I gave this half an hour video the first 10 minutes. He
- explicitly only wanted to eval the infrasound noise burden, which is not what the guy above was referring to here (the human audible noise burden; not that this would be pointless to check)
- played back a recording where the car door slamming was way louder than ambient
- showed that the place is pretty far away from residential areas
- did not actually confirm the source of the infrasound he did record
- did not disclose the actual dB SPL figures measured
- kept derailing to talk about other things he finds objectionable, to the extent that it felt like more time was spent on those than on the actual subject of the video.
If the remaining 20 minutes are like this too, then I'm not sure he's a reliable narrator or that this is actually valuable research, at least in this context.
I would have hoped people would have been inoculated against the 'infrasound is harmful' nonsense when it was used as a complaint against wind turbines.
Two things can be true. Open AI is a huge company.
1. It has people in it who are career obsessed and who are willing to ruthlessly go after any opportunity to improve their standing/stock valuation. Using a 2 week old model to snipe a millenium prize for PR is in line with that.
2. There are many researchers and even executives at the company who genuinely think we are speedrunning the end of the world. I don’t know anyone in this field who honestly argues that if we build ASI soon it doesn’t lead to extinction. This group of people can output warnings about the state of research and fears for the future while pushing for regulation out of genuine fear of what they’re building. I tend to agree with them.
You can’t view these companies as a monolith. They’re actions won’t be consistent because it’s built of many people with conflicting beliefs. Please look at arguments regarding AI risk and the current pace of progress and value them as it relates to the argument itself, not who said it. We are in a dangerous place and no one is sure how quickly we’ll get to a bad spot.
Yes I think this level of pessimism doesn’t actually hold up to the history of the last 100 years as it relates to nuclear weapons, cloning, wars etc. In fact I think the history actually points to the fact that believing such deals were impossible was a source of much of the strife. In many cases as soon as people started to actually speak to each other about what they had been fighting about they quickly realized that they wanted the same thing. No one wanted nuclear proliferation to increase but until someone said it it only got worse: https://www.history.com/articles/reykjavik-summit-nuclear-de.... When Robert McNamara met with a Viet Cong general after the war ended he realized that they both had totally misunderstood the objectives of the other: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=0X1YY49rPtg&ra=m. Agreeing to end nuclear testing saved us from the Cuban Missile Crisis. Richard Ngo, an AI safety researcher, often says that none of us are on the pareto frontier and I tend to agree with him.
Almost nobody (I have to say almost) in the world including Xi, the ceo of deep seek, Dario, and even Sam Altman want AI to kill everyone. I really think we just have to
A. Get stakeholders to believe this is a bad idea.
B. show that we’re willing to do it first to prevent this stupid race from continuing.
> Agreeing to end nuclear testing saved us from the Cuban Missile Crisis.
The treaty came after the crisis, not before. And it only banned atmospheric, underwater, and space tests. The US and USSR kept testing underground on a large scale, while France and China never signed it and continued atmospheric tests for years.
Fair, I was going off memory and was wrong. I guess I was mostly just trying to get across that communication seems to be more powerful than we give it credit for, but should’ve double checked.
This is off topic now but yeah the world would have been a different place if someone had listened to the demands of Ho Chi Minh earlier.. and Hammarskjöld had not been crashed
I think both Seb and Sam have said that it would’ve been simpler if the coauthor hadn’t worked at Anthropic so they’ve largely admitted they didn’t invite the collaborator as a coauthor because it would’ve look bad to have an Anthropic employee on the paper.
Generally I don’t think anyone is arguing about the for now part. I don’t think it’s crazy to extrapolate out a few years and ask what kind of danger we’ll be in then. A team of 10,000 agents just solved the Navier Stokes problem (sans bad behavior by the researchers). Even 1 year ago that would have been unimaginable. What happens to this risk view as:
1. Robotics begin rolling out more broadly across the world.
2. Labs start automating more and more of the physical process of running science as expectations of natural science advances begin to mount.
3. Economic pressure between the labs continues to ramp up and the pressure to continuously improve forces quicker and quicker model releases than a team of human scientists can effectively evaluate outside of automated means.
No one knows what pre-conditions are for us to hit the point of no return nor how quickly it will come. If all is required is a sufficiently advanced cyber model we may not be far off. If it requires incredibly complex biological knowledge and access to certain lab supplies we likely have a bit longer. Yes this is guess work and we need more evidence of the dangers but at the same time we need evidence of safety. While you may disagree with the risk level, I think it is easy to see the consequence if these labs achieve their stated goal. At this point it seems a political solution is the only way to enforce caution.
That’s because being 99.9999% good isn’t better than 98% + human does the rest + human is liable for screw ups - highly important in edge case scenario’s. It’s more economical. Technology can only generalise+verify so much.
E.g automobile production - humans do the QA / touches.
Didn't you follow the robotics advances in the Ukrainian - Russian battlefield? There is now a death zone of 50km, only controlled by drones and automatic weapons.
The drones are obviously very important but they only work in the context of everything else on and around the battlefield, especially people. You aren't holding the line with drones alone, and on the whole they are not autonomous.
They are holding the lines with drones alone nowadays. That's why it's called the deathzone, no humans survive. Some drones have FPV operators, some weapons use AI only already.
I think you're painting a slightly misleading picture. The drone AI, computer vision and autonomous fire-control systems existed (and were used in combat) before LLMs/AI was a hot topic.
There are applications of modern LLMs and recent AI advances on the front-lines, but they are not the majority contributor to enforcing the death zone. Without modern LLMs, I would bet that the frontlines would look very similar to how they are today.
I don't think that's accurate. What I've seen described is actually a surprisingly porous line: The Russians are often behind the Ukrainians and vice-versa, but it doesn't result in a break due to the transparency of the battlefield and the risk of getting killed if spotted, as well as the improvements in getting supplies to units behind 'enemy lines'. Drones shape this a lot but there's still a lot of people on the battlefield.
50km is just the "very likely to get hit" part of the gray zone
ISR drones and other tools can go as far as 200km, albeit with worsening visibility.
in most cases everything meaningful in that 200k is seen, and the only limitation is range of the drones, artillery, missiles, and potential countermeasures.
> There is now a death zone of 50km, only controlled by drones and automatic weapons.
If there would be such 50km death zone, front line would not move a nanometer in a year, would it. You yourself contradict above in your next post. No need for being too dramatic, facts are enough here.
In reality, frontline is moving constantly albeit by small chunks, russians are advancing a bit, getting beating elsewhere and so on. Automated drones are helping, but bulk of destruction is still handled by human drone operators as it should be.
There is such a thing as a No Man's Land[0]. It can move, but if you don't dare cross it for even a few days, it's very real. It doesn't have to be glacial, and it currently exists in Ukraine. Breakout pockets don't mean it is porous everywhere.
[0] Ironically, the French phrase - from ground zero for the first known No Man's Land - is "le No Man's Land".
- If you have been laid from your info sector/digital creation job you are now competing with 100s of thousands looking for their next such job where Ai can do a lot of the tasks these workers did/do. It's a shitshow for those unemployed looking for their next info sector/digital asset creation job. You are better off doing welding building out the Ai data centers if you want long term properous financial stable employment.
> 1. Robotics begin rolling out more broadly across the world.
To borrow the Strangelove quip, this is not only necessary but essential.
Broader physical robotic deployments are the glue that connects {cheap synthetic intelligence} to {physical outcomes}.
The former is a newer phenomenon, in the LLMs-can-approximate-higher-intelligence-well sense, so robotics deployments haven't caught up yet (outside of the highest ROI dark factory scenarios).
They'd also have to be self-assembling from the ground up or rely on human slaves. They'd need to understand the world much better. And they'd have to be incredibly more power efficient. These all remain hard problems right now. That said, you could swarm people with cheap drones (the predicted slaughterbots) that were assembled by robots that eventually break down I guess, but how is that any worse than a crazy human with a gun or what nation states do to people they deem enemies already? The worst these things seem capable of is an attack on the infrastructure and shutting down the Internet. Perhaps this is a great time to insure that our infrastructure is capable of operating autonomously indefinitely and hardening it against attack? But unfortunately, no VC or politician will touch that until something bad happens.
So broadly, a better educated Blake Lemoine IMO. What's disturbing to me is how fast and far some junior minion from the frontier labs was platformed all the way to the Wall Street Journal over a tweet that sounds exactly like every other anti-AI tweet. I share concerns about irresponsible deployments of AI, and we need technological literacy in the leadership, but America hates technocracy and prefers populism so buckle up.
> They'd also have to be self-assembling from the ground up or rely on human slaves. They'd need to understand the world much better. And they'd have to be incredibly more power efficient.
All robotics needs to drive deployment at scale is (1) useful intelligence & (2) performing novel valuable functions.
Both of these are satisfied by current tech (LLM + sensors + robotics) and the existing simplest use cases (assembly lines and repetitive tasks).
LLMs get you a moderately-intelligent, mostly-reliable orchestration layer of intelligence on top of deterministic hard robotics.
And that's enough for a lot of failure-tolerant, feedback-looped cases. E.g. reading 20 dials in a factory throughout the day or monitoring a production line visually, then figuring out what to do about a problem, then effecting that plan.
It'll be deployed in heavily utilized spaces at first, but will eventually trickle down throughout the economy.
And that will be when 'control over robots' starts to be an existential threat, for denial of critical services at the minimum.
And all of this will inevitably roll out as long as ROI is positive, because that's the way the world works.
While it would be insane to get a PhD if you had to pay for it, at least in the US you are paid a stipend (if not a good one) so you can generally avoid any debt. There is definitely an opportunity cost though.
I’m not so sure this is trivial and strongly depends on the biases of the agents that the group is composed of. It seems like some species of animals (humans, ants, wasps, etc) seem to select for intelligence in group settings more than individual intelligence. One of my favorite facts about human evolution is that in the process of becoming homo sapiens our brains actually shrunk relative to our ancestors possibly due to our reliance on social ties and specialization allowing for each individual unit to be “dumber” while the collective becomes more intelligent than any individual ever was.
It’s not apparent to me that current LLM’s have the right biases for a trivial unit of “more LLM” = smarter. It seems apparent that LLM’s are under many metrics more “intelligent” than the average person but they still don’t rival our corporations or collectives in terms of intelligence and I don’t see them being plug in replacements for humans and maintaining the benefits of the collective structures yet. Not impossible but definitely not trivial in my mind. We and our cultures evolved to work together and the modern world is the result of the emergent structure that resulted.
As a plug my favorite field relating to this is called stigmergy and basically describes how individual units like ants build intelligent collectives that are far greater than the sum of their parts.
Depends on who you’re talking about. How does the cost benefit analysis work out for someone while lives within a mile of a datacenter, owns no shares in the company, and pays rate fees for their utilities and will have to pay for maintenance for the increased load capacity as well as higher spot prices? If you view America as a cohesive unit I’d agree with you, but I don’t think these people are necessarily acting irrationally if you view their personal circumstance. It’s up to the building company to sweeten the deal and provide an incentive for the locals to add it. Based on the contracts I’ve read from many of these datacenters it seems more like they’re buying the pockets of corrupt politicians and developers in areas with high political inequality while conferring very little benefit to the people who deal with the externalized cost.
While I’m sure there are people profiting off these movements, there is very real grassroots support for blocking datacenters and generally anything relating to AI and I can’t blame anyone other than the companies building it. I think in 30 years this will be studied as the worst marketed technology ever. It’s one thing if outsiders try to say your technology is dangerous, it’s another if the companies themselves are telling the public that they’re technology is either going to a) exterminate humanity or b) eliminate all jobs and institute a permanent underclass. I think they’re right that these are concerns and while our niche tech bubble maybe thinking also about the potential scientific benefits of the technology, all the wider world sees is multi-national tech companies taking advantage of areas with high political inequality to push through genuinely unfair contracts that saddle utility rate payers with higher fees, potentially negative health effects, and with very little long term job creation. This is also coming from companies that have ignored complaints about the overriding addiction and division which their platforms have allowed to propagate over the last 20 years all while many Americans watch historic levels of corruption in government in favor of those same companies go unpunished. At this point I think the tech world has really burnt all of its political capital with the wider populace and while we may sit back and complain that progress is being blocked by luddites, its not irrational to want to block the creation of a technology which you will pay the cost for while seeing a disproportionately small percentage of the rewards. I think if we’re going to see the actual proliferation of this tech and the benefits it will bring, their needs to be a) more publicized news of real benefits to human quality of life in visible fields like medicine and b) an actual plan for how to confer the rewards of technology more widely rather than just continuing to center in the hands of so few people and not just approaching it as higher gdp but also lower wealth inequality as long as its correlated with political power
> while our niche tech bubble maybe thinking also about the potential scientific benefits of the technology
While all the academic talk about benevolent AI is fascinating, it has become quite clear that the development is driven by billionaires to become richer and big companies to get more revenue.
Everything else is just billionaires playing the tech bubble, so that they can rationalize what's happening and what they are part of.
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