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Culture War Roundup for the week of April 17, 2023

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  1. markdown sucks

  2. what is a sentience? why does not having it prevent you from dying?

  3. GPT-4 can solve simple problems 'outside its distribution'. a hundred billion dollars will be poured into getting neural nets to solve as complex 'outside-distribution' problems as possible over the next years, because it's insanely valuable and powerful

  4. this doesn't need to happen though. we can just make superintelligent AI because it's useful

(G): How a machine can boundlessly and recursively self-improve and yet be incapable of changing its core programming and impetus (Why a hostile AGI necessarily stays hostile)

replace hostile with friendly (also uh what is a friendly ai? what does it do? seems important)

I reject in entirety the possibility of consciousness emerging accidentally. That it happened to humans after a billion years of evolution is no proof it will happen in machines even if we could iterate them billions of times per day

... why? and again whatever a consciousness is why does that prevent the machines from smart

(I): How we can measure and exert controls on machine progress toward cognition when we do not understand cognition

uh, how does gpt-4 exist at all then? this approach would strongly suggest gpt-4 is impossible if applied even 3 years ago...