No_one
Underemployed Slav. Likes playing Factorio.
User ID: 1042
No_one
1mo ago
No, I wasn't thinking of a CAB, I was thinking a 'airborne corps' is likely to have a serious amount of helicopters in its organisational structure, as it's 2020s and not 1940s.
The so-what there is that since the 82nd's job is to basically be on a plane anywhere to the world on a phone call,
Helicopters based in the US can't be 'on a plane' to anywhere to the world on a phone call. Helicopters go over the sea by ship.
No_one
1mo ago
National guard can do search and rescue, but they don't have many helicopters.
Airborne corps of the US army is based just a few hundred km away, at Ft.Bragg. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XVIII_Airborne_Corps#Structure
Might be something of a paper formation but they should still have a serious amount of helicopters and trained people.
No_one
1mo ago
How credible is any of this?
At this point, with lawfare, several unclear assassination attempts, it's IMO pretty credible FEMA would deliberately be a bit slow. Politico thinks Helene could affect elections in the states hit.
Hurricane Helene hit especially hard in heavily Republican areas of Georgia and North Carolina — a fact that could work to Donald Trump’s disadvantage in the two swing states.
...
Helene hit some predominantly Democratic communities hard too, adding to the uncertainty. In North Carolina, “Buncombe [County] was affected in really bad ways, and that is a liberal bastion,” said Chris Cooper, a political scientist at Western Carolina University. “And Watauga is in really bad shape, also a blue leaning county.”
Overall, Helene could “dramatically change who is in the electorate,” Cooper said.
“In a state like North Carolina where margins matter, then every little tweak to the electorate could be the tweak that makes the difference,” Cooper added. “It’s right on the razor’s edge between red and blue.”
County elections offices in North Carolina — five of which remained closed Thursday — will assess damage to early voting sites and polling stations to determine “which facilities won’t be available,” Karen Brinson Bell, executive director of the State Board of Elections, said this week.
"Every little tweak matters" - there you have it.
Perfect motivation for strong partisans to be inefficient with recovery so that voting is depressed in leaning red counties.
No_one
1mo ago
It's a surprisingly wise position re: human Agency but it's still going to be very easy to manipulate by any system with above human intelligence.
No_one
1mo ago
Nothing short of a live demonstration I could observe through thermals would convince me.
The whole scene is pure bullshit. If anything it convinces me MK-Ultra developed a good bunch of useful techniques.
No_one
1mo ago
I don't think you are right because anti-natalist propaganda is all over GAE media aimed at middle classes.
No_one
1mo ago
Highly capable people acting kooky is nothing new.
Critical thinking is completely uncorrelated to intelligence.
And of course, the barren cheerlessness of the materialist, Darwinian worldview promotes grasping at straws behavior from people who evolved to be kooky animists.
No_one
1mo ago
I absolutely loathe people projecting feelings and interior lives to onto LLMs derived from texts by people writing about their feelings and interior lives.
I listened a bit to the poop/fart discussion. It is about as vacuous as radio people talking.
Also your timeline is wrong. The great step change in human culture was longer ago, it wasn't shared universally, e.g. with Bushmen their recent culture is identical to 10k years ago.
Because they live at the end of the world, with no real enemies. Which is why they ended up conquered by blacks and whites.
Hunter-gatherers in Eurasia had no such luxury and had to adapt, hence agriculture, civilization and all that.
Surely some revelation is at hand?
Aligned AIs and robots are going to be much better, less demanding and less cheeky servants than the middle and lower classes.
Organized minorities win, so you can pretty much expect SV and their ilk to win, especially if they pull one over on the feds.
If you're lucky, you end up eating bugs and living in a pod. Don't think anything as pedestrian as ownership or property rights will prevent you from getting screwed over when very smart people with AI assistance are making the rules.
No_one
1mo ago
Total bullshit.
Europe started from the same base and doesn't have that problem. Never has prohibition.
Alcoholism also declined in Russia by quite a lot since the 90s.
No_one
1mo ago
It's ridiculous to conflate human cognition and culture with LLMs. Quality of thought depends on data to a much more limited degree, people can also discern truth from nonsense with some reflection.
LLMs can't.
No_one
1mo ago
The jump to where we are was sudden and surprising, the next one could be as well.
If a cat surprises you with a sudden jump to a wardrobe top just under a ceiling, how likely is it to then surprise you with jumping through the ceiling ?
There's no superhuman data, this isn't as easy. What happened until know was just adding more scale and it led to increasing returns until it got to the point there was no new data to add. And this is still a system that's basically a glorified retrieval tool because it has trouble with basic logic unless it uses 'chain of thought' which is pretty expensive and not much better.
No_one
1mo ago
It isn't clear we need superhumanly good data.
It is.
Humans can make novel discoveries if they have a sufficiently good understanding of existing data and sufficiently good mental horsepower to use that data
LLMs and similar systems aren't human, not in the slightest.
It seems like we just need to get an AI to approximately Von Neumann level
They're nowhere near that. People are happy they can count letters correctly.
No_one
1mo ago
I am utterly unclear as to the mechanism that allows blame to propagate forward through time and generations but doesn't allow credit and pride to propagate as well.
It's not about a mechanism. It's bullshit wordcelry.
The entire thing exists to harm what's left of the culture of your people and to deprive you of power. That was explicitly stated by the people who made it up, except nobody bothers to read marxist books but people paid to do so or lunatics. Trying to tease about the internal consistency of an ideology seeking your dispossession is just crazy.
Rufo's book "America's Cultural Revolution" goes about the genesis of that bullshit in excruciating, mind numbing details, it's also widely available.
