scossar

[Caylan Ford @caylanford]

Currently listening to closing arguments from the CBC in my $7M+ defamation trial against them.

Their counsel have admitted that the following statements about me (several of which were news headlines) were not true:

"Star UCP candidate who resigned over white supremacist comments also questioned value of Pride parades’"

"Ford lamented that white supremacist terrorists face a double standard compared to Islamic terrorists."

"UCP finds replacement for star candidate who resigned after white supremacist comments"

"White supremacist and homophobic posts force UCP candidates out"

"two candidates have resigned from the United Conservative Party over Islamophobic, white supremacist, homophobic and transphobic messages on social media"

“[Ford] said some things that were really really really hard to defend. Stuff that was quite literally sympathetic to white supremacists.”

"Over the past several weeks, there have been high-profile controversies involving UCP candidates making sexist, homophobic, or racist remarks. Two of those candidates, Caylan Ford and Eva Kiryakos, have since resigned"

And more.

[scossar @scossar]

@millerman Are we sure that consciousness means the same thing in both contexts? It's not obvious to me that an unconscious person doesn't have the thing that some people are referring to as consciousness.

[José Valim @josevalim]

If coding agents will write most of our code, what happens with our communities and sense of ergonomics? How does it impact our compilers and tools? https://t.co/DaYCSHFUBY

[Hunter Ash @ArtemisConsort]

I was very strongly influenced by rationalism/LessWrong/EA growing up. This is why I don’t emphasize claims that it’s all just a cynical ploy for power. I know what it feels like to sincerely believe these things. And that’s much worse.

By and large, I think these people really believe that not just the world but the entire lightcone is at stake, and the only hope for a good outcome is if they totally control AI development, which would require global governance and a surveillance state. And since the stakes are ~infinite, any means are justified in achieving this.

A cynical greedy person can be negotiated with and bought off. A true believer can’t. They’re much more dangerous, ironically for the same reason they say AGI will be dangerous: monomaniacal focus on a single goal leads via instrumental convergence to unconstrained power-seeking.

[Ruxandra Teslo 🧬 @RuxandraTeslo]

But what I am worried about is that as humans are outpaced and rendered obsolete in the most parts of cognitive labour, the incentives to maintain the institutions and practices that strengthen our minds so that we can even have the imagined intent, taste and capacity to wisely steer vastly more intelligent machines, will fade.

A myriad of questions seem unanswered to me: Where will the human’s purpose come from? Through what experience will his taste have matured? What will enable him to recognise that the advice he receives is mistaken, or that the goal he has chosen is unworthy of pursuit?

To separate our capacity to decide and exercise “agency” from our ability to think seems to me like making the old educational error in a more radical form. Educational reformers once imagined that knowledge and memorisation could be ignored, while at the same time leaving something called “critical thinking” intact. We are now being asked to believe that thinking itself can be handed over while human agency somehow would somehow survive untouched. But agency is not an abstract faculty floating free of everything else we do. Our purposes are inextricably linked to our acquisition of knowledge, to our thinking.

Agency, considered in the abstract, tells us little about what a person will do with it. Someone intelligent and well-read may devote extraordinary energy to building a library that enlarges the lives of his compatriots, while someone unintelligent and indoctrinated by religious extremism might use their agency to wage jihad against infidels. Not only that: by delegating the work of understanding, we may also relinquish some of the means through which we discover what is worth doing. The promise that humans will supply the goals while machines do the thinking treats our purposes as though they were already fully formed, awaiting the means of execution.

[scossar @scossar]

@walterkirn It would be funny if Canada stepped up to the plate.

[François Chollet @fchollet]

One of the most worrying risks linked to frontier AI is extreme power concentration.

The only way to avoid extreme power concentration is to ensure we have multiple independent providers of frontier AI models, including open-source options.

[François Chollet @fchollet]

I hope the proposals by frontier labs to pace AI research stem from a genuine concern for safety and a recognition of the potential risks posed by future models, rather than a strategic effort to consolidate power and permanently solidify the market dominance of a few top players.

If these efforts are genuine, then oversight must take a more democratic and accountable form, with both national and international components, similar to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission in the US and the International Atomic Energy Agency internationally.

If there is only one organization responsible for safety monitoring, and it happens to be staffed by the same people as the frontier labs, and it is perfectly aligned with them both by incentives and by ideology, then it would be indistinguishable from letting frontier labs self-regulate and self-certify their own safety standards.

Two potential warning signs of regulatory capture to watch out for:

1. Calls to ban open-source AI. Open-source development currently serves as the only real counterweight to the dominance of frontier labs.

2. Attempts to hinder non-frontier research. Models that are one or two generations behind the frontier -- whose level of capability has already been deployed at scale -- are empirically known not to pose safety risks.

As long as we don't see 1 & 2, and we see real international coordination efforts, then I will optimistically believe that the proposals are benevolent.

[Michael Levin @drmichaellevin]

Here it is - the official, revised, peer-reviewed version of my Platonic Space paper. https://t.co/PXNpx5FgFN Of all the many unpopular positions I’ve taken over the decades - bitter controversies around the origin of left-right asymmetry in embryogenesis, bioelectricity and genetics, diverse intelligence, etc., this one has by far generated the most pushback: serious (grateful for those!) and energetic attempts to move me to other views, pleas to just drop it and not talk about it (for several different reasons), nasty emails and accusations, impacts on reviews of papers that have nothing to do with this, etc. Kind of amazing to me how incendiary this is. What can I say... Our job is to call it as we see it, and right now for me, this is it. Apologies to collaborators and colleagues for any shrapnel! Time will tell if this pans out or not; I've placed my bets. And btw, if you think this stuff is weird and uncomfortable, just wait… There’s much more on the way. The knob turns slowly but as long as the data keep coming, I'm going to say what I think it all means and follow it to the next steps it enables. Buckle up!

[scossar @scossar]

@avidseries Ken Kesey

[scossar @scossar]

@IonaItalia Having spent the past week reading AI generated docs, I'm less sure about this. Something is really off.

[scossar @scossar]

@IonaItalia For the most part, but I'm ok with AI generated documentation, as long as it's good.

[John Nosta @JohnNosta]

What happens when AI teaches us all to think the same way?

AI and the Risk of Synchronized Blindness

📌AI doesn't just change how individuals think, it changes what what can see.

📌When everyone thinks with the same tools, diversity of perception may disappear.

📌The risk isn't that AI fails us, it's that we all start missing what matters.

https://t.co/UdNUEWOcH6

[François Chollet @fchollet]

Human cognitive friction has long been acting as a regularizer for a lot of digital infrastructure. It made software APIs less terrible and codebases less complex.

Now LLM disintermediation is causing this effect to fade, which in turn will cause runaway software complexity.

[Mo @atmoio]

I was a 10x engineer. Now I'm useless.

[scossar @scossar]

Sharing my notes on the internet: https://t.co/6lmramyXVh

[scossar @scossar]

Finding roots with Halley's method:

https://t.co/igAzIrhRKZ

[scossar @scossar]

Fun with math: