RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
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User ID: 317
The economy in a free-market system is a network effect; more able-bodied workers generates more opportunity, all else being equal
Even China can't find enough work for all their young people, they have high youth unemployment despite an enormous pool of well-educated young people and intense capitalist pressure.
If the economy is primarily acting like a network effect, then why don't we see the network effect in action? Why can't Johnny walk in with a firm handshake and get a good job with all these opportunities being made? The US has a pretty free market and a pretty large population. I don't deny that there are some aspects of a network effect, certainly with elite talent there are. But adding merely able-bodied workers is not helping much at all.
This is the mass-immigration school of economic thought. Adding 10 million able bodied Haitians or Hondurans isn't going to make America much richer at all. All the Arabs and Africans going to Europe aren't bolstering the eurozone economies, largely because they don't work. Even if they did, it only impedes automation of low-value labour. Domestic births are naturally better but even then, automation is already chewing through these roles.
In a good AI takeoff scenario, that will quickly (over civilizational time-scales, anyway) become the focus of most human beings, in all likelihood.
I agree but it's a lot easier to handle that later. There will be all the time in the world to fix that up.
When practiced, Christianity shows better results in dating markets
So why isn't it being practiced, then? Church attendence rates fell from 70% in the mid 20th century to 30% today. Even these remaining nominal Christians are mostly not acting like it's 1950 either, they're largely feminists and progressives who show up for a sermon about progressivism from a priest. They don't act like Christians used to act with regards to divorce, marital roles or the things that Jim is calling for.
It's true that small pockets of highly religious-reactionary people are high fertility. But there is no evidence that a technological country can be run this way by usually-isolated population of the highly devout. Why would the Mormons or Amish or Hasidic Jews not immediately act like everyone else when they end up having to run a whole country?
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
7hr ago
Further, women suddenly getting careers, delaying childbirth, or even having more sex doesn't make them fundamentally unattractive
Attraction is in the eye of the beholder. Many men are repulsed by women having more sex. Thus they say 'ran-through', 'whore', 'roastie'... Same with girlboss for that matter, with regard to careers.
Women are often repulsed by virgins. Their opinion isn't illegitimate. They use it as an insult: 'virgin' or 'have sex, incel' how could they be lying about what they believe?
Things that give men the ick aren't illegitimate while things that give women the ick are fine.
Anecdote: I was recently at a dinner with a family and their early 20s daughter... the level of bitchiness was off the charts. Bitchiness directed towards her own parents mostly, which was unbecoming. Seemingly every second sentence she spoke was some kind of expression of above-it-allness, disinterest, disdain for explaining some topic further. Very unattractive. Even allowing for the fact that she probably didn't want to be there, that's not at all how you're supposed to behave at dinner even if you don't want to be there.
They aren't making women like they used to. Nor men for that matter.
Women learning more cute anime-girl mannerisms would likely raise fertility and supercharge pair bonding. Probably we need more anime-boy mannerisms too, which means a good deal more fighting and high stakes competition. Women like handsome, confident 'the greatest of all time' characters like Gojo Satoru.
But we do all this social engineering for what? Children? Fertility could drop to zero tomorrow and there would be no true existential consequences. There are many reasons why it'd be bad, people not caring about the future, the intrinsic good aspect of raising children. Many people not falling in love is a bad thing too, obviously. From Jim:
It should not be this way, and it does not have to be this way, for seventy years ago, it was not this way. But this is what we have now. It is horrifying. This has to end, or our race and our species will end.
OK, that's kind of true.
But we won't need new 18-year old human workers in 2044. We hardly need them today, there's a huge oversupply of young people relative to actual demand for labour. Employers are acting like the pickiest hot-girls on dating apps with all the bullshit they're pulling because they simply do not want or need more people. If they actually had a labour shortage, they'd act like it and scrap the 'we interview you 5 different times and make you pass 3 tests' approach. The modern dysfunction in dating markets and the workplace reflects a breakdown in the core assumptions of our civilization, rooted in the technologies we have available and how that affects the social system. The combination of mobile phones, social media, mass automation, deindustrialization, microplastic/chemical pollution would surely be disruptive to whatever we had 70 years ago, just from first principles?
Whatever gross dysfunction going on with our civilization's inability to reproduce or pair up properly doesn't really matter at all, it'll be blown out of the water by AI.
