I don't have this problem, but a lot of people I know pay astonishing amounts of money for day care. If you could figure out a way to build the Starbucks of day care, you could probably make billions of dollars. Similarly for elder care.

The Gentle Seduction by Marc Stiegler ; search strategy was [short story about technological change saturn]

You develop a system for setting up and running a day care center, in the same way that Starbucks has a system for running coffee shops. That gives you economies of scale, because you only need to develop the system once, and then you can copy it across the country. What are the best toys? How do you physically set up the center? How do you manage the pickup transition (what do you do if a parent is chronically late to pickup?) Do you include a transportation (bus/van) service to get kids to the center?

Then you also develop a brand, which gives you a huge marketing advantage. New parents wonder where to send their kids to day care, and the LironCare brand is already at the top of their mind.

Having a brand also makes you more trustworthy, for game theory reasons, and there's nothing more important in day care than trust. Parents know that if there's a fiasco at any one LironCare center, that's going to be a huge black mark for the entire company, and they know you know that too, and so will work 100% to make sure there's no fiasco.

Aging. I would pay $20,000 a year to stop aging, more if I could figure out a way to increase my income.

This is ridiculous. Arguing that 234 stars is a tiny number and therefore it was aliens...

On the contrary, 234 is 234. If something has been found in 234 stars, it is a naturally occurring phenomenon.

This is exactly as ridiculous as ID in human biology. In fact it is the same thing, just applied to a different area.

I'm surprised to find such rhetoric on this site. There is an image now popularized by certain political activists and ideologically-driven cartoons, which depict the colonization of the Americas as a mockery of the D-Day landing, with peaceful Natives standing on the shore and smiling, while gun-toting Europeans jump out of the ships and start shooting at them. That image is even more false than the racist depictions in the late 19th century glorifying the westward expansion of the USA while vilifying the natives.

The truth is much more complicated than that.

If you look at the big picture, there was no such conquest in America like the Mongol invasion. There wasn't even a concentrated "every newcomer versus every native" warfare. The diverse European nations fought among themselves a lot, the Natives also fought among themselves a lot, both before and after the arrival of the Europeans. Europeans allied themselves with the Natives at least as often as they fought against them. Even the history of the unquestionably ruthless conquistadors like Cortez didn't feature an army of Europeans set out to exterminate a specific ethnicity. He only had a few hundred Europeans with him, and had tens of thousands of Native allies. If you look at the whole history from the beginning, there was no concentrated military invasion with the intent to conquer a continent. Everything happened during a relatively long period of time. The settlements coexisted peacefully with the natives in multiple occasions, traded with each other, and when conflict developed between them it was no more different than any conflict at any other place on the planet. Conflict develops sooner or later, in the new world just as in the old world. Although there certainly were acts of injustice, the bigger picture is that there was no central "us vs them", not in any stronger form than how the European powers fought wars among themselves. The Natives had the disadvantage of the diseases as other commenters have already stated, but also of the smaller numbers, of the less advanced societal structures (the civilizations of the Old World needed a lot of time between living in tribes and developing forms of governments sufficient to lead nations of millions) and of inferior technology. The term out-competed is much more fitting than exterminated, which is a very biased and politically loaded word.

You cannot compare the colonization of the Americas to the scenario when a starfleet arrives to the planet and proceeds with a controlled extermination of the population.

Hell yes this is a problem! Hours worked and hourly pay are very much correlated (it costs a lot to get someone to work that 80th or 120th hour in a week) and part time jobs often don't come with health benefits. Many workers have the opposite problem - the local retail store won't increase their hours and they never hire anyone full time ever because then they would have to provide health insurance.

Needing to have a job to support myself. But I suspect that is a problem that entrepreneurs will have great difficulty solving.

Sorry, can't see why situation III is so bad. I generally like the fact that I like spending time with my husband. On the other hand, I can almost imagine the 'and then zombie apocalypse happened and she had to bash his head in with the frying pan' end of story. What exactly did you have in mind?

Having more workers (shorter hours for each worker) adds administrative costs. I have no idea whether employers are over-estimating those costs.

The development of Native Americans has been stunted and they simply exist within the controlled conditions imposed by the new civilization now. They aren't all dead, but they can't actually control their own destiny as a people. Native American reservations seem like exactly the sort of thing aliens might put us in. Very limited control over our own affairs in desolate parts of the universe with the addition of welfare payments to give us some sort of quality of life.

We create friendly AI that maximizes the happiness of humans. This AI figures that we would be happiest in our galaxy if we were alone.

