All you've done is explain why the printing press was so important and necessary in order to break down previous unwarranted power structures. I have a similar hope for AGI. The alternative is that the incompant power structure instead benefits from AGI and uses it for oppression, which would mean it's not comparable to the printing press as such.

Religious schisms happened before the printing press, too. There was the Great Schism in 1054 in Christianity, for example.

Yes, ants could technically conspire to sneak up to you while you sleep and bite you all at once to kill you, so do you go out to eradicate all ants?

“A society grows great when old men plant trees in whose shade they know they shall never sit”

So basically we are a bit screwed in our current timeline. We are at the cusp of a post-scarcity society, possibly reach AGI within our lifetimes and possibly even become a space faring civilization. However, it is highly likely that we are going to pay the pound of flesh and only subsequent generations - perhaps yet unborn - will be the ones who will be truly better off.

I suppose it's not all doom and gloom, we can draw stoic comfort from the fact that people in the near future will have an incredibly exciting era full of discovery and wonder ahead of them!

The list of things states have attempted to deploy offensively is nearly endless. Modern operations research arguably came out of the British empire attempting (succeeding) to weaponise mathematics. If you give a state fertiliser it makes bombs, if you give it nuclear power it makes bombs, if you give it drones it makes bombs, if you give it advanced science or engineering of any form it makes bombs. States are the most ingenious system for turning things into bombs that we've ever invented; in the grand old days of siege warfare they even managed to weaponise corpses, refuse and junk because it turned out lobbing that stuff at the enemy was effective. The entire spectrum of technology from nothing to nanotech, hurled at enemies to kill them.

We'd all love if states commit to not doing evil but the state is the entity most active at figuring out how to use new tech X for evil.

The sleight of hand here is the implication that human interactions, values, and ideas are only expressed through the state.

We have absolutely no idea how to specify human values in a robust way which is what we would need to figure out to build this safely

  (I) All of the focus on AGI is a distraction.

  (II) "AI" (the goalpost shifting for marketing purposes to make that name apply to chatbots is a stretch honestly)

I'd love to get into the weeds on the different kinds of intelligence and why being to absolutist about the term can get real Faustian real quick, but these quotes bring up a more convincing, fundamental point: these chatbots are damn impressive. They do something--intuitive inference+fluent language use--that was impossible yesterday, and many experts would've guessed was decades away at least, if not centuries. Truly intelligent or not on their own, that's a more important development than you imply here.

Finally, that brings me to the crux:

  (III) AI... is a technology like any other

  I’ve always thought of A.I. as the most profound technology humanity is working on-more profound than fire or electricity or anything that we’ve done in the past. It gets to the essence of what intelligence is, what humanity is. We are developing technology which, for sure, one day will be far more capable than anything we’ve ever seen before. [3]

1) This kind of talk is so grandiose that it seems like a questionable move if that's the goal,

2) it's a sentiment echoed by many scientists (as I mentioned at the start of this rant) and

3) the unprecedented investments made across the world into the DL boom speak for themselves, sincerity-wise.

Yes, this is because AI will create uber-efficient factories, upset labor relations, produce terrifying autonomous weapons, and all that stuff we're used to hearing about from the likes of Bostrom[4], Yudkowsky[5], and my personal fave, Huw Price[6]. But Pichai's raising something even more fundamental: the prospect of artificial people. Even if we ignore the I-Robot-style concerns about their potential moral standing, that is just a fundamentally spooky prospect, bringing very fundamental questions of A) individual worth and B) the nature of human cognition to the fore. And, to circle back: distinct from anything we've seen before.

To close this long anxiety-driven manuscript, I'll end with a quote from an underappreciated philosopher of technology named Lewis Mumford on what he called "neotechnics":

  The scientific method, whose chief advances had been in mathematics and the physical sciences, took possession of other domains of experience: the living organism and human society also became the objects of systematic investigation... instead of mechanism forming a pattern for life, living organisms began to form a pattern for mechanism.
  In short, the concepts of science--hitherto associated largely with the cosmic, the inorganic, the "mechanical"--were now applied to every phase of human experience and every manifestation of life... men sought for an underlying order and logic of events which would embrace more complex manifestations.[7]

[1] OpenAI's Charter https://web.archive.org/web/20230714043611/https://openai.co...

