He’s talking like it’s 2010. He really must feel like he deserves attention, and it’s not likely fun for him to learn that the actual practitioners have advanced past the need for his philosophical musings. He wanted to be the foundation, but he was scaffolding, and now he’s lining the floors of hamster cages.
He wanted to be the foundation, but he was scaffolding
That’s a good quote, did you come up with that? I for one would be ecstatic to be the scaffolding of a research field.
That’s 100% my weird late-night word choices. You can reuse it for whatever.
I agree with your sentiment, but the wording is careful. Scaffolding is inherently temporary. It only is erected in service of some further goal. I think what I wanted to get across is that Yud’s philosophical world was never going to be a permanent addition to any field of science or maths, for lack of any scientific or formal content. It was always a farfetched alternative fueled by science-fiction stories and contingent on a technological path that never came to be.
Maybe an alternative metaphor is that Yud wanted to develop a new kind of solar panel by reinventing electrodynamics and started by putting his ladder against his siding and climbing up to his roof to call the aliens down to reveal their secrets. A decade later, the ladder sits fallen and moss-covered, but Yud is still up there, trapped by his ego, ranting to anybody who will listen and throwing rocks at the contractors installing solar panels on his neighbor’s houses.
Scaffolding is actually useful, he’s completely irrelevant to actual thought about this. However he is unfortunately influential to some silicon valley nonsense.
A year and two and a half months since his Time magazine doomer article.
No shut downs of large AI training - in fact only expanded. No ceiling on compute power. No multinational agreements to regulate GPU clusters or first strike rogue datacenters.
Just another note in a panic that accomplished nothing.
No shut downs of large AI training
At least the lack of Rationalist suicide bombers running at data centers and shouting ‘Dust specks!’ is encouraging.
considering that the more extemist faction is probably homeschooled, i don’t expect that any of them has ochem skills good enough to not die in mysterious fire when cooking device like this
It’s also a bunch of brainfarting drivel that could be summarized:
Before we accidentally make an AI capable of posing existential risk to human being safety, perhaps we should find out how to build effective safety measures first.
Or
Read Asimov’s I, Robot. Then note that in our reality, we’ve not yet invented the Three Laws of Robotics.
If yud just got to the point, people would realise he didn’t have anything worth saying.
It’s all about trying to look smart without having any actual insights to convey. No wonder he’s terrified of being replaced by LLMs.
Before we accidentally make an AI capable of posing existential risk to human being safety, perhaps we should find out how to build effective safety measures first.
You make his position sound way more measured and responsible than it is.
His ‘effective safety measures’ are something like A) solve ethics B) hardcode the result into every AI, I.e. garbage philosophy meets garbage sci-fi.
This guy is going to be very upset when he realizes that there is no absolute morality.
Before we accidentally make an AI capable of posing existential risk to human being safety
It’s cool to know that this isn’t a real concern and therefore in a clear vantage of how all the downstream anxiety is really a piranha pool of grifts for venture bucks and ad clicks.
That’s a summary of his thinking overall but not at all what he wrote in the post. What he wrote in the post is that people assume that his theory depends on an assumption (monomaniacal AIs) but he’s saying that actually, his assumptions don’t rest on that at all. I don’t think he’s shown his work adequately, however, despite going on and on and fucking on.
Might have got him some large cash donations.
“Nah” is a great reaction to any wall of text by this bozo, really.
There is a way of seeing the world where you look at a blade of grass and see “a solar-powered self-replicating factory”. I’ve never figured out how to explain how hard a superintelligence can hit us, to someone who does not see from that angle. It’s not just the one fact.
It’s almost as if basing an entire worldview upon a literal reading of metaphors in grade-school science books and whatever Carl Sagan said just after “these edibles ain’t shit” is, I dunno, bad?
There is a way of seeing the world where you look at a blade of grass and see “a solar-powered self-replicating factory”.
this is just “fucking magnets, how do they work?” said different way. both are fascinated with shit that they could understand, but don’t even attempt to. both even built sort of a cult
EY is just ICP for people that don’t do face paint and are high on their own farts
What the fuck any of this mean? What could this be in response to? Was there a bogo deal on $5 words?
I’m one of the lucky 10k who found out what a paperclip maximizer is and it’s dumb as SHIT!
Actually maybe it’s time for me to start grifting too. How’s my first tweet look?
What if ChatGPT derived the anti-life equation and killed every non-black that says the n-word 😟
