We will use our big brains to draw bold conclusions about the most effective use of money, without the burden of conventional wisdom.
For our first bold conclusion we have determined that all of the world's money should be in the hands of people with big brains who intend to draw bold conclusions about the most effective use of money, without the burden of conventional wisdom.
This concludes the planning phase. There will be an additional planning phase once we've collected all of the money, we promise.
That's the take away I get. It's a philosophical justification to being as greedy and heartless as possible because in the future the money you got from burning down the world could potentially be used to reverse that damage.
Very few billionaires are EAs. A few more have a generally EA approach to their giving. But billionaires are generally not that keen on EA because it would involve donating almost all their money.
If you're a regular person and you start taking an EA approach to the world, that is probably not going to look like donating almost all your money: most people don't have that much disposable income, and applying your working hours directly to important problems will often be more effective. But if you have billions of dollars you totally should be trying to figure out how to give most of it away effectively.
Basically EA operates as an insurance system for billionaires who want to gain enough wealth and power to collapse humanity until they need to insurance against the collapse of humanity so that they can keep extracting anyway.
"Sorry I can't it's unethical to give more to you just because you are closer to me, I need to do some excel sheets and maximize my mosquito net donations to africa."
That's definitely how it comes across now. Especially with all the TESCREAL weirdness that gets attached to it. But originally, EA really was extremely altruist. Early pioneers were practically Francis of Assissi-style vow of poverty people, giving away the majority of their income to the worthiest cause they could find.
But somewhere along the way it attracted the attention of tech bros, billionaires and AI believers, and the whole thing seems to have gotten corrupted way beyond recognition. I think it started by telling people that instead of becoming a volunteer, they could also become a stock trader and donate all of their income to fund a dozen volunteers. And once you've got that kind of money, well, isn't just donating 10% already pretty good? And then came the AI concerns, which mostly seem to have become a reason to hype up irresponsible AI use, rather than the opposite (note that both OpenAI and Anthropic were founded based on the concerns for the threat AI might pose to humanity), and then the Longtermist idea that the concerns of potentially trillions of humans in the very distant future should outweigh the concerns of the mere billions alive today, lead to basically an excuse not to help people today anymore. Also, all those millionaire and billionaire tech bros are still millionaires and billionaires. Is there any EA adherent who has given away that level of wealth?
So while the poverty and altruism of the early pioneers was extremely inspiring, the current visible public face of EA is exactly the opposite.
They define "altruism" as "don't actually do anything about the problems of today, so that you can do more about them tomorrow". But does tomorrow ever come?
Bluntly, I trust Jesus more than them. And in Luke 16:10, Jesus said, "One who is faithful in a very little is also faithful in much, and one who is dishonest in a very little is also dishonest in much."
I think you got it backwards. Their motivation is this "I must look charitable, but if there are no problems, then there is no reason to donate, hence I must operate at both ends. I must create problems by earning money and then solve them by spending money."
That certainly seems to be the motivation of AI companies warning us about the threat of AI to humanity, while working as hard as possible to bring it about.
I’m not sure. It could definitely be incompetence. We are talking about an industry rushing as fast as possible in every directions, their systems are very likely a complete mess. I really wouldn’t be surprised if advertisers are getting that data for free just because the AI labs didn’t bother
It's because of people like you that these companies have a free ride. When we're talking about billion dollar companies there's no such thing as a "mistake", because they need to be held accountable for everything that they do. Thinking otherwise let them keep the rewards while getting away with anything wrong they cause to society.
there's always some organizational, systematized intent in the creation of incompetence. all organizations should be accountable for it's workers and their adherence to policy - it's why safety regulations and training exist, after all
if you have an individual who has been sexually harassing others regularly the problem exists both with the individual and with there not being clear reporting standards, remediation processes, and person-by-person training opportunities (or only offering lackluster, barely enforced versions of the training)
organizations, especially ones as large and well-funded as LLM model providers that can hire whole fleets of trainers, ethics watchdogs, etc, that then produce large-scale, systematic incompetence are and should be the primary culprit and the one targeted by accountability processes
outside of someone just straight up embezzling funds or grossly misusing their power, organizations should also bear the brunt of the culpability especially when it relates to harms to the public good, especially if those harms benefit the organizations directly. and even in those cases the question becomes why weren't there accountability practices? checks on power? etc
Those companies are grossly incompetent to the point of committing what is likely to be felonies. If you think I’m deflecting you’re misguided, I’ve been advocating for months for the AI labs to be shutdown and their leadership investigated for gross negligence and potential crimes.
I would still bet they aren’t making any money from data leaking to advertisers
Thank you. I keep saying this and the spin doctors keep using words that imply "oh, my...I am so sorry we had that tiny little privacy issue...we'll get right on that in the next sprint...". And winning the message war.
It's not a 'leak'. It's in the T&Cs you agreed to. This is the business plan.
>Our legal system isn’t ready for machines that act on their own.
Technically, the code is owned and deployed by AI companies which make the AI companies 100% responsible. I'm not sure how is code written by LLMs different than any other kind of code. If somebody hacked just like OpenAI's agents did, he would've ended up in prison right away.
Maybe I'm too cynical but the same AI companies that have pretty much endless lobbying dollars, massive government contracts, have the ear of just about every powerful politician and bureaucrat in DC, are influencing the laws and regulations. Add judges that don't understand the technology to that and it doesn't seem likely that we will ever see any actual consequences, unless something catastrophic happens and those same politicians and bureaucrats need a scapegoat. If they ever do have "consequences" it will be some trivial fine.
One recent example of a scapegoat https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49806430 people are still to blame, "the dog ate my homework" is a fine enough excuse for a second chance to learn, it's nowhere near enough of an excuse for death and destruction.
Yeah. Committing crimes via some sort of elaborate rube goldberg machine is not something that has been just invented in the 2020s with unclear legal precedent.
It's if nothing else a staple in the Arthur Conan Doyle tradition of mystery novels, and even then half the plots involved hiding who was culpable by using the machinations to create false alibis, with delayed murders and the illusion of a locked room as not even in the 19th century did anyone believe that the indirection itself would hold up as a defense.
If someone buries an anti-personnel mine in a public park and then argues that it acted on its own accord when it maimed a pedestrian, I doubt you'll find a court on the planet that would spend even a 4 seconds considering the culpability of the land mine itself.
No. The person that set the agent in motion is liable. If your agent, infused with magic inference juice you only partially understand, but picked up and used any way, does something harmful, you are to blame.
You may have a case that the magic inference juice was somehow tainted, but that seems like a stretch. If you run your car into someone else, and it isn't a total failure of the systems of the car, you did that, not the car, and not the car company.
I think some of it is they know they're so full of debt that they'll never survive intact.
Also, the assumption about AGI, singularity, etc is just a delusion of a cult leader. They might realize that more watts are not getting them more intelligence from LLMs.
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