The Europeans did not "proceed with a controlled extermination of the population". Yet, what happened to that population?

They still exist... so they were not exterminated? They did not carry out purposeful extermination, and in fact the indigenous people were not exterminated. So what exactly are you arguing?

The only thing that was very truly devastating to indigenous populations was smallpox exposure, and that was an accident. Also lots of internal wars, famine, civilization collapse, etc. But most of that was triggered by the smallpox plague 30+% die-off.

The fact that Europeans outnumber indigenous people 100:1 in north america (less so in central and south america) isn't some purposeful, master plan of the European colonialists. It's just the inevitable outcome of a number of historical accidents with compounding effects.

His name is literally Dagon.

You misunderstood my point.

The Europeans did not "proceed with a controlled extermination of the population". Yet, what happened to that population?

You don't need to start with a deliberate decision to exterminate in order to end up with almost none of the original population. Sometimes you just need to not care much.

designing technology is a special case of prediction

It's possible to be very good at prediction but still rather bad at design. Suppose you have a black box that does physics simulations with perfect accuracy. Then you can predict exactly what will happen if you build any given thing, by asking the black box. But it won't, of itself, give you ideas about what things to ask it about, or understanding of why it produces the results it does beyond "that's how the physics works out".

(To be good at design you do, I think, need to be pretty good at prediction.)

To the speed section, you might want to add examples of parallel learning. Parallelizing learning of robot arm manipulation, or parallel playing of Atari games, which are both (much) faster in terms of wallclock time and also can be more sample and resource efficient (A3C actually can be more sample-efficient than DQN with multiple independent agents, and it doesn't need to waste a great deal of RAM and computation on the experience replay).

This.

Also, schlep alert: this might be the densest regulatory thicket outside of healthcare, with huge variation in standards at (at least?) the state/province level. In my little environment of 13 million Ontarians, a recent arbitrary change of the teacher/child ratio allegedly drove a good many daycares out of business.

Also, parents are insane (source: am parent).

Seconding resuf's comments: both that this is a pretty good, professional looking video, but also that it's another instance of you seeming to listen to some of the exact-letter-of-the-request when people ask you to stop or do things differently, without understanding the underlying reasons why people are upset.

And that this is especially important if your goal is to be a public-facing outreach organization.

I won't be able to create a new Open thread on monday (I will be at our national version of Comic-Con). Can someone East of US create it?
Community service is good karma. Literally.

This comment taken out of context kind of delighted me.

Can someone here come up with any sort of realistic value system a foreign civilisation might have that would result in it not destroying the human race, or at least permanently stunting our continued development, should they become aware of us?

Not being bored. Living systems (and presumably more so for living systems that include intelligence) show more complex behavior than dead systems.

The part about healthcare is USA-specific, but the relationship between total hours and total pay is nonlinear at other places, too.

In Slovakia, the healthcare is set up so that everyone pays a fixed fraction of their income, and then everyone receives exactly the same healthcare regardless of how much they paid. So it shouldn't have any impact on hourly rate.

Yet, it is difficult to find a part-time work on the market. When I tried it, I had to work for 50% of my previous salary just to reduce the work to 4 days a week, and the employer still believed they were doing me a favor. (After a few weeks I decided that getting 50% of money for 80% of time is not a smart deal, so I quit.)

I believe the problem is signalling. Almost everyone is okay with working full-time; especially men. (Women can use having small kids as an excuse for a part-time job, but that also dramatically reduces their hourly rate, which is an important part of the pay gap.) If you are a man unwilling to work full-time, it makes you weird.

So it's not like the employer literally needs you there 5 days a week. It's simply a decision to not hire a weirdo, when there are non-weird candidates available. If you differ from the majority by not willing to work 5 days a week, 8 hours a day, who knows what else is weird about you? Why take the unnecessary risk? Also, well-paid employees are supposed pretend they love their job; and by asking for a part-time job you show too clearly that you actually care about something else more.

Thus, I sometimes had jobs where I was able to spend up to 50% of my working time just browsing websites from the company computer. But no comparably well paid option where I could officially work 4 days a week, or 6 hours a day, and then simply go home.

(I was also trying to get home office, so that instead of browsing the web I could do something useful. But the companies where the employees spend much time online are usually on some level aware of what is happening, so they don't allow home office. As long as everyone must stay in the building the whole day, the management can keep pretending that people are actually working.)

