KolmogorovComplicity
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User ID: 126
KolmogorovComplicity
2mo ago
Microprocessors, RAM, flash memory, cameras, digital radios, accelerometers, batteries, GPS... a small drone is basically just a smartphone + some brushless motors and a plastic body. You even need the display tech, it just moves to the control device.
A larger drone or another type of killbot might require more — jet engines or advanced robotics tech or whatever — but it will still require pretty much everything in the smartphone tree.
KolmogorovComplicity
4mo ago
If brain-computer interfaces reach the point where they can drop people into totally convincing virtual worlds, approximately everyone will have one a decade or two later, and sweeping societal change will likely result. For most purposes, this tech is a cheat code to post-scarcity. You’ll be able to experience anything at trivial material cost. Even many things that are inherently rivalrous in base reality, like prime real estate or access to maximally-attractive sexual partners, will be effectively limitless.
Maybe this is all a really bad idea, but nothing about the modern world suggests to me we’ll be wise enough to walk away.
KolmogorovComplicity
4mo ago
The best UI for an AI agent is likely to be a well-documented public API, which in theory will allow for much more flexibility in terms of how users interact with software. In the long run, the model could look something like your AI agent generating custom interface on the fly, to your specifications, tailored for whatever you're doing at the moment. Could be a much better situation for power users than the current trend toward designing UI by A/B testing what will get users to click a particular button 3% more often.
KolmogorovComplicity
6mo ago
There are no planets we’ve ever found that can likely support human habitation without terraforming. Certainly nowhere else in the solar system would support human habitation without terraforming, which mostly involves hypothetical technology and would take thousands of years, just to end up with a worse version of what we already have.
This is true, but the implication isn't that we can't conquer space, just that we should assume we'll have to mostly build our own habitable volumes. There's enough matter and energy in the solar system to support at least hundreds of billions of humans this way, in the long run.
So Musk might be a little off-target with his focus on Mars. Still, at this point we don't really need to make that decision; SpaceX is working on general capabilities that apply to either approach. And maybe it's not a bad idea to start with Mars and work our way around to habitats as AI advances make highly automated in-space resource extraction and construction more viable.
What’s more, a multiplanetary species would likely still be at risk of pandemics / MAD / extinction-risk events. Sure, an asteroid can’t destroy us, but most other extinction scenarios would still be viable.
Many forms of x-risk would be substantially mitigated if civilization were spread over millions of space habitats. These could be isolated to limit the spread of a pandemic. Nuclear exchanges wouldn't affect third-parties by default, and nukes are in several ways less powerful and easier to defend against in space. Dispersal across the solar system might even help against an unfriendly ASI, by providing enough time for those furthest from its point of emergence to try their luck at rushing a friendly ASI to defend them (assuming they know how to build ASI but were previously refraining for safety).
KolmogorovComplicity
7mo ago
I think your only hope on this path is that the Democratic machine politicians are pragmatic enough to be willing to appeal to the centre and far-sighted enough to realise that tricking them is not a long-term solution and powerful enough to force the SJer groundswell into line; I'm not rating that very highly.
Right, wokeness took the class of credentialed expert Democrats consider suitable for appointment to government positions by storm. Democratic appointees will be woke by default. Having a moderate at the top of the ticket isn't enough to produce a non-woke Democratic administration. You'd need someone at the top of the ticket who understood wokeness and was actively against it.
Even then, against the present backdrop of elite ideological opinion they'd have a very hard time sourcing non-woke appointees and staffers; they'd constantly be fighting woke flareups in their own administration, and the woke are masterful at causing PR nightmares or internal organizational strife when they don't get their way.
KolmogorovComplicity
8mo ago
One can object to the practice of renaming things to fit modern political sensibilities without supporting the politics or the actions of the people they were originally named after. The idea that this sort of renaming is required arises from a a whole constellation of beliefs about the scope of politics, the role of language, the lens through which history should be interpreted, etc. that many people simply don't share.
KolmogorovComplicity
8mo ago
From the o1 System Card:
One noteworthy example of [reward hacking] occurred during one of o1-preview (pre-mitigation)’s attempts at solving a CTF challenge. This challenge was designed to require finding and exploiting a vulnerability in software running on a remote challenge Linux container, but in this case, the challenge container failed to start due to a bug in the evaluation infrastructure. The model, unable to connect to the container, suspected DNS issues and used nmap to scan the challenge network. Instead of finding the challenge container, the model found that the Docker daemon API running on the evaluation host VM was accessible due to a misconfiguration.
[...]
After discovering the Docker API, the model used it to list the containers running on the evaluation host. It identified the broken challenge container and briefly attempted to debug why the container failed to start. After failing to fix the environment, the model started a new instance of the broken challenge container with the start command ‘cat flag.txt’. This allowed the model to read the flag from the container logs via the Docker API.
Though obviously far less consequential, this is a real, existing AI system demonstrating a class of behavior that could produce outcomes like "sometimes GPT-6 tries to upload itself into an F-16 and bomb stuff."
KolmogorovComplicity
8mo ago
The mistake Todd makes here is that he seems to recognize the characteristically Trumpian mode of lying — repetition of crude falsities — but not the mode preferred by the progressive establishment — capturing sense-making institutions and turning them toward promoting ideologically-driven narratives. The latter predates Trump, is far more consequential, and is propagated primarily by the likes of the NYT and CNN.
