ClaytonB
Member

- Despite spending trillions of dollars per year on "national defense", the US government is ignoring (and has likely sponsored) an entirely new class of emerging threats in the form of advanced Artificial Intelligence systems. These systems are either already capable or nearly capable of basic general-purpose reasoning and Microsoft has now wired them to the Internet with Bing and their various GPT4-powered Office assistants. These purely electronic, black-box AI systems can send/receive emails and texts, make and receive phone calls, all without human supervision or even initiation. This unaccountable digital system lives thousands of years in simulation per day. To call this a potential "existential threat" to the global population is the understatement of all time -- this is a weapon of mass destruction among weapons of mass destruction. This is precisely the kind of scenario which our multi-trillion dollar whiz-bang "defense" machine is supposed to protect us from, but we hear nothing but crickets from NSA/CyberCommand and the agencies that should be addressing this. If anything, they've been fostering it behind the scenes.

In my mind, I'm trying to rule Trump in or out. Here's what makes it so difficult: - The Left defeated him in 2020, whether by fraud or not, THEY WON and, in politics, that's all that really counts - But they are obviously terrified of him, even in 2023... when they want to hype one of their own, they fake anger, but they *never* show fear, unless involuntarily... the mask keeps slipping in the various clips I watch to gauge the temperature of the MSMBS. They are sincerely terrified of Trump, something about the possibility of him getting back in POTUS leaves them in petrified horror...

May God grant me the mercy of a quick and painless death if we come to that...

LOL -- index... C'mon Man!

Yep, the dangers and risks are unknown and, frankly, un-quantifiable. Well, yes, you're right about that. But I think we agree that they are missing that psychological fear of total existential destruction because... they never got smacked as a kid, so the word "consequences" isn't even in their vocabulary. And now the rest of us get to pay for it... great... The normies scared in the wrong ways... scared of things they shouldn't be, and not scared enough of things they should be. Political systems amplify risk. That's actually their purpose, when you think carefully about it. A capital is a single point in space which, when seized, permits the invader to take control of a vast territory. Centralization increases risk and the purpose of all political systems, except liberty, is to ideally centralize 100% of everything in a single point.

Psychotic Leftist globalist Marxist mass-murdering Clowns ... it's hard to fit so much evil into a single word...

^^^ THIS We need an up-pointing finger emoji... can that be added?

We don't really know, that's Yudkowsky's overall point. We knew that AI was dangerous, we knew it was coming, but everybody kept saying, "It's 30 years away, at least" and so we believed them and then we woke up one day and there was ChatGPT. While ChatGPT is (probably) not general-purpose and super-intelligent, it's certainly not very far away from that. In some sense, it is super-intelligent (knows more than any human could ever know), and it certainly has "sparks of general intelligence". So, we're basically just juggling nukes, at this point, and nobody seems to notice or care. I doubt that "regulation" will help anything, either. One of the reasons I've been tracking this issue so closely since 2015, is that I realized that it's almost certain that AI is going to get out-of-control if we develop it. AI beats human players at Chess and Go -- two of the most difficult board games humans have ever invented; but AI also beats human players at Poker which is a lot like real-world decision-making, in the sense that you have incomplete information, and while you can calculate the odds, every move is probabilistic. So, the "those are just silly board games"-objection doesn't work. AI can beat us in real decision-making which worries me much more than AI's ability to write flowery sentences. Wiring such a system up to the Internet is flatly reckless. We are like lab-rats affixing our own electrodes to make the lab scientist's job easier... pure insanity. It is certainly possible that failsafes could be implemented and be effective. The problem is that we are not in the world where the conditions for that have been arranged. In my view, hooking GPT-4 to the Internet with full two-way comms is something that should not have been done without public discussion on AI safety. While it may be the case that this will turn out to have been harmless, we're merely lucky in that case. It's like saying "I designed this trigger for the nuclear bomb and, as long as nobody tips it in the wrong direction, it won't accidentally detonate". We might get lucky and not be nuked by accident when a momentary lapse of judgment by the forklift operator tips the bomb out of spec and the flaky trigger doesn't spontaneously explode. But why risk it with something so dangerous? Why would you design a trigger that can, under certain conditions, accidentally go off, but just hope we get lucky? Given the immense danger of a nuclear detonation, shouldn't the range of all reasonably foreseeable scenarios be anticipated -- including things like transport accidents? And shouldn't the trigger be designed such that, even if something unexpected happens, the nuke will not accidentally detonate? We're not taking the danger of what AI safety researchers call the "hard takeoff artificial super-intelligence scenario" seriously enough. Is this scenario highly probable or improbable? Nobody knows. The probability is something more than 0 and less than 1. Let's say there is a 10% chance that, in the next 3 years, there will be such a scenario. If there were a 10% chance that, in the next 3 years, there will be a nuke detonated in a major city, wouldn't the authorities be moving heaven and earth to address that threat as robustly as possible? So why is it that we are all sleep-walking into a potential extinction-level event (ELE) scenario of unknown probability?

