dougvk retweeted
Yup. Although, it's really important to keep in mind that one of the really disruptive things about AI is that it allows us to throw money at the problem. Something we've been unable to do in software.
dougvk retweeted
Reputation is the cornerstone of power. Through reputation alone you can intimidate and win; once it slips, however, you are vulnerable, and will be attacked on all sides. Make your reputation unassailable.
dougvk retweeted
Often, when new technology is introduced, we see pain in the short run and increased productivity in the long run. Increased productivity has almost always proven to be beneficial. The AI/ML/robotics revolution may indeed be different; however, I do believe that it will be a good think. Unfortunately, what worries me is that the scope and rapidity with which the resultant changes will occur will also intensify the short-run pains we experience.
I don't think the right answer is to arbitrarily slow down development by government regulation. Other than controlling for obvious externalities, decreasing the effectiveness and efficiency of the market isn't a good idea and may, in fact, just lengthen the pain experienced. Temporary--note, temporary-- programs that directly help those displaced may be a better path.
I think we're entering a civilizational rupture that nobody can predict. Not me, not the labs, not governments.
I don't know how much people realize how fast we're moving.
Look at what Anthropic's new model did during testing.
It solved two open problems in theoretical physics, both on black holes. One of the calculations was laid out in 2003 and nobody had ever finished it, because it was too laborious.
It formalized the proof of Fermat's Last Theorem in 30 hours, with a thousand agents that organized themselves. The first attempt took 11 days.
It wrote an operating system that boots on a laptop, starting from an empty folder, in 8 days.
It designed three electronic devices, boards, enclosures and software included. All three worked without a single electrical modification.
It found a new method to predict the structure of viral capsids, the shells used to deliver gene therapies.
And on robot control, it more than doubled the previous version's score.
All of that in a single announcement, on a Monday.
I think discoveries are going to stack up so fast that they'll produce an abundance we've never known: energy, health, materials, food. And with it a phase of immense joy, the joy of a civilization realizing that scarcity was never a law of nature.
Except that joy is going to land in a world order that's cracking everywhere, and that was designed by Malthusians. People convinced that resources are finite, that there are too many of us, and that the job of an enlightened elite is to manage scarcity on everyone else's behalf.
To me, Bill Gates is the most famous face of that worldview: a man nobody elected, who has weighed on the planet's health, agriculture and climate policies for twenty years. The degrowth crowd is the militant version. They don't even want to manage scarcity anymore, they want to organize it.
Abundance is the worst possible news for that worldview. If energy becomes nearly free and diseases fall one after another, nobody needs anyone to ration anything for them.
So I don't think they'll fight it. I think they'll try to capture it.
In the name of safety, climate or public health, we'll be told this power is too dangerous to be left in everyone's hands. We already saw the movie during Covid: the permission slips, the passes, the QR code to go get a coffee. Now imagine the same logic with an AI that can see everything, trace everything and decide everything in real time. Orwell never imagined a tool like that.
The technology is winning on its own. The question of the next ten years is who abundance will belong to.
We are living through the greatest civilizational revolution in human history. It's happening right now, and most people are looking the other way.
dougvk retweeted
there is not a single person in government alive today who has improved my life even a fraction as much as amazon. and most have made it worse.
dougvk retweeted
The 2020s are the first decade since... Maybe the Middle Ages (?!?!?)... that not a single corporate entity from the European continent was in the top-10 largest global corporations.
dougvk retweeted
Personally I am implacably opposed to sovereign wealth funds, in most circumstances.
Have too much money sloshing around your treasury? Great! Pay down your debt!
Then reduce taxes towards zero. Individuals are always going to find a better home and use for their own money. Stop stealing it from them.
Still have money left over after paying down 100% of your debt and reducing taxes to zero? OK, now start a sovereign wealth fund.
Otherwise it's just a job creation exercise for your buddies.
dougvk retweeted
Many hopeful delusions breaking up in the sky now, with debris starting to arc to earth. The repudiation of MAGA and/or AI might precipitate a broader cultural reset. Wondering if this is a historical turning point.
a favorite eastern-med recipe website has been defunkt for 2 years - stopped paying bills, dead, unclear. 30 second prompt on a dog walk and in 20m entire website was re-resurrected including pictures from wayback machine - now hosted privately for me. could turn it public too
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"use my grapheneos pixel10 to download this app, make a fake account with my infinite-fake-email-anonymous-domain email address generator you have access to and browse the app until you have every screen and flow. then make me a private version using my testflight to ios flow."
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dougvk retweeted
You can also vibe-electrical engineer. China manufactured this this moisture-sensing film that I’m using in my dog area. All designed to-spec in Claude; it looked up all the patents and everything to come up with the solution.
i thought utilitarianism was already rejectable as a proposition, why is it still taken seriously. gud post tho
Two things I’ve been thinking about regarding AI:
• People often highlight the risks involved in AI, which are surely very real. I’m struck, however, by how hard it is to understand the contours of the positive scenario. There are easy-to-perceive and frequently invoked elements of a positive vision — more diseases cured, more material abundance, etc. — which sound great, but these are by themselves just ingredients. I’m curious what the larger equilibrium is supposed to look like. Do people work? If so, why? What is their marginal contribution? If not, how are resources allocated? What is scarce? What is the ratio between humans and AIs? Are humans in control, whatever that means? One sometimes hears the Culture novels invoked as one scenario, but I’m not sure they depict a desirable outcome. (AI runs everything and humans compete in games? Iain Banks himself said that the humans in the Culture are “somewhere between passengers, pets and parasites.”) There is Richard Brautigan’s famous poem, but do we want to be “returned to our mammal brothers and sisters”? (Isn’t that rewinding Genesis?) We could say that it was hard to imagine the world of 1900 from the vantage point of 1700, and that’s assuredly true. But nobody in 1700 was trying to recast humanity itself within a couple of years — things necessarily unfolded slowly and by increments, and therefore with the possibility for error correction. Given how rapid the rate of progress in AI may be, it feels strange for the upside case to be so opaque.
• There is increasing discussion of whether AIs are conscious or how we would know whether they are, with conclusions there often assumed to be relevant to matters of moral worth. At first blush, this seems a rather arcane, benign, or even absurd issue. (Remember the response to Blake Lemoine’s fears.) Setting aside the terms of the debate itself, or the relevant demarcation criteria, it seems to me a quite high-stakes question, for an affirmative answer — that is, granting moral worth to AIs — would presumably mean that the aggregate worth of AIs would soon outweigh that of humans in any utilitarian calculus. The AIs will be exceptionally wise and intelligent, and vastly more numerous (especially once one considers the imminent future and the AIs not yet born). As such, even epsilon of moral worth will multiply to a lot once one considers the quadrillions that could soon exist. (This is effectively a distributed version of the Nozick’s utility monster.) If this conclusion is unpalatable, I think one of three propositions needs to be rejected: the premise AIs can have moral worth; utilitarianism itself; or the belief that there is even a possibility that they will be far more numerous than humans.
With both of these matters (contours of future society; AI moral worth), there is the possibility of dramatic change. Today, people argue about datacenters. I’m curious how popular support for AI will evolve as more people come to understand these medium-term questions and the relevant stakes. What is the vision for AI that most people would be excited about?
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I spent the last week guiding my local Qwens to audit a subset of my lab for security issues. Clearly worse than GPT, but I learned much more by following closely and providing a lot of guidance and course correction.
Model choice says more about your problem than you.
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