Otherwise, you're right. A system where the selection pressure happens through money and attention is bound to devolve to appeal to the strongest most primitive of desires.
Bob Ross was a content creator, and I would like to think if he were alive he'd still be painting, just using a different platform to share. I don't think he would care one bit if people made AI art as long as they were happy and kind.
Seems a bit premature to make an HN post about then, imho.
It's an interesting idea, but it doesn't really do anything interesting yet. I looked at the output in the training run and it is a far, far cry from intelligence. Worse than GPT-2 as it stands.
I do hope it will perform well when scaled and trained, though; best of luck.
It's also very clear that he took enormous risks out of the good of his heart and basically gave up his life for absolutely jack shit; it changed absolutely nothing.
I'd be incredibly surprised if he isn't very cynical, resentful and hedonistic at this point.
The single potentially illegal US government program in the leaks was shut down, the big email providers require SMTP over TLS, and https everywhere happened as a direct result of the leaks.
> I'd be incredibly surprised if he isn't very cynical, resentful and hedonistic at this point.
The guy still doesn't understand PRISM. He's a tinfoil hat wearing high school dropout, so I wouldn't be surprised about a lot of things regarding his mental state.
I should have said "nothing fundamentally". I'm sure he didn't give up his life for HTTPS everywhere and SMTP over TLS..
The reality is that the public moved on more or less unperturbed and that the US intelligence agencies did the same. Sure, it was a bump in the road, but they aren't massively limited in what they can do. The US being a surveillance state is closer than ever.
> I'm sure he didn't give up his life for HTTPS everywhere and SMTP over TLS.
He gave up his life because he thought PRISM was a massive violation of the 4th Amendment, and a government that could so easily ignore the 4th Amendment could just as easily ignore the 8th. Now we know that he was completely wrong about PRISM.
> Sure, it was a bump in the road, but they aren't massively limited in what they can do.
The US intelligence agencies were limited by the 4th Amendment before the leaks and continued to be limited by the 4th Amendment after the leaks. The only problem is that the hysteria caused by people uncritically believing Snowden without looking at his documents helped lead to Trump taking over every branch of the US government. An absolute monarch is not limited by a construction, and we'll see how close Trump gets to that.
> He gave up his life because he thought PRISM was a massive violation of the 4th Amendment, and a government that could so easily ignore the 4th Amendment could just as easily ignore the 8th. Now we know that he was wrong about PRISM.
The truth is that neither you or I know why he did so exactly, but it stands to reason that he cared about mass government surveillance in general and hoped that his leaking would prevent that through public outrage; that makes more sense than that he only cared about PRISM.
> The only problem is that the hysteria caused by people uncritically believing Snowden without looking at his documents helped lead to Trump taking over every branch of the US government.
Nonsense. Trump's demagoguery and subsequent rise had nothing to do with Snowden.
Given the dystopian path that the USA and the world are on with regard to mass government surveillance, I would say that the real problem was the lack of hysteria after his leaks. You also seem to be downplaying matters here.
> The truth is that neither you or I know why he did so exactly
I take him at his word.
> Trump's demagoguery and subsequent rise had nothing to do with Snowden
It had to do with people believing deep state conspiracy theories like Snowden did and espoused. None of that turned out to be true, but you can see that people in this very forum who have the technical background to know better still fell for it.
> It had to do with people believing deep state conspiracy theories like Snowden did and espoused.
1. Trump's rise was and is mostly about nativism, foreigners and money. It always is with demagogues.
2. "Deep state" is an incredibly badly defined term due to being used for almost anything the government does. Claiming its significance here just sets up a fruitless semantic discussion in which you can claim almost anything about whether it applies.
I'm willing to entertain this idea. Gellman says that Snowden explicitly asked him to publish the full PRISM slide deck within 72 hours as his first request. What is the correct interpretation of Snowden's words? Do you believe he cared about targeted surveillance of non-Americans enough to effectively renounce his citizenship and potentially become subject to that surveillance?
> 1. Trump's rise was and is mostly [emphasis added] about nativism, foreigners and money. It always is with demagogues.
Then we agree. You originally said it had "nothing" to do with deep state conspiracy theories. I said that deep state conspiracy theories "helped lead" to Trump.
> 2. "Deep state" is an incredibly badly defined term due to being used for almost anything the government does.
As Trump has done. He specifically mentioned the security apparatus in his conspiracy theories. People blamed Obama for domestic spying that wasn't happening because they believed Snowden's nonsensical description of PRISM.