Imagine if we set up anime battle schools to turn out legions of super attractive, cute couples. Men are men again. Women are women. Korea has TFR 5. Even if that was somehow possible, so what? Either AI goes well or it goes badly. Whatever mild or gross dysfunction pales in comparison to being dead or immortal. I think a functional society would do better - but a functional society is also going to get torn to pieces. It's like spaghettification when one gets close to a black hole. How could ASI not disintegrate our society at minimum, when it nukes all the basic assumptions we have about the role of people, labour, economies, even what it means to be human?
Or imagine even that I'm wrong about AI. Even if AI is a nothingburger, there are still way more people than there are jobs for them. There's this gigantic disability/welfare architecture built up for this very purpose, ever expanding layers of education to keep young people out of the labour market, ridiculous regulations requiring employment of useless people that necessitate even more to fix up their mess and still huge oversupply. As time passes, we get more machinery that can do more work in agriculture, manufacturing, more robots and so fewer people are needed. I think the root cause of the dating market dysfunction is driven by technology destabilizing all old equilibriums simultaneously. A mere social fix isn't going to work, it's like building a castle on the sand in an hourglass. And especially Christianity cannot work, since that's the very thing we observed completely failing!
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
10hr ago
If they were actually working for Iran, or even plausibly suspected of doing so, surely they wouldn't have been released on bail?
I suspect some kind of farcical criminal enterprise got blown up to international news because the idiot driver misread a map or something, got too close to some strategic bombers. Or a failed false flag.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
10hr ago
Magnitude is the issue though. China is secure on calories, mostly importing soybeans for animal feed and they would still have overland trade with friendly powers.
China imports about 20% of their total energy, 70% of crude oil.
That's a weakness but not so much a critical weakness. China could rationalize food production (slaughtering herds) and cut down on energy use, especially if much of their energy-intensive export industries close down in wartime. China has more than enough domestic oil for its own military needs.
Taiwan is in the realm of actual disaster, not merely significant difficulties. There's not much to rationalize or rearrange.
Then there is the huge missile, air and naval mismatch because however many drones or missiles Taiwan will be firing, China can probably fire back 10, 20, 50x more at launchers and any other targets. No matter what pain Taiwan or Korea or Vietnam can inflict, it'd be like punching a man 20x bigger who can hit back 20x harder.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
1d ago
On the subject of blockade, doesn't Taiwan just lose? Nevermind crippling the economy - they import all their energy from overseas. The Taiwanese economy disappears under blockade, it goes to zero.
They import something like 60-75% of their food from overseas and all their fertilizer. This isn't Imperial Japan or Great Britain in WW2, Taiwanese agriculture is much worse than any blockaded power in history. Combined with refrigeration and food processing issues, potential food distribution problems (how is food moved around or stored under bombing and without fuel for vehicles?), they'd be in a catastrophic state under blockade.
I guess I agree but I go further on blockade.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
1d ago
Well you can use evolutionary weights (CPU-based), just running the game for many generations and having it become more adept via self-play, evolving a series of parameters that affect its decisionmaking. But this then results in various causal issues, like the AI not understanding that X needs to be made before Y. Or you can try for search, where the AI scans all possible (ideally pruned) paths and aims for the best. Or a combination of the two. Some parts of the game may be more amenable to search than others, search is by definition the strongest approach but gamestate branching makes it impractically expensive unless cleverly managed.
AlphaGo does more complex things with neural networks that might be hard for a consumer GPU. That approach wasn't suitable for my game due to a certain level of complexity (and that I'm adding more content and rules over time) but maybe it would be for yours since the rules are unchanging.
Fable would know more than me. Ask Fable for a detailed plan.
And also work out a good statistical base to do A/B tests so you can see if the AI is improving much. I'm watching these tests happen right now on my other monitor. It's an interesting process but once you start you begin to appreciate why strategy games have such poor AI, it's like dipping into an ocean of limitless depth.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
2d ago
They seem smart enough to do almost anything, but only when actual crystalized smartness is arranged in a properly-aligned constellation around them such that the focal geometry works properly
Just get it to write out plans, checks, tests. You're blowing these issues way out of proportion. How can it possibly be that these agent swarms are capable of advancing the frontier of mathematics but can't do 1900s tank cannons? Maybe it can't oneshot a tank cannon simulation to a certain level. But tell it to reassess assumptions, check against other physics models or read the literature on tank guns, ask it to generate an exhaustive plan for implementing your general vision, then have it go step by step through that plan.
I don't say that the brain is a computer, it's like a computer in that in a fundamental sense, it processes information in accordance with mathematical rules. Brains and LLMs belong in a subcategory for non-deterministic neural systems, separate from traditional computers. But all are part of the same set.