[2] Investigation of a famous AI quote https://quoteinvestigator.com/2024/06/20/not-ai/

[3] Pichai, 2023: "AI is more profound than fire or electricity" https://fortune.com/2023/04/17/sundar-pichai-a-i-more-profou...

[4] Bostrom, 2014: Superintelligence https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superintelligence:_Paths,_Dang...

[5] Yudkowsky, 2013: Intelligence Explosion Microeconomics https://intelligence.org/files/IEM.pdf

[6] Huw Price's bio @ The Center for Existential Risk https://www.cser.ac.uk/team/huw-price/

[7] Mumford, 1934: Technics and Civilization https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.49974

This assertion is meaningless because it can be applied to anything.

"I think vaccines cause autism and will cause human annihilation" - just because it has not yet come to pass does not mean it is wrong.

That we often won't have control over big changes affecting our lives, so be prepared. If possible, get out in front and ride the wave. If not, duck under and don't let it churn you up too much.

Pretending that Europe wasn't in a perpetual blood bath since the end of the Pax Romana until 1815 shows a gross ignorance of basic facts.

The printing press was a net positive in every time scale.

I disagree with your example, however, as the most basic tenet of capitalism is that when there is a demand, someone will come along to fill it.

Addressing your example specifically, there's a fixed supply of housing in capitalist countries not because people don't want to build houses, but because government or bureacracy artificially limits the supply or creates other disincentives that amount to the same thing.

There are some thoughts on this here: https://www.playforthoughts.com/blog/concepts-from-game-theo...

Humans are social animals. We are individually physically weak and defenseless. Unlike other animals, we are born into this world immobile, naked, starving and helpless. It takes us literally years to mature to the point where we wouldn't simply die outright if we were abandoned by others. Newborns can literally die from touch deprivation. We develop huge brains not only to allow us to come up with clever tools but also to help us build and navigate complex social relationships. We're evolved to live in tribes, yes, but we're also evolved to interact with other tribes - we created diplomacy and trading and even currency to interact with those other tribes without having to resort to violence or avoidance.

In crises, this is the behavior we fall back to. Yes, some will self-isolate and use violence to keep others away until they feel safe again. But overwhelmingly what we see after natural disasters and spaces where the formal order of civilisation and state is disrupted and leaves a vacuum is cooperation, mutual aid and people taking risks to help others - because we intrinsically know that being alone means death and being in a group means surviving. Of course the absence of state control also often enables other existing groups to assert their power, i.e. organized crime. But it shouldn't be surprising that the fledgling and atrophied ability to self-organize might not be strong enough to withstand a fast moving power grab by an existing group - what might be more surprising is that this is rarely the case and often news stories about "looting" after a natural disaster turn out to be uncharitable descriptions of self-organized rescues and searches.

I think a better analogy for human selfishness would be the mirage of "alpha wolves". As seems to be common knowledge at this point, there is no such thing as an "alpha wolf" hierarchy in groups of wolves living in nature and the phenomenon the author who coined the term (and has since regretted doing so) was mistakenly extrapolating from observations he made of wolves in captivity. But the behavior does seem to exist in captivity. Not because it's "inherent" or their natural behavior "under pressure" but because it's a maladaptation that arises from the unnatural circumstances of captivity (e.g. different wolves with no prior bonds being forced into a confined space, naturally trying to form a group but being unable to rely on natural bonds and shared trust).

Humans do not naturally form strict social hierarchies. For the longest time, Europeans would have laughed at you if you claimed the feudal system was not in the human nature - it would have literally been heresy to challenge it. Nowadays in the West most people will say capitalism or markets are human nature. Outside the West, people will still likely at least tell you that authoritarianism is human nature - whether it's the boot of a dictatorship, the boots of oligarchs or "the people's boot" that's pushing down on the unruly (yourself included).

