I call this the BLACKMIRROR FALLACY:
When new technologies are treated as much more threatening and risky than old technologies with proven risks/harms. When technological progress is seen as a bigger threat than technological stagnation.
this goes so hard, i can't believe it's on a government building. need more of this energy
nuclear reactors should have prometheus stealing fire from the atom
datacenters should have an angel with a flaming sword holding back chaos
A Waymo costs $7.60 for 15 min ride.
So for 8 hours that is $243.
Put a bed in it and you have moving hotel room.
Extend range and you could go to sleep in SF and Wake up in LA.
There is no rational reason, other than greed, for Novo Nordisk to charge Americans nearly $1,000 a month for Ozempic when it costs less than $5 to manufacture it and can be purchased in Germany for just $59. Novo must substantially reduce the price of Ozempic in the US now.
Politico profile on AI lobbying has HILARIOUS anecdote:
Tristan Harris showed lawmakers META chatbot could give instructions to make bio-weapon
Mark Zuckerberg was present, took out phone & got same instructions using Google
Room erupted into laughter!
Lex Friedman was extremely patient with Kanye and confronted him repeatedly, while trying to educate him.
Kanye's response was essentially: sHuT uP JEW!
The New York Times's lawsuit against OpenAI and Microsoft seeks "destruction... of all GPT or other LLM models and training sets that incorporate Times Works"
I call this the BLACKMIRROR FALLACY:
When new technologies are treated as much more threatening and risky than old technologies with proven risks/harms. When technological progress is seen as a bigger threat than technological stagnation.
So the odds of getting a blood clot from the J&J vaccine are literally one in a million and they stopped administering it.
Do you know the odds of getting blood clots from birth control? It's 1/1000. (This is considered very low odds.)
Nick Bostrom is starting to worry that AI fear could prevent upsides of AI in the same way nuclear fear prevented upsides of nuclear power.
This is a watershed, pivotal moment for the AI risk movement. Bostrom has broken ranks.
FINALLY: AI xrisker Nick Bostrom regrets focusing on AI risk, now worries that our fearful herd mentality will drive us to crush AI and destroy our future potential. (from an UnHerd podcast today)
Nick Bostrom: It would be tragic if we never developed advanced artificial…
Overpopulation panic lead to... millions of forced sterilizations
Nuclear power panic lead to... millions of tons of unneeded Co2 emissions and an emboldened Russia
The GMO panic lead to... millions of blind and dead children in the third world
AI panic will lead to...
What AI doomers won't tell you: MODERNA uses AI to create its mRNA vaccines.
BEFORE AI it produced 30 mRNAs per month
AFTER AI it produced 1000 mRNAs per month
C.S. Lewis: “Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some…
Nick Bostrom is starting to worry that AI fear could prevent upsides of AI in the same way nuclear fear prevented upsides of nuclear power.
This is a watershed, pivotal moment for the AI risk movement. Bostrom has broken ranks.
Things that have always been around, tend to hold a subconcious authority over us, they arn't questioned because they aren't noticed.
Example: backspace on a keyboard is just a holdover from typewriters. Design methodology:
cc
@eli_schiff
The most effective risk mitigators are determinate optimists.
They believe in solutions.
They’re often drowned out by the least effective risk mitigators: the indeterminate pessimists.
Why? Because they’re too busy building solutions to write op-eds and do Ted talks.
Mr Beast has so many views he struggles to find sponsors who can afford to pay for so much value at once.
The solution to this is him launching and selling his own products within videos
@JeffreyKBerns
City Name idea: Ethcot (Ethereum City of Tomorrow)
Other idea: working on new age knowledge accreditation that could be rolled out to school/college in Ethcot see
@NewtrustFdn
- will do to hiring credentials what blockchain did to currency
The danger of overstating extinction risk from powerful new technologies?
It offers justification for an almost unlimited number of preventable deaths.
Science fiction has conditioned us to be hypervigilant about avoiding dystopias born of technological acceleration & totally indifferent to avoiding dystopias born of technological stagnation
🇩🇪Nuclear free Germany faces energy crisis
🇱🇰100% organic Sri Lanka faces food crisis
Hear, hear. Also fundamental scientific research. And economic growth.
All of them, or any one of them, might easily become necessary to save the species. Within living memory, civilisation was saved by a breakthrough in metamathematics.
Overpopulation panic lead to... millions of forced sterilizations
Nuclear power panic lead to... millions of tons of unneeded Co2 emissions and an emboldened Russia
The GMO panic lead to... millions of blind and dead children in the third world
AI panic will lead to...
I call them problemists.
The glass is half full
full glass has no ice
The full glass with ice has no lemon
The full glass with ice and lemon, doesn’t have organic lemon
Science fiction has conditioned us to be hypervigilant about avoiding dystopias born of technological acceleration & totally indifferent to avoiding dystopias born of technological stagnation
Until 50 years ago, CO₂ emissions developed in lockstep with economic growth in France.
