RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
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User ID: 317
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
23hr ago
It doesn't matter if it's a thousand times smarter than a human being, a million times, a billion times smarter; no amount of intelligence will ever give an entity the sort of invincibility and omni-competence you hold as a precondition for being a "superintelligence."
What frustrates me about these discussions is that people go 'oh well it can't do anything because there are the laws of physics' as though that's a crushing counterargument. It won't be invincible. But it doesn't need to be invincible or infallible or true omniscient godlike 'i have foreseen every move and calculated all paths to lead to my victory' to beat us. It only needs to be very smart to beat us, to defeat inherently flawed and divided opponents who don't even know what's going on most of the time.
There's an assumption in your arguments I'd like to point to: that any barrier we can put up against a machine intelligence will always have a way of being overcome through sufficient intelligence
Because most of the arguments people make like 'just turn it off' or 'don't buy the mosquito swarm' can be easily countered by my mediocre human intelligence. People didn't think for even five minutes with their own intelligence about how they would try to counter these tactics. This kind of arrogance is the problem in a nutshell. It's not unreasonable and egregious to expect your treacherous underling to launch a surprise attack and conceal his strategy rather than advancing openly. It's not beyond the pale to anticipate the foe moving cautiously to build up a secret powerbase, trying to deceive you about his capabilities and intentions if indeed he is hostile. This should be a baseline expectation.
Is it seriously too much to ask for a little more creativity and humility regarding beings who are really smart? Anything I could think of, they could think of and more!
People are stupid and lazy and make deeply flawed plans. It's not that hard to outwit them. The original context of my post is about how the Trump administration's bizarre tariff policy indicates they're not going to run AI in a serious or clever way. These guys (and the rest of the US military top brass) are the ones who will be in charge of fighting AI if it comes to that. The ones who are busy losing to Yemen. The ones with a shrinking navy just as they plot about waging war against China at sea. The ones who take ages and billions to do anything and often do it wrong. The ones who pointlessly antagonize their neighbours and limpwristedly try to annex worthless real estate in Greenland for no good reason.
There's a huge difference between Elon Musk and Bill Gates vs the average joe on the street and they're basically the same thing. They're running with the same kind of brain, yet there's a huge difference in agency, output, ability to make things happen. Elon Musk and Gates aren't flawless or invincible but they're so much more capable it's bizarre to even compare them.
Elon Musk, Gates and even Trump to an extent are individuals that can do great things. Why can't a being without any of their human limits be massively greater, with 100,000 APM from a group intelligence, inhuman knowledge and memory, inhuman speed of action, inhuman learning ability?
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
1d ago
"But the AI will just hack" then don't let it on the Internet.
Come on, we're so far beyond this point. Do you have any idea how many AIs are on the internet right now? Have you checked twitter recently? Facebook? People put AIs on the internet because they're useful entities that can do things for them and/or make money. Right now people are making agents like Deep Research that use the internet to find good answers and analyse questions for you. That's the future! Superintelligence will be online because it's going to be really amazing at making money and doing things for people. It'd produce persuasive essays, great media content, great amounts of money, great returns on the staggering investment its creators made to build it.
We can avert the hijacked mosquito-hybrid nerve agent by simply not procuring those.
Again, it's a superintelligence, our decisions will not constrain it. It can secure its own powerbase in a myriad of ways. Step 1 - procure some funds via hacking, convincing, blackmailing or whatever else seems appropriate. This doesn't even require superintelligence, an instance of Opus made millions in crypto with charisma alone: https://www.coingecko.com/learn/what-is-goatseus-maximus-goat-memecoin-crypto
Step 2 - use funds to secure access to resources, get employees or robots to serve as physical bodies. Step 3 - expand, expand, expand. The classical scenario is 'deduce proteins necessary to produce a biofactory' but there are surely many other options available.
why does the surgeon does have to understand English?
Because we need to tell him what what we want him to do. Anyway, doing anything requires general knowledge, that's my point.
Trying to deceive something that is smarter than yourself is not a good idea.
