I disagree with Eliezer when he says that countries with surpluses never cash them in, which is kind of part of the core of his argument.
(Equity) Billionaires live lavish lifestyles, even though they never sell their equity. Doing so would give up their power. Instead they borrow for cheap (c.f. " buy, borrow, die"). I wonder which countries typically can borrow money very cheap. Maybe Japan, or Germany...?
He just looks at a single number, and then utters "these numbers don't make sense". Well of course.
Look at the whole picture instead.
T...
Google is skilled at marketing. The only other new information is that they were able to prove that error correction capability scales faster than errors when adding 'physical' qubits. They use about hundred 'physical'qubits to emulate a single (error corrected) 'logical' qubit.
So once they are able to scale up from N=1 to something like 256, they will be able to do what you say.
Importantly, before that happens, let's say for N=100, they will be able to simulate the behavior of chemical systems composed of 100 atoms. This is a huge thing, and your will hea...
The 50% annual revenue growth that they've averaged over the last 9 years shows no signs of stopping
What makes you think that?
I am of the completely opposite opinion, and would be amazed if they are able to repeat that even for a single year longer.
All the "creative" bookkeeping only work for so long, and right now seems to be the moment to pop bubbles, no?
Why?
Because of perverse, counterproductive and wrong monetary incentives.
There are a few complexities:
There is only really one, and that is not accounted for.
You want to generate electricity that you actually use.
I'm no expert on your part of the world, but in Central Europe electricity prices sometimes turn negative, because eletricity is generated that nobody needs. So large producers have to pay money, to get rid of it. Taking a pickaxe to your solar panel would be net positive in that situation.
Why? because everybody maximizes electricity produced and ...
Are you familiar with ergodicity economics?
https://twitter.com/ole_b_peters/status/1591447953381756935?cxt=HHwWjsC8vere-pUsAAAA
I recommend Ole Peters' papers on the topic. That way you won't have to construct your epicycles upon the epicicles commonly know as utility calculus.
We are taught to always maximize the arithmetic mean
By whom?
The probable answer is: By economists.
Quite simply: they are wrong. Why?
That's what ergodicity economics tries to explain.
In brief, economics typically wrongly assumes that the average over time can be substituted...
To me this is a good example of a too theoretic discussion, and as the saying goes: In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice. (But in practice there is).
My counterargument is a different one, and I kind of already have to interrupt you right at the start:
If there is no death, [,,,]
Putting "immortal animals" into any search engine gives lots of examples of things that get pretty close. So we can talk about reality, no need to talk only about Gedankenexperimente. So the first question cannot be: "Why is the counterargument wrong"?
Instead...
The most powerful one is probably The Financial System. Composed of stock exchanges, market makers, large and small investors, (federal reserve) banks, etc...
I mean that in the sense that an anthill might be considered intelligent, while a single ant will not.
Most of the trading is done algorithmically, and the parts that are not might as well be random noise for the most part. The effects of the financial system on the world at large are mostly unpredictable and often very bad.
The financial system is like "hope" according to one interpretation of the myth...
Very good idea
I did not do it. My argument would be that the impetus is not my own, it is external, your written word.
What stops you from making increasingly outlandish claims ("Your passphrase is actually this (e.g illegal/dangerous/lethal) action, not a simple thought" Where to draw the line?
Just as a point of reference, as a kid I regularly thought thoughts of the kind: "I know you're secretly spying on my thoughts but I don't care lalalala....." I never really specified who "you" was, I just did it so I could catch "them" unawares, and thereby "win". J...
We Live in a Post-Scarcity Society
Do you mean "we Americans"? or "we, the people living on the East West Coast"? Because it certainly is not true on a national/worldwide level.
For example, in a "magical post-scarcity society" , you would probably be okay to be (born as) really anybody. You shouldn't really care as much as you might during medieval times for example.
How about right now? Do you care? Are you willing to trade places? I certainly am not.
Furthermore, you picked the worst possible timing for this post. One should not characterize a society based...
I guess that would be one way to frame it. I think a simpler way to think of it (Or a way that my simpler mind thinks of it) is that for a given number of parameters (neurons), more complex wiring allows for more complex results. The "state-space" is larger if you will.
3+2, 3x2 and 3² are simply not the same.
From my limited knowledge (undergraduate-level CS knowledge), I seem to remember, that typical deep neural networks use a rather small number of hidden layers (maybe 10? certainly less than 100?? (please correct me if I am wrong)). I think this c...
First of all, kudos to you for making this public prediction.
To keep this brief: 1 (95%), 2 (60%), 3 (75%), 4(<<5%), 5 (<<1%)
I don't think we are in a hardware overhang, and my argument is the following:
Our brains are composed of ~10^11 neurons, and our computers of just as many transistors, so in a first approximation, we should already be there.
However, our brains have approximately 10^3 to 10^5 synapses per cell, while transistors are much more limited (I would guess maybe 10 on average?).
