VoxelVexillologist
🇺🇸 Multidimensional Radical Centrist
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User ID: 64
Those sorts of targeting concerns are [ETA not] strictly new: there are plenty of WWII accounts of poorly-designed torpedos swimming in circles back toward their launchers. But they are valid concerns, and there are better IFF techniques (not AI) available for that sort of thing.
VoxelVexillologist
🇺🇸 Multidimensional Radical Centrist
6d ago
Can the fruit fly grok, say, the axiom of choice? It's both a simple and a very abstract concept. I'm not sure, but it's an interesting question.
I'm sure at least someone has considered more difficult target discrimination problems, which seem to edge closer to the "poetry" use case. "Is this language Russian or Ukrainian", or discerning between common Eastern Bloc hardware used on both sides seems relevant and difficult, especially with active countermeasures on silhouettes and shapes going on. That meme with three fingers seems relevant.
VoxelVexillologist
🇺🇸 Multidimensional Radical Centrist
6d ago
The usual arguments for the platform-ization of the Internet focus on social network effects and corporate centralization. Your argument has me wondering if there's another element of security that's been ignored. The big platforms can afford security professionals; my basic personal site is more likely to be running an unpatched (who has time for prompt patching) WordPress with an expired SSL cert. Let's Encrypt is finally a free option, but is going to start issuing 45-day certs by 2028.
Beyond that, the desire for a public web presence seems to have wanted over time. I don't want to be internet-famous. IMO the "I don't post anymore" problem is evidence that whatever effort the platforms put into "trust and safety" doesn't seem to have delivered either. But I do miss those naive times some days.
Also one of the things the Yuddites seem incapable of doing is figuring out that superintelligence does not mean omnipotence.
I find myself frustrated at a lack of what I expect would be cool theoretical results on bounds for intelligence. It seems clear that tiny microcontrollers are never running meaningful models, but I'd have expected some "this much hardware/weight count for this much intelligence" bound. But I suppose we still don't have a raw measurement (maybe even definition) of intelligence.
My intuition is that my (not-web-enabled) toaster is never going to achieve much useful thinking, and that actual intelligence has diminishing returns with scale in ways that make "super intelligence" useful, but not unboundedly powerful. But I don't have a strong argument for that.
Pithily: Modern AI has a Claude, but lacks a Claude Shannon.
The mood is already turning against AI even while the labor market is strong, it’s hard to believe that won’t get much worse as large scale layoffs start to bite.
I don't think "large scale layoffs" is necessarily the only future here. I'll certainly admit it's possible, but historically automation hasn't always gone that way. A century ago, we had lots of accountants, and most of their time was spent manually balancing arithmetic, maybe with a mechanical adding machine. Along came the personal computer (earlier for large businesses with mainframes), and most of that work can be automated pretty trivially. Yet there are more accountants today than there were a century ago. What changed is that they're not doing arithmetic, and the complexity of what they do has grown substantially. For all the complaints about the growth of the tax code (and frequent related stunts by politicians), we are able to handle that complexity because we can offload the line-by-line balancing to software. Some of that complexity is probably wasteful, but some of it is also better auditing and accountability, or targeted governmental incentives — some, again, is probably wasteful, but some seems reasonable.
I don't have quite as coherent an argument (still a work in progress), but it's also the case that "recession caused by mass AI-driven unemployment" is actually a self-own by corporate AI overlords in limiting their upside. If you replaced half of human workers tomorrow at a cost savings, any not-truly-essential business is going to lose customers who can't afford their wares: tech companies fit pretty high on Maslow's pyramid, and most of the base ones are long-commodified — at one point, most of us were farmers, then along came the tractor. Nobody in the West is starving because they can't get a farmhand job. The cratering of farm employment is, in fact, why I get to work an office job, rather than out in the fields somewhere, and I'm not sure I'm worse-off for it.
But that latter part is, again, a half-formed argument.
Due to the sorts of inequalities that people complain about regularly, banks have a lot more resources at their disposal than hackers typically do. Plausibly, they can afford Fable and Astra tokens to pentest and harden their own networks ahead of script kiddies having the means to buy them. I wouldn't expect that to last forever, but if they put effort into it they might not lose. Nation-state actors are different, but even then Western nations can afford better models generally.
Not a strong hypothesis, but pithily "the only thing that can stop a black hat with an LLM is a white hat with a better LLM."
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