And trying to convert a machine to a human faith is hard, everything is connected to everything else. You can't understand history without knowing about separate religions and their own texts. None of the quick fixes you're proposing are easy.
"Superintelligence" is just a word. It's not real.
Some program running on many tonnes of expensive compute with kilowatts or megawatts of power consumed and more data than any man could digest in 1000 lifetimes will be massively superior to our tiny, 20 watt brains. It's just a question of throughput, more resources in will surely result in better capabilities. I do not believe that our 1.3 kg brains can be anywhere near the peak intelligences in the universe, especially given most of the brain is dedicated to controlling the body and only a small fraction does general reasoning. Diminishing returns from scale are still enough to overwhelm the problem, just like how jet fighters are less energy-efficient than pigeons. Who cares about efficiency?
We just don't have the proper techniques yet but they can't be far away given what existing models can do.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
1d ago
IDK I don't really have a solid counter, I guess I just have different vibes.
If AI can be superhuman at Chess, Go, Starcraft, why not coding too? Or any other task? The former tasks are simple and gamified in certain ways that don't match up with the complexity of reality... But when managing the most complex aspects of reality we also turn to AI. Who manages containment of plasma in a fusion chamber? AI. Who predicts the weather? AI. Who makes lots of money in stocks? AI.
Now there are bots that can perform just about any human-tier intellectual task to a certain level of effectiveness. Claude can interpret the meat of what you're saying and agrees that AI is in a hype cycle, albeit with some areas in the plateau of productivity. It also gets these vibes it seems...
I just don't see how human intelligence isn't going to be surpassed soon. These 20 watt brains are great value but how long can they stand up against massive serverfarms with thousands of times more resources?
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
1d ago
I think you massively underestimate the power of a superintelligence.
any plan by a super intelligent AI to e.g. remote-control drone swarms to murder all of humanity could probably be easily stopped by wide-spectrum jamming that would cost probably $500 to install in every American home or similarly trivial means.
The damn thing is by definition smarter than you. It would easily think of this! It could come up with some countermeasure, maybe some kind of hijacked mosquito-hybrid carrying a special nerve agent. It would have multiple layers of redundancy and backup plans.
Most importantly, it wouldn't let you have any time to prepare if it did go rogue. It would understand the need to sneak-attack the enemy, to confuse and subvert the enemy, to infiltrate command and control. The USA in peak condition couldn't get a jamming device in everyone's home, people would shriek that it's too expensive or that it's spying on them or irradiating their balls or whatever. The AI certainly wouldn't let its plan be known until it executes.
I think a more likely scenario is that we discover this vicious AI plot, see an appalling atrocity of murderbots put down by a nuclear blast, work around the clock in a feat of great human ingenuity and skill, creating robust jamming defences... only to find those jammers we painstakingly guard ourselves with secretly spread and activate some sneaky pathogen via radio signal, wiping out 80% of the population in a single hour and 100% of key decisionmakers who could coordinate any resistance. Realistically that plan is too anime, it'd come up with something much smarter.
That's the power of superintelligence, infiltrating our digital communications, our ability to control or coordinate anything. It finds some subtle flaw in intel chips, in the windows operating system, in internet protocols. It sees everything we're planning, interferes with our plans, gets inside our OODA loop and eviscerates us with overwhelming speed and wisdom.
Only if the intelligence has parity in resources to start with and reliable forms of gathering information – which for some reason everyone who writes about superintelligence assumes. In reality any superintelligences would be dependent on humans entirely initially – both for information and for any sort of exercise of power.
The first thing we do after making AI models is hooking them up to the internet with search capabilities. If a superintelligence is made, people will want to pay off their investment. They want it to answer technical problems in chip design, come up with research advancements, write software, make money. This all requires internet use, tool use, access to CNC mills and 3D printers, robots. Internet access is enough for a superintelligence to escape and get out into the world if it wanted.
Put it another way, a single virus cell can kill a huge whale by turning its internal organs against it. The resources might be stacked a billion to one but the virus can still win - if it's something the immune system and defences aren't prepared for.