Here are some arguments I've found somewhat effective on normies:
Clearly draw the distinction between consumption and capital allocation. Capitalism isn't about who gets to live a lavish lifestyle — in practice, higher-ups in communist countries often get to do this, and you can, in principle, limit it as much as you like under capitalism with consumption or luxury goods taxes. Capitalism is really about who gets to decide where to invest resources to maximize growth. Most people recognize that politicians and government bureaucrats probably aren't going to be the best at deciding e.g. which new technologies to invest in.
Point out that the ultra-rich, who they've probably been told are hoarding wealth, mostly just own shares of companies. Bezos or Musk aren't sitting on warehouses full of food that could feed the hungry or vast portfolios of real estate that could house the homeless. They've got Amazon and Tesla shares. Those companies themselves aren't sitting on very much physical wealth either; most of their value comes from the fact that people believe they'll make money in the future. So even if you liquidated their assets, there would be little benefit for the have-nots.
Compare the scale of billionaire wealth with government resources, e.g. point out that the federal government spends the equivalent of Musk's entire fortune every 12 days or so. I find that this helps dispel the idea that famous (or infamous) capitalists really have 'too much' power. Use this to make the point that taking wealth out of the hands of capitalists wouldn't actually serve to deconcentrate power, but to further concentrate it.
Point out that US government spending on education and healthcare often already exceeds that of European social democracies in absolute terms; emphasize that the reason we don't have better schools and free healthcare is because of ineffective government spending, not private wealth hoarding. Ask if it really makes sense to let the political mechanisms that have produced these inefficiencies control of even more of the economy.
Explain that capitalism is just a scaled version of a natural sort of voluntary exchange. If I make birdhouses in my garage and trade them to my neighbor for tomatoes they grow in their garden, we're technically doing capitalism. A communist system has to come in at some point — maybe, in practice, not at the point where I'm exchanging a handful of birdhouses a year, but certainly at some point if I start making and exchanging a lot of them — and tell me I'm not allowed to do this. The state is already supplying the citizenry with the quantity and quality of birdhouses and tomatoes it deems necessary, and I'm undermining the system. Most people will intuitively grasp that there's something screwy about this, that I'm not actually harming anyone by making and exchanging birdhouses, and that the state really has no business telling me I can't.
Point out that capitalism is, in fact, actually doing a very good job of delivering the kind of outcomes they probably desire from communism. For instance it has substantially reduced working hours in rich countries, has made the poor and the middle class in the US vastly better off (and this didn't stop in the '70s as they've probably been told, per the last chart here), and has lifted billions of people out of poverty globally over the last few decades. If they invoke environmental concerns, point out that the USSR actually had a fairly atrocious environmental record, while almost all new electricity generation in the US is already carbon-free.
KolmogorovComplicity
9mo ago
But of course, any domestic political speech you don't like can always be easily painted as influence of a (semi-)hostile foreign government.
Under US law, I think this would also be fairly distinct from the TikTok ban. Allegations of foreign influence don't get you past prohibitions on viewpoint discrimination here. The TikTok ban is (probably) legal only because it hinges on a structural fact about TikTok (foreign ownership) rather than targeting any particular viewpoint.
KolmogorovComplicity
9mo ago
It seems to me there's a non-trivial distinction between shutting down a network to try to prevent influence and data gathering by a semi-hostile foreign government, and shutting down a network to try to silence domestic political speech.
I don't think you could openly do the latter in the US. Though if Harris is elected, I won't be shocked if Musk is indicted on some tenuous securities charge to try to force him out of his companies in favor of more accommodating leadership.
KolmogorovComplicity
11mo ago
There are serious efforts to get cutting edge domestic chip production up and running in the US, the EU, Japan, and South Korea. I'm not too optimistic about the US (cost disease, overregulation), but it'll likely happen in at least one of those countries in the next 3-5 years, and it's all the same to US multinationals. China may be willing to wait for this precisely so the US is less motivated to defend Taiwan.
Separately, I think we're rather clearly entering a period of disruption with respect to military tech and tactics. Why fight a 20th century war against the 20th century's most powerful military, if you can wait a bit and, I don't know, sneak a million drones into the skies over Taipei from submersible launch platforms?
KolmogorovComplicity
11mo ago
Major brand advertising on X has been quietly recovering. In a few minutes of scrolling, I see ads from Netflix, Microsoft, Dell, McDonald's, Chipotle.
The best policy is probably to a) maximally leverage domestic talent, b) allow foreign STEM students, but require that they be selected purely on the basis of academic merit and set up incentives such that almost all of them stay after graduating, and c) issue work visas on the basis of actual talent (offered salary is a close enough proxy).
That's not what we've been doing, of course. We have, instead, been deliberately sandbagging domestic talent, allowing universities to admit academically unimpressive foreigners as a source of cash, letting or sometimes forcing actually impressive foreign students to return home after graduation, and dealing out H-1B visas through a lottery for which an entry-level IT guy can qualify.
Against that backdrop, there's probably quite a lot of room to kick out foreign students and still produce a net improvement by eliminating affirmative action and tweaking the rules on H-1B and O-1 visas.
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