No_one
1mo ago
If batting your eyes and saying, "You know, I like spending time with you," doesn't work, then best to cut losses then and there. Guy isn't going to know the first thing about building a good life together.
Or he's young and literal minded ..
No_one
1mo ago
It'd make me feel better if someone could muster a rebuttal that explained with specificity why further improvements aren't going to be sufficient to breach the "smarter than human" barrier.
To sum it up, to train superhuman performance you need superhumanly good data. Now, I'd be all okay for the patient, obvious approach there - eugenics, creating better future generations.
The Synthetic Data Solves ASI pill is a bit awkward:
- Our AI plateaues ≈on intelligence level of expert humans because it's trained on human data
- to train a superhuman AI, we need a superhuman data generating process based on real world dynamics, not Go board states -…fuck
In what ways are they wrong?
I'd not say they're wrong. Even present day polished applications with a lot of new compute could do a lot of stuff. They're betting they'll be able to make use of that compute even if AGI is late.
And remember, the money is essentially free for them. Those power stations will be profitable even if datacenters aren't, the datacenters will generate money even if taking over the world isn't a ready option. & There's no punishing interest rates for the big boys. That's for chumps with credit cards.
Human-level AGI that can perform any task that humans can will resolve almost any issues posed by demographic decline in terms of economic productivity and maintaining a globalized, civilized world.
Aschenbrenner is a smart charlatan, he's probably going to do very well in the politics of AI.
My opinion is that the way he has everyone fooled and the way he has zeroed in on the superpower competition aspect makes it clear what he is after. Power. Has he gotten as US citizenship yet? He'll need that.
There's going to be an enormous growth in computing power, possible hardware improvements (e.g. the Beff Jezos guy has some miniaturised parallel analog computer that's supposedly going to be great for AI stuff.. ). But iirc, the models can't really improve easily because there's not the best data to pretrain them, so now everyone is trying to figure out how to automatically generate good synthetic data and use that to train better models, combine different modalities (text/ images etc). All stuff that's hardly comprehensible to outsiders, so people like Leopold can go around and say stuff with confidence.
Likely, yes, but how computationally and energy expensive it's going to be matters a whole lot. Like e.g. aren't they basically near hitting physical limits pretty soon? That'd cap lowering power costs, right?
And scaling up chip production to 1000x isn't as easy as it sounds either. Especially if Chinese get scared and start engaging in sabotage.
No_one
1mo ago
It DOESN'T fit my model of a man who believes he is going to be at ground zero when the silicon Godhead is birthed, if he really believes that superintelligence is somewhat imminent, he should be willing to give up ridiculous sums of money to ensure he's present at that moment.
Nobody with a clue thinks that is imminent. All that exists is trained on data, and there's not enough high quality data. Maybe synthesizing it will work, maybe not.
Even the most optimistic people in the know say stuff like "maybe we'll be able to replace senior engineers and good but not great scientists in 5 yrs time". 'Godhead' and superintelligence is just conjecture at this point, thought of course an aligned set of cooperating AIs with ~130 IQ individually could give a good impression of superintelligence. Or be wholly dysfunctional given the internal dynamics.
No_one
1mo ago
Are jobs good in themselves?
You're a survival machine, your sense of purpose comes from overcoming obstacles impending your survival. Maybe the machines will just take over and provide a stimulating environment of constant low-level warfare which is what we evolved for.
Who knows, it's possible. Maybe you're going to be turned into biodiesel, or reengineered into a better pet. Unknowable.
No_one
1mo ago
Civilization came into existence because it enhanced group survival.
It's pretty ironic that it's probably also going to end it. Once the deep state is efficient machines and not inefficient apparatchiks, things might get pretty funny.
No_one
1mo ago
Echopraxia has a better quote about the posthuman/machine vs human relationship:
“I’ll fight you,” Brüks said aloud. Of course you will. That’s what you’re for, that’s all you’re for. You gibber on about blind watchmakers and the wonder of evolution but you’re too damn stupid to see how much faster it would all happen if you just went away. You’re a Darwinian fossil in a Lamarckian age. Do you see how sick to death we are of dragging you behind us, kicking and screaming because you’re too stupid to tell the difference between success and suicide?
No_one
1mo ago
Most likely scenario is AI being used to keep and hold power forever because it's going to allow you to spy on everyone, to play psychological games against everyone to get rid of opposition and know most everything. AI regulation will play beautifully into this because it means no one's going to be able to have their own AIs keep them safe.
SaaS. Stasi-as-a-Service.
That US is led by midwits has been evident since 2001 at least. The war on terror was a grotesque miscalculation-the neocon dreams of seven countries in five years delusions, Iraq a fumble, the war was a strategic victory for Al-Qaeda because it led to a decrease in US power and influence, loss of trust in the USG. Then you had the Arab Spring, which succeeded only in ruining things and not increasing US power either. Let's not even speak of Afghanistan. Then we got to Ukraine. Chinese have made no secret they're not going to be color-revolutioned, yet Americans thought driving China and Russia closely together was just the thing.
Putin clearly wanted in, was cooperative post 9/11, asked to be considered for membership and seeing as NATO has at times contained wholly authoritarian regimes like Turkey's various juntas , Portugal (somehow a founding member) etc, there were no obvious reasons why not to admit them. This would've gone some way to containing China.
That China would become extremely powerful was obvious since early 1900, when they were found to be not intellectually deficient, just merely medieval.
Emanuel Todd, the anthropologist famous for calling Soviet decline back when people thought USSR was eternal has an some interesting remarks in an interview about his upcoming book. Translation here.
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