All of Lantalia's Comments + Replies

Answer by Lantalia30

The trivial argument can be made after a foom "I've already taken over, I like sapients, please stop harming yourself with the stress of anticipating doom, if there was going to be AI doom, it would have already happened last year" potentially with evidence of it's power, altruism, and ability to prevent doom

But I presume you are asking about the restrained case where that AI has not rendered itself inviolable and practically omnipotent?

Answer by Lantalia41

Iain M Bank's The Culture, as an example of a society of aligned AI, biological humanoids, and aliens seems like the obvious one, along with other positive, collaborative, AI portrayals

3AnnaSalamon
Thanks for the suggestion.  I haven't read it.  I'd thought from hearsay that it is rather lacking in "light" -- a bunch of people who're kinda bored and can't remember the meaning of life -- is that true?  Could be worth it anyway.
Answer by Lantalia62

Self preservation, preserving your terminal goals, acquiring resources, and self improvement, are all convergent instrumental goals for most terminal goals. Robert Miles has done some good videos on the subject, and there are, of course, multiple articles on the subject

On a side note, we probably want to preserve (or strongly encourage preserving) the quality of requiring and using a visible scratch space, the "show your work" quality is extraordinarily useful

To clarify, when you say 'originated in a laboratory' do you mean engineered in a laboratory; evolved in an intentionally infected lab animal; or transiently stored in a laboratory?

These are very different hypotheses, but are often conflated.

So far, there is strong evidence that it was not engineered [the spike protein is novel, and not something from the geneticists toolbox], and I haven't seen any evidence that would favor lab storage or evolution over the much larger wild populations of bats and intermediary animal hosts.

3CTVKenney
I mean to include all the alternatives that involve the virus passing through a laboratory before spreading to humans; so all the options you list are included. There's nothing wrong with asking about the probability of a composite event.

Baseline rates of deaths from political violence are a bit tricky to pin down, but a process of elimination on homicides (YMMV, depending on which political acts you normalize as, on balance, apolitical. For various reasons, I tend to exclude DV, and theft, but include racism and police violence as political) gets us to 1k to 5k per year for the past decade, so, assigning an expectation of 1% for breaching 5k for the next year seems low.

We are likely operating on different definitions what constitutes political acts

4kdbscott
Good point - I'm thinking political acts along the lines of violent protests, terrorism, and insurgencies. I can see how police shootings could be included there. The spirit of what I'm going for is how much change to expect, so e.g. deaths above and beyond what you would have in an average year
Answer by Lantalia80

The US unsheltered population is around 200k, the cheapest rent I can find in a city is ~$500 a month, so, assuming (incorrectly), you can actually provide shelter at that rate in the places people actually are, you get about 1.2 billion a year more than we currently spend, ignoring what that will do to the market, efficiencies of scale, tiny houses, and other options. This also only deals with the unsheltered (there are, probably, another 400k sheltered but homeless), and doesn't necessarily include utilities. If 30 year fixed plus maintenance is the... (read more)

4Timothy Underwood
The tech founder liquidating his holdings to solve homelessness may or may not be a good idea, but it is not a bad idea because it would suck resources dedicated to tech out of the economy. He'd sell his shares to other people, who now own the tech stream of income, and then take their money and use it to solve homelessness. The only possible economic downside is a bit of inflation as the implied velocity of money goes up slightly since most capital owners spend a very small portion of their wealth each year, while he presumably would be spending it faster. But a 20 billion or even 50 billion one time spend in terms of that is not even a rounding error to the total economy.
3ChristianKl
If you provide free housing, then not only the people who are currently homeless would want to move into that housing but also some people who currently rent their flats. 

This is a WAG, but maybe Vitamin D fortified milk?

One note: China's policies will be seen as a failure due to their initial denial and persecution of the medical professionals attempting to call attention to the issue, they have already undermined any response's success or failure

I disagree. I think that might be how China's policies are viewed, but I think a more likely outcome is that they will actually work to dramatically slow the spread of the virus within China. The denials and coverups early on will seem inconsequential compared to the millions of lives saved by the quarantines.

Above and beyond it's APM, it was doing things humans physically can't do with the camera in order to micro perfectly on three effective screens at once, with effectively infinite mouse speed, and no input lag

Basically, #2 in the article dominates with how it won