I don’t believe the control problem is solved, but I’m not sure it would matter if it is.
I don't even understand what the proposed mechanism for "rouge AI enslaves humanity" is. It's scifi (and not hard scifi) as far as I can see.
We already did. Look at the state of animals today vs <1 mya. Bovines grown in unprecedented mass numbers to live short lives before slaughter. Wolves bred into an all new animal, friendly and helpful to the dominate species. Previously apex predators with claws, teeth, speed and strength, rendered extinct.
To put it simply, it could outcompete humanity on every metric that matters, especially given recent advancements in robotics.
Again, I wonder why no group of smart people with brilliant ideas has unilaterally imposed those ideas on the rest of humanity through sheer force of genius.
I don't know if this will happen with any certainty, but the general idea of commoditising intelligence very much has the ability to tip the world order: every problem that can be tackled by throwing brainpower at it will be, and those advances will compound.
Also, the question you're posing did happen: it was called the Manhattan Project.
“AGI” has proven to be today’s hot marketing stunt for when you need to raise another round of cash and your only viable product is optimism.
Flying cars were just around the corner in the 60s, too.
The Manhattan Project would be a cute example if the Los Alamos scientists had gone rogue and declared themselves emperors of mankind, but no, in fact the people in charge remained the people in charge - mostly not supergeniuses.
All of these entities would have been enormously more powerful with access to an AGI's immortality, sleeplessness, and ability to clone itself.
If Alexander could have left perfectly aligned copies of himself in every city he passed, he could have gotten much more control and authority, and still avoided a fight by agreeing to maintain the local power structure with himself as the new head of state.
The problem you're proposing could be solved via a high quality cellular network.
Having said that, we do not to understand the world to exploit it for ourselves. And what better way to understand and exploit the universe than science? Its an endearment.
1)Leibniz wasn't superhuman 2) Leibniz couldn't work 24/7 3) he could not self increase the speed of his own hardware (body) 4) he could not spawn 1 trillion copies of him to work 24/7
Like how much time did you think before writing this
A trillion hyperintelligent demons might be cogitating right now on the head of a pin. You can't prove they aren't thinking up all sorts of genius evil schemes. My point is that "intelligence" has never been a sufficient - or even necessary - component of imposing ones will on humans.
I feel like HN/EA/"Grey Tribe" people fail to see this because they so worship intellect. I'm much more likely to fall victim to a big dumb man than smart computers.
Not even, they already ran out of data.
I think reinforcement learning with little to no human feedback, O-1 / R-1 style, might be that revolution.
Setting the world on fire and disrupting societies gleefully, while basically building bunkers (figuratively more than literally) and consolidating surveillance and propaganda to ride out the cataclysm, that's what I'm seeing.
And the stories to sell people on continuing to put up with that are not even good IMO. Just because the people who use the story to consolidate wealth and control are excited about that, we're somehow expected to be excited about the promise of a pair of socks made from barbed wire they gave us for Christmas. It's the narcissistic experience: "this is shit. this benefits you, not me. this hurts me."
One thing is sure, actual intelligence, regardless of how you may define it, something that is able to reason and speak freely, is NOT what people who fire engineers for correcting them want. It's not about a sort of oracle for humanity to enjoy and benefit from, that just speaks "truth".
Oil and minning companies too?
There's also the monetary policy, which is when the federal reserve does this on purpose. The general principle is the same, but instead it spends its money buying bonds and gets its money selling those bonds, and creates a bunch of rules about where banks keep their money so it always has some money on hand.
Yeah, that's why I mentioned the fed.
> It would mean that countries with low taxes have very high inflation and this is not the case.
It's about the total balance of government spending and taxes. The point being made is that tax breaks have the same effect as government spending. Recall that I was replying to
> Tax breaks, i.e. my money not being in your pocket means that they are stolen?
The government writing someone a million dollar check and the government giving someone a million dollar tax break (assuming they pay at least a million in taxes), contribute to inflation by increasing the money supply by a million dollars than it would be otherwise. Yes, this federal reserve is by far a larger driver of inflation, but the government giving this tax break still degrades the value of your money, same as if they wrote a check.
Of course, it is easy to view a tax break as a non-action, but that's exactly why the government gives so many tax breaks. Once you're taxing everyone, you can hand out tax breaks that's the same as handing out money only you can pretend that it's doing nothing.
