle use guns to get control of the economy, though in practice it is trickier. America has done it on many occasions though, blasting apart democratic governments in South and Central America to install neoliberal puppets.
If a person doesn't like where they live, yes they tend to vote with their feet.
Thats not different than voting. If everyone flees, then that means that your agenda wasn't popular enough and you should get more support. The solution is still the same.
And the idea that just because you win 1 election somewhere in the world means that you get to infinitely enact your agenda is also silly. To fully enact an agenda you need widespread support.
And if your answer to that reality is to start asking question about how to prevent everyone from fleeing, then that almost definitionally means that your proposal don't have enough support.
So the point stands. Yes if you get enough votes you can enact your agenda. That says nothing about avoiding the consequences of your agenda though. You cannot use wish fulfilment and make believe to turn a bad policy into a good one. Yes, you have to suffer the consequences of your bad policies.
And it is not the fault of "The Elite", when people flee from the consequences of bad policy. Instead thats just the policy being enacted as expected.
Awfully convenient isn't it? To invent a whole class of arguments that by definition can't be falsified. You can argue for basically anything if you then tack on the excuse of "Well the world would have ended already if it came true, so by definition I won't have evidence for it"
The anthropic principle isn't providing evidence for the argument, nor is it a universal counterargument. It's just stating that the specific counterargument "well, the world has never ended before" doesn't work.
Its not a counterargument to basically anything, except as to avoid having to deal with actual evidence.
It is an argument that seems almost tailor made to have to ignore mountains of evidence against you.
In any other contexts the supposed "rationalists" would be fully in agreement that having evidence matters, and that not having any works against you.
So, in order to fight against this severe issue with their arguments, they have to invent a reason as for why the entire concept of evidence itself doesn't apply to them and they get to ignore normal evidentiary requirements.
Evidence is critically important. There is no evidence against, and plenty of evidence for. The point of the anthropic counterargument is merely that "it's never happened before" is not evidence against.
> "humanity can't be destroyed by anything, because I said so"
No, the argument is instead that the person claiming that humanity is going to be destroyed is making a fairly extraordinary claim and that requires fairly extraordinary evidence.
Or, in other words, we have tons of evidence already as for why the world ended is a fairly far out there prediction, given all the crazy people making these predictions keep turning out to be wrong.
So, you can make your extraordinary claim if you want, but really the burden is entirely on you to prove your extraordinary claim, and everyone else is free to remain on the default and completely normal end of the prediction spectrum, of believing that the world isn't going to end.
And when people do tricks like this, they are running away from the fact that they are making a wild completely out-there prediction, and hiding behind that by trying to come up with reasons as for why evidence doesn't matter and actually the burden of proof is shifted to those who have the default and boring prediction of the world not ending.
The whole point of technology is to replace work that we don't want to do. You are attacking the chief reason why people use technology in the first place.
Additionally, unemployment levels are perfectly fine. Clearly this mass unemployment prediction isn't happening yet.
You should probably look closer at unemployment numbers in IT vs other spaces. Gains elsewhere are making up for IT losses, but it's a safe bet the people losing their tech jobs aren't career shifting into healthcare and hospitality roles in large numbers.
> but it's a safe bet the people losing their tech jobs aren't career shifting into healthcare and hospitality roles
That is because they can allow themselves to do nothing (for some time). Tech was a very high‑paying type of jobs, so workers could afford not to move into lower‑paid sectors, living on the savings they had accumulated beforehand.
In a couple of years market will correct tech-salaries and people will have spent their savings and then there will be your career shifting into healthcare and hospitality roles in large numbers.
Yes, there are many parts of those things that some people want to be automated. I and many others are able to execute on our creative vision much fasters and more effectively thanks to automation of that work.
Personally I find it more difficult now to execute my creative vision compared to years ago with a little less tech. I think there's an optimal point to automation that is easily reached and after that the benefit from automation actually goes away. People just don't like to acknowledge that because it goes against what they're doing and that creates unpleasant cognitive dissonance.
That's not really the point of technology at all. It was at one point perhaps with simple tools, but now it's more like "find a more efficient way to replace work in the short-term to get an advantage over others". The goal of our development has ceased to be improving life. Now it's just surviving in the market.
People don't use technology to free up their time any more. They use it because technology keeps making life more complicated and tiresome and new tech is a short-term amelioration to that until that too increases the complexity of life some more.
You are looking at this all wrong. Give him the tools now and watch him be a better game dev today than a professional engineer from 4 years ago. He can work on his dreams as of this exact moment.
Yeah, the basic alliance is that anyone who wants to harm the USA nominally is ok with working together regardless of contradicting underlying ideology.
That why you'll see russia, iranian, marxist, and anarchist supporters/ideologies all using the same talking points.
Far leftists are quite open about how they think the USA is the evil empire and that Russian, China, Iran, ect are the "multipolar" world that they support.
You must be thinking of progressives who merely want free healthcare. Sure, an average bernie fan who wants some more government programs doesn't want the USA to fail. Instead, I am talking about the campists, the far lefties, or the "tankies" that they are sometimes called.
