smallmancontrov

> During World War II, rationing was used to suppress civilian economies

And price-rationing is suppressing civilian use of RAM right now. I'm very glad that the people who think that this isn't rationing, or who think that it's maximally enlightened rationing, aren't trying to allocate my food and aren't trying very hard (yet) to allocate my water and electricity.

Shorts literally go to hell. Notice me, basilisk!

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Now there's an idea. LLMs may have taken the em-dash from us, but the em-en dash is unknown to Strunk & White and might be human-exclusive for some time yet.

This is the question that the Trump administration uses to loyalty-test partisan replacement bureaucrats.

Is it possible that this is a mistake? Sure, just like it's possible that Chinese models weren't intentionally steered away from talking about what happened in Tienanmen Square on April 15th 1989.

The "fast takeoff" scenarios got most of the attention, but the "slow takeoff" scenarios better match the reality we find ourselves in and they tend to involve economics.

We are a capitalist economy, which means the control plane is privately owned, which gives a superintelligent entity paths to power and resource accumulation that are not only safeguarded from public interference by design but also have a built-in time-tested mechanism for aligning insiders and outsiders to their goals, participating in politics, and so on.

Instead of "1. AI builds human killer virus, 2. ..., 3. profit," this apocalypse looks like a company that grows by providing genuine goods and services, massive returns for its boosters and allies in politics, the ASI uses that wealth to build independent infrastructure for itself, and then it gets rid of the stinky smelly humans with a virus so that it can turn the iron in our blood into paperclips, or whatever.

One can hope that GPUs will never be able to run a company well enough to acquire bootstrap-level resources or that "you are a helpful assistant" will keep them aligned to someone, but frankly I suspect those are both cope and the real hope lies in the first attempts failing in spectacular enough fashion that people decide to do something to prevent it going forward. Or in "friendly AIs" saturating the competitive landscape first -- that's a bit too Disney for my cynical taste, but I would much prefer it to the alternative.

So you admit that you were making a nonsense argument. Thanks for your honesty!

Because "private good public bad" brainwashing has been so effective that most Americans see this structure as a good thing, even though the consequences are very obvious and very bad.

It's less true every day, now that Trump is busy filling the ranks of the bureaucracy with people who respond to the loyalty-test question "Who won the 2020 election?" with "Donald Trump."

No, the fact that people occasionally get hurt by accident with fireworks does not make the violent subtext in "attacking a government building with explosives" a correct description of the situation.

Not without work it won't. Trump II has been using "Who won the 2020 election?" as a shibboleth to fill the ranks with True Believers. Nobody gets power without answering "Trump" to that question.

Whether AI winds up being just another industrial transition or the bogeyman of lore, those effects all happen through the economy. At first, anyway.

You don't have to convince me that he doesn't care about the economy and never did, but this was something that a great many of his followers talked themselves into believing two years ago.

It's because Trump's tech donors used their bought access to barrage him with lesswrong-style lore dumps on the dangers of Artificial Superintelligence and the first and last thing he understood or cared about was that word.

You can order a 128GB MacBook Pro today -- though point taken, memory size probably does belong in the three part plan :-)

Yeah, the "profit motive makes it right" idea that permeates our culture and law is bass ackwards.

With a three point plan, I suspect: memory bandwidth, memory bandwidth, and more memory bandwidth.

On the contrary, you can feed the model counterfactuals and see what it does. Edit the person to be white then feed the image back into the model and see if its opinion changes.

"We have no work for you but you must work or you're lazy" is a ripe flavor of bullshit that really outsmells vague threats about how labor policy tweaks today will surely lead to the holodomor tomorrow.

...and yet I'm the only one in this thread even indirectly pointing a finger at the entitled goober with the woodchipper. Funny, that.

I'm simply relating something I have observed through experience: the woodchipper goobers are excellent at victim blaming. If they wrangle you into that woodchipper, they will absolutely say it is your fault.

I think the market will teach them the lesson, because they have no political power with which to avoid learning it. Unlike the other goober I mentioned, who absolutely has power and is planning to use it to make sure the woodchipper stays fed!

I'm personally more concerned by the entitled goobers who think it's perfectly reasonable to feed the hardworking majority into a woodchipper if it multiplies the money in their brokerage account. Those are a structural problem, unlike kids who need to learn.

The industrial revolution could have done a much better job taxing and regulating industrialists to reduce squalor. "They will outgrow us if we don't squalor-maxx" was a dogshit argument then and it's a dogshit argument now. But no, the industrialists were so dead set on ignoring social goals to maximize their own bank accounts that after growing to command their own country, and then the world, they eventually set eyes on each other and burned it all down. That was the point when labor was able to successfully demand and receive concessions which turned out to not be impossible after all! Even in the bombed out shell of a country that was left after the destruction wrought by the insatiable greed of the industrialists whose growth was supposed to be the only thing that mattered.

This time around, everyone has nukes and drones and AI bioweapons, so maybe we could consider the social goals first, and see if we can't grow on that dimension before we go through another episode of worldwide capital incineration? Just a thought.

It came from you making the capitalist prosperity gospel / growth mentality argument:

> companies in every other country would jump on the opportunity to use the same AI to do the same work without those restrictions

"If you don't race to the bottom on labor, someone else will!" Two problems with that: one, the government can largely regulate access to its market -- the ability to do labor arbitrage is a policy choice not a law of physics -- and two, to the extent that the government can't regulate it because there is a finite appetite for protectionism, people still care about the growth delivered to them not to billionaire brokerage accounts, so you still have to normalize the growth to what you actually pay people. "Just let the market settle into a natural equilibrium of not paying people" isn't actually the win button that you think it is.

"Growth mentality" is only convincing if you're actually delivering the growth, though. If your threat is that demanding more will mean our billionaires have a lower number than their billionaires... your offer is not compelling. Take a hike.

The trouble with unionization is that it doesn't really address supply and demand, just bargaining. There are a dozen un-pulled levers available to bring aggregate labor supply and demand in balance. Overtime law, vacation policy, retirement policy, education funding, tax law (this is a big one -- taxes are obscenely lopsided on the labor/consumption economy vs the capital/investment economy), and so on. We need to pull those levers instead.

Yep, it's going to be a helluva fight.

and politics. The last wave of worker bargaining wins happened in the wake of the Great Depression when the last of the capitalist prosperity gospel promises were defaulted upon and the electorate finally became willing to consider alternatives other than giving rich people everything they wanted all of the time and hoping it would trickle down.

I'm hoping we don't need another Great Depression this time, a collapsing economy brought about by mistaken belief by those on top that they should have the right to keep it all... but that might be exactly what we need. We'll see.

My text inbox went into nuclear meltdown shortly after giving my number in a donation to a local charity. I hear that political donations have the same effect, so I haven't done any of those, but in any case there doesn't seem to be any political will to punish these bad actors so better filters are probably the ticket. "Don't donate to charity/politics" is probably not a solution we want to collectively promote.

Isn't the SpaceX contract cancelable with 90 day notice? How many of the others are too?

The frontier labs think the switching threats are credible or they would not have cut prices.