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You can start making memes.
The Chinese will gladly trade the vanishing shot at dominance for some more overregulation and domestic oppression in the short term. Indeed, that's how they settled the issue of Choynese Eugenics, and this is what they're doing already with AI. That's how