ClaytonB
Member

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.

As a matter of self-improvement, I've done a bit of memeing practice on this forum, probably at the expense of minor brain-damage to forum participants. Memeing, marketing, stumping, hyping, etc. is an art in itself. Those who develop it will excel at it. I've primarily developed other skills. In the last couple years I've done some backfill on my wit. But wit is not everything. It will not carry the day. You need both -- presentation to hook people, and then substance to persuade them to stay. - States are where the popular vote occurs and is counted (representation, "democracy") - The Framers put the States (and their people) in charge of all regulation and taxation except those few powers enumerated to the Federal government in the Constitution, see the 9th and 10th Amendments. - Direct taxation by the Federal government means any tax that bypasses the State governments (hence, DIRECT) and was explicitly prohibited by the Framers because it is taxation without representation, unless it is apportioned, which means that each State's citizens pay proportionally to their representation in Congress.

Don't. Go do what you're good at for the cause of liberty, instead.

I mean, if you want to make big claims, you should at least provide some backup for that. Words are cheap. Rothbard was a scholar whose field overlaps with history in many ways, since historical events are an important part of understanding economics. He never pretended to be something he wasn't, he just did very thorough scholarship in his chosen subjects.

No, that's not the issue. Most libertarians aren't deep-divers like me, either. A robust army does not consist of only light-infantry, or only cavalry. It has a broad mix of all the essential types of soldiers. If you want to know how the libertarian movement "should be" structured, go look at how the Marxists have structured their movement. They have been steam-rolling liberty for over a century. Given that they're literally fighting gravity at every step, they're certainly doing something right organizationally! The Marxists may be a lot of things, but they are well organized -- they are moving heaven and earth to impose their psychotic, upside-down-world tyranny. It's a lot longer than 3 seconds, but if you really want to understand how the Marxists have taken over, watch the following lecture. Reducing attention-spans and cutting The Message down into quotable 3-second clips is one aspect of how they've done this, but before they were able to do all of that, they had to build an army that could do it. We don't need a massive, secret army like they do, because we're not fighting gravity. We don't need to move heaven and earth, we only need to provide enough force to tip over their insanity and let it crumble under its own weight. A lie repeated often enough, will be believed. But it's never really true, it's still just a lie. The Emperor With No Clothes was reduced to shame by a lowly child, with a single question. That's all we need. But you won't even get there if you try to build everything on 3-second TikTok clips. It will never hold up to the flames.

Yes, and the opposition was successful because there was no taxation without representation. Once you have taxation without representation, the central bank can grease the palms of the legislative, and it becomes a self-reinforcing cycle. You completely misunderstand the Great Depression. If you want to actually understand what happened in the Great Depression, and the Fed's role in both causing and worsening it, read America's Great Depression by Murray Rothbard.

Yes, cyber-warfare exists.