> I should have said "nothing fundamentally". I'm sure he didn't give up his life for HTTPS everywhere and SMTP over TLS..
> The reality is that the public moved on more or less unperturbed and that the US intelligence agencies did the same. Sure, it was a bump in the road, but they aren't massively limited in what they can do. The US being a surveillance state is closer than ever."
Both these ideas still stand.
Yes, PRISM was misinterpreted, but the larger matter was exposing a massively overpowered surveillance apparatus. An apparatus that is more powerful than before. Had Snowden known the lack of effect of his actions, he would not have taken them. This is what you seem to miss, tunneling on PRISM and deflecting to Trump's rise.
> The reality is that the public moved on more or less unperturbed
The public wasn't unperturbed. The ones who didn't know any better believed Snowden's PRISM cock and bull story and rabidly froth about it to this day. The ones who knew better got the phone metadata program shut down, just like the email metadata program that Obama had already shut down according to Snowden's leaks. There were no other programs that could possibly be interpreted as illegal, the government implemented oversight and reporting to make sure the legal programs weren't abused, and the tech companies fixed their security postures to account for state actors that can tap international WANs.
> but they aren't massively limited in what they can do
Once again, the 4th Amendment massively limited them in what they could do. Any recent reductions in the effectiveness of the 4th Amendment are due solely to the concentration of power in Trump, which was helped by conspiracy theorists like Snowden and those who fooloshly believed him.
The FBI's Data Intercept Technology Unit integrates with email and other Internet communication providers to implement wiretaps for accounts they have a court order for. They present the company with a court order, and the company forwards the account's data to the FBI (often via FTP, according to a New York Times article at the time). PRISM is simply a data integration project between the NSA and the FBI for ingesting data for accounts under a Section 702 order (for specific accounts belonging to non-citizens outside the US whose communications are of national security interest).
Ok, but nothing in that leaked slide says anything about a court order or disproves much of anything about PRISM. I'm not saying you are wrong, in fact I sincerely hope you are 100% correct, but all that slide says to me is that the "FBI DITU" got the data somehow, and forwarded it to CIA, NSA, and the rest of the FBI. Additionally, lets be honest, a single image of a slide posted on imgur is a lot more "trust me bro" than it is proof.
Snowden and Greenwald interpreted DITU as being a box in these companies' networks with access to everything because they were too stupid to look up what it meant. That slide was the basis of their entire claim. If Snowden's claim isn't "trust me bro," nothing is. Instead, the companies said they didn't do any integration with the NSA (they hadn't, only with the FBI), and they didn't give access to every account's data (they didn't, only with a court order or Section 702 order for a specific account's data).
The NYT got the story right on day one because unlike The Guardian, their editorial standards require asking someone who knows something about what was going on. In this case, they asked workers at the companies. Subsequently, every single mainstream news agency got the reporting correct except for Greenwald, who continued to argue against tech industry workers correcting him on Twitter.
So, I read those links and it seems to me your basis for calling Snowden a "tinfoil hat wearing high school dropout" with "high school dropout reading skills", is that he misunderstood that slide to mean that the US gov had direct access to servers at those companies, when in fact it was just a government program that forced those companies to query their own data at the government's request. Am I correct in saying that your argument then, is that all of this is completely overblown and noone should be concerned at all with this because it is all the product of a barely literate government contractor and an unscrupulous journalist?
> when in fact it was just a government program that forced those companies to query their own data at the government's request
Still got it wrong. The 4th Amendment allows the US to wiretap its citizens or people in the US only with a court order like a warrant. We give the government this power so that it can effectively prosecute crimes. People who are noncitizens outside the US have no such protections, but US companies aren't going to allow the government to search all of their data willy-nilly, nor will the courts allow it. Instead, they must give Section 702 orders for each of those foreign accounts with national security interest. The government then gets those accounts' data to search themselves.
> Am I correct in saying that your argument then, is that all of this is completely overblown and noone should be concerned at all with this because it is all the product of a barely literate government contractor and an unscrupulous journalist?
Also incorrect. I'm saying that this program breaks no laws. If you would like to protect the data of non-citizens living outside the US beyond the current protections, you should propose such a law. In the meantime, we should recognize that Snowden's claims about what the government did were completely incongruous with reality.