Think of it as 3 Scenarios:
1) The island government writes a check to everyone except you, increasing their wealth by 50%.
2) The island government taxes just you for 50% of your wealth.
3) The island government taxes everyone 75% of their wealth, grants everyone but you a total tax-break, and you 25 percentage point tax break.
Basically the same result, only in one they say "It was fair, and we handed out a few tax-breaks, what's wrong with letting people keep their money?"
2) if government gives everyone tax break but not me, it means only that the government taxes only me
3) if everyone has 50% more money, there is very high probability that my business will go up A LOT
Seriously, dude, it’s not worthy anymore to try and explain to you very basic stuff. Inflation is not a balance between taxation and spending. All Middle Eastern countries are having huge spending and almost zero taxes. I asked you very simple question and you couldn’t answer.
What bothers me most is why people write about things they have no clue about and clearly haven’t even put a decent thought into it.
Basically what you believe in is that the thieves are controlling the inflation because they get some of the citizens wealth.
There's actually lots of taxes that aren't income or sales tax
> if everyone has 50% more money, there is very high probability that my business will go up A LOT
No, you'll be getting twice the money, but the money is worth half as much.
> Inflation is not a balance between taxation and spending.
It is for the US federal government.
> All Middle Eastern countries are having huge spending and almost zero taxes.
Those countries peg their currency to the dollar. Their money doesn't come from taxes, but instead from state oil companies. These countries aren't as free to hand out money like the US. If enough people tried to exchange their Saudi Riyals for dollars quick enough, and the Saudi government couldn't gather US dollars quick enough, their currency would very quickly collapse.
The difference is that Musk can do twice as much for 1/10 what Nasa thinks the program will cost, which is never what the program will actually cost, and Musk will do it in half that time to boot.
The guy is an unhinged manchild, but if what you care about is having your money well spend and getting to Mars as cheaply as possible, he's exactly who you're looking for.
I do find impressive that SpaceX engineers figured out reusable rockets and now we can send things more cheaply out to orbit. But in all seriousness, should we care about getting to Mars cheaply? Or do people care because Musk came along to convince them (and the US government) to invest in this venture of his?
Who cares about the planet, anyway.
https://apnews.com/article/wind-energy-offshore-turbines-tru...
https://www.utilitydive.com/news/trump-offshore-wind-leasing...
I mean, I can see how numbers wise this decision makes sense.
Maybe at some point they are going to AI themselves out of climate change. Well.. except for the part where they don’t believe in man-escalated climate change.
The data centres were already being built. All of these companies have been dumping tonnes of money into AI and will continue to dump tonnes of money into AI. It's just more of the same, but they had to do a big announcement with Trump to pander to his ego and somehow make it about him. Like he engineered this Stargate thing. The whole embarrassing spectacle was likely arranged by Ellison.
I was bullish on OpenAI, but honestly I don't see any path forward where they have any differentiating value that justifies even a tenth of the valuation. Their video AI is simply terrible. Dall-E 2 is matched by many competitors. 4o and o1 and good, but already have been eclipsed by a number of competitors, including an open source Chinese option.
My work has almost entirely transitioned to competitors, and Google's latest updates have quietly absolutely trounced OpenAI's offering. Like, Gemini has quietly become the best AI platform in the game.
That's all neither here nor there, but I just don't care what Altman and crew have to say any more. They are not leaders in the space. They are, in many ways, has beens.
Regarding to your question, yes. I'd prefer a healthy counterbalance to what we have currently. Ideally, I'd prefer cooperation. A worldwide cooperation.
On a tangential note, those who wish to frame this as the start of the great AI war with China (in which they regrettably may be right), should seriously consider the possibility of coming out on the losing end. China has tremendous industrial momentum, and is not nearly as incapable of leading-edge innovation as some Americans seem to think.
So those who framing this are correct and that we should matching their momentum here asap?
I don't think there is much point of reading the whole thing after the following:
"Everyone is now talking about AI, but few have the faintest glimmer of what is about to hit them. Nvidia analysts still think 2024 might be close to the peak. Mainstream pundits are stuck on the willful blindness of “it’s just predicting the next word”."
but regardless of the net balance of actions, it is clearly more interventionist than China has been up to this point
What happens inside China is nothing of my interest, it's their business. They existed for millennias, they probably know how to manage themselves. They are not trying to expand outside of may be Taiwan, they don't put their military bases in my country, they don't fund so-called "opposition" and that's good enough for me.
