Meta-assassination markets: is it a terrible idea to start a prediction market “Will any would-be assassin of me be caught and themselves assassinated before end of 2030, AND I survive 2030” and take a big short position? The market terms will say it also resolves no if there is collusion between the assassin and meta-assassin or the same person hired both.
I will expect to lose a small amount of money to incentivize meta-assassins, which will disincentivize assassins. However the largest advantage is that I would personally derive joy from this, as long as it doesn't increase my risk.
Dynamic pricing is reducing consumer surplus, and in the limit of perfect AI pricing algorithms and no competition it would go to zero. If most nonfungible goods were subject to perfect price discrimination, what would the world look like? I genuinely have little idea.
There must be increased firm profits but consumer surplus will only come from commodities. So even the firm owners have nothing to spend their wealth on that actually gives them >ε utility more than sitting at home, making sandwiches from commodity bread and cheese and watching commodity TV.
- Does economic growth continue to happen or does it all get eaten by advertising or something?
- If so does consumer utility increase, and by what mechanism? Does everyone have so much money to spend on commodities that they become incredibly high quality and other goods have to drop in price?
I wonder if most of the population accepts these as valid reasons. I don't feel much jealousy and fear it's ruining my dating prospects to even be open to poly, even though it's plausible that I would rarely or never date additional people
Seems difficult for three reasons:
- Many other companies are trying to build an AGI so a company trying to do this would have to first win the race and disempower everyone else; this means they will have fewer resources for safety
- The AI will have to act antagonistically to humanity, so it could not be at all corrigible
- The AI will need to act correctly until 2125, which is much farther out of distribution than any AI we have observed
Given these difficulties I'd put it below 50/50, but this challenge seems significantly harder than the one I think we will actually face, which is more like having an AI we can defer to that doesn't try to sabotage the next stage of AI research, for each stage until the capability level that COULD disempower 2025 humanity, plus maybe other things to keep the balance of power stable.
Also I'm not sure what "drawn from the same distribution" means here, AI safety is trying dozens of theoretical and empirical directions, plus red teaming and model organisms can get much more elaborate with impractical resource investments, so things will look very qualitatively different in a couple of decades.
Just how expensive are missiles and how bad is NATO at producing them? This article claims that the US navy has 10,000 VLS cells but only about 17,000 missiles (mostly the small SM-2 type), meaning the entire fleet couldn't be reloaded even once after depleting their magazines.
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1What is Vapi doing that they're so expensive? I feel like someone who uses another service or does text-to-speech in house would pay WAY less than $4.32/hour per call, that would pay for 3 H100s these days.
Thanks for writing this, I've suspected for a while that we're ahead, which is great but a bit emotionally difficult when I'd spent basically my whole career with the goal of heroically solving an almost impossible problem. And this is a common view among AI safety people, e.g. Ethan Perez said recently he's focused on problems other than takeover due to not being as worried about it.
I do expect some instrumental pressure towards misaligned power-seeking, but the number of tools we have to understand, detect, and prevent it is now large enough that it seems we'll be fine until the Dyson sphere is under construction, at which point things are a lot more uncertain but probably we'll figure something out there too.
Kessler syndrome isn't permanent though, and it only affects orbits where there is a high density of satellites. If SpaceX can continue launching they would launch to higher orbits with low debris density, and very low orbits where the high surface area : volume ratio of debris means it reenters fast but the satellite needs to use a bit more fuel.
What they can do is deny LEO due to Kessler syndrome, and deny slightly higher orbits by launching 10^9 tiny ball bearings into retrograde orbit, which will cause several unavoidable collisions per year with any satellite passing through that altitude. I think this forces adversaries to retreat into VLEO which is shielded by drag.
Navy should transition from few expensive carriers to distributed drone-launching platforms—hundreds of cheap drone carriers, underwater drone deployments, and autonomous loyal wingmen for the naval air-force.
Drone carriers seem extremely important. Probably half the missiles and all the attack helicopters on every ship should be replaced with drones that cost 1/20th as much. Eg for amphibious assault ships, the America class, which carries 20 helicopters and some F35s, seems completely obsolete given it has no drone infrastructure. The Chinese Type 076 at least has a small catapult for drone launch, but both should really carry at least 50 large jet powered drones, 500 loitering munitions, 500 recon drones, 20,000 FPVs as well as surface and undersea drones.
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This model of interconnect energy has been thoroughly debunked here, as coax cables violate it by a factor of 200: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/fm88c8SvXvemk3BhW/brain-efficiency-cannell-prize-contest-award-ceremony
If it applies in the specific cases of axons and cmos there should be justification of why it does, though given the amount of prior discussion I don't think this would be fruitful.