Roko’s Basilisk: the idea that the emergence of super-AI is inevitable and that it will kill everyone that hindered or didn’t support its development in revenge. If both those premises hold, it makes sense to aid its development for self-preservation.
I don’t think either premise holds, personally, but these people evidently do.
I’m in Germany. I wasn’t aware this bullshit had actually proliferated here too (though maybe they just did a catch-all for Europe, idk).
I hate this timeline
Uhh… did they just figure this out now?
All the other salient points aside, I think this is an example of the interaction between the bubble effect (we here all know it, but it’s hard to ascertain just how widespread that awareness is outside this corner of the net) and the misunderstanding of the way such big organs function.
The latter is particularly made worse by how Trump (and others, but I’m not gonna write a whole list) has desensitised us to the scandalous nature of “person with some measure of authority makes throwaway comments”.
Big organisations and institutions being “slow” to work or comment such things is an unfortunate side-effect of the fact that they’re supposed to put some diligence into their statements. There’s probably a nice pile of reports and arguments that have been written, reviewed, refined, discarded, assembled, cross-referenced to support such a statement with not just evidence for that fact, but also for the negative implications that make it a human rights problem. They probably figured it out a while ago, but had to build a case before going public with their results.
Even if we assume the best intentions, the Chief couldn’t responsibly “guess” or offer a forecast of where this was gonna go, because his job is to report on facts, not on probabilities*, and those facts have to be established, while all the other work of those organs also is still goiny on. In that light, his statement is tantamount to saying “those doomsayers were right and you should have listened”.
Courts have the same issue: you and I and everyone else may know that some person is guilty, but due process demands that they be properly tried and have their guilt proven to a certain standard. That’s slow. It’s painful to watch. But even in the best circumstances, doing things properly takes time, and doing them quickly risks error.
All of that said, you’re probably right that he wasn’t in a rush to confirm that, just as courts tend to drag their feet. Corruption makes that issue of delay worse.
* Expressing concerns about potential issues is a little more complex, since it uses extant and studied patterns to show the danger of where a partial match might go, but there was hardly much precedent for a rushing tide of slop pouring into so many households at once to compare to until patterns started emerging that could be observed and matched and eventually coalesce into certainty.
Every time I see this clip and remember the original he’s trying to copy, I can’t help but guffaw at how pathetic an imitation it is. Don’t mistake this for endorsement, by any means, but the original had composure, posture, military , projected control and determination, all the ingredients for the image of strength he wanted to project.
Musk? He has an edgy tryhard teenager’s imitation, biting his lip like he’s trying to look super focused, moving as if he’s trying to put feeling into it or whatever. It’s like the uncanny valley of parody: We know it’s not parody, but it’s also not really the original.
It’s like “How do you do, fellow kids Nazis” except Buscemi doesn’t deserve being used as analogy for that. Nobody does, really.
God, Musk is such a loser and it’s a mystery how he got as influential among young people as he did.
Pharell doesn’t deserve blame, according to this comment thread’s sources:
sex.com wants me to verify my age.
Takes more than one nail to close a coffin, and they’ve been hammering a while already
That makes you one of today’s Lucky 10,000.
(The figure is US-based, but it has become proverbial even beyond the US)
Fascist infighting is a very real phenomenon Americans aren’t taught enough about
Honestly, that’s really just ideological fracturing, scaled up with the degree of radicalisation and readiness to do violence. The more you’re willing to kill the opposition, the more likely you’re willing to also target perceived opposition in your own ranks.
That infighting is probably more visible to us on the left because we see it all the time, while the right wing’s propagandists manage to project an image of unity. Charlie getting Kirked is an example of that facade cracking.
Good.
Avoid messaging my coworkers late at night.
I generally don’t do that. Once I’m off work, the laptop is shut and work profile on my phone is turned off. The second I step out of the building, I’m no longer having work-related conversations.
That’s not just personal work-life ethic, it’s the explicit policy my boss laid out. He just doesn’t stick to it himself.
My boss is like that sometimes. I’d come down one Sunday morning with some kind of stomach issue. Turned on company laptop to message him that I won’t be coming in on Monday. Go to turn off the laptop again, and just as I do, there’s his message popping up wishing me speedy recovery.
Just glad he doesn’t expect that same kind of availability of me, because that can’t be a healthy work-/life-balance.
I love the Oligarchy typo
I agree, but I suggest you direct your replies directly to the source comment. I’m just the messenger here.
Per @[email protected]’s comment
I think we all know why. Whether having money causes racism, or it just so happens that racists are the ones with the money and they’re good at keeping it “In The Family” so to speak is kind of tangential and academic. It’s the hateful bigots that have the cash to fund big things, so if you want funding, it pays to be trashy.
Taking a comic about a flimsy excuse and doing a serious analysis of a joke problem is such an xkcd thing to do.
Well, the tool apparently fought him and “several times stated flat out that this was impossible and unsolvable and that we should just write a report about it.”
And it also doesn’t look like the LLM actually added code so much as helped with debug code and analysis, however exactly that may have looked like. The resulting fix changes three lines of code, very much human-writable or -verifiable.
Also, let’s not worship Linus. The guy has done much good and is brilliant, but he’s still human, still capable of making mistakes. This instance working out well deserves the proper appreciation, bu we still ought to be wary.
If we ever find a way to deal with the whole “burning the planet” issue, their best use case is to find and match patterns, not to imitate them.
The idea of using a language model to process search engine input isn’t the dumbest part about Gemini and plenty of people report good results finding information easier and quicker with ChatGPT. In those cases, the deviation from rigid keywords is desirable because it can match results with related words rather than literal word-matching. Google Search already did a decent job at that (before the enshittification ran rampant), which more complex language models could improve even further.
The landmine is in their reproduction of those results, where the generated “summary” is the equivalent of a cunning bullshitter that convincingly sounds like he understood the topic but actually has no clue and just delivers a best guess. That’s where the deviation becomes a risk of misinformation or introducing bugs.
They should narrow things down by finding the likely answers where that matters, not produce more stuff that humans will have to double-check.
Just downloaded both, will give them a try - thsnks for the recommendation!
I mean, yeah, I’m not saying that it’s plausible. But I don’t think we ascribe sound reasoning to those people in the first place.