That's moving the goalposts and doesn't address the issue.
>They have been smart and done all their dealings via money.
You mean just like the country who issues the world reserve currency and who's intelligence agencies get involved in destabilizing regimes across the world?
Is this how you make a constructive argument? Perhaps I was expecting too much from a joke account but this style of whataboutism is boring.
My post that you responded to set my premise which was that China has its own form of colonialism that is quite different than Americas but it exists and it’s quite strong. To classify China as a peaceful loving nation that respects other cultures is as if we were saying the US has never started a conflict. It’s factually a lie. China has a long list of human rights issues, they factually do not respect other cultures even within their own borders. I am not defending America but pointing out that China is not what the OP stated.
Are you the kind of superficial petty person who needs to take jabs at the messenger's name and not the message itself?
And are you really in the position to throw stones from a glass house with that account name? If you had your real name and social media profiles linked in the bio I'd understand, but you're just being hypocritical, petty and childish here with this 'gotcha'.
> To classify China as a peaceful loving nation that respects other cultures
I never made such a classification. You're building your own strammen to form a narrative you can attack but you're not saying anything useful the contradicts my PoV and wasting our time. Since you're obviously arguing in bad faith I won't converse with you further. Goodbye.
>How many countries has China invaded and bombed in the last 30 years? >How many deaths did China's warmongering caused abroad?
You didn't answer those, just started hand waving some stuff about China's "own form of colonialism" -- without even explaining what that is and how it works (which personally I'd be curious to hear about, and believe *is*" likely guilty of violence).
So you very clearly are the one guilty of shifting the goalposts, going on tangents, and bringing up usernames instead of real arguments.
> Since 7 October 2023, the IDF has been accused of extrajudicial killing of unarmed Palestinian detainees, doctors, and healthcare workers. Israeli soldiers have summarily executed Palestinian civilians, often in front of their families. They have killed Palestinians waving white flags. In April 2024, mass graves were found containing corpses with their hands tied. The corpses included women and the elderly.
Sources: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2008_Uyghur_unrest
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/April_2013_Bachu_unrest
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xinjiang_conflict#1990s_to_200...
Me personally? Yes.
[1] https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2024/09/omnip...
It's worth keeping in mind how extremely unfriendly to tech the last admin was. At this point, it's basically proven in court that emails of the form "please deboost person x or else" were send, and there's probably plenty more we don't know about.
Combine that with the troubles in Europe which Biden's administration was extremely unwilling to help with, the obstacles thrown in the way of major energy buildouts, which are needed for AI... one would have to be stupid to be a tech CEO and not simp for Trump.
Tech has been extremely Democratic for many years. The Democrats have utterly alienated tech, and now they reap the consequences.
Nice euphemism for giving people autonomy in their data and privacy.
Most of there companies are so large that they cannot really fail anymore. At this point it has very little to do with protecting themselves, more with making them more powerful than governments. JD Vance are said that the US could drop support for NATO if Europe tries to regulate X [1]. Oligarchs have fully infiltrated the US government and are trying to do the same to other countries.
I disagree with the grandparent. They don't support Trump because they do not want to be on his bad side (well, at least not only that), they support Trump because they see the opportunity to suppress regulation worldwide and become more powerful than governments.
We just keep making excuses (fiduciary duties, he just doesn't know how to wave his arm because he's an autist [2]). Why not just call it what it is?
[1] https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politic...
[2] Which is pretty offensive to people on the spectrum.
Oligarchs want less regulation, but they also want these beefy government contracts. They want weaker government to regulate them and stronger government to protect them and bully other countries. Way I see it, what they actually want is control of the government, and with Trump they have it (more than before).
Well, on the other side it can be said that Big Tech wasn't really on the side of democracy (note: democracy, not the Democrat Party) itself, and it hasn't been for years - at the very least ever since Cambridge Analytica was discovered. The "big tech" sector has only looked at profit margins, clicks, eyeballs and other KPIs while completely neglecting its own responsibility towards its host, and it got treated as the danger it posed by the Biden administration and Europe alike.
As for the cryptocoin world that has also been campaigning for the 45th: they are an even worse cancer on the world. Nothing but a gigantic waste of resources (remember the prices of GPUs, HDDs and RAM going through the roof, coal power plants being reactivated?), rug pulls and other scams.