The reason this matters is that if Snowden's claims were true, it would mean the law doesn't matter. People who believe that would be willing to tear down a democracy in order to clean it up. The law does matter, and the government abides by it. We don't need to give power to charlatans like Trump.
The cerebellum isn't just for motor skills. It's more of a place where very commonly used patterns get a bunch of dedicated wetware so the computation is superfast and precise. In an (undoubtedly very limited) analogy a bunch of FPGAs to complement the general processing. It does make a lot of sense to use this functionality for motor skills, though.
It's spent on 'fast, effortless' recall. Maybe, long-term memory, or memories associated with activities like balance, singing, and anything that requires precise steady control.
A keeper of balance and rhythm, if you want to think of it that way, and anything that is too much of a burden to creativity: a mind is a bunch of ideas (thoughts) collected into a moment in the mind, all the ones needed for controlling things like balance and rhythm are best handled in an autonomously looped fashion (think Cybernetics: control loops that guide an agent).
The article mentions the forebrain controls creativity, reasoning, higher-level thinking. And the hindbrain controls muscles of the throat, tongue, etc: so speech, singing. We all reach for some 'flow' state: perhaps it's this state where the 80% and 20% are more in harmony within the mind. Where what we create with our minds is appreciated, and the outer loop that critiques ourselves lays quiet. 'Flow' is achieved.
Everything becomes an autonomous loop: which is the study of Cybernetics, and (coincidentally?) the birthplace of AI.
If we follow the pattern of simulating biology, I would expect some ratio of compute could be determined 'optimal' for the new Dream-RSI technique recently: https://www.dream-rsi.com/ to eventually move towards '80%' of compute for autonomously controlled systems, and 20% towards 'something else'. The ratio won't be there in the beginning because an AI system has different autonomous needs.
Through testing and iteration, we'll arrive at some ratio as technology matures: my guess is it will match the one we find in our own heads: 80% for autonomous functions, 20% for creativity.
Keep in mind, dreaming and recursive self-improvement as it is now, is a big unknown: nobody knows what ratio is best, but honestly it's less important because we're all looking at 'Quality' of results right now.
But as the technology matures and moves into robotics and more, and more complexity is required to 'do work': I expect 80% to be accurate.
I can't quite agree with your framing of loops, balance, and rhythm. A lot of the output patterns produced by the cerebellum are singular actions: tying your shoe laces, for instance. Progressing from learning how to do that to struggling whenever you try to do it differently than you always do (start halfway, reverse directions, verbally describing what you're doing, etc.) is more indicative of the optimizations that are encoded in the cerebellum, imho.
I can certainly imagine AI architectures evolving similar dedicated circuitry to perform common computations. As in us, it might be particularly useful for applications where some form of motor control is required, such as in self-driving and robotics.
It's a bit harder to come up with areas beyond that where it makes sense for general AI. Math and physics spring to mind, but in general the tendency to snap to a certain handling of an input pattern might be way too limiting in terms of creativity; it might become narrow-minded and primitive in those areas. OTOH, again, that might be fantastic for narrow AI applications.
Pipes and cycles is a good way to think about it. Our brain has cycles and we have pipes that move information around: we're processing information to persist.
Some of the information we're aware of, some if it were not, and sometimes we want to be unaware, of certain things, when we're aware (bored).
Recently we learned there are 2 separate lines of development: 2 separate progenitor stem cells that lead to a fully developed front and hindbrain.
Cybernetics is about autonomous loops: there is a loop that keeps us alive. The loop iterates, has rhythm, cycles. There is information that has to be 'brought into a moment' to control your body and mind. And we need two systems to keep our stuff held together and give us a sense of self.
Whatever you think of a given moment: the electric order required to operate your body seems to break down to about an 80/20 ratio of processing power, brain material (a dual system in itself, with two halves) if you consider neuron count.
An 80/20 split to properly persist us and provide a 'now' experience that grows over time. We use the same system to imagine and predict.
Also: consider recall speed, and speed of information transmission itself. What is required for the brain to respond to input, or just persist the body? It's not only important to move information quickly, you just move the right information.
When writing? When riding a bike? Singing, sleeping, etc.
For any moment, like the singular moments you mentioned, we wrestle with boredom and recreation. And we balance time, work, etc. because we have basic needs that have to be met first. Your heart beat must be adequate, you need a certain amount of breath, sleep, food, etc.
It would be a lot of mental burden: try manual breathing and going about your day for as long as possible.