What we do know about more egalitarian tribal societies is that they often use delegation, especially in times of war. When quick decisions need to be made, you don't have the time for lengthy discussions and consensus seeking and it can be an advantage to have one person giving orders and coordinating an attack or defense. But these systems can still be consent-based: if the war chief is reckless or seeks to take advantage of the group for his own gain, he is easily demoted and replaced. Likewise in times of unsolvable problems like droughts, spiritual leaders might be given more power by the group. Now shift from more mobile, nomadic groups to more static, agrarian groups (though it's worth pointing out the distinction here is not agriculture but more likely granaries, crop rotation and irrigation, as some nomadic tribes still engaged in forms of agriculture) and suddenly it becomes easier for that basis of consent to be forgotten and the chosen leaders to maintain that initial state of desperation and to begin justifying their status with the divine mandate. Oops, you got a monarchy going.

Capitalism freed us from the monarchy but it did not meaningfully upset the hierarchy. Aristocrats became capitalists, the absence of birthright class assignment created some social mobility but the proportions generally remained the same. You can't have a leader without followers, you can't have a ruling class without a class of those they can rule over, you can't have an owning class without a class to rent that owned property out to and to work for that owned capital to be realized into profits.

But just like a monarch despite their divine authority was still beholden to the support of the aristocracy to exert power over others and to the laborers to till the fields, build the castle and fight off foreign claims to power, the owning class too exists in a state of perpetual desperation and distrust. The absence of divine right means a billionaire must maintain their wealth and the capitalist mantra of infinite growth means anything other than growing that wealth is insufficient to maintain it. All the while they have to compete with the other billionaires above them as well as maintain control over those beneath them and especially the workers and renters whose wealth and labor they must extract from in order to grow theirs. The perverse reality of hierarchies is that even those at the top of it are crushed underneath its weight. Nobody is allowed to be happy and at peace.

Sure, we don't need to talk about how certain Big Oil companies knew about the climate catastrophe before any scientists publicly talked about it, or how tobacco companies knew their product was an addictive drug while blatantly lying about it even in public hearings.

But it's ironic to mention FAANG given what the F is for if you recall that when the algorithmic timeline was first introduced by Facebook, the response from Facebook to criticism was literally that satisfaction went down but engagement went up. People directly felt that the algorithm made them more unhappy, more isolated and overall less satisfied but because it was more addictive, because it created more "engagement", Facebook doubled down on it.

Also "sustainable" stopped being a talking point when the tech industry became obsessed with LLMs. Microsoft made a big show of wanting to become "carbon neutral" (of course mostly using bogus carbon offset programs that don't actually do anything and carbon capture technologies that are net emission positive and will be for decades if not forever but still, at least they pretended) and then silently threw all of that away when it became more strategically important to pursue AI at any cost. Companies that previously desperately tried to sell messages of green washing and carbon neutrality now talk about building their own non-renewable power plants because of all the computational power they need to run their LLMs (not to mention how much more hardware needs to be produced and replaced for this - the same way the crypto bubble ate through graphics cards).

I think the pearl-clutching is justified considering that ethics and climate protection have now been folded into "woke" and there's a tidal wave in Western politics to dismantle civil rights and capture democratic systems for corporate interests that is using the "anti-woke" culture war to further its goals - the Trump government being the most obvious example. It's no longer in FAANG's financial interests to appear "green" or "privacy conscious", it's now in their interest to be "anti-woke" and that now means no longer having to care about these things and having freedom to crack down on any dissident voices within without fearing public backlash or "cancel culture".

I'm not sure what you mean by that. Ancient Greece was a loose coalition of city states, not an empire. You could say they were short-sighted by being more concerned about their rivalry than external threats but the closest they came to being united was under Alexander the Great, whose death left a power vacuum.

There was no direct cause of "the fall" of Ancient Greece. The city states were suffering greatly from social inequality, which created tensions and instability. They were militarily weakened from the war with the Persians. Alexander's death left them without a unifying force. Then the Roman Empire knocked on its door and that was the end of it.

