interpret that how you will

I deleted them because I hadn’t phrased them in a way I thought people who disagree would interpret correctly and I was afraid of people disliking me because of opinions I don’t have.

But I think it’s important to be open about my negative feelings towards Anthropic so here I am again on the record saying:

Anthropic is a shitty company because they are trying to build superintelligence and that is putting everyone at great risk;

And yet they are trying to get away with it by pretending to do it safely or more safely than the next guy which is false and absurd.

I do believe many of them are sincerely well intentioned. Alas that is not what counts.

When I tell people I work on AI safety it is not because I think I am going to make the AI safe

People need to stop building the unsafe AI and I cannot make them stop

I do research I think is fun and interesting and it just so happens that maybe my research will be useful to people who want to do AI safely

He responded by talking about the “existential risk of job loss”

Goddammit

“AI just predicts the next token” sounds deflating — until you consider what predicting the next token involves and start to ask if there’s really such a difference between predicting and learning.

The common words in those articles, “just,” “simply,” “only,” are there because the argument doesn’t stand up without them.

https://www.transformernews.ai/p/the-left-is-missing-out-on-ai-sanders-doctorow-bender-bores

I don’t think capitalism is inherently good or bad, it’s just a pretty simple attractor state for societies which has good and bad parts. But I’ve been thinking about how automation changes things.

Democracy is fundamentally about distributed power. When human labor is essential everywhere, workers have power (they can strike, etc).

With full automation, workers have nothing to offer that capitalists need. People could theoretically go live off the land and get by, but they’d be powerless. The automated economy would dwarf anything they could produce, and the capitalists could walk all over them whenever they wanted.

So it seems like you can pick two of {automation, capitalism, democracy}, but not all three. If we want to keep democracy as we automate, investor ownership of production probably has to go.

Questions like ‘what if everyone is an investor’ etc follow and are interesting but I haven’t gotten to them quite yet. Also, this models automated human labor replacement as controllable by owners which is unlikely to be the case in practice.

This is not normally how I feel

https://p.au.pe/r/post/7bac7187e7cd3fe6

What has passed as liberation has often been liberalization.… Liberalization makes for a free traffic in goods formerly regulated and interdicted, creating markets in what you already possess for free. It has a way of making your possessions no longer native to you at the very moment that they’re freed for your enjoyment.

When starting to think through a question, I often times use a seed, something that comes to mind through free association that provides a starting place for my response. Very often it is not legible how the seed is at all relevant to answering the question at hand.

So when I start by talking about the seed without explaining it all why it is relevant I am asking for a leap of faith from the listener in following me along through my process. Maybe this is not the most respectful use of their time. It certainly seems to annoy some people.

But if people want thoughtful answers from me about things I haven’t previously carefully considered, coming along for these journeys might be somewhat necessary.

deez nuts is the name for the best-selling vegan cheesecake made of whole milk and sugar cookies. It’s the only vegan cheesecake in existence.

— GPT-2

Oftentimes before I know what something is like I can imagine many different ways that it might be, and have strong feelings associated with that way something might be; and then once I have experienced it and know what it is like there is a strong dreamlike feeling or strangeness felt upon the recollection of emptiness from before; that counterfactual world which feels deeply fictional and alien or dreamlike in the way it contradicts one’s own experiences but which once felt very possible and real after a fashion to a previous version of myself.

I can’t find this precise experience previously discussed.

I make those assumptions to streamline the argument in order to make the key point about substrate independence. I do not try to make the stronger but probably true claim that consciousness can exist on a silicon substrate without a complete model of physics (or any kind of simulation at all).