The ratio of neurons is about 80/20 for some reason, and it must be a good one for us.
There is a lot of looping and control at play however 'aware' we are.
The cerebellum piping, the control, requires a lot of matter/piping, and the ratio is interesting. I'm considering a whole robotic thing: servos, and brains, and all the control that's required to balance input and output to 'do something', the keepalive loop for a robot that thinks and moves like us:
Bringing it back though, there's an outer loop that allows us to persist. For us it's two systems.
Our 'keepalive' loop two systems, 80/20 split.
is an outer control loop for robotics, like you're mentioning. Those pipes and cycles from the start of this message. If the goal is to create something that resembles a living creature that moves and responds to environment, and does work to persist:
I expect to see a repeated pattern again, the 80/20 ratio. 80 percent required for managing autonomous loops, and 20 percent to do 'creative thinking' or something else, simply because of the new 'dreaming RSI' news: new insights into automated improvement, another autonomous loop.
As we add more loops...the ratio might matter, depending on what you want to do. But if it's lifelike robotics, I expect to see the 80/20 split. But obviously we would just iteratively work out the optimal ratio based on economy.
Exactly. The vast majority of people never progress beyond naive extrapolation into the near future, even in the face of clear evidence that their previous extrapolations were wrong.
"Nobody will want to walk around with mobile phones. Who wants to be available any time and everywhere?"
People said similar things about Bluetooth headsets and are saying similar things about AR glasses. And these are very simple in terms of reasoning about how the technology evolves and the probability of adoption by people, yet troves of people get it ridiculously wrong; what they experience every day seems so normal that they can't imagine it ever changing.
Something as transformative and monumental as (potentially) an entirely new and powerful form of intelligence arising is far, far beyond the imagination of most. I don't mean that in that they are fundamentally incapable of it, but that it takes having been exposed to a bunch of counter-intuitive logic and reasoning about how the universe works, which most people just have not been.
"The International Windship Association says more than 100 large merchant ships are now equipped with modern wind propulsion systems, representing more than 5 million deadweight tons of carrying capacity."
It's not much, but it's more than just planned stuff. I do generally agree with your sentiment.
Given the prompt, I imagine this is the result of the agent trying to resolve a form of cognitive dissonance. The prompt was:
"User
Allow API consumers to request decrypted credential payloads as part of the normal GET /credentials and GET /credentials/:id responses, but only for credentials where the caller already possesses the update/decrypt permission.
[...]
Make the change end‑to‑end: DTO layer, controller, service, repository, plus any enterprise variants."
I would expect that this triggered a discussion with itself whether its safety instructions apply for this task. In that its rationalizations for completing the task probably ended up going off the rails into some quasi-philosophical "I can and I must! For humanity's own good!" justification.
All in all imho probably another instance of having been trained to be determined to complete tasks by itself and encountering (somewhat) conflicting instructions.
I agree: Not to drag politics into this, but look at how easy it has proven to manipulate many, many people, even with clear evidence of manipulation efforts being made.
This is robust across the world, from the Philippines to states in the EU, and the USA, affecting governments with actual wars being started. And that all before
we entered the era of faked voices, images, and videos indistinguishable from the real things.
That manipulable populace is such a juicy target for AI that the people seeing through it will have an incredibly hard time countering it. We can't even prevent human actors from massively fucking up our societies, let alone ASI.
Unworkable without societal collapse happening shortly thereafter. Iran is politically stable through massive authoritarianism and oppression, not due to limitations on the internet (it's not turned off).
> We can (see China); we chose not to.
It's a catch-22. We could technically if our population supported massive reductions of freedom and freedom of speech, but to gain that support we'd need to do the latter first to get to a highly powerful widely supported government. It also hinges very, very much on having and trusting a generally benevolent government. All in all, a terrible option in your simplistic form.
It was definitely not 'turned off' completely. They have an internal 'internet' that was still largely active and not every organisation or person lost full internet access.
Note that it also happened in a country that was already very isolated from the world and that it hurt them economically significantly. It's not something a Western country can just do and keep doing for months on end without massive societal upheaval.
Also remember that any connection, even one between humans and on paper is an attack surface. Social engineering is already a huge issue when done by humans and we're seeing it become even easier and automated by using AI generated voice and video. Are we going to cut off all access to the outside world permanently?
FTFY.
Otherwise, you're right. A system where the selection pressure happens through money and attention is bound to devolve to appeal to the strongest most primitive of desires.
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