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All of Aligned?'s Comments + Replies

By default, capital will matter more than ever after AGI
Aligned?20

Labour-replacing AI will shift the relative importance of human v non-human factors of production, which reduces the incentives for society to care about humans while making existing powers more effective and entrenched.

 

And yet, ... society appears to be caring more about humans.       

And yet, ... existing powers (specifically the state) seem even less effective and entrenched. Open Borders policies are clearly an act of desperation ... while these policies appear to have been broadly rejected by the electorate. The state only op... (read more)

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7GeneSmith
I have to say, I don’t find these bullet point lists developed by AIs to be very insightful. They are too long with too few insights. It’s also worth pointing out that the AI almost certainly doesn’t know about recent developments in iterated meiosis or super-SOX
7dirk
LLMs' guesses aren't especially valuable to me. I understand wanting to expand out your half-formed thoughts, but I'd rather you condense the output down to only the points you want to argue, rather than pasting it in wholesale.
Superbabies: Putting The Pieces Together
Aligned?*-2-3

Thank you sunwillrise for your reply!

Yes, I actually agree with your disagreement. The quote was quite provocative.

However, the basic sentiment of my comment would seem to remain intact. If we actually even tried to launch a global scale effort to genetically engineer "superhumans" it might take at least 10 years to develop the technology ... and then it might be argued about for a few years ... and then it would take 20 years for the children of the uplift to develop. From the current advances in AI it does not seem plausible that we have 30 or more years... (read more)

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7GeneSmith
This is definitely wrong. A global effort to develop this tech could easily bring it to fruition in a couple of years. As it is, I think there's maybe a 50% chance we get something working within 3-5 years (though we would still have to wait >15 years for the children born with its benefits to grow up) I agree this is unlikely, though there remains a non-trivial possibility of some major AI disaster before AGI that results in a global moratorium on development. I agree that aligning superhumans could potentially be a concern, but consider the benefits we would have over AGI: * Literally hundreds of years of knowledge about the best ways to raise and train humans (not to mention a log of biologically primed psychology that helps that training process along) * The ability to edit and target other traits besides intelligence such as kindness or altruism * We have guaranteed slow takeoff because they will take over a decade to reach cognitive capabilities of the level of our smartest people. Consider also the limitations of even genetically engineered superhumans: * They have no ability to rapidly and recursively self-improve * They cannot copy themselves to other bodies While these don't guarantee success, they do give us significant advantages over an AGI-based path to superintelligence. You get more than one shot with superhumans. Failure is not catastrophic.
4[anonymous]
This is unnecessarily hyperbolic. We have not actually reached AGI yet. Moreover, while current LLM systems may be superhuman in terms of breadth of knowledge and speed of thought, they most certainly aren't in terms of depth of understanding, memory, agentic capability, and ability to use such cognitive tools to enact meaningful change in the physical world.
Self-driving car bets
Aligned?30

Thank you Daniel for your reply.

The latest delivery count is 5M. That is a fairly substantial ramp up. It means that the double over the 1.5 years from October 2021 --> April 2023 is being maintained in the 1.5 years from Jan 2022 through July 2023 (admittedly with a considerable amount of overlapping time). 

In addition it is quite remarkable as noted above that they have been level 4 autonomous for years now. This is real world data that can help us move towards other level 4 applications. Obviously, when you try and have level 4 cars that move at... (read more)

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Self-driving car bets
Aligned?70

Why no mention of the level 4 autonomous robobuggies from Starship. These buggies have been exponentially ramping up now for over 10 years and they can make various grocery deliveries without human oversight. Autonomous vehicles have arrived and they are navigating our urban landscapes! There have been many millions of uneventful trips to date. What I find surprising is that some sort of an oversized robobuggy has not been brought out that would allow a person to be transported by them. One could imagine for example, that patrons of bars who had too many d... (read more)

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Daniel Kokotajlo100

Interesting, thanks for the update -- I thought that company was going nowhere but didn't have data on it and am pleased to learn it is still alive. According to wikipedia,

In October 2021, Starship said that its autonomous delivery robots had completed 2 million deliveries worldwide, with over 100,000 road crossings daily.[23][24] According to the company, it reached 100,000 deliveries in August 2019 and 500,000 deliveries in June 2020.[25]

By January 2022, Starship's autonomous delivery robots had made more than 2.5 million autonomous deliveries, and

... (read more)
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Going Crazy and Getting Better Again
Aligned?30

Personal perspective: psychotic experience truly is an enigma wrapped inside of a riddle. So much complexity involved that rookies would have no idea what was actually going on (even the insiders would largely be unaware of whatever ground truth might exist).

Interestingly, perhaps my clearest memory from that time was thinking that I was playing my most rational strategy to cope with my life as it was. My life was not making sense and escape seemed the best way out.

From the perspective of today that might seem an odd take, though given what I know now it a... (read more)

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Which technologies are stuck on initial adoption?
Aligned?10

The shower water recycle idea is something that I have already bought and tried. They sell these units for those who want to have a shower while camping. They are quite inexpensive and actually would pay for themself with a month of my typical shower usage. So, for this one, it's better than not costing anything: it actually has large potential as a cost saver.

Perhaps this is somewhat off topic, though I have found my robovac to be a great piece of technology. Here again by any reasonable measure of the value of my time the robovac has to be considered a negative cost purchase. 

Remote work/school also seems in this category. 

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Agentized LLMs will change the alignment landscape
Aligned?21

Isn't a substantial problem that the programming priesthood is being dethroned by the GPT technology and this is allowing the masses entry -- even those with minimal programming understanding? For not only has GPT given us a front end natural language interface with information technology, but we now have a back end natural language interface (i.e., the programming side) that creates a low barrier to entry for AI programming. The "programming" itself that I saw for BabyAGI has the feel of merely abstract level natural language interface. Doesn't this make ... (read more)

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