The current shift towards the far-right is just the final masks falling off. Tech has rather (openly) supported the 45th than to learn from the chaos it has brought upon the world and make at least a paper effort to be held accountable.
What are you talking about via Europe? Holding tech companies accountable to meddling in domestic politics? Not allowing carte blanche to user data?
I understand (though do not like) large corps tiptoeing around Trump in order to manipulate him, it is due to fear. Not due to Trump having respectable values.
Corruption is as old as mankind; don't know why it's pointed out prominently. Just look at that Xipeng/Biden photo from the National Archives.
Did I?
> Corruption is as old as mankind
Yeah but seldomly celebrated or boasted about.
MSFT or even Google (AWS is not as mature in that space imho) made perfect sense, Oracle doesn't.
Elon and Larry are good friends, I would guess that has something to do with this development.
And the market leader is what, 30%? about 1 order of magnitude. That's not such a huge difference, and I suspect that Oracle's size is disproportionate in the enterprise space (which is where a lot of AI services are targeted) whereas AWS has a _ton_ of non-enterprise things hosted.
In any case, 2-3% is big enough where this kind of investment is 1) financially possible, 2) desirable to grow to be #2 or #3
Disclaimer: I work at a highly regulated industry and we are fine running our "enterprise" workloads in Azure (and even AWS for a spinoff company in the same sector). Oracle has no specific moat in that area imho, unless you already locked-in in one of their software offerings.
The announcement was funny because they weren't quite sure what they are going to do in the health space. Sam Altman was asked, and he immediately deferred to Ellison and Masayoshi. Ellison was vague... it seems they know they want to do something with Ellison's massive stash of health data... but they don't quite know what they are building yet.
Providing a turnkey HIPAA-compliant but modern health dataverse would be huge.
The Snowflake-for-health is more about opening EHR data for operational use by providers and facilities.
Versus being locked into respective EHR platforms.
If Oracle provided a compelling data suite (a la MS) within their own cloud ecosystem, they'd have less reason to restrict it at the EHR level (as they'd have lock-in at the platform level), which would help them compete against Epic (who can't pivot to openness in the same way, without risking their primary product).
That said, this does look like dreadful policy at the first headline. There is a lot of money going in to AI, adding more money from the US taxpayer is gratuitous. Although in the spirit of mixing praise and condemnation, if this is the worst policy out of Trump Admin II then it'll be the best US administration seen in my lifetime. Generally the low points are much lower.
Did we see the same fallout from the space-race from a couple generations ago?
I don't think so — certainly not in the way you're framing it. So I guess I don't accept your proposition as a guarantee of what will happen.
The spoils of the space race would have gone to someone a lot like Musk. Or Ellison. Or Masayoshi Son. Or Sam Altman. Or the much worse old-moneyed types. The US space program was, famously, literally employing ex-Nazis. I doubt the beneficiaries of the money had particularly clean hands either
I agree in principle. And realistically, there is no way Altman would not be part of this consortium, much as I dislike it. But rounding out the team with Ellison, Son and Abu Dhabi oil money in particular -- that makes for a profound statement, IMHO.
Trying to process this but doesn’t his fall from grace have more to him increasing his real personality to the world? Sometime around calling that guy a pedo. Not much bothers me but at the very least his apparent lack of decision making calls into question many things.
Many people dislike all billionaires, but some have escaped criticism more than others by successfully appearing to have some humanity left in them, like Gates and Cuban.
A serious question though, what does happen when AIs are filing lawsuits autonomously on behalf of the powerful, the courts clearly won't be able to cope unless you have AI powered courts too? None of how these monumental changes will work has been thought through at all, let's hope AI is smart enough to tell us what to do...
AI controlled cheap Chinese drones will start flying into their residencies carrying some trivial to make high explosives. With the class wars getting hotter in next few years we may be saying that Luigi Mangione had the right ideas towards the PMC, but he was underachiever.
It won't just be at the behalf of the powerful.
If lawyers are able to file 10x as many lawsuits per hour, the cost of filing a lawsuit is going to go down dramatically, and that's assuming a maximally-unfriendly regulatory environment where you still officially need a human lawyer in the loop.
This will enable people to e.g. use letters signed by an attorney at law, or even small claims court, as their customer support hotline, because that actually produces results in today.
Nobody is prepared for that. Not the companies, not the powerful, not the courts, nobody.
... has anyone ever written a book about this? If not, I think I'm gonna call dibs.
https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2024/09/omnip...