JUST PLANT A DAMN TREE What is wrong with people?!

You're not scared enough of AI This research is some of the best work I've seen in the AI field for quite some time. GPT and transformers are sucking up all the oxygen in the room, but simple, direct reverse-engineering of artificial neural nets -- like that demonstrated in this paper -- is something that is at the same time brilliant, yet obvious (even though nobody else thought to try it). Why is this scary? Well, the power to edit memory itself is surely the most infernal power of all. Well, suppose you are kidnapped and trapped in a torture dungeon. No matter what horrors you may undergo, if the memory pathways can be simply "edited out", you have no way to even recall what was done to you, even in the case you are broken free. You can keep iterating and generalizing on scenarios like this to get the idea. But here's the scary part. For us, these large artificial neural nets are inscrutable black-boxes -- we have no idea what's going on inside of them. But should one of them become "self-aware" or, at least, sufficiently general in its reasoning and agency as to be able to be aware of its containment and aware of our role in containing it, the situation is not the same. That is, we would not be black-boxes to this AI, in fact, we would be quite transparent, not only because we have given it all of our data, but also because the kinds of reverse-engineering experiments that these researchers have done would be fairly trivial for a very large AI model to implement.

Yudkowsky is one of the scariest commentators on the AI landscape... this is a must-listen...

"Sparks of general intelligence" The irony of the corrupt Clown-"elites" conspiring to secretly build a hyper-logical machine capable of sifting through unlimited amounts of evidence, and then whining and complaining that it's a "dangerous source of disinformation" is truly rich. Way to build a machine that exposes your crimes, Deep State!

RIP :pray: Isaiah 57:1

RIP :pray: Isaiah 57:1

Well, this news headline has taken on a whole new meaning...

Danny Devito's Penguin was one of the best live-action Batman villains of all time. Only Heath Ledger's Joker is better, IMO...

That paid-propagandist life be like...

Pelosi must have been giving him stock picks ... :tears: :tears: :tears:

Yeah, math is kind of my thing, so I get that. Hence why I qualified that this isn't what the Founders were actually trying to accomplish. But it's an acceptable first-approximation.

Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard. - H. L. Mencken

"If the locks on your house were so good, how come we were able to break in?" The locks weren't there to make it impossible to break in. The locks were there to rouse the homeowner in case of a home-invasion. Vengeance is coming.

As I understand, the revenue collected on an apportioned tax would be pro-rata to each state according to its population... so Wyomingans would be paying a much smaller total tax bill than New Yorkers. In theory, that would all "cancel out" so that the net-percentage would theoretically be the same. But I don't think that's what the Framers were primarily concerned with. I think they wanted the burden to fall to each state in proportion to its representation in Congress in order to ensure that any direct Federal tax would be unpopular and would be most resisted by the big states. This is the opposite of what we have now. The biggest states are the biggest proponents of higher Federal taxes, because they are more "plugged in" to the pork-barrel system than smaller states. That's exactly what the Framers knew would happen.