No, what you would do is stop your own private development immediately, get in touch with the government by any means necessary, and build a coalition as fast as possible to stop the technology from continuing and put hard regulation (determined by the government, not dario) on the tech.

Clearly they aren't that scared.

If I hold a gun to your head and tell you to fork over your wallet, you will do it, because you sense imminent threat to life. Yet somehow we're to believe these people have the equivalent of a technological gun to their heads but are choosing to keep their wallets?

> No, what you would do is stop your own private development immediately, get in touch with the government by any means necessary, and build a coalition as fast as possible to stop the technology from continuing and put hard regulation (determined by the government, not dario) on the tech.

What you're missing is that they've tried repeatedly to do this over the past years, and the government has repeatedly said that they do not want to put hard regulation on the tech. The previous administration was discussing putting a couple of soft regulations in place; the current administration doesn't want to limit progress at all because they want to stay ahead of China. So the option you're describing just isn't available.

First of all, I do not think they've been pursuing that to the degree that you think.

But even assuming that's the case, the natural thing to do in that scenario is to not contribute to the development of the doomsday device. But anthropic's approach seems to be to help build the supposed doomsday device faster?

The only generous interpretation is that Anthropic thinks that only they, the people at Anthropic have the morals/intelligence/whatever needed to build the doomsday device ethically, which is basically the perspective of an egoist despot and which should terrify you.

The more generous interpretation would be that Anthropic thinks they know how to build powerful AI systems in such a way that they will not become doomsday devices at all. They don't claim to be the only people with this knowledge and do not argue that their competitors should be shut down.

Thank you. This is the kind of basic critical thinking that basically no one in technology today seems to possess. Some days I wonder if I've gone insane because everyone else seems to be staking life itself on wispy, undefined meaningless terms and unarticulated concepts that they assume are valid universals.

We've slid so backward, so quickly.

This is a fine example of how rational good faith can quickly turn into naivety.

Consider the massive power and wealth differentials these companies stand to gain if they "win".

When the other participants have given up all reason and reasonable bounds on power, you'd do well to abandon any pretense of generous interpretation. Now is the time for critical analysis, not faith in the inherent "goodness" of someone whose entire job is presently to make as much money as possible by disrupting literally the entire white collar industry and who stands to gain much more than you or I do, and let's not forget, this outstanding success would never have happened without our work.

Keep in mind this is not a person who thought "wow, this is an existential threat, I'd better not contribute to building this". If anything Dario's past alarm ringing only proves that he's not really doing this in good faith. Otherwise he would have stopped a long time ago. The most generous interpretation of his behavior is that he literally thinks only anthropic is responsible and smart enough to build and control this stuff which...yeah, that should be pretty telling (esp. when you consider their recent security mishaps).

Bingo. What we're seeing is all their early bullshitting and waffling about intelligence back when the models couldn't count the r's in strawberry paying off.

They've managed to dupe the dull eyed masses into thinking these products have some kind of agency of their own and can thus bypass the responsibility that should be falling on them to control their software. Amid all the marketing fluff and hype people seem to forget easily that ultimately these things are stateless functions running in a data center. We ought to be demanding these companies take culpability for their actions. Of course, the current political environment doesn't help.

In other words, same as it's always been. The general rule is that inequality increases until a war comes along and burns everything down and levels it to ashes. The world has been relatively peaceful since WW2 ended so inequality has grown particularly egreguous.

The challenge is to figure out a way to reduce inequality without war. I hope everybody agrees that war is a cure worse than the disease.

We have a particularly inept executive that manufactures crises rather than solving them. This isn't the first such in US history.

Where did I say people shouldn't work on their societies?

Yes, thank you. The demise of basic reading comprehension skills will be the true end of us all.

Our society overconsumes by insane degrees. TBH the world would probably be a better place if most people limited their consumption to what they could reasonably acquire on disk.

I don't think it's possible to have a universal "colloquial" definition of "simple" that is also precise. It's all relative.

This is why I think the formalists studying complexity back in the 50s had the right approach. You can only give "simple" precise meaning within some kind of formal system with a shared set of initial axioms or assumptions. From that point you can define it quantitatively over some set of objects (relations, programs).

Funnily enough, this approach also touches on Hickey's etymological derivation. The root words also fundamentally have to do with the quantity of relationships.

Definitely. Much of the structure of internet media encourages constant, passive consumption. Or, to use the terms of the grandparent, we move traded ambient thinking, reflection, and imagination, which the brain is pushed into during boredom, for ambient consumption.

I think a lot of people believe that, as long as they consume "high quality" or more intellectual content, the negative effects of constant consumption are mitigated, but I think that's false. It's less about the content and more about the structure and process. If you never give your brain moments to stop basic processing of wildly different inputs and to just critically examine them instead, you will suffer brain rot, even if the content you consume is "educational".

Yes. And I'd also add that so much of it is about context and intention.

If you intentionally sit down to enjoy some low-brow entertainment (Maybe a silly action movie or a mediocre rom-com) because you enjoy that, great.

But I recently realized that there are podcast episodes from 10 years ago that I still remember parts of, but few from recent years, even though I've listened to far more podcasts (and they haven't become less intellectual).

Programming can be a medium of expression for working through ideas. However, source code is not art in the same way that the paintbrush is not art.

I think because a program is textual, people incorrectly draw analogical conclusions for programs based on their experience with written works, in which the medium of expression and the artwork coincide. However, this is not the case for programs because many equivalent programs can produce the same end result (runtime user experience) and we do not typically incorporate the program itself in our judgement of the artistic merits of the runtime experience. In writing the form and content are inextricably linked to a much stronger extent.