Since the early 1970s, the opposite has been true: emissions declined as people in France got richer.
I wouldn’t worry Nick. It isn’t as if this exact thing happened with:
Nuclear power, depriving world of key carbon free energy source
Overpopulation, leading to forced sterilization campaigns and infanticide
GMOs, leading to millions of deaths from malnutrition (golden rice)
In 1983, Steve Jobs predicted ChatGPT:
He imagined the next Aristotle writing all ideas down into personal computer, then future generations using it to train a chatbot: "We can ask this machine, hey what would Aristotle have said?"
Hear audio here:
Journalism shapes the conversation less than the memes.
Many articles that were titled ‘Do Cellphones Cause Brain Tumours’ are pretty skeptical. But a headline should be treated like a tweet: a stand alone piece of media.
Harmful in same way ‘Do Immigrants Steal Children?’ is
Other examples of pessimists sounding smart in peacetime, then being revealed as useless and dangerous in wartime:
☢️ Anti-nuclear power movement in Germany before invasion of Ukraine.
🌱 Leftwing Anti-GMO/emerging biotech movement before global pandemic.
Politico reports Tristan Harris helped inspire Biden’s executive order on AI. ()
Harris told Glenn Beck he’d have let his late-mother die, rather than strong AI curing her, to avoid extinction of humanity.
Childhood has been declared ruined for 100s of years by Smartphones, TV, Videogames, Comics and Novels.
Go back in time trying to find when childhood was supposedly uncorrupted and you find yourself at a point when child labour was common and child mortality high.
Article calls for state control of cyberspace
Not ONCE does it mention authoritarian efforts to outlaw open-source AI
Not ONCE does it mention efforts to weaken encryption
Not ONCE does it mention efforts to have forced real ID on web
THAT is the real techno-authoritarianism
Replacing ‘AI’ with ‘Encryption’ in safety debate is clarifying
“We can’t release encryption until it is proven safe”
“Encryption can protect privacy of good people, but it must not be allowed to protect criminals”
“Creators of encryption must be liable for harms it causes”
People treat science fiction as a more reliable allegory for technological development than history fact.
They sit, comfortably in the least dystopian time in human existence - watching Blackmirror on an iPad in bed - convinced it was just a fluke that technology got us here.
Proud to be part of the first ever protest calling for a global moratorium on the development of AI systems more powerful than GPT-4! See you at 5pm Monday for more of the same.
#PauseAI
A few months before
@Twitter
was founded:
“young adults are accusing Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation of CENSORING THEIR POSTS and BLOCKING THEIR ACCESS TO RIVAL SITES.”
Replacing ‘encryption’ with ‘locks’ in safety debate is clarifying
“We can’t release locks until they are proven safe”
“Locks can protect security of good people, but it must not be allowed to empower kidnappers”
“Creators of locks must be liable for harms they cause”
Replacing ‘AI’ with ‘Encryption’ in safety debate is clarifying
“We can’t release encryption until it is proven safe”
“Encryption can protect privacy of good people, but it must not be allowed to protect criminals”
“Creators of encryption must be liable for harms it causes”
This isn't 'a bit blackmirror.' It is anti-blackmirror: the robot is delivering sustenance in a hygienic way while we all cower in the face of a naturally occurring virus.
Not only is this not techno-dystopia, technology is actively mitigating dystopia.
2019: “Billionaires will not save us. Fuck Big Pharma. Technology will cause mass unemployment!”
2020: Billionaires and big Pharma saved us. Technology prevented mass unemployment.
Me in
@thedailybeast
: AI Doomers Are Starting to Admit It: They’re Going Too Far
“Nick Bostrom—father of modern debates about existential risk from artificial intelligence —is worrying he may have yelled “Terminator!” in a crowded theater, creating a neo-Luddite stampede that…
Building houses to deal with a housing shortage?
Building Nuclear power to deal with carbon emissions?
Ozempic to address obesity?
E-cigarettes to reduce smoking?
NO NO NO. You are misunderstanding. These micro problems are mere proxies for a macro problem: cApiTaLisM
Problemists HATE solutions.
Anyone that even hints at the prospect of solving a problem - rather than managing it - is written off as a delusional solutionist.
If you are right leaning libertarian you should be thanking
@nandoodles
:
She’s cutting off oxygen to the most toxic players in right wing media ecosystem, without government coercion or violating the constitution. Which in turn is reducing chances and justification of latter.
OMG. 1987 internal Apple video set in 1997 had VR 'Vista Mac' (Apple Vision Pro!)
At very end then CEO John Sculley says "The APPLE VISION is stronger than ever!"
‘AI Doomers Are Starting to Admit They’re Going Too Far’
“Bostrom is right to worry. The risks of technological stagnation - despite what shows like Black Mirror imply – presents a real dystopian danger” - me in
@thedailybeast