akhil

You say that the times are bad. Be better yourselves, and the times will be better: You are the times.

Technology must multiply human agency. DMs closed.

[akhil @fkasummer]

If you have an obsessive streak, this is the greatest time to be working on frontier technology. The problems are genuinely monumentally difficult, which makes progress feel amazing. Besides, it's quiet on the frontier. None of the circus of mainstream AI.

[akhil @fkasummer]

d5176f8f4c439d3014c6adce42814509c19c33ad119e1f4fe39baf59ffbd2c3577ec0fbf51ba73b913fc1b0d97a59c82046c4f9a2900df2c4449ff925b340a38

[akhil @fkasummer]

Economics of AI at the moment suggests there's $10K out there in someone's pocket that is worth more than the many hundreds of billions of dollars sloshing around because those dollars can get the necessary leverage over depleted physical resources and start a non-zero-sum game.

[akhil @fkasummer]

If you're a technologist, you have a duty to do more than critique. As Blake said:

"I must create a system, or be enslaved by another man's.
I will not reason and compare: my business is to create."

[cat ✝️ @a_musingcat]

the technologists will not stop . they are incapable of it . every technology that is possible will be created

[akhil @fkasummer]

It's time to read CS Peirce. Let's see how much of a dent I can make in two volumes.

[akhil @fkasummer]

My criterion is: make sure you're working on the most important, civilization-critical technological problem, and review it often.

This automatically rules out LLMs and a whole host of things that are DDoSing most people.

[Fahd Ananta @fahdananta]

We’re hitting a period in time in tech where money is irrelevant.

Important to re-evaluate all priors. The most expensive thing right now is to work with people that are just larping and wasting their time. You will actively get dumber and fall behind.

This was always true but the clock cycles have collapsed to be much faster now.

[akhil @fkasummer]

This is a limited view of reasoning. Mathematical logic can be a blinding force when you think about knowledge production and its reflexive relationship to consciousness and cognition.

[C. S. Peirce @CSPeirceSpeaks]

Ask your pretended logician whether there are any necessary reasonings of an essentially different character from mathematical reasonings. If he says no, you may hope he knows something about logic; but if he says “yes,” he is contradicting a well-established truth
/1

[akhil @fkasummer]

I wonder if there are limits to symbolization.

[akhil @fkasummer]

This suggests our idea of intelligence is wrong.

[Opus Copus @OpusCopus88]

@razibkhan He may have well been one of the smartest people in the world for his birth year considering both physics Olympiad and Putnam honorable mention

He switched into AI from biology at over 30 and was VP of research at OpenAI just a few years later…

[akhil @fkasummer]

Been reading Sloterdijk. Good. I'll be reading more like this.

[akhil @fkasummer]

@girlbossnxt plausible in context

[akhil @fkasummer]

There's an emerging coalition of catholic technologists. Many cradle catholics :)

[People's Art of War @pplsartofwar]

Techbros believed they were above religion, so naturally they made their work their religion and ask you to fund their latest jihad/crusade against humanity.

[akhil @fkasummer]

It's curious that we believe nature evolves but don't think so about the universe. Anthropocentric bias + scale.

[akhil @fkasummer]

@girlbossnxt Well, between the rationalist sex cults, the shrimp welfare philanthropists, and garden-variety incompetence and psychopathy, it's just difficult.

[akhil @fkasummer]

What is the relationship between gravity and computation?

[akhil @fkasummer]

These people are not technologists despite their STEM educations and sci-fi predilections. Not having the chops to spar with complex systems (including social, technical, political, economic, etc., aspects) is the tell.

AI safety is the current manifestation.

[Phil Trubey @PTrubey]

Y2K was the dumbest thing ever. It was easily mitigated, and companies had years to work on it. I remember VC backed companies “working” on Y2K, which evaporated 1/1/2000.

Dario sees everything through the lens of computers, but there’s a whole world out there that just adapts when computers don’t work.

AI isn’t a risk anymore than PCs or the Internet were. We will find problems … and fix them.

[akhil @fkasummer]

Hmm.

[C. S. Peirce @CSPeirceSpeaks]

Ask your pretended logician whether there are any necessary reasonings of an essentially different character from mathematical reasonings. If he says no, you may hope he knows something about logic; but if he says “yes,” he is contradicting a well-established truth
/1

[akhil @fkasummer]

@lu_sichu Kauffman is inside the math.

[akhil @fkasummer]

What is the relationship between reflexivity and the limits of human knowledge?

[akhil @fkasummer]

@lu_sichu hahahaha

[akhil @fkasummer]

I genuinely would love to know why people bounce off of Hegel. People I know for sure are smart take issue with his language (?).

[square 🟥 @chloeallegra228]

I feel like most people that love Hegel engage with the work indirectly

[akhil @fkasummer]

I wonder if math is just like the alphabet in this regard.

[little grey mouse 🐭 @mouse_math]

to me it seems far simpler and much more likely that instead of the platonic notion of all math dwelling in some ideal eternal domain waiting to be discovered, math is the product of collections of logical statements devised by humans and has no special metaphysical status.

[akhil @fkasummer]

@BeebsMemes Oh yeah.