The man has the moral system of a private prison and the money to build one.
What is far more important to understand is to ignore all that nonsense and focus on who makes money? It will be Ellison and his buddies making tens of billions of dollars/year selling 'solutions' to local governments, all paid by your property taxes. This also enables an ecosystem of theft, where others benefit a lot more. With the nexus of Private Prisons, kids for cash judges (or judges investing in stock of prisons), DEA/police unions, DEA unions, small rural towns increasing prison population (because they get added to the total pop, and get funds allocated).
More importantly this is extremely attractive to police who can steal billions every day from civil forfeiture, they have access to anyone who makes a bank withdrawal or transacts in cash, all displayed in real time feeds, ready for grabbing!
Wow! It is genuinely frightening that these people should be in control of our future!
Example: Cities are being presented a false choice between accepting deadly high speed chases vs zero criminal accountability [1], which in the world of drones seems silly [2]
I don't want the police to have unfettered access to surveil any and all citizens but putting camera access behind a court warrant issued by a civilian elected judge doesn't feel that dystopian to me.
Is that what Ellison was alluding to? I have no idea, but we are no longer in a world where we should disregard this prima facie.
[1]: https://www.ktvu.com/news/controversial-oakland-police-pursu...
[2]: https://www.cbsnews.com/sanfrancisco/news/san-francisco-poli...
This reminded me of https://www.bitsaboutmoney.com/archive/optimal-amount-of-fra...
Let's be honest. He isn't wrong. I'd rather live in a society with zero crime than what we have now.
But if you think about it, an unstated yet necessary prerequisite is that the definition of "crime" must be morally aligned with what is right. If it's not, well then you're living in a dystopia. Imagine a world where slavery is still legal and being a runaway slave is a crime. How do people like Frederick Douglass escape and survive long enough to make a difference?
And that's before we get into the prerequisite that such a state must apply the laws completely evenly with no special tiers based on class, wealth, political connection, celebrity status, etc.
This makes preventing the crime and protecting people from effects of these crimes extremely difficult.
There are a number of countries that might give you a panopticon state of you want one
https://www.themarshallproject.org/2023/11/03/violent-crime-...
Because everyone's buying everything online and getting it delivered to their homes.
Crime is at historical lows.
The people telling you that there is an immense wave of shoplifting are outright lying.
The US will fare no better if it walks down this path, and honestly will likely fare worse for it's cultural obsession with individualism over community.
Welcome to... choose among many of the technodystopies in literature.
If you look at the original video [1], starting at 1:09:00, he's talking specifically about police body/dashcams recording interactions with citizens during callouts and stops, not everyone all the time as that article strongly implies. The USA already decided to record what police see all the time during these events, so there's no new privacy issue posed by anything he's suggesting. The question is only how those videos are used. In particular, he points out that police are allowed to turn off bodycams for privacy reasons (e.g. bathroom breaks), which is a legitimate need but it can also be abused, and AI can fix this loophole.
In the same segment he also proposes using AI to watch CCTV at schools in real time to trigger instant response if someone pulls out a gun, and using AI to spot wildfires using drones. For some reason the media didn't condemn those ideas, just the part about supervising cop stops. How curious.
[1] https://www.oracle.com/events/financial-analyst-meeting-2024...
Too many greedy mouths. Too many corporations. Too little oversight. Too broad an objective. Technology is moving too quickly for them to even guess at what to aim for.
I think OpenAI was originally founded against that kind of force. Autocratic governments becoming masters of AI.
The last few months, between TikTok ban, RedNote, elections, United Healthcare CEO, etc I’ve seen so many people compare the US to China, and favor China. Which is of course crazy because China has things like forced labor and concentration camps of religious minorities, and far worse oppression than the US. But many people just view everything coming out of the US Gov’s mouth as bad.
Is the Chinese government worse than the US government? Probably. Do people universally think that still? Not really. The US Gov will have to contend with the reality that people -even citizens- are starting to view them and not their “enemy” as the “Bad Guys”.
US also has forced labour, huge prison population, bombing civilians and journalists to oblivion, literally nuking other countries and religious fanatics — do I still think china would be less pleasant as our new overlord? Yes — Do I think the world is better off with US-American hegemony? I’m not so sure.
Maybe it’s a net good for the world if not one power is dominating — maybe it’s the start of a hellish ww3. I choose to believe the former.
edit: typos