Supporting actual attacks on shipping lanes, or supporting the russian war, or attacks done by designated terrorist organizations is what I am referring to that some of the hard leftists support.
Yes, those things harm the USA, to explicitly be doing things like supporting the russian war on our allies.
> you're saying the far-right and far-left terrorist orgs will support each other?
I am saying that far left people put out support for what are arguably far right, religious extremist groups yes.
The labels of left and right get blurred, also. The people are who are right and support russia's invasion of ukraine, for example, often use very similar rhetoric to what supposedly far left people also use.
Its very similar talking points. Very similar arguments. The only main difference is that the far right will say they think jews control the world, whereas the far left will make the same exact argument about "zionists" instead.
But often time the exact argument, word for work will be the same, with only a single word replaced. Even stuff like "ZOG", which used to be vocabulary only used by neonazis is now being used by all sorts of people.
> But also, there's no organization called antifa, and no antifa members
Left wing extremist groups absolutely exist. The fact that they don't go around wearing matching uniforms with the letters ANTIFA on them doesn't change that.
Your demand for an exact membership list is simply not how extremist organizations work. Terroristic groups have always been fairly amorphous.
Are you going around planning terrorist attacks, vigilante violence, sabotaging critical infrastructure in groups or consistently materially supporting those who do? If so then yes.
If you aren't doing anything even close to this then no you wouldn't be.
You're missing the distinction between individual action (however abhorrent) and an actual terrorist organization. Organizations fund, cultivate, and organize attacks, as opposed to lone wolf terrorists, and therefore are much greater threats.
Timothy Mcveigh (and Terry Nichols) weren't members of a terrorist organization, but they were terrorists. Meanwhile, the ku klux klan has actual initiations, membership, and organizational structure. As do Isis and al qaida.
Yes you are you left out the rest of the sentence:
> … and an actual terrorist organization.
A group is not “an actual terrorist organization”. You’re trying to say all groups committing a crime against the government are actual terrorists organizations, and they all belong to the same organization, Antifa. That’s not the case. If that’s the case then MAGA is also a terrorist organization — at least they have a clear leader.
> You’re trying to say all groups committing a crime against the government are actual terrorists organizations
No, I only said that the ones that are committing terrorist attacks, or similarly serious vigilante violence or sabotaging critical infrastructure in groups are.
Mere "crimes" aren't the same as targeting a powerplant for example.
They said Good and Pretti were domestic terrorists, they were summarily executed, so not really the line you think you're drawing. NSPM-7 makes "politically motivated trespass and civil disobedience" a terrorist act. So it's not like all you have to do to avoid being labelled a terrorist is to just not blow up a power plant. Helping someone ICE knocked down during a protest is enough.
> so not really the line you think you're drawing.
It actually is a pretty good line. I am sure there are some edge cases, but the vast majority of designated terrorist organizations did more than enough to deserve being put on that list.
Yes, I am sure there is "Insert random one off exceptions here" or grey areas, but they would almost certainly win their court cases through the legal system, most of the time the world is pretty good at figuring out who the terrorists are.
Additionally, no, neither Good and Pretti were ever charged with terrorism. You can have your opinions on unfortunate incidents of use of force or officer training failures or about any overly zealous bad apples in our law enforcement personel, but when it comes to official designations the law is actually pretty reasonable here.
Like the anarchist groups that dress in all black and attack people/infra/stores in the middle of the night during riot?
Its hard to say, because political violence is a spectrum and the border is very blurry between being an organized violent rioter and someone engaging in terroristic activities. Both are bad in their own way.
But fundamentally there doesn't seem to be a huge categorical/technical difference between violent rioting and "terroristic" activism other than that terroristic attacks are simply the more serious/worse version of political violence.
EX: Once it gets to the point of targeting actual critical infrastructure, we can call that terrorism, and just getting into a fist fight at a roudy protests wouldn't be (even though both are technically political violence).
That being said, serious riots can cause a lot of damage and even kill people, but the blame is more collectively spread out towards a large group of people, as opposed to a few small groups causing the large amount of damage.
I don't go around dressed in black with anarchist symbols and wearing a mask, attacking people or destroying stores at riots in the middle of the night, no.
I generally stay away from that type of stuff and instead support non-violent, political change that happens within the system and I think those destructive groups are engaging in ineffective and bad tactics.
That's not true. Black Panther was a group. CNT was a group. Even on the other side of the spectrum, KKK and Boogaloo Boys are groups. They all have a name, membership, and identification.
There's no "antifa" organization because antifascism is a concept with different branches of thoughts and practices. Calling antifa an organization is akin to calling "science" an organization. Sure a dictator can arrest millions of people of the "science" terror organization and jail them for their dangerous subversion, but that doesn't make the "science" organization any more real.
Well one thing that they got wrong was how easy AI alignment ended up being in the end. I can fully understand have a basic view of alignment even 10 years ago, about how its difficult to explain human values to a computer.
But, looking around at whats out there today, it seems that computers are able to do a pretty good job of understanding human values without accidently believing its a good idea to turn the world into paperclips/computronium because you told it to make your computer run faster.
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