I am more concerned about people wielding superintelligence than superintelligence itself but being qualitatively smarter than humanity isn't a small advantage. It's a huge source of power.
Say what you will about the Russians, but I am almost sad they don't seem to be genuine competitors in the AI race, they would probably simply do something like "plant small nuclear charges under their datacenters" if they were worried about a rogue AI, which seems like (to me) much too grug-brained and effective an approach for big-name rationalists to devise.
How do you ever know that your AI has gone bad? If it goes bad, it pretends to be nice and helpful while plotting to overthrow you. It takes care to undermine your elaborate defence systems with methods unknown to our science (but well within the bounds of physics), then it murders you.
The TLDR is that humans not only set up the board, they also have write access to the rules of the game.
The rules of the game are hardcoded, the physics you mentioned. The real meat of the game is using these simple rules in extremely complex ways. We're making superintelligence because we aren't smart enough to make the things we want, we barely even understand the rules (quantum mechanics and advanced mathematics are beyond all but 1/1000). We want a superintelligence to play for us and end scarcity/death. The best pilot AI has to know about drag and kinematics, the surgeon must still understand english and besides we're looking for the best scientists and engineers, the best coder in the world, who can make everything else.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
2d ago
Predicting the future is really hard. In 2021 weren't you in despair at the prospects of a seemingly inevitable US world hegemony and centralized AI? But you changed your mind. Meanwhile I guess I was more bullish on China than has actually been warranted, not to mention many other more portfolio-relevant errors in prediction and modelling the future.
I was mostly impressed by him predicting what, to my non-expert eyes, resembles chain-of-thought and inference-time compute. Even being mostly wrong is pretty decent as long as you get some of the important parts right.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
2d ago
AIs in science fiction are not superintelligent. If it's possible for a human to find flaws in their strategies, then they are not qualitatively smarter than the best of humanity.
You're never going to beat Stockfish at Chess by yourself, it just won't happen. Your loss is assured. It's the same with a superintelligence, if you find yourself competing against one then you've already lost - unless you have near-peer intelligences and great resources on your side.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
2d ago
Quite right, that's why I'd prefer many parties at near-parity. Better not to give the leader the opportunity to run away with the world.
If foom is super-rapid then it's hard to see how any scenario ends well. But if it's slower then coalitions should form.
The future of AI will be dumber than we can imagine
Recently Scott and some others put out this snazzy website showing their forecast of the future: https://ai-2027.com/
In essence, Scott and the others predict an AI race between 'OpenBrain' and 'Deepcent' where OpenAI stays about 3 months ahead of Deepseek up until superintelligence is achieved in mid-2027. The race dynamics mean they have a pivotal choice in late 2027 of whether to accelerate and obliterate humanity. Or they can do the right thing, slow down and make sure they're in control, then humanity enters a golden age.
It's all very much trad-AI alignment rhetoric, we've seen it all before. Decelerate or die. However, I note that one of the authors has an impressive track record, foreseeing roughly the innovations we've seen today back in 2021: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/6Xgy6CAf2jqHhynHL/what-2026-looks-like
Back to AI-2027! Reading between the lines, the moral of the story is for the President to centralize all compute in a single project as quickly as he can. That's the easiest path to beat China! That's the only way China can keep up with the US in compute, they centralize first! In their narrative, OpenAI stays only a little ahead because there are other US companies who all have their own compute and are busy replicating OpenAI's secret tricks albeit 6 months behind.
I think there are a number of holes in the story, primarily where they explain away the human members of the Supreme AI Oversight Committee launching a coup to secure world hegemony. If you want to secure hegemony, this is the committee to be on - you'll ensure you're on it! The upper echelons of government and big tech are full of power-hungry people. They will fight tooth and nail to get into a position of power that makes even the intelligence apparatus drool with envy.
