It was not copyrighted until 2016. Seeing as it’s from the 1800s, that would not be possible.

If we bully him enough, the genocide will stop.

Well, the probability you have for the AI apocalypse should ultimately be the product of those three numbers. I’m curious which of those is the one you think is so unlikely.

Please assign probabilities to the following (for the next 3 decades):

1. probability an AI smarter than any human on any intellectual task a human can do might come to exist (superintelligence);
2. given (1), probability it decides to kill all humans to achieve its goals (misaligned);
3. given (2), probability it is successful at killing all humans;

bonus: given 1 and 2, probability that we don’t even notice it wants to kill us, e.g. because we don’t know how to understand what it’s thinking.

Since the AI is smarter than me, I only need to propose one plausible method by which it could exterminate all humans. It can come up with a method at least as good as me, most likely something much better though. The typical answer here would be that it bio-engineers a lethal virus which is initially harmless (to avoid detection), but responds to some trigger like the introduction of a certain chemical or maybe a strong radio signal. If it’s very smart, and has a very good understanding of bioengineering, it should be able to produce a virus like this by paying a laboratory to e.g. perform some CRISPR operations on some existing bacteria strain (or even just mix some chemicals together if Sagan turns out to be right about bioengineering) and mail a sample somewhere. It can wait until everyone is infected before triggering the strain.

They said we weren’t prepared for a pandemic, either.

Shit we gotta fix this.

The reason it’s always just around the corner is because there is very strong evidence we’re approaching the singularity. Why do you sound sarcastic saying this? What probability would you assign to an AI apocalypse in the next three decades?

Geoff Hinton absolutely kicked things off. Everybody else had given up on neural nets for image recognition, but his breakthrough renewed interest throughout the world. We wouldn’t have deepdreaming slugdogs without him.

It should not be surprising that most people in the field of AI are not predicting armageddon, since it would be harmful to their careers to do so. Hinton is also not predicting the apocalypse – he’s saying 10-20% chance, which is actually a prediction that it won’t happen.

5490175897536472785479178950797495787834 [sic]

Okay but I use AI with great concern for truth, evidence, and verification. In fact, I think it has sharpened my ability to double-check things.

My philosophy: use AI in situations where a high error-rate is tolerable, or if it’s easier to validate an answer than to posit one.

There is a much better reason not to use AI – it weakens one’s ability to posit an answer to a query in the first place. It’s hard to think critically if you’re not thinking at all to begin with.

The difference between Biden and UH’s CEO is that Biden is retired, so him dying does not help stop the war in Gaza. Are you familiar with the concept of moral desert?

I don’t think like this person, because I simply hate Hitler too much, but I hope some day I can be as sensible as her:

But some effective altruist once wrote that, if she had the option to give Hitler a nice dream — immediately before he died of suicide so it couldn’t strengthen him to commit more atrocities, and secretly so no one would be incentivized to commit the Holocaust — she would. Because she thinks it is good, all things equal, for Hitler to be happy.

Seems on-brand for Springsteen. Don’t know much about him, but “born to run” is a parody of americana basically.

I’m guessing you don’t do 10 because you just don’t wear tank-tops in general. But why on earth a bra, especially if you’re ditching the panties? Don’t you find it uncomfortable to decompress wearing one? Do you just have unusually uncomfortable underpants?

Literally anything except 5 10 and 15. Extremely curious to hear from the 5/10/15 crowd.

In that case, you should know that Geoff Hinton (the guy whose lab kicked off the whole AI revolution last decade) quit Google in order to warn about the existential risk of AI. He believes there’s at least a 10% chance that it will kill us all within 30 years. Ilya Sutskever, his former student and co-founder of OpenAI, believes similarly, which is why he quit OpenAI and founded Safe Superintelligence (yes that basic html document really is their homepage) to help solve the alignment problem.

You can also find popular rationalist AI pundits like gwern, acx, yudkowsky, etc. voicing similar concerns, with a range of P(doom) from low to the laughably high.

I feel like this is robbed by the perfectly valid objections in the second panel not really being answered by “throw into the sun.”

It’d be nice to have “home improvement” cat and “incremental progres on a long-term project” cat

I think you’re talking about accelerationism. IMO, the main problem with unrestrained AI growth is that if AI turns out to be as good as the hype says it is, then we’ll all be dead before revolution occurs.

departs when full

I love this detail.

I’m very skeptical of arguments that there is voter suppression of minorities based on reasoning like:

an audit by the State of Washington found that a Black voter was 400% more likely than a white voter to have their mail-in ballot rejected.

since there could be another variable which, once controlled for, causes this difference to disappear. This article seems to be assume the reader has no understanding of statistics.

This is much more self-evidently indicative of voter suppression, in my opinion:

Brian Kemp, signed SB 202 which slashed the number of drop boxes by 75% only in Black-majority counties and locked them away at night.

But could this be explained by another variable, like higher crime rates in black-majority counties leading to a necessity for increased security? I don’t understand why this measure would cause a 90% decrease in drop-box balloting either. This article has a lot of red flags for me – it’s not actually explaining the reason for any of these measures, so it’s implying there is no reason for these measures except for voter suppression of minorities. Obviously that is not the rationale which those who implemented these measures would give publicly.

This is copium. It’s preferable to think there was a conspiracy to swing the election compared to the reality that more people voted for him than for sanity.

Borders change, governments fall, but people stay. When people say “death to <country>” they usually don’t mean its inhabitants in general.