Matt Levine, qntm

I can see why these would appeal to LW crowd. One of them writes cosmic horror about monstrous alien phenomena that can't be directly perceived preying on humanity and all life in the universe, and qntm writes wordy science fiction.

No comment on Wildbow. I'm sure Worm is excellent but I'm just not in the market for three HPMoR wordcounts of capeshit, so I don't know what his deal is. Bummer for him to have one of his characters be the indirect namesake of a notorious murder cult.

I'm so used to bad rat science being expressed in obscurantist math and quantum physics jargon that the kindergarten neuro woo like "each half-a-brain has a 1 in 20 chance of being ontologically Good" and "nonbinary people have one half of their brain be transgender" throws me off.

Where are the Planck units and the h-bars, category theory, maybe something about Turing machines or Gödel? Can't you at least throw in a square root or something? Is this all it takes to stroke the a modern STEM dweeb's ego? I guess all the talk about "debugging" and "jailbreaking" compensates for the infantile aesthetics of the crankery.

new meta for cultivation novels: prison literature

Tired of people stereotyping metalheads as dumb smh

There's a difference in having a personality that gets easily bored of luxury and believing conflict is what inherently gives life a meaning. Maus puts it: "Suffering doesn't make people better, it just makes them suffer"

If someone's life is so damn easy and hedonistic they're actually getting bored of it, there are good ways and bad ways of introducing adversity and getting out of your comfort zone. The negation of being a slave to the hedonic treadmill[1] is not an eternal war for domination.

1: A strange figure of speech, who the hell thinks treadmills are hedonistic?

Ohh, I thought he meant one thing but actually he meant the same thing I thought he did and not the even worse thing I expected he might actually think instead.

I have a lot of trust in ChatGPT's ability to make things worse even if they're already bad.

So if you read Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality, and thought...

I did read HPOMR and I also thought!

"You know, HPMOR is pretty good

OK, I didn't exactly think that. But go on.

so far as it goes; but Harry is much too cautious and doesn't have nearly enough manic momentum,

Dunno about Harry, but the story as a whole could have done with some momentum, manic or otherwise.

his rationality lectures aren't long enough, and all of his personal relationships are way way way too healthy."

Nobody in their right mind would ever think any of this.

Oh fuck I should not have read further, there's a bit about the compiler mistaking color space stuff for racism that's about as insightful and funny as you can expect from Yud.

Well I certainly hope ethical concerns are holding back eugenics. Possibly even among the main things doing so.

Before 2030, do you consider it more likely than not that current AI techniques will scale to human level in at least 25% of the domains that humans can do, to average human level.

Domains that humans can do are not quantifiable. Many fields of human endeavor (e.g. many arts and sports) are specifically only worthwhile because of the limits of human minds and bodies. Weightlifting is a thing even though we have cranes and forklifts. People enjoy paintings and drawing even though we have cameras.

I do not find likely that 25% of currently existing occupations are going to be effectively automated in this decade and I don't think generative machine learning models like LLMs or stable diffusion are going to be the sole major driver of that automation.

Do you consider it likely, before 2040, those domains will include robotics

Humans are capable of designing a robot, procuring the components to build the robot, assembling it and using the robot to perform a task. I don't expect (or desire) a computer program to be able to do the same independently during any of our expected lifetime. It is entirely plausible that tools which apply ML techniques will be used more and more in robotics and other industries, but my money is on those tools being ultimately wielded by humans for the foreseeable future.

If AI systems can control robotics, do you believe a form of Singularity will happen. This means hard exponential growth of the number of robots, scaling past all industry on earth today by at least 1 order of magnitude, and off planet mining soon to follow. It does not necessarily mean anything else.

No. Even if Skynet had full control of a robot factory, heck, all the robot factories, and staffed them with a bunch of sleepless foodless always motivated droids, it would still face many of the constraints we do. Physical constraints (a conveyor belt can only go so fast without breaking), economic constraints (Where do the robot parts and the money to buy them come from? Expect robotics IC shortages when semiconductor fabs' backlogs are full of AI accelerators), even basic motivational constraints (who the hell programmed Skynet to be a ~~paperclip~~ C3PO maximizer?)

Do you think that mass transition where most human jobs we have now will become replaced by AI systems before 2040 will happen

No. A transition like that brought by mechanization and industrialization of agriculture, or the outsourcing of manufacturing industry accompanied by the shift to a service economy, seems plausible, but not by 2040 and it won't be driven by just machine learning alone.

Is AI system design an issue. I hate to say “alignment”, because I think that’s hopeless wankery by non software engineers, but given these will be robotic controlling advanced decision-making systems, will it require lots of methodical engineering by skilled engineers, with serious negative consequences when the work is sloppy?

Yes, system design is an important issue with all technology. We are already seeing real damage from "AI" technology getting to make important decisions: self-driving vehicle accidents, amplified marginalization of minorities due to feedback of bias into the models, unprecedented opportunities for spam and propaganda, bottlenecks of technology supply chains and much more.

Automation will absolutely continue to replace more and more different kinds of human labor. While this does and will drive unemployment to some extent, there is a more subtle issue with it as well. Productivity of human labor per capita has been soaring decade by decade, but median wages and work hours have stagnated. AI, like many other technologies before and after, is probably gonna end up creating more bullshit jobs, with some people coming into them from already bullshit jobs. If AI can replace half of human labor, that should then mean the average person has to work half as hard, but instead they will have to deliver double the results.

I just think the threat model of autonomous robot factories making superhuman android workers and replicas of itself at an exponential rate is pure science fiction.

Spoken like a true Lawful Good weenie.

As a Chaotic Neutral INTJ Gray Tribe Ravenclaw Scorpio the DnD alignment system works great for analyzing behavior in hunter-gatherer societies and therefore ours.