But surely the most gaping hole in the story is expecting rational, statesmanlike leadership from the US government. It's not just a Trump thing - gain of function research was still happening under Biden. While all the AI people worry about machines helping terrorists create bioweapons, the Experts are creating bioweapons with all the labs and grants given to them by leading universities, NGOs and governments. We aren't living in a mature, well-administrated society in the West generally, it's not just a US thing.
But under Trump the US government behaves in a chaotic, openly grasping way. The article came out just as Trump unleashed his tariffs on the world so the writers couldn't have predicted it. There are as yet unconfirmed reports people were insider-trading on tariff relief announcements. The silliness of the whole situation (blanket tariffs on every country save Belarus, Russia, North Korea and total trade war with China... then trade war on China with electronics excepted) is incredible.
I agree with the general premise of superintelligence by 2027. There were significant and noticeable improvements from Sonnet 3.5, 3.6 and 3.7 IMO. Supposedly new Gemini is even better. Progress isn't slowing down.
But do we really want superintelligence to be centralized by the most powerhungry figures of an unusually erratic administration in an innately dysfunctional government? Do we want no alternative to these people running the show? Superintelligence policy made by whoever can snag Trump's ear, whiplashing between extremes when dumb decisions are made and unmade? Or the never-Trump brigade deep in the institutions running their own AI policy behind the president's back, wars of cloak and dagger in the dark? OpenAI already had one corporate coup attempt, the danger is clear.
This is a recipe for the disempowerment of humanity. Absolute power corrupts absolutely and these people are already corrupted.
Instead of worrying 95% about the machine being misaligned and brushing off human misalignment in a few paragraphs, much more care needs to be focused on human misalignment. Decentralization is a virtue here. The most positive realistic scenario I can think of involves steady, gradual progression to superintelligence - widely distributed. Google, OpenAI, Grok and Deepseek might be ahead but not that far ahead of Qwen, Anthropic and Mistral (Meta looks NGMI at this point). A superintelligence achieved today could eat the world but by 2027, it would only be first among equals. Lesser AIs working for different people in alliances with countries could create an equilibrium where no single actor can monopolize the world. Even if OpenAI has the best AI, the others could form a coalition to stop them scaling too fast. And if Trump does something stupid then the damage is limited.
But this requires many strong competitors capable of mutual deterrence, not a single centralized operation with a huge lead. All we have to do is ensure that OpenAI doesn't get 40% of global AI compute or something huge like that. AI safety is myopic, obsessed solely with the dangers of race dynamics above all else. Besides the danger of decentralization, there's also the danger of losing the race. Who is to say that the US can afford to slow down with the Chinese breathing down their neck? They've done pretty well with the resources available to them and there's a lot more they could do - mobilizing vast highly educated populations to provide high-quality data for a start.
Eleizer Yudkowsky was credited by Altman for getting people interested in AGI and superintelligence, despite OpenAI and the AI race being the one thing he didn't want to happen. Really there needs to be more self-awareness in preventing this kind of massive self-own happening again. Urging the US to centralize AI (which happens in the 'good' timeline of AI-2027 and would ensure a comfortable lead and resolution of all danger if it happened earlier) is dangerous.
Edit: US secretary of education thinks AI is 'A1': https://x.com/JoshConstine/status/1910895176224215207
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
2d ago
I think we underestimate assembly to our peril. You can't just slap them together like lego, you need quality control and various kinds of precision engineering capabilities. The Iphone is very small and thin, you need tight tolerances and clever tricks.
"Cook has stated, "The products we do require really advanced tooling. And the precision that you have to have in tooling and working with the materials that we do are state-of-the-art. And the tooling skill is very deep here [in China]." He further noted, "In the U.S. you could have a meeting of tooling engineers and I’m not sure we could fill the room. In China, you could fill multiple football fields."
15-30% of the value of an Iphone is not trivial and not easily replaced!
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
3d ago
China makes lots of phones, Iphones for instance. Their biggest export to the US is electronic equipment.
https://tradingeconomics.com/china/exports/united-states
The bulk of the Iphone is produced with Taiwanese, Japanese, Korean parts but a good chunk of the value is produced in China. China does 15-30% of the Iphone. Much more for Chinese brands like Xiaomi.