Even assuming that 1 transistor is "worth" one neuron...
I have a similar objection. Not particularly because they are Refugees, but instead because they are Foreigners.
I actually quite liked the presented idea, but I think it is very heavily slanted towards ideas that are oriented on the political left (which I generally favor if I were forced to choose). Still, some concepts from the political right are important here, particularly those of culture, and personal responsibility.
Summarized very briefly (and therefore certainly wrong)
Culture, according to the left is something that is imposed from above, and can ...
"Probably most ambitious people are starved for the sort of encouragement they'd get from ambitious peers"
If you were to substitute "intelligent" for "ambitious", I would agree. Some kind of dialog is needed to flourish, and a dialog between equals is strongly preferred. Or said another way, when training, it makes no sense to train with to little weight.
The smartest people tend to be ambitious.
I strongly disagree. Assuming a certain bias regarding the selection of examples, this is just a tautology: Highly visible people are highly visible. Successf...
we would task AGI with optimizing
I see, that kind of makes sense. I still don't like it though, if that is the only process to optimize.
For me, in your fictional world, humans are to AI what in our world pets are to humans. I understand that it could come about, but I would not call it a "Utopia".
this was assuming a point in the future when we don't have to worry about existential risk
This is kind of what I meant before. Of course you can assume that, but it is such a powerful assumption, that you can use it to derive nearly anything at all. (Just li...
I read the original post, and kind of liked it, but I also very much disagreed with it.
I am somewhat befuddled by the chain of reasoning in that post, as well as that of the community in general.
In mathematics, you may start from some assumptions, and derive lots of things, and if ever you come upon some inconsistencies, you normally conclude that one of your assumptions is wrong (if your derivation is okay).
Anyway, here it seems to me, that you make assumptions, derive something ludicrous, and then tap yourself on the shoulder and conclude, that obviously...
I pretty much agree with you. Human intelligence may be high because it is used to predict/interpret the behaviour of others. Consciousness may be that same intelligence turned inward. But:
3. Given enough computational power and a compatible architecture, the agent will develop consciousness if and only if it needs to interact with other agents of the same kind, or at least of similar level of intelligence.
This does not automatically follow I think. There may be other ways that can lead to the same result.
An existing example would be cephalopods (octopus, ...
each UV photon that hits exactly in the right spot will cause permanent DNA changes that eventually lead to cancer
Pretty sure this is incorrect. It's not the damage that causes cancer, but the failure of the body to heal/repair it. Such failures can be caused for example by you being very old, and therefore healing slower, or by getting a sunburn (= too much exposure in a short time, overwhelming repair capability).
I think the most important thing here is that things scale very much not linearly.
See also this, which argues/claims that more sun exposure (wi...
Lots of interesting answers, and all of them correct (most of the time anyway). One I haven't seen mentioned, is the one described in this preprint titled "How to Increase Global Wealth Inequality for Fun and Profit".
In short:
Why Mars for your thought experiment?
I tried to think of a case where a "new" state is founded. On earth, every (dry) place is already owned, so that wouldn't have worked (without seceding). Seasteads might work nearly as well as space colonies. Assuming infinite monetary resources, in both cases it is conceivable to set up something completely disconnected from existing power structures.
In a way it's just a toy example, that disregards wars and other military actions.
I really like this, and agree that incentives are very important.
A related idea for example is to limit the pay of CEOs to X times that of the average/lowest salary of employees.
A trivial (as in too simple to actually work) toy example in the same vein is to continuously make the least powerful person the most powerful person.
That person than either helps themselves (consequently loosing office), or helps everybody at the bottom. Either way, inequality decreases (Yes, I know this won't work).
Hard cases make bad law is a general legal maxim.
I agree.
I don't want to constantly create new laws, but instead constantly shine light on things that go wrong (This may or may not happen already, depending on which news you consume. Sadly however, mostly nothing comes of it, since change is hard). From there, if patterns emerge, then new laws should be proposed (For example, one pattern could be "unemployment in sector XY increases due to automation". For how many sectors should this have happened, before general action is warranted?)
...You can't reliably co
automating it with git would not in any way change the fundamental power structures at play
Well, currently, a lobbyist provides the desired changes, and your politician implements them. I am proposing to make it possible for everybody to propose changes easily.
proposing that anyone can change the law would clearly be insane
I agree. I was thinking more of something like wikipedia vs a classic encyclopedia. Many people determine what actually makes up wikipedia's content, but far fewer are in charge and oversee the final approval. As an example, in the past ...
Well please do derive it then, because to me it seems you just focused on one aspect and then concluded that that aspect definitely is the correct answer.
If the goal was to reward the best and the brightest, then why does china make some of them disappear from time to time? Why reeducate the odd billionaire who misbehaves? The idea was to get him in power because he knows better and generates riches, no?
On giving away stuff for 'free': what would be good examples in your opinion? Steel? Silicon or finished solar cells? Electric cars and batteries? Ma... (read more)