Rome likewise didn't fall in one single way. "Rome" isn't even what people think it is. Roman history spans several different entities and even if you talk about the "empire in decline" that's covering literally hundreds of years, ending with the Holy Roman Empire, which has been retroactively reimagined as a kind of proto-Germany. But even then that's only the Western Roman Empire - the Eastern Roman Empire continued to exist as the Byzantine Empire until the Ottoman Empire conquered Constaninople. And this distinction between the two empires is likewise retroactive and did not exist in the minds of Romans at the time (although they were de facto independent of each other).

If you only focus on the century or so that is generally considered to represent the fall of Western Rome, the ultimate root cause actually seems to be natural climate change. The Huns fled climate change, chasing away other groups that then fled into the Empire. Late Western Rome also again suffered from massive wealth inequality, which the ruling class attempted to maintain with increasingly cruel punishments.

So, if you want to look for a common thread, it seems to be the hubris of the financial elite, not "society" as a whole.

Capitalism obviously has advantages and disadvantages. Regulation can address many disadvantages if we are willing. Unfortunately, I think a particular (mostly western) fetish for privileging individuals over communities has been wrongly extended to capital itself (e.g. corporations recognised as entities with rights similar to - and sometimes over-and-above - those of a person). We have literally created monsters. There is no reason we had to go this far. Capitalism doesn't have to mean the preeminence of capital above all else. It needs to be put back in its place and not necessarily discarded. I am certain there are better ways to practice capitalism. They probably involve balancing it out with some other 'isms.

The problem is that the information can go anywhere that has an internet connection, and the enforcement can't.

As for the Chinese chip industry, I don't claim to be an expert on it, but it seems the Chinese are quickly coming up with increasingly less inferior alternatives to Western tech.

"We've already lost our first encounter with AI" - I think Yuval Hurari.

Algorithms heavily thumbed the scales on our social contracts. Where did all of the division come from? Why is extremism blossoming everywhere? Because it gets clicks. Maybe we're just better observing what's been going on under the hood all along, but it seems like there's about 350 million little cans of gasoline dousing American eyeballs.

Make Algorithms Govern All indeed.

That requires dissolving the anarchy of the international system. Which requires an enforcer.

I think it is one-sided to see any situation where we want to retain balance as being significantly affected by one of the sides exclusively. If one believes that there is a balance to be maintained between cooperation and competition, I don't immediately default to believing that any perceived imbalance is due to one and not the other.

As for nuclear weapons, I mean it does kind of suck in today's age to be a country without nuclear weapons, right? Like, certain well known countries would really like to have them so they wouldn't feel bullied by the ones that have them. So, I actually think that example works against you. And we very well may end up in a similar circumstance where a few countries get super powerful AGIs and then use their advantage to prevent any other country from getting it as well. Therefore my point stands: I don't want to be in one of the countries that doesn't get to be in that exclusive club.

In reality, most people will continue to live the modern life where there are doctors, accountants, veterinarians, mechanics. We'll continue to enjoy food distribution and grocery stores. We'll all hope that North America gets its act together and build high speed rail so we can travel comfortably for long distances.

There was a time Canada was a big exporter of engineering technology. From mining to agriculture, satellites, and nuclear technology. I want Canada to be competitive in these ways, not making makeshift shacks out of planks and nails for junkies that have given up on life and live in the woods.

If a society is okay accepting a lower standard of living and sovereign subservience, then sure, competition doesn't matter. But if America and China have AI and nukes and Europe doesn't, one side gets to call the shots and the other has to listen.

https://crimethinc.com/2018/09/03/the-mythology-of-work-eigh...

We face issues (like we always have), but I'd argue quite strongly that the competitiveness in our history and drive to invent and innovate has led to where we are today and it's a good thing.

It is quite possible there is a cultural reaction against AI and that we enter a new human cultural golden age of human created art, music, literature, etc.

I actually would bet on this as engineering skills become automated that what will be valuable in the future is human creativity. What has value then will influence culture more and more.

What you are describing seems like how the future would be based on current culture but it is a good bet the future will not be that.

The nuclear peace is hard to pin down. But given the history of the 20th century, I find it difficult to imagine we wouldn't have seen WWIII in Europe and Asia without the nuclear deterrent. Also, while your parents may have been uncomfortable with the hydrogen bomb, the post-90s world hasn't particularly been characterised by mass nuclear anxiety. (Possibly to a fault.)