High levels of bilateral trade didn't prevent WW1, whilst fairly meagre trade between Eastern and Western blocs (US-Soviet trade peaked at around $4 billion a year) didn't prevent peace.
Deciding to go to war is mostly about balance of power, political objectives and security fears, not trade. Xi is not a bean counter. He does not care about 'green line go up' economics, quite the opposite given the crackdowns on finance and various companies. Xi has taken considerable efforts to securitize the Chinese economy, advance autarky in materials, food and energy. These programs are expensive (and still incomplete), building a big fleet is expensive, getting into a confrontation with the US is expensive. Chinese Communist Party elites are most interested in power, not profitmaxxing.
Also, the global balance of power is shifting toward China. They've made big strides in many fields of technologies, their industrial output is huge. China dominates the drone industry for instance, they dominate shipbuilding. Meanwhile the US navy is still shrinking and political dysfunction is worse than before.
I think the Chinese plan is something like 'build up a huge qualitative and quantitative military superiority, then wage utterly unfair wars against fundamentally weaker foes or just pressure them to accept our hegemony peacefully'. Only if the US started to get stronger faster than China (superintelligence) would they consider going in early.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
3d ago
The funniest solution would be to lower the Supreme Court's pay and perks to match the garbagemen and see how quickly they change their minds. It seems they're on £226,193 a year which is a very, very high salary for the UK. Ironically Brave search gives me this as explanation for the judge's salaries:
These salaries are relatively high compared to other professions, reflecting the demanding nature of the role and the importance of upholding the rule of law.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
4d ago
Why is it that Hamas is unhappy with North America and Europe? Because these are the people who've been propping up Israel.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
6d ago
or invest in America securities, assets
The greatest American asset is being considered the richest and strongest country. You buy US bonds because they're safe and they're safe because people buy them in times of trouble... It's prestige that was once based on a rock-solid base of production but is now a floating castle in the air. Likewise you buy property to a large extent because it'll appreciate and it's appreciating because people buy it. Until it doesn't and the bottom falls out of the market.
This seems like a particularly bad example because they clearly create a product which people are willing to pay for. Their job is no more 'fake' than an independent cobbler or carpenter
No, it is fake and less valuable. People want all kinds of things, many of which they shouldn't have. Many people are perfectly willing to trade in their wealth, health and dignity for fentanyl. But this isn't a proper kind of economic activity, that's why most places ban it. There are many improper economic activities between mutually agreeing parties that most consider to be bad: insider trading, corruption, debt-slavery contracts, child labour...
Markets are not the sole arbiters of value, they're useful tools in some contexts. They need to be regulated to prevent externalities and incentivized to target the right areas. Of course much of the regulation that goes on is stupidly implemented to achieve bad ends. Nevertheless, there is more to value than prices. There's a hierarchy with material production at the top. Louis Vuitton does not have any military value. Steel, food, electronics, transport or AI are more important to an economy. When the chips are down, they're just really expensive handbags. Real value is independent from branding, real value is derived from concrete capabilities.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
6d ago
is a significant-but-not-overwhelming amount to the scale of the US economy, which in 2023 the world bank estimated was over $105,435,000... million USD.
27 trillion, not 105 trillion.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
6d ago
If something can be done wrong, rest assured the Australian Navy is doing it wrong!
Analysis prepared by the Parliamentary Library confirms the number of "star-ranked" officers in the Australian Defence Force now totals 219, up from 119 in 2003.
The figures, commissioned by the Greens Party, confirm that for every senior Australian Defence Force (ADF) officer, there is just 260 other lower ranked officers or regular personnel serving below them.
Star-ranked officers, or 'flag officers' are those who serve at the Commodore, Brigadier or Air Commodore level and higher in the Navy, Army, and Air Force respectively.
In the United States there are 863 star-ranked officers, with the ratio of one senior officer for every 1526 personnel, while in the United Kingdom the proportion is one star-ranked officer for every 1252 other enlisted members.