I believe that if for example 50% of people working in some profession would demand part-time work, this problem would mostly disappear. Then, wanting to work part-time would simply be normal. But that's a coordination problem, and I don't even know how many people would actually be interested in working part-time if that would be a legitimate option (with the same hourly rate).

The issue is the standard "The AI neither loves you nor hates you, but you're made out of atoms...". The Europeans did not desire to wipe out Native Americans, they just wanted land and no annoying people who kept on shooting arrows at them.

Because it would not fit into our values to consider exterminating them as the primary choice.

Did you ask the Native Americans whether they hold a similar opinion?

If we developed practical interstellar travel, and went to a star system with an intelligent species somewhat below our technological level, our first choice would probably not be annihilating them. Why? Because it would not fit into our values to consider exterminating them as the primary choice. And how did we develop our values like this? I guess at least in some part it's because we evolved and built our civilizations among plenty of species of animals, some of which we hunted for food (and not all of them to extinction, and even those which got extinct, wiping them out was not our goal), some of which we domesticated, and plenty of which we left alone. We also learned that other species besides us have a role in the natural cycle, and it was never in our interest to wipe out other species (unless in rare circumstances, when they were a pest or a dangerous disease vector).

Unless the extraterrestrial species are the only macroscopic life-form on their planet, it's likely they evolved among other species and did not exterminate them all. This might lead to them having cultural values about preserving biodiversity and not exterminating species unless really necessary.

Should probably have been posted in the open thread (not meant as a reproach)

The premise this article starts with is wrong. The argument goes that AIs can't take over the world, because they can't predict things much better than humans can. Or, conversely, that they will be able to take over because they can predict much better than humans.

Well so what if they can predict the future better? That's certainly one possible advantage of AI, but it's far from the only one. My greatest fear/hope of AI is that it will be able to design technology much better than humans. Humans didn't evolve to be engineers or computer programmers. It's really just an accident we are capable of it. Humans have such a hard time designing complex systems, keeping track of so many different things in our head, etc. Already these jobs are restricted to unusually intelligent people.

I think there are many possible optimizations to the mind to improve at these kinds of tasks. There are rare humans that are very good at these tasks, showing that human brains aren't anywhere near the peak. An AI that is optimized for them, will be able to design technologies we can't even dream of. We could theoretically make nanotechnology today, but there are so many interacting parts and complexities, humans are just unable to manage it. The internet has so much bugged software running it. It could probably be pwned in a weekend by a sufficiently powerful programming AI.

And the same is perhaps true with designing better AI algorithms, an AI optimized towards AI research, would be much better at it than humans.

Along the lines of my earlier GCTA, I've written a Wikipedia article on genetic correlations.

what's the most annoying part of your life/job?

Pain. Moderate but constant pain from old sports injuries makes me: spend money on pain meds and counter irritants, work longer hours because the pain is distracting and reduces my productivity, limit physical activity and travel, deviate from an optimal exercise routine, fall into a black hole of grumpiness occasionally.

how much would you pay for a solution?

If by "solution" you mean an easy, one-time, guaranteed fix: $10,000

It sounds pretty spectactular!

I found one paper about comets crashing into the sun, but unfortunately they don't consider as big comets as you do--the largest one is a "Hale-Bopp sized" one, which they take to be 10^15 kg (which already seems a little low, Wikipedia suggests 10^16 kg.)

I guess the biggest uncertainty is how common so big comets are (so, how often should we expect to see one crash into the sun). In particular, I think the known sun-grazing comets are much smaller than the big comet you consider.

Also, I wonder a bit about your 1 second. The paper says,

The primary response, which we consider here, will be fast formation of a localized hot airburst as solar atmospheric gas passes through the bow-sock. Energy from this airburst will propagate outward as prompt electromagnetic radiation (unless or until bottled up by a large increase in optical depth of the surrounding atmosphere as it ionizes), then in a slower secondary phase also involving thermal conduction and mass motion as the expanding hot plume rises.

If a lot of the energy reaching the Earth comes from the prompt radiation, then it should arrive in one big pulse. On the other hand, if the comet plunges deep into the sun, and most of the energy is absorbed and then transmitted via thermal conduction and mass motion, then that must be a much slower process. By comparison, a solar flare involves between 10^20 and 10^25 J, and it takes several minutes to develop.

Do the exercise where you look into the other person's eyes for 10 minutes by the clock, that's a fun social skills building exercise that brings you closer to the person you do it with.

Do pre-mortems of things. I.e. supposing we're 5 years in the future and we look back at the problems we had, what do we expect those problems to have been? Can we change them?

