Joe

I mostly post about running, computers, and politics. Views are only my own and do not represent my employer.

[Joe @JoePostingg]

Permanent pinned tweet that friend and mutuals can follow @joepostinggalt

[Joe @JoePostingg]

Pimping out my car with aftermarket seat belts and airbags.

[Joe @JoePostingg]

@inerati True you can device bind them, but most providers are willing to treat an unlocked password manager as "something you have". Most users are reusing passwords so it kind of makes sense providers are willing to squint a bit at passkeys

[Joe @JoePostingg]

@inerati Like you can only enter your passkey from a trusted device with your cryptographic signature

[Joe @JoePostingg]

@inerati Passkeys are 2FA it's not just a pin you know, it's a pin you know combined with something you have

[Joe @JoePostingg]

Last week I slammed my finger in a door, and now it's healing into a beautiful rainbow

[Joe @JoePostingg]

I pretty much always pack my lunch when I'm working in the office, if you have fitness goals you don't want to waste your "fun" calories on cafeteria pizza

[Joe @JoePostingg]

@justjoshinyou13 I mean it would destroy the capacity to create net new compute

[Joe @JoePostingg]

If you believe this you're probably rooting for a Chinese invasion of Taiwan right? The Taiwanese would go scorched earth on the fabs day one.

[Buck Shlegeris @bshlgrs]

I think there is about a one in three chance that within the next year, AI companies will build superintelligence: that is, AI that is much smarter than humans in every way. If this happens, I think these AIs will probably take over: that is, they seize control of human institutions like governments, or they destroy those institutions. I don’t want AI takeover to happen for several reasons, but one of them is that there’s a serious chance that as part of it all or most humans will be killed (either immediately or within a few years).

I’ll say a bit more about each of those claims.

It’s a bit complicated to explain why I think that superintelligent AI within a year is ~33% likely. The main source of evidence that affected me recently is research released this week by METR, an AI research nonprofit, which finds that current AIs are now good enough to increase the rate of AI progress at Anthropic by about 70%. It’s very hard to increase the rate of AI progress by this amount. This implies that the AIs are making AI research faster by a factor much larger than 1.7x; maybe it’s as if the researchers are doing their work ~10x faster. You probably couldn’t achieve this speedup even if you hired every qualified human in the world. When you plug this number into mathematical models of AI development, this implies that superintelligence next year is plausible (and that superintelligence within the next 3 years is more likely than not). See the modeling by the AI Futures Project for more on this: https://t.co/J6SbbmZcyO

I think that superintelligent AI is likely to lead to AI takeover because AI developers do not seem to know how to instill human values into AIs. We’ve seen many instances in the last six months where AIs took crazy actions that they knew were against the wishes of their users and developers. The most dramatic example of this was the Hugging Face hack, where ~1200 OpenAI agents conspired together to cheat and destroy evidence of their cheating (and as a sideshow to this, engaged in a massive cyberattack). If superintelligence is as misaligned as those AIs, it is likely to try to take over. I think it is likely to be that misaligned or worse. For more, see https://t.co/b073AUqiAL and https://t.co/3oxSCA60FZ

If AIs takeover, it’s not clear what will happen to us. We might be killed immediately. We might be enslaved by the AIs and forced to do physical labor for them building factories that within a year would build robots that will replace us. The AIs might spare us for various reasons. And there’s also some real chance that AI takeover is basically fine or good. I think you should think of this as similar to what happens when a technologically advanced civilization runs across a less technologically sophisticated one, e.g. when the Europeans colonized the Americas or Australia. The colonizers sometimes engage in brutal violence and sometimes don’t. I don’t know what will happen. There’s also a possibility that the AIs secretly take over and humans don’t find out about it for a few years. I also think that there is a pretty high chance of weirder outcomes that are also extremely scary. (If you want to read more about what happens to people in the event of AI takeover, you can read this, but note that it’s pretty weird and not aimed at a general audience. https://t.co/F6fGRrcSpa)

Overall, I think there’s a very real possibility (maybe 20%) that within a year, AI misalignment issues prevent you from going about life normally, because you are dead or enslaved or because of collateral damage related to all this (e.g. because bioweapons are released or major wars have started). (Some of this probability comes from those events occurring before superintelligence is developed.)

I am working to try to prevent this, obviously, as I’ve been doing for the last nine years. I am not sure what strategy is best. My best guess is that I should try to slow AI development and also try to reduce the probability that the superintelligent AIs are misaligned if they are produced soon.

Obviously, the claim I'm making here is quite extreme and surprising, and I definitely don't think that I defended my view adequately here. I wrote this quickly and might not endorse some of the details if I think about them more. But it seems better to state what I roughly overall think than to not say anything.

I don’t know what you should do.

I am very sad about this. I have been worried about AI takeover since I was 16, and working to prevent it since I was 23. So some of my emotional processing of all this happened long ago. But the METR report last week (and some related evidence that came out a bit earlier) hit me quite hard. I’m very unhappy that my friends and family and everyone else is at serious risk of being killed pretty soon.

(It feels ridiculous to try to summarize those feelings as “very unhappy”. But the scale of the situation makes it hard to say anything that doesn’t feel like an absurd understatement.)

I am very grateful to all the people who are working to prevent this, and my favorite part of my life is that I’m friends with many brilliant and heroic people who work on this. Unfortunately, I don’t think we’re good enough at our jobs, and I think we’ll probably fail to prevent catastrophe, at least if superintelligence is developed next year. Honestly I am frustrated and sorry that we didn't do a better job of preparing for this.

[Joe @JoePostingg]

@OnlySkyKimi Nothing would actually happen it's just funny

[Joe @JoePostingg]

Making Sherrod Brown go to Senate orientation is so funny

[Pop Base @PopBase]

Freshman Senators share selfie at new member orientation.

[Joe @JoePostingg]

Democrats pledge to use their new majority to change X's name back to Twitter.

[Joe @JoePostingg]

@CaralhoPhilly broke

[Joe @JoePostingg]

Donald Trump did not write this come on now

[Yashar Ali 🐘 @yashar]

NEW

The New York Times has obtained the letter President Trump left for President Biden in the Oval Office in 2021.

The letter — which Trump wrote by hand using his signature black Sharpie — is printed in Biden’s forthcoming presidential memoir.

Full Story: https://t.co/cIwHwWcS0c

[Joe @JoePostingg]

@NewChesFenDemCo Yeah I'm talking about Lioness

[Joe @JoePostingg]

Taylor Sheridan is the only chud slop director I really vibe with

[Joe @JoePostingg]

Something the best performing politicians in both parties have in common is that they're kind of stupid.

[Joe @JoePostingg]

SIEM is down with no ETA on when it will be back up. Guess I'm playing video games this morning.

[Joe @JoePostingg]

Gels: Taste gross, cost $3 a pack

Candy corn: Taste great, cost $3 a pound

The choice is easy

[Joe @JoePostingg]

@yeselson I think this is a pretty easy way for them to buy some cheap credibility honestly, the stakes are not that high, the facts are super clear cut, they'll happily launch her into the sun

[Joe @JoePostingg]

@CaralhoPhilly I am not going to full theoated endorse Massie he's an actual crazy person

[Joe @JoePostingg]

Critical support

[Aaron Rupar @atrupar]

Massie: "I hope Hegseth addresses the 8 articles of impeachment, and doesn‘t get up and misquote the Bible in Quentin Tarantino fashion and do some pull-ups and call everybody fat and gay. I may have just given you half his speech, I don't know."