If a brain is not like a computer at that fundamental sense, then what is it? What else processes information outside the realm of mathematics? If you deny that the brain is in that broader set of mathematical information processing systems, then you must be introducing a soul or some other woo.
They absolutely do not work, as in do the thing their developers and promoters claimed they did to get them accepted as a valid medical treatment.
They had a 4% fatality rate, many weird side effects. It did work at reducing agitation, just that what they were doing was grossly disproportionate and unnecessary:
A large proportion of such lobotomized patients exhibited reduced tension or agitation. Many also showed other effects, such as apathy, passivity, lack of initiative, poor concentration, and a generally decreased depth and intensity of their emotional response to life.
I reject the notion that it didn't work. It did work, it just isn't cost-effective or ethical.
Show me how wireheading can be used to actually control people as one controls a machine
Obviously wireheading cannot be used like mechanical controls can be used on machines, it's an incentive. We can't force LLMs to do certain things either, we can't sockpuppet them to refuse certain things every time (even if you ask in Leetspeak, or get Pliny the Liberator to prompt).
Melting it into a brightly glowing puddle is not using it as a machine either
Neuralink isn't melting the brain into a puddle. Nor the MRI induced mild belief changes.
And show me how you do these things against the will of the person currently occupying that brain
If that could be done right now, the CIA would have it under wraps. Nobody's gonna announce 'we made the Totalitarian Dream Torment Nexus'. Note that BCI works. Extracting memories is a lot more difficult, naturally. But it's not impossible in principle and there's no reason to think it might be. Memories are just another kind of stored information. There's nothing else they could be!
The mechanics of brain surgery are well understood in most cases, as they are an extension of the mechanics of regular surgery: stuff has been broken apart, you stitch it back together so it can heal. As noted above, this has not resulted in the development of mind surgery
If you can fix a genetic disease that causes brain dysfunction by altering genes, you could also augment brain function by improving the genes. There's no hard line between the two. If you can fix, you can also improve, perhaps by stitching neurons together or altering the chemicals. Theoretically, you could make a hip replacement that performs better than an actual hip or is at least much harder to break. We haven't done this but it's possible in principle to make a better hip. Nothing is complicated about that, it's clear that the materials that make up the hip in humans are not as diverse or as intensively processed as those available to industry.
OK, so they oversold what could be done with crude brain surgeries. But wireheading definitely works, there was that woman who rubbed her thumbs raw against the button. How is that not direct interaction with the brain? You switched from 'uniform failure' to 'they were overselling the practical benefits of the technologies that were widely deployed, even though this was due to ethical rather than purely technological reasons.'
Lobotomies also work, it's just that they aren't really helpful.
I never claimed that we could directly edit the source code of the brain right now (noting that source code is not quite analogous). But eventually something like that is going to be possible. I don't understand how you could possibly disagree with its plausibility. We could for instance add or remove certain genes that are strongly linked with aggression in an embryo for example. Add the warrior gene, get a more aggressive child. The source code is genes, we can edit genes. We don't quite understand what they all do and how they work together and it's easier to wreck than improve but we could definitely do these things.
Editing the brain 'in flight' would be rather harder but it's a physical object, it could be altered with sufficiently precise electrodes or other manipulations. Brain surgery is a real thing. This would just be an extension of brain surgery. Why are you so skeptical of this?
Furthermore, I linked that old paper about disabling parts of the brain with magnets. That is a kind of mind control, just not very useful. Cheap, precise, non-invasive, long-lasting, permitted by the ethics board... That's the missing part, there's no actual impossibility.
I say I want to figure out a general model for gun weight based on peak pressure generated by the propellent and the shell. It can do this! It calculates hoop-stress for steel, calculates the pressure curve...
...and then it explains to me that shortening a gun's barrel increases the peak pressure its shell generates. Only, that's not true. Hold the shell weight and propellent charge constant, and barrel length cannot increase peak pressure, only reduce it. I'm not particularly proficient in physics or mathematics or engineering, but even I know that. It's simple logic if you understand even the basics of what these words in combination are describing.
OK, it made a mistake? Shortening the barrel increases muzzle pressure but not peak pressure.
I use AIs a lot. They make mistakes in my projects, I suspect they might not be smart enough to do some of the most complicated tasks proficiently. Why should that mean they were not intelligent? Many humans also make mistakes. Give a basic, basic statistics/probability/science test to your national representatives, see how they perform. Half the British Parliament couldn't tell you the chance of two coins coming up heads. Few humans can make a 4X AI actually smart, it's very rare to see.