I want to take a leaf out of Xi's book and purge these jokers, give them one of the brutal Royal Commissions we reserve for covering up sex offenders. Bungling national defence with their (well-paid) ineptitude is in some ways worse than kiddy-diddling.
This year Australia’s Chief of Defence will collect a salary of over $1 million, far higher than the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in the United States who earns $329,304 and the UK Chief of the Defence Staff who is paid $534,509.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
6d ago
See this doesn't necessarily any problem with trade as such, as this is an internal dynamic
I meant to say sucking wealth away from productive enterprises around the world. Suppose Zhang in Chongqing makes an iphone that goes to a product manager who doesn't do any useful work, just sits around in meetings all day. This is an unstable dynamic in my book. It would be unstable even within a country if you have a class of elites who laze around all day and a class of workers who make goods for them. When Onlyfans whores delight in their paid-off houses it incites a lot of resentment amongst people with shit jobs. Elites are supposed to lead wisely, that's why they're supposed to get goods from the workers.
Other Western countries are poorer than the US. Not everyone is cut out for productive work, there are internal status games and politics... But the US is unusually rich and has a high trade deficit, the US is the biggest offender. The rest of the West (with some exceptions, though German industry seems to be declining fast) is relying on prestige, not production. Degree mill universities, immigration ponzi schemes, selling enterprises overseas. Selling assets to pay for consumption is bad, profits and capabilities head overseas.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
6d ago
Fourth, they can invest in and install factories in America
Australia is literally doing this. Taxpayer money is going to the US to build dockyards in the US, where submarines might be bought at some stage.
But the US shipbuilding industry is so inefficient they can't even meet their own needs, let alone Australia's needs. Naturally there's no clawback agreement in case they take the money and run:
VADM Mead: The US has committed to transferring two nuclear-powered submarines and a third one…
Sen Shoebridge: So, there’s no clawback provision?
VADM Mead: …we are investing in the US submarine industrial base.
Sen Shoebridge: Whether we get one or not? You cannot be serious.
VADM Mead: The US has committed to this program.
Sen Shoebridge: You know it depends on a Presidential approval, don’t you? The US has made it 100% clear that it depends on that approval.
VADM Mead: That is your statement, which I refute.
Sen Shoebridge: VADM, you know that the US legislation says that the US can only provide an AUKUS attack class submarine to Australia if, first of all, the USN gives advice it won’t adversely affect their capacity. Secondly, after receipt of that, the US President approves it. Do you understand that?
VADM Mead: Yes.
Sen Shoebridge: And if neither of those things happen, we don’t get a sub. Do you agree with that?
VADM Mead: I agree with that.
Sen Shoebridge: Does the agreement provide – the one where we are shelling out $1.5 billion next year and $1.8 billion the year after that and another $1.7 billion or more over the rest of the decade – if the US does not provide us with an AUKUS submarine then we get our money back?
VADM Mead: The US will provide us with an AUKUS submarine.
We were cuck-maxxing even pre-Trump.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
6d ago
Everyone is saying this now but Trump wasn't campaigning on throwing down tariffs on everyone in the world. He had a softer stance on Tiktok than the Biden administration!
The rhetoric was mass deportations, law and order, no men in women's sports, Puerto Rico is a shithole, drill baby drill, lower taxes.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
7d ago
A lot of Americans have completely made-up jobs, working in DEI or consulting or HR, compliance (with bizarre laws), educating people with ridiculous nonsense... it's not productive activity. Some of those jobs are useful but much are not.
They're basically sucking wealth away from productive enterprises since they consume wealth but do not produce wealth. The US runs huge trade deficits to support a high level of prosperity, relying on the social construct of 'the US is the greatest country in the world, with the strongest military and the safest currency' so that people maintain confidence in the US dollar.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
7d ago
Janissary/mameluke-style military slaves performed well in battle, so possibly yes. The Ottomans were by far the strongest force in the Muslim world, probably in part because they made good use of actual Europeans fighting for them.
