Anthropic: “We’re worried there’s a 10%+ chance AI will kill all humans with a biological agent”

Also Anthropic: “we’ve given AI a biological lab to develop chemicals that impact humans!”

> how are they avoiding the janky crap?

That’s the neat part! They don’t!

Sterile insect releases are a tool for suppressing populations and have been used for about a century. This is not really a new suppression technique but a novel way of producing the sterile insects.

It has been used to suppress screw worm in the United States for decades until the administration cut the funding.

These are almost always a temporary solution that need constant funding and seasonal releases to work. The populations will surge back as soon as it's stopped.

GitHub has a dashboard?

It changed?

TIL

Nice to see someone equally dispassionate about Github. It's a place to `git push` to and that hasn't changed in ages!

Why not both?

That’s old technology now.

That’s like being GenX and saying millennials never learned to use a rotary phone.

Files and folders are far from old tech. It is like not knowing how to calculate 2+2.

Where do you see files and folders nowadays? They're pretty much only used by developers and some corporate offices.

They are used by literally every office worker who does their job on a computer. It's not remotely uncommon.

Google drive, icloud drive, anything drive is also file/folders based. Someone that doesn't know about that is a modern-day illiterate. Yeah, I know, there are many of them nowadays.

Are they actually? Google Drive has folders, but there's no concept of things like "which folder is this file in", you can have access to many root folders but not a list of them all, and the most convenient way to find anything is to search.

They are still present everywhere. They are just badly hidden behind a leaky abstraction.

I know this one you ask jev for that right?

Recall the articles claim that efficiency is gaining 2.5 orders of magnitude per year.

Something seems off about this.

Oh wow, I need to customize every app to disable learning from that app?

Next phone is not gonna be an iPhone.

The most optimistic outcome of generative AI leaves us with a technology that warps our perception of reality and crushes labor. The most pessimistic destroys all of humanity.

Our CEOs not only insist we genuflect before these machines but measure our sacrifice and shame our reluctance.

The optimistic outcome is the machines do the work and people can be freed from drudgery.

That requires abolishing capitalism, and since these AIs are going to hyper-empower the already powerful capitalist ruling class, that utopian outcome seems unfortunately extremely unlikely.

Feeding ever more amazing technology and science into a broken social/political/economic system does not result in a better world unfortunately.

How does that coexist with Capitalism? I just don't see a path.

Regardless of where you fall on the alignment chart, if you are looking backwards from now to the industrial revolution, it's pretty easy to make the claim that from a standpoint of pure technological progress (discounting all other things, like quality of life, environmental impact, etc) that capitalism "won". But going forward, if the need for labor is completely crushed, and capital continues to get concentrated into the hands of the elites, I just don't see how that is viable long term. It seems like for things to shift to the world Keynes (wrongly) predicted, where we all have abundance of leisure time, then there's a massive distribution of the fruits of automation into the hands of the masses, which needs to be controlled by an entity who does not purely exist to acquire more capital, which is sort of the end of capitalism as we know it.

Or maybe AI kills us all before we get there, who knows.

I also enjoy their privacy focused email startmail.com