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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: October 6th, 2023

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  • We need these abstractions though, we love them, and we should! The problem isn’t abstraction itself, we couldn’t survive without that. The problem is in how we build these abstractions, the problem is that we create unsustainable and irresponsible abstractions and then present them as legitimate options.

    But we can’t throw out abstraction entirely. It’s like, if a person dies in a car crash, we should ask some questions, but you don’t ask “should we really have cars?”, instead you ask “should that person be driving a car? And is that car safe to drive?”


  • I know a couple of people who had jobs working with a defense contractor. One of them justified it by saying he doesn’t actually work on missile projects, his department does as air traffic control systems (and sure, there’s nothing objectionable about that). But they both knew what their company did and it certainly did make it an uncomfortable place to work. You can tell yourself that these weapons only get used on bad guys, but I think the more you have to tell that story, the harder it is to hear yourself.

    They’ve both moved on at this point.












  • I can answer that. We won’t.

    We’ll keep iterating and redesigning until we have actual working general intelligence AI. Once we’ve created a general intelligence it will be a matter of months or years before it’s a super intelligence that far outshines human capabilities. Then you have a whole new set of dilemmas. We’ll struggle with those ethical and social dilemmas for some amount of time until the situation flips and the real ethical dilemmas will be shouldered by the AIs: how long do we keep these humans around? Do we let them continue to go to war with each other? do they own this planet? Etc.