esprit d'escalier

this whole "superbabies will save us from AI" presupposes that the superbabies are immune to the pull of LW ideas. Just as LW are discounting global warming, fascism etc to focus on runaway AI, who says superbabies won't have a similar problem? It's just one step up the metaphorical ladder:

LW: "ugh normies don't understand the x-risk of AI!"

Superbabies: "ugh our LW parents don't understand the x-risk of Evangelion being actually, like, real!"

Roko is of course begging the question, and the premise he is wrong about is that there is a sizable population willing to relocate to a floating iceberg, instead of living in an existing country.

Consider what the proposed citizens have to consent to:

• paying for the R&D required to implement the technical solutions Roko envisions, along with the continued higher maintenance costs
• paying higher wages for the people who are supposed to do all the boring menial jobs in this floating city, on par with existing cities
• paying higher daily cost of living for everything from food to building supplies to luxuries to entertainment that have to be imported
• being at the mercy of "legacy governments", many of whom possess navies capable of everything from interdicting the food supply, to literally undermining the city from below, to actual assaults and airstrikes
• paying higher prices for insurance of their lives and dwellings and possessions because of all the above

Amusingly the solution for a libertarian city is a megastructure project probably only a rich nation is prepared to pay for.

Back in the pre-Elon days I idly wished Twitter had something like RES to be able to tag idiots. Now ofc the blue check does a good job as a first-pass filter.

Oh I am aware of the term's history[1], but just like the humble swastika some stuff can become tainted (although I believe that Ultima Thule the band is only locally infamous here in Sweden). I do know that if someone presented themselves as Ultima Thule I'd do a spit-take, but so would I if I was presented by someone named Titan Invictus.

Arrokoth is a fucking metal name tho.

[1] pretty sure the first I heard of it was in one of Evan S Connell's great collection of essays.

Every contributor to the mag has an Urbit handle. Enough said.

I remember people convinced his big donations to Democrats would enable him to walk.

Edit I'm pretty sure those same people are gonna defend the judge's opinion that SBF is the worst defendant he's ever met with the fact he's autistic.

It's fascinating to see how the narrative (at least in tech circles) has gone in the last 6 months or so: from "I typed a prompt and got a college-level essay" to "no way this [rich][powerful][respected] VC could write anything so incoherent, he must have used an LLM"

Bring back röckdöts!

(Funniest example of that is the band Tröjan, which literally means "the sweater" in Swedish)

For a while there, when it looked as if only the rich were gonna be able to source R95 masks and everyone else was gonna die, the SV elite were all aboard with this being the new Black Death. As soon as it became apparent that the only way to deal with it was through massive government support they did a 180 and started talking about how it wasn't that bad after all.

These dudes wouldn't recognize culture if unsafed its Browning and shot them in the kneecaps.

Tradcaths gonna tradcath, but it's interesting he feels he can reach the EA audience with his views.

1. no
2. no, (follows from 1)
3. no, but space exploration by drones with semi-autonomous decision making might be feasible. The power levels for such tech will have to go way down though.
4. define "mass transition". I believe a lot of jobs that require humans now (like customer support) will be enthusiastically robotized, but not that that outcome will be postive for either the workers or consumers. I doubt it will be more that maybe 10% of the total workforce though.
5. like someone mentioned, we can see "artificial intelligences" (corporations) do bad things right now and we aren't stopping them. Considering everybody in AI research subconsciously subscribes to the California ideology, there's no way they have the introspection to truly design an "aligned" AI.