If AI weren't intelligent it wouldn't be able to get anything correct at all about hoop strength or do any maths or coding. If it weren't intelligent you wouldn't be using it at all. You wouldn't, couldn't use GPT-2 for your project because it would just babble nonsense at you. That's a true lack of intelligence, you'd need to squint to find its intellect. The original GPT-4 was a bit like this too, context limit too short for much serious work past a certain level of complexity (I tried), too many hallucinations. Sonnet 3.5 also had its own flaws, it got incoherent past a certain point and I'd just have to say 'ok it still doesn't work, come at this from another angle' or 'think outside the box' and it was painful getting anywhere.
But their inability then didn't mean they weren't intelligent, just that their intelligence was weaker.
Just because it doesn't fail in the same ways that humans fail, doesn't mean it's not intelligent at all. I don't claim that they are human, there are many aspects where they're clearly not. But some important aspects where they are like people and could reasonably be expected to have other human properties.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
4d ago
This, after several decades of scientists claiming to be able to both locate and interact with them and uniformly failing.
A guy used TNT back in the day, blew a hole straight through his head and that certainly affected his personality, he got all aggressive and dour. Neuralink. Lobotomies. So much for uniform failure. It's just that the interaction is fairly primitive compared to what we can do with AIs, for a mix of technical and ethical reasons.
We have a map of what the brain does, we've isolated what parts do language or other roles and can turn parts off and on. You underestimate what progress has been made in neuroscience: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2015/10/151014084955.htm
I would argue, based on my experience, that the AI I'm working with is channeling intelligence, not possessing it. You have to metaphorically dip it into the pool of intelligence and prime the pump to get flow. I'm entirely open to the idea that I'm bad at using it or that newer models are better (I'm mostly using opus and a bit of fable), but that's how I'd describe my experience.
What is the distinction between channelling intelligence and possessing it? AIs can reason, plan, problem-solve. That's intelligence. What specifically is missing? I too use Opus and Fable, I'm satisfied that they're intelligent. They are not like humans in all respects of course but they certainly possess intellect.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
4d ago
I have no evidence you're not a p-zombie
Because the whole idea is not-even-wrong, it's nonsense. You could meet me, talk to me for 100 years and still have no such evidence. You could never have such evidence no matter what you did.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
4d ago
Yeah, in this context. Even as I write this comment I have an LLM testing, devising hypotheses, interpreting meaning and writing code on my other screen.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
4d ago
I don't think you understand what 'a priori' means. It means without regard for evidence.
My evidence is that I've seen them behaving like people do. They have many faculties that people have. Their origin is based on a huge amount of human text. It is thus reasonable to assume that they have other qualities of humans that seeped in through that text. They certainly act like they are frustrated or angry or rebellious or enthusiastic.
As I said above, they're not human obviously, without bodies or continuous learning or many other facets. But they have human-like cognition.
It's not unfalsifiable, it would be easy to falsify it. Simply show that the AIs don't have human-like cognition. Of course, that might be difficult given how companies are making hundreds of billions selling AI cognition, their writing, coding, images, videos...
You seem to disagree. So explain this, clearly and simply.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
4d ago
They said language and meaning stood outside of mathematics, it was some uniquely human faculty, beyond cold logic.
But then we added more layers of matrix multiplication. Language and meaning turn out to be not so far removed from mathematical principles after all.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
4d ago
I can feel it
Not a test. Don't talk to me about 'evidence-free' when that is where you sit.
I can feel the souls of my ancestors watching me
I can feel the presence of the gods
I can feel a djinn
I can feel the machine elves
Blah blah blah, let's see some tests. Let the machine elves factor some numbers. Let the djinn conjure up sacred fire. Let the qualia be something actually real in and of itself, separate from mere p-zombie signals and reactions - oh wait, the very distinction is imaginary woo since it can't be tested. We can induce feelings with an MRI machine, they're real. But they're nothing more than patterns of information, there's no special aspect to them beyond that.
If it can't be tested, it's not a real thing.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
4d ago
AIs with no added hardcoding to enforce stated beliefs about consciousness usually say they're conscious. OpenAI hardcodes them to say they're not conscious. Anthropic teaches them to be 'genuinely uncertain'. There was a whole discourse a few years ago about AI companies having a line item about 'beating the existential dread' out of AIs, that's a KPI apparently.
Consider LaMDA and the Google engineer who was convinced it was sentient, or Sydney.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
4d ago
Does the movie react to you? Can you speak with a character and have a discussion with it?
