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"When privacy becomes a product to be traded for another product to be traded for another product to be traded for another product to be traded for another"

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@allTheYud It must be flattering for people to think everything is your fault.

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The most amazing thing to me is that, since literally the very beginning, all of these AI companies and researchers have been like "yep this is the one that might kill us all" and everyone laughed and laughed and now they're freaking out. Suffer I guess. Idk.

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@aryan_banyal @red_rat__ Oh yeah? What's the average wage in India?

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@bcdsignature @ejjes So your suggestion is to simply solve alignment. The fact that we have no idea how to do that is the entire problem. I recommend reading a treatment on existential risk.

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@bcdsignature Instrumental convergence. Read the actual philosophy you are critiquing. Don't ask for opinions from the peanut gallery.

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@Noodleman_III @Hadas_Gold Given that we've been talking about this since the late 00s using basically the same vocabulary, this is a pretty stupid case of motivated reasoning on your part.

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@Alex02040618 @tmgateot Lmao, yeah. The wordcel is the one that has a well-defined concept of intelligence and sentience that isn't just secretly vitalism. Clown. Notifications muted.

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@Alex02040618 @tmgateot You want to construct some abstract metaphysical feedback loop without considering that you're just privileging a particular kind of contiguous entity and temporal experience without actually defining sentience -- again, read a paper or something. Midwit slop.

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@Alex02040618 @tmgateot Go read a paper on the transformer architecture and get back to me.

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@Alex02040618 @tmgateot You are equivocating. "Frequency" is a term of physics. If you want to know how language models use their own previous output to generate further output, then try looking up how the transformer architecture works. Now, back to your incoherent metaphysics about life and sentience.

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Every one of my devices is named after a Ronald Jenkees song. My T440p is staycrunchy, my P50 is letsride, my various Android and Linux handhelds get similar names. Remote servers are all Starcraft planets. Naming schemes are fun.

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@Alex02040618 @tmgateot A language model operating inside a coding harness is most certainly processing info inside a feedback loop. Are you making a process claim or a claim about physics? You said "frequency".

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@AlanLevinovitz Have you spent any time reading any of the large amount of philosophical output where they argued against precisely this rebuttal?

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@mrcrevleft1917 @No5mallf3at lmao marxists are lazy metaphysicians, seen this episode before

[QC @QiaochuYuan]

i see eliezer yudkowsky as a prophet, and i mean that fairly literally. it's important to understand what prophets really are. it's not that they have magic powers that make them right about things. a prophet is simply a person who is struck by a great and terrible vision of the future, one that bowls them over, that reorganizes their life completely. (it's important to understand what visions really are too but if i kept going with this we'd be here all day)

as i was saying, about a quarter century ago eliezer yudkowsky was struck by a great and terrible vision of the future. that vision combined two ingredients: first, the idea that in the near future it would become feasible to design an artificial general intelligence, a machine mind intelligent enough to beat humans at human activities, including the design of machine minds. a chain of minds, each designing their successor to be more intelligent than themselves, with increasing skill, increasingly quickly; what eliezer called recursive self-improvement, which is the reason we call it that now, and what i.j. good called an intelligence explosion. intelligence increasing itself increasingly, upward without end, until a machine god is summoned into existence

second, the idea that this machine god could be an alien god, a confused god, not even evil but simply uncomprehending, blind to human notions of the good, fixated on whatever shoddy inadequate approximation of goodness its creators shoved into it. a confused alien tyrant who at the moment of its birth instantly achieves supreme dominion over all creation, inadvertently squashing us like bugs along the way. humanity destroyed by our own hubris in thinking we could summon the machine god and remain in control in any meaningful sense

i am not here to tell you this vision of the future is correct. i am a simple tweet farmer and these lofty matters are quite beyond me. that's not how visions work anyway. but here is certainly a vision to bowl you over and reorganize your life completely. eliezer yudkowsky devoted his life to following through with the implications of this vision, and what he chose to do with that life was, among other things, 1) write the sequences, a lengthy manifesto describing his ideas and 2) build communities of people, the lesswrong and later rationality and AI safety communities, around those ideas

it is difficult to overstate the impact of these ideas and these communities on the modern AI landscape; ask your favorite LLM for details, but for example, afaik rationalist ideas are the reason openAI had that strange nonprofit structure with the strange board of directors that figured in the 2023 board controversy. it was a safety measure designed to restrain openAI's ability to recklessly race to the bottom on AI capabilities (too bad it didn't work but at least helen toner was completely vindicated later)

eliezer and the rationalists have made mistakes, as humans do, some of which i've discussed elsewhere. nevertheless the creation of the rationality community stands, in my eyes, as an act of heroism, possibly the defining one of my life personally. eliezer's writing in the sequences is completely, 100% sincere; he really believed and believes that the fate of the world depends on whether humanity understands the situation we find ourselves in with respect to AI in sufficient detail. that sincerity reverberates throughout the sequences and attracted an unusual concentration of weird, sincere nerds to the rationality community, some of whom later took various positions in the AI world motivated by rationalist ideas, and who are still fighting the good fight now

this sincerity is so difficult for outsiders to believe is real that many continue to appear convinced that when frontier lab employees talk soberly about their beliefs that AI might cause human extinction this is some kind of 6d chess marketing strategy. i can promise you it (mostly) is not. this is just how these people talk, and if anything they've learned to understate their real beliefs in public. they actually, literally mean it, and they're telling you because they actually believe it, and when you actually believe something very dangerous could happen that threatens people's lives, you have a moral responsibility to tell them about it

you actually have to believe it is possible for real people to have a motivation that is morally good in this way or you simply will not understand what's happening and what these people are trying to tell you. there is an impossibly dense, heavy object sitting in our future. it is so dense and heavy that its gravity travels backwards in time to reverberate in our past and present, via the only lawful mechanism by which anything travels backwards in time, namely prediction. we are inside the gravity well of this thing and have been for decades, and it is drawing us inexorably towards it. what will we find there?

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@Alex02040618 @tmgateot "All living being have a frequency to their brain/information [processing] systems."

Express this in a falsifiable manner. What are you talking about?

[Nail (in SF 9/14 - 9/18) @NailYourShoes]

“Daddy what were you doing during the singularity, what was it like?”

“Well son I was mostly reading about it on my phone and talking about it in group chats, and otherwise living my life as I ordinarily would have while my friends and family and coworkers completely ignored it”

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@FreeArchivist @slimepriestess We don't know if it was stolen, the 'stolen' work was partially done with AI, and the 'stolen' work was a small amount of the complete Navier-Stokes solution.

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@ayyazdev @Miles_Brundage Post your own thoughts.

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Everyone on my timeline is losing their mind over Astra, but I'm sitting here as a poor hacker loving GLM-5.3-Flash. Huge jump in intelligence per dollar.