However, that really doesn’t invalidate the rule.

"Lack of Adaptability"

AI advocates argue that those who lose jobs simply failed to "upskill" in time. The burden is placed on workers to constantly retrain, even if AI advancement outpaces human ability to keep up. Companies and governments say, “The opportunities are there; people just aren’t taking them.” "Work Ethic Problem"

The unemployed are labeled as lazy or unwilling to compete with AI. Hustle culture promotes side gigs and AI-powered freelancing as the “new normal.” Welfare programs are reduced because “if AI can generate income, why can’t you?” "Personal Responsibility for Economic Struggles"

The unemployed are blamed for not investing in AI tools early. The success of AI-powered entrepreneurs is highlighted to imply that struggling workers "chose" not to adapt. People are told they should have saved more or planned for disruption, even though AI advancements were unpredictable. "It’s a Meritocracy"

AI-driven success stories (few and exceptional) are amplified to suggest anyone could thrive. Struggling workers are seen as having made poor choices rather than being victims of automation. The idea of a “deserving poor” is reinforced—those who struggle are framed as not working hard enough. "Blame the Boomers / Millennials / Gen Z"

Economic shifts are framed as generational failures rather than AI-driven. Older workers are told they refused to adapt, while younger ones are blamed for entitlement or lack of work ethic. Cultural wars distract from AI’s role in job losses. "AI is a Tool, Not the Problem"

AI is framed as neutral—any negative consequences are blamed on how people use it. “AI doesn’t take jobs; people mismanage it.” Job losses are blamed on bad government policies, corporate greed, or individual failure rather than automation itself. "The AI Economy Is Full of Opportunity"

Gig work and AI-driven side hustles are framed as liberating, even if they offer no stability. Traditional employment is portrayed as outdated, making complaints about job loss seem like resistance to progress. Those struggling are told to “embrace the new economy” rather than question its fairness.

The closest might be nuclear power, we know we can do it, we did it, but lots of places said no to it, and further developments have vastly slowed down.

You need to be totally naive to believe that materials shipped to the US are all checked to make sure they are asbestos free. You are provided with a report saying it is asbestos free, that is it.

Time to grow up.

At some level, there's a disaster-seeking function inside us all acting as an evolutionary propellant.

You might make an argument that "AI" is an evolutionary embodiment of our conscious minds that's designed to escape these more subconscious trappings.

Or the front-door analog route, point a real camera at a screen showing fake images.

That said, lots of people are incompetent at forging, about knowing what "tells" each process of fakery has and how to overcome them, so I think this will still broadly work.

> We might be teetering on the edge of a dystopian techno-feudalism where a significant portion of the population languishes in slums because industry has no use for them, but that's why I said we need to adapt.

That's underestimating the impact this can have. An AI which reaches human performance and speed on 250 watt hardware, at current global average electricity prices, costs about the same to run as a human costs just to feed.

By coincidence, the global electricity supply is currently about 250 watts/capita.

As with most things, the primary issue is not really a technical one. People will believe fake photos and not believe real ones based on their own biases. So even if we had the Perfect Technology, it wouldn't necessarily matter.

And this is the reason we have fallen into a dystopian feudalistic society (we aren't teetering). The weak link is our incompetent collective human brains. And a handful of people built the tools necessary to exploit that incompetence; we aren't going back.

Still, I can't really see it happening.

Laws like this serve primarily to deter casual criminals and catch patently stupid criminals which are the vast majority of cases. In this case it took a presumable sexual predator off the streets, which is a great application of the law.

[1]: https://www3.nhk.or.jp/news/html/20250212/k10014719841000.ht...

[2]: https://www3-nhk-or-jp.translate.goog/news/html/20250212/k10...

Here I mean that at point of sale you register yourself as owner for the camera. And you make extracting a key cost about a million. Then bulk forgeries won't happen.

The point is not the usage is harmful or not, almost any tech can be used for bad purposes if you wish to do so.