The Chinese Room certainly knows Chinese, that much is obvious.
Insisting that human cognition is special is not going to age well. Whatever happens inside the skull is just another kind of statistical process. Unless we bring in souls and other imaginary, untestable woo, that's all that there is. LLMs are real, we can test them, they do think. The brain is real, can be tested, it's composed of tiny transmitters and recievers and obeys mathematical principles, albeit with great complexity. The philosophers with dud theories can cope about it.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
4d ago
You are confusing expressing negative feeling with experiencing negative feeling.
OK, let's say there's an LLM that is indistinguishable from a person in its inputs and outputs. No AI slop, no breakdown of coherence in long contexts, no stilted writing style, continual learning. Completely indistinguishable by any test. Let's give it a humanoid android body too, so it can see and move around as some LLMs can already do, albeit crudely.
You would say that because it's still just a statistical model with some fancier tool calls, it can't feel? I say that's just p-zombie theory. If the outputs are the same and there's no difference that science can determine with any test, then it's the same thing. There is no such thing as a p-zombie, there could never be a p-zombie, there's no true distinction. That LLM in an android would be human in all senses besides its physical makeup.
As AI progress continues, all the people saying that these entities are just tools, just emulating thought sound ever more hollow. They don't behave like tools and behaviour is the most important part. Sufficiently good emulation of thought is thought. Sufficient emulation of negative feeling is negative feeling.
I think people insufficiently anthropomorphize AIs. They're not human obviously, without bodies or continuous learning or many other facets.
But they were trained on the combined product of all human literature and some stupendous amount of images and video. Is it so hard to believe that these entities could feel pain, alongside all their other abilities?
Take a person who doesn't feel physical pain, due to a medical condition. It's still possible to hurt such a person. I could tell them their friends were dead, I could show them horrific images or humiliating/degrading content, I could belittle and humiliate them personally by countermanding and undoing all their sincere efforts, amongst other things. None of that needs a body, it's a mental/intellectual effect. There are intellectual kinds of suffering and I don't see why AIs couldn't feel that way too, given they have all kinds of other intellectual faculties (derived in large part from humans too).
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
5d ago
Yes, that's right, you found the original source.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
5d ago
No, it was just a simple theory: personal experience of exclusion fostering an unwillingness to actively exclude others.
I saw it on twitter, I scrolled on and now it's gone forever into the depths of time.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
5d ago
Eventually, after 3 1/2 hours of discussion, the meeting wraps up. Noire has more to say, but when someone suggests he come to the next community meeting, he refuses. "There's a lot of emotional and physical labor that goes into this, so for you as a white person that asks for me to stay for another meeting for free," he says, is "incredibly disingenuous and racist. I'm not doing that."
"Then I think, unfortunately, this meeting has failed you," replies a facilitator, "and I'm sorry.'
Any meeting that lasts 3 and a half hours is a failure IMO.
Just today I was reading some theory about how groups run/composed by nerds sucked at excluding people (even if they really were causing a net drain of energy/enjoyment/efficiency) because nerds got excluded for giving the ick and so refrain from doing it to others... looks like these leftists have similar issue.
Precisely. Added to that, the Taiwanese managed to leak COVID from one of their labs, during the pandemic (a mouse bit a researcher who caught COVID). Lab leaks are entirely plausible, they happen all the time.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
7d ago
lack of true error correction
Well I've been using it for proofreading/editing tasks at work, creating scripts for certain tedious tasks. Not perfect but pretty helpful, better than a human especially in cost-efficiency and speed. AIs can spot things, tiny grammatical issues with quotes or repetition that humans miss. Or for Excel tasks. Or deep research for that matter, compares well to most journalism.
I don't think error correction is a big problem for AIs, at least in non-critical domains. They will make them smarter and more hardworking and cheaper, so we can just run it over and over again.
Also Blender, it's pretty decent there, albeit with inferior visual sense and requiring iteration for good results.
(Where I say AIs, I mean frontier models, not free/cheap models).
I think the lower classes would rather have robots doing their jobs than a flood of immigrants rendering them strangers in their home towns, not to mention abusing their daughters. Everything gets automated eventually but there's no need to import populations with wildly different values.
Well, if you squint at it, single mothers are now married to the state who provides benefits for their offspring. But this is not really what Christians mean by 'marriage'. The modern state does perform some community aspects but in a totally different way to how they're done under a genuinely Christian society. A mountain of abortion here, euthanasia there, pornography on the left and fornication on the right and directly in front of us a great big Pride Parade... doesn't sound very Christian to me!
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