This should be right up LW's alley. Reconstruct dead people as... chatbots? Quote:

And one day it will do things for you, including keeping you alive. You talk to it, and it becomes you.

Define "rationality things"...

they're full of guys who'll hit on her no doubt!

So what? Do you think that is different in any street or store? On the opposite I would say that rationality meetups would tend to be more respectful of boundaries than the average group of human beings.

The world is certainly not going to change

We'll see about that...

The study is more about how telling lies primes (for lack of a better word) you to tell more lies, not just lies to cover up the original lie.

It is on the bets registry. I am Unknown with a new username.

Nice plus-size women's clothing is obnoxiously expensive, compared to standard sizes.

Slashdot comment:

why do people slap "AI" label on unnecessarily? ... this is mere data analysis.

I would appreciate a service that would provide long-term guidance to programmers. More like a guild than like a job agency.

I imagine something like this: You would pay a small yearly membership fee. In return you would get an access to a guild forum (where members provide information to each other), and a subscription to a digital newspaper (where the guild provides the most important information to the members). For a higher fee, you could get some personal counseling or training. The guild would provide information about the job market; e.g. which technologies are currently in demand, and how much salary get the people who know them. It would also provide information about new technologies; e.g. a short description and a link to more resources, with an expert opinion about why this is an important thing, and how is it connected with other technologies.

Essentially, the problem I am trying to solve here is that as long as I work in a company, it is easy to lose the sight of the larger picture. My company may use a technology X, while the rest of the world is moving towards Y, but I don't notice it because I spend most of my time reading about X and solving problems related to X; the nature of my work creates a huge selection bias. And the people I talk with most often, i.e. my colleagues, have a selection bias in exactly the same direction.

Of course, once in a while I will hear about Y; but I don't know whether it is really a trend, or just another hype. Even looking at the job market, which technologies are most required, provides a distorted picture: sometimes companies are looking for X because it's the new trend, and sometimes companies are looking for X because it's a crappy technology no one wants to use, so those job positions remain open forever.

I would also love to be able to get better background info about my possible future employers; to be blunt, how much "what they tell you at the job interview" differs from how things are actually done once you are there. (I realize this would be difficult, probably impossible. First, there is a risk of the bad employers suing you for libel. Second, people may have various incentives to provide false information; e.g. to astroturf for their own company, or to badmouth competition.) Or some insider info; for example if the company is working on a several large projects, you may want to get to the project A, but you should really avoid the project B.

Some of these things can be (at least partially) solved by other ways, such as specialized websites (e.g. stack exchange, including their workplace forum) or tech conferences or knowing the right people and keeping in touch with them. But it would be convenient to have everything in one package, also with some coaching. Someone you could ask to help you with your career, to identify some blind spots you may have, to give you a honest estimate of how much money you could make with your skills if you apply for the right job or learn the additional technology that is currently missing in your portfolio. In best case, to also give you some advice about passive investment and early retirement, work-life balance, etc.

Is this a validation of "What tangled webs we weave when we seek to lie and deceive"?

That assumes that AIs maximize things, and in my opinion they won't, just as humans don't. But in any case, if you think that the AI is simply implementing the true extrapolation of human values, then it can only do that if it is the true extrapolation of human values. Which can hardly be called an accident.

Such things exist (e.g. Action Day Primary Plus where I live). They are among the more expensive options. One reason is that the brand allows them to price themselves higher, but it is also true that their costs are fundamentally higher. Their competition is home daycares that not only don't pay for added rent and employees, but take a tax write-off for using their home as their business location.

The reason daycare is expensive is because of state laws regulating daycares that mandate a certain number of kids (e.g. 6) per licensed adult. Divide a living wage for your area by that number and you'll realize there really isn't much overhead at all.

No it's not necessarily a negative outcome. I think it could go both ways, which is why I said it was "my greatest fear/hope".

Native American population is at 3 million (not included "mixed race") and the trend is that it's growing.

The native American thing isn't analogous to paperclipping because they weren't exterminated as part of a deliberate plan.

The alien encounter thing isn't all that analogous, either. It makes a little sense for paperclippers to take resources from humans, because humans are at least nearby. How much sense does it make sense to cross interstellar space to take resources from a species that is likely to fight back?

The ready made economic answer to intra species conflict is to make use of the considerable amounts of no-mans-land the universe has provided you with to stay out if each other's way.