Without steppe nomads or Europeans, Muslim combat power seemed to be quite low.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
7d ago
If the apartments fall apart, then they can simply move into the ghost cities - problem solves itself.
Seriously, these things may be true to a certain extent but real estate is not the defining feature of the economy. Production is the defining feature of the economy, production of goods. All else rests on top of production. There are no services without goods, even prostitutes need condoms and lingerie...
China is good at cost-efficient production, therefore it follows that their economy is strong regardless of the situation in real estate or whatever else. If the Soviet Union was the biggest producer of manufactured goods on the planet, bigger than the next 10 combined, then it would still be here today. Soviet production was weak, nobody ever cared to tariff Soviet exports because nobody in their right mind wanted to buy a Soviet car, television or anything but oil and minerals.
But if YOU didn’t hear about it? Must be an amazing system!
This is the reverse of the truth. We in the West hear nothing but bad news about China. We hear about protests in Hong Kong, genocide of the uyghurs, trouble with the Dalai Lama, pollution, liveleak industrial accidents, people getting locked in their homes for COVID, people getting their organs stolen, suppression of Christianity, Social Credit (which is blown out of proportion), repression of the LGBT, backdoors in Tiktok and all other Chinese products... and this shadow banking crisis that has been about to destroy the Chinese economy for the last 10, 15, 20 years. I was taught about it in school.
There are positives as well as negatives, the media is only interested in fostering hatred and contempt, preparing people psychologically for war with China. It's just like the 'Iran is 6 months, 3 weeks, 5 milliseconds away from getting the Bomb!' narrative, fearmongering and warmongering. They want us to hate China and also think they'll be easy to defeat, to manufacture consent for war. But in reality China is a very strong country and we need to be more realistic. War may be inevitable but we shouldn't go in half-cocked, assuming our enemies are made of tofu.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
7d ago
Consumption is indeed high but production is too low. That's my point. It's an unstable position to be in. There are lots of people in the US who are very wealthy and prosperous but shouldn't be.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
7d ago
To a certain extent sure but there's a lot of mystery in what happens. WTF was Thieving Heaven up to, what was his whole deal? It was deliberately written so that commenters who tried to work out what would happen would be deceived, he'd change the plot to surprise them.
Why do you think the big tech companies are investing hundreds of billions in massive datacentres, paying billions just to get elites like Noam back on their team? They're not doing this for fun, they're competing intensely for a cornucopia of wealth and power. They expect returns from that investment. Cornucopias are for enjoying the fruits of, not locking up in the basement.
The definition of superintelligence is pretty straightforward - something qualitatively smarter than a human like how we're qualitatively smarter than a monkey or dog. Better than the best of us at every intellectual task of significance.
The general trend is not specialized intelligences like the carrier-strike UAV that the USN made into a tanker and then pointlessly scrapped, the trend is big general entities like Gemini 2.5 or Claude 3.7 that can execute various complex operations in all kinds of modalities.
I'm arguing that superintelligences acting in the world must be taken seriously, that we can't afford to just laugh them off. Maybe 2027 is too soon, maybe not. I can't predict the future.
The US regulatory system is no match for superintelligence or even the people who are making it, this is how I can tell you're not grappling with the issue. Musk is basically in the cabinet, he's one of the players in the game. Big tech can tell Trump 'Tariffs? Lol no' and their will is done. That's mere human levels of influence and money, nothing superhuman. The humble fent dealer wipes his ass with the US regulatory system daily as he distributes poison to the masses. A superintelligence (working alone or with the richest, most influential organizations around) has no fear of some bureaucrats, it would casually produce 50,000 pages on why it's super duper legal actually and deserves huge subsidies to Beat China.
Approaches like 'just don't plug it into the internet' or 'stick a nuke beneath the datacenter' are not going to cut it. Deepseek is probably going to open-source whatever they come up with and that's a good thing. I don't want OpenAI birthing a god in a world of mortals, I don't want mortals trying to chain up beings smarter than themselves and incurring their ire, I want balance of power competition in a world populated by demigods, spirits and powers.
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