ponkaloupe
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don't forget the political environment:
- locally, there's a meaningful "break up big tech" current which could make it politically difficult to simultaneously sell AI as a paradigm shift and monopolize it for yourself via the legal apparatus. cynically, firms might view regulation as a path to achieve similar ends but with fewer political repercussions, less blatant than if they leveraged patents.
- globally, the country which presently enjoys the lead in AI sees itself in an economic battle against a competitor unlikely to respect its intellectual property claims. to the degree which states view AI through any lens related of "national defense", there will be some push to maintain competitiveness at least on the global stage.
it’s odd to leap to things like housing markets and consumer debt without considering the demographics of startup employees. i believe your graphs are national averages, so are these employees expected to hold more or less debt relative to average? more or less likely to be homeowners v.s. renters? more or less likely to live in specific regions of the country?
the initial shock of covid 3.5 years ago was just massive. i get that it was in many ways transformative and not strictly destructive, but still hypotheticals like “a hundred billion decrease in VC funding” just seem so miniscule in comparison. simultaneously we see how the impacts of a sharp shock got
It seems mostly correct to accept the new calculations in the Improved COTI, which represent a -25% adjustment, and then include the 13% adjustment for taxes, resulting in about a -13% adjustment. This still represents an increase in the cost of thriving.
is COTI actually an inverted measure of the literal “cost of thriving”? i.e. the index goes up when the cost goes down? otherwise, this apparent inverted sign (a -13% change in COTI representing an “increase in the cost of thriving”) is throwing me for a loop.
... (read more)In broad terms, families with children have seen large reductions in their federal income tax burden, largely due to the introduction and expansion of the child
To learn gravity, you need additional evidence or context; to learn that the world is 3D, you need to see movement. To understand that movement, you have to understand how light moves, etc. etc.
for the 3d part: either the object of observation needs to move, or the observer needs to move: these are equivalent statements due to symmetry. consider two 2D images taken simultaneously from different points of observation: this provides the same information relevant here as were there to be but 2 images of a moving object from a stationary observer at slightly different moments in time.
in fact then, you don’t need to see movement in order to learn that the... (read more)
rationally, automating more tasks in my life should make for an easier life that’s subject to fewer demands. rationally, when this isn’t the case — when individuals each working to automate more things causes them to instead be subjected to more demands (learn new skills, else end up on the street), you shouldn’t expect doubling down on this strategy to be long-term viable.
rationally, if you’re predicting the proportion of people able to stay afloat to be always decreasing up to the singularity — a point at which labor becomes valueless — you shouldn’t expect to still be afloat come that moment.
“rationally”, you’re doomed unless you can slide into a different economic system... (read more)
> The tradeoff for connecting with similar people is not connecting with people different from us.
disagree. as you say, micro-communities are aligned very narrowly. which means that if you pair any two random individuals from the same micro-community, they'll be extremely similar along only one particular metric, but randomly different across every metric not relevant to that community. the easiest example of this is nationality: to the degree LW is a micro-community, it connects people of many different nationalities. perhaps the disappointment is that although you're connecting with different people, you aren't connecting over your differences.
> Widespread camaraderie is becoming rarer and rarer. Most of us live in highly polarized societies where... (read 890 more words →)
i’d love for anyone to present the argument against this. eq says it’s things like karaoke which make friendships great. the friends i know who are eager to do karaoke are the same ones who will start wild, speculative conversation when we’re idly sitting in the living room together. they’re the interesting people.
the people in my life whom, come the first lull in smalltalk after dinner get uncomfortable and declare “great meal, time to go” instead of opening themselves up for those late-night intimate conversations, are the same people who would turn down an invitation to karaoke.
interesting friends are fun friends. “boring” is the opposite of both “fun” and “interesting”. so if the latter two mean something different to the author than to me, perhaps we agree by saying “build non-boring friendships”?
OpenAI estimated that the energy consumption for training GPT-3 was about 3.14 x 10^17 Joules.
sanity checking this figure: 1 kWh is 1000 x 60 x 60 = 3.6 MJ. then GPT-3 consumed 8.7 x 10^10 kWh. at a very conservative $0.04/kWh, that’s $3.5B just in the power bill — disregarding all the non-power costs (i.e. the overheads of operating a datacenter).
i could believe this number’s within 3 orders of magnitude of truth, which is probably good enough for the point of this article, but i am a little surprised if you just took it 100% at face value.
Should there be an opt-out from A.I. systems? Which ones? When is an opt-out clause a genuine choice, and at what point does it become merely an invitation to recede from society altogether, like saying you can choose not to use the internet or vehicular transport or banking services if you so choose.
the examples given are all networks, with many of the nodes human. if “receding from society” means being less connected with the other humans, then there’s no debate: to opt out of these networks is necessarily to “recede from society”.
but LLMs don’t have this property. they aren’t a medium used to bridge connections between individuals: rather things like chatbots exist... (read more)
I'm relatively OOTL on AI since GPT-3. My friend is terrified that we need to halt it urgently: I couldn't understand his point of view; he mentioned this book to me. I see a number of pre-readers saying the version they read is well-suited exactly for convincing people like me. At which point: if you believe the threat is imminent, why delay the book four months? I'll read a digital copy today if you point me to it.