Fortunately, Native American populations didn't plummet because they were intentionally killed, they mostly did so because of diseases brought by Europeans.

I think Val's argument is that "no realistic value system implies not destroying alien civilizations" implies "either our value system is unrealistic, or we would take the first opportunity to destroy any alien civilization we came across." Perhaps you intended your comment to imply that we would do that, but I am skeptical. And if we would not do that, Val's argument is a good one. The only intelligent species we know does not desire to wipe out aliens, so it is more likely than not that alien species will not be interested in wiping us out.

<shrug> it's consumption. Does it annoy you that a lot of money, time, and effort is spent on a big fancy dinner and then it just turns into poop? Which also emits chemical substances including the notorious dihydrogen monoxide...

Can someone here come up with any sort of realistic value system a foreign civilisation might have that would result in it not destroying the human race, or at least permanently stunting our continued development, should they become aware of us?

As has come to light with research on super intelligences, an actor does not have to hate us to destroy us, but rather realise we conflict, even in a very minor way, with its goals. As a rapidly advancing intelligent civilisation, it is likely our continued growth and existence will hamper the goals of other intelligent civilisations, so it will be in their interests to either stunt our growth or wipe us out. They don't have to hate us. They might be very empathetic. But if their goals are not exactly the same as ours, it seems a huge liability to leave us to challenge their power. I know that I would stop the development of any other rapidly advancing intelligent species if I could, simply because struggles over our inevitably conflicting goals would be best avoided.

So, my question is, can you see any realistic value system a superintelligent alien civilisation might hold that would result in them not stopping us from going on growing and developing our power as a civilisation in a self-directed way? I cannot.

Given this, why is it in any way legal to broadcast our existence and location? There have been efforts in the past to send radio signals to distant solar systems. A superintelligent civilisation may well pick these up and come on the hunt for us. I think that this is one of the biggest existential threats we face, and our only real advantage is the element of stealth and surprise, which several incomprehensibly stupid individuals seem to threaten with their attempts to contact other actors in the universe. Should the military physically bomb and attack installations that attempt to broadcast our location? How do we get the people doing this stuff to stop?

A reading experience that is comparable to that offered by printed books.
E-book readers are clunky to configure and to upload to, have shitty impagination, are very slow.

Well so what if they can predict the future better? That's certainly one possible advantage of AI, but it's far from the only one. My greatest fear/hope of AI is that it will be able to design technology much better than humans.

The way I think of it, designing technology is a special case of prediction. E.g. to design a steam engine, you need to be able to predict how steam behaves in different conditions and whether, given some candidate design, the pressure from the steam will be transformed into useful work or not.

I have trouble falling asleep at normal times and have been blocking blue light at night sometimes by wearing blue-blocking glasses but also by having red lights in my home office. I would like a bright lamp whose light would automatically change based on the time of day. I recently spent $75 buying smart light bulbs whose color can be changed by my iPad but I have to change the color myself several times each day.

So your problem is that it's much harder for you to find part time work than full time work, at the same average hourly rate?

Yeah, I think people today have a major anti-trashing bias. Manufacturing and distribution have gotten so good and cheap that we should all be anti-hoarders trashing lots of stuff, then ordering new stuff as needed.

Well, but is there any value there? If you can't even give your old comics away, trashing them is not a "waste". Your 10-year-old modem might still be functioning, but if no one wants it, it has no value.

This is what annoys me the most currently in my life: perfectly fine things going to the trash.
I've read that comic series, and probably won't pick it up again. What do I do? I do not have the storage space to save them indefinitely, nor anybody is going to accept it (comics are at an all time low marketing value where I live). So I throw them away.
The same thing for books, old hdds, modems, keyboards, laptop, cd's, etc.
There's an enormous waste of material goods.

Haha the problem is that even if you have a pretty souped up gaming desktop, its computing power is probably worth less than the power costs, so you'd basically be selling just your room's power.

Maybe you live in a dorm and you don't have to pay for that power, but even then, we're talking about pennies.

The problem of "college students are annoyingly poor" is a big niche. What do you know about converting your time to money through your computer?

I don't think there's a business model there at all. Once anyone sells a forecast to anyone it's OUT THERE and hard to sell again, and this is a HARD problem, basically the definition of chaos, severely limited by supercomputer time and raw data from dedicated satellites and thousands if not millions of instruments around the world and subject to exponentially diminishing returns. Weather forecasts basically perfectly fit the definition of a public good.

Now, if you were talking establishing a new network of weather sensors and selling that DATA to institutions...