You can put controls is the point , controls here could be agent Dameons monitoring the gpus and tallying usage to heat signals, or firmware etc . The controls on what is being trained would be at a higher level than just agents process on a gpu .

In a world full of sensors where everything is logged in some way or another I think that it would actually be not a straightforward activity at all to build a clandestine AI lab at any scale.

In the professional intel community they have been talking about this as a general problem for at least a decade now.

And maybe it will be like detecting nuclear enrichment. Instead of hacking the firmware in a Siemens device, it's done on server hardware. Israel demonstrated absurd competence at this caliber of spycraft.

Sometimes you take low-tech approaches to high tech problems. I.e., get an insider at a shipping facility to swap the labels on two pallets of GPUs, one is authentic originals from the factory and the other are hacked firmware variants of exactly the same models.

Which in turn leads to the cautious approach for which OpenAI is criticised: not revealing things because they don't know if it's dangerous or not.

> I think control at all is most likely a pipe dream, but one which serves as a justification for the exercise of power in ways which will please both authoritarians and favored industry actors, and even if it is possible it is simply a recipe for a durable global hegemony of actors that cannot be relied on to be benevolent.

Entirely possible, and a person I know who left OpenAI had a fear compatible with this description, though differing on many specifics.

There might be a few humans that don't agree with even those values, but I think it's safe to presume that the general-consensus values of humanity include the above points. And AI alignment is not even close to far enough along to provide even the slightest assurances about those points.

So for example if a family with 5 children is on vacation, do you maintain that it is impossible even in principle for the parents to take the preferences of all 5 children into account in approximately equal measure as to what activities or non-activities to pursue?

Also: are you pursuing a complete tangent or do you see your point as bearing on whether frontier AI research should be banned? (If so, I cannot tell whether you consider your point to support a ban or oppose a ban.)

So what is your solution? Give up and die? It's worth trying. If it buys us a few years that's a few more years to figure out alignment.

> The methods and materials are too diffuse and the biggest players (nation states) have a strong incentive to be first.

So there's a strong incentive to convince them "stop racing towards death".

> Do you really expect China to coordinate with the West on this?

Yes, there have been concrete examples of willingness towards doing so.

We've already found ourselves on a trajectory where un-employing millions or billions of people without any system to protect them afterwards is just accepted, and that's simply the first step of many in the destruction-of-empathy path that creating AI/AGI brings people down.

Seems like we're splitting hairs a bit here.

So the skills, knowledge, and expertise are in the UK. Google can close the UK office tomorrow if they wanted to sure, but are 100% of those staff going to move to California? Doubt it. Some will, but a lot have lives in the UK (not least the CEO and founder etc) so even if Google pulls the rug I will bet there will be a new company founded and funded within days that will vacuum up all the staff.

Maybe. I think it's a matter of culture.

Very few people mistreat their dogs and cats in wealthy countries. Why shouldn't people in power treat regular people at least as well as regular folks treat their pets?

I'm no history buff but my hunch is that mistreatment of people largely came from a fear that if I don't engage in cruelty to maximize power, my opponents will and given that they're cruel, they'll be cruel to me when they come to take over.

So we end up with this zero sum game of squeezing people, animals, resources and the planet in an arms race because everyone's afraid to lose.

In the past - you couldn't be sure if someone else was building up an army, so you had to build up an army. But now that we have satellites and we can largely track everything - we can actually agree to not engage in this zero sum dynamic.

There will be a shift from treating people as means to an end of power accumulation and containment, to treating people as something you just inherently like and would like to see prosper.

It'll be a shift away from this deeply corrosive idea of never ending competition and growth. When people's basic needs are met and no one is grouping up to take other people's goodies - why should regular people compete with one another?

They shouldn't and they won't. People who want to do good work will do so and improving the lives of people worldwide will be its own reward. Private islands, bunkers and yachts will become incomprehensible because there'll be no serf class to service any of it. We'll go back to if you want to be well liked and respected - you have to be a good person. I look forward to it :)

You can’t seriosly claim they are upending people’s jobs when those jobs were BS in the first place.

Because I can think of a large number of historical scenarios where malicious people get access to certain capabilities and it absolutely does not go well and you do have to somehow account for the fact that this is a real thing that is going to happen.

I mean stuff like

>We underline the need for a global reflection integrating inter alia questions of safety, sustainable development, innovation, respect of international laws including humanitarian law and human rights law and the protection of human rights, gender equality, linguistic diversity, protection of consumers and of intellectual property rights.

Is quite hard to even parse. Does that mean you'll get grief for you bot speaking English becuase it's not protecting linguistic diversity? I don't know

What does "Sustainable Artificial Intelligence" even mean? That you run it off solar rather than coal? Does it mean anything?

It isn't about what % of the population is affected or number of people. It is about PRINCIPLES. Yes it matters just as much to enshrine dishonesty in law if it is dishonesty abour 1 person or 1000 people or 1m people. It matters.

The EU is even more nuts with their plans that all big companies in the EU should have 50/50 men-women representation in the board of directors.

Believe what you want, but America did not reject Hillary or Kamala because they were women, they rejected them because of their incompetence. And speaking of this, after seeing Kamala talk, it is beyond me how she got to be VP - not one coherent sentence comes out of her mouth.

Most Senate Democrats have voted against their respective confirmations, by the way.

We are quite fine having women as leaders if they are actually competent and charismatic like it would be the case with men. Neither HRC nor Harris were that; the former was reviled and the latter couldn't even speak coherently. The Democrats can easily get a woman elected President if they would simply choose a good candidate with policies that resonate with the electorate.

Why the people in the background are not entitled to it: https://a.dropoverapp.com/cloud/download/605909ce-5858-4c13-...

Why US government personel is being replaced with loyalist if you are about equality and legal justice?

(+) terms and conditions apply; did not originally apply to nonwhite men or women. Hence allowing things like the mass internment of Americans of Japanese ethnicity.

Board members using tools like ChatGPT or Excel as part of their deliberations? That's great.

Replacing a board member entirely with a black box automation that makes meaningful decisions without human involvement? A catastrophically bad idea.

Let's suppose that, like you, both Moscow and Beijing do not want AGI to exist. What could they do about it? Why should they trust that the rest of the world will also pause their AI development?

This whole discussion is basically a variation on the prisoner's dilemma. Either you cooperate and AI risks are mitigated, or you do not cooperate and try to take the best outcome for yourself.

I think we can expect the latter. Not because it is the right thing or because it is the optimal decision for humanity, but because each individual will deem it their best choice, even after accounting for P(doom).

this is exactly the value that caused so much war and death all over the world, for decades and thousands of years. still, even in 2025, it's being followed. are we doomed, chat?

I do claim that it is obvious that widespread acquisition of nuclear weapons by smaller states would be a severe degradation of security. Among other things, widespread ownership, would also mean that militant groups would acquire it and dictators would use it as a protection leading to an eventual use of the weapons.

Yes, the danger of AI weapons is nowhere at that level of nuclear weapons yet.

But, that is the trend.

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/25/opinion/karp-palantir-art...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42938125

Regarding an increase in security with nukes, what you say applies for exceptions against a general non-nuclear background. Without restrictions, every small country could have a weapon, with a danger of escalation behind every conflict, authoritatrians using a nuclear option as a protection against a revolt etc. The likelihood of nuclear war would be much more(even with the current situation, there have been close shaves)

I'm Japanese-American, so I'm not exactly happy about Japan's state of irrelevance (yet again). Their one saving grace as a special(er) ally and friend is they can still enjoy some of the nectar with us if they get in lockstep like the UK does (family blood!) when push comes to shove.

People and countries who make and ship products.

You don't make rules by writing several hundred pages of legalese as a litigator, you make rules by creating products and defining the market.

Be creators, not litigators.

Is this not exactly what the EU are doing?

https://edition.cnn.com/2025/01/22/world/video/danish-offici...

https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-60870287

Frankly, I can't stand these guys viewing themselves as some sort of high-IQ intellectual majority types when none of such labeling would be true and they're more like stereotypical tourists to the world. Though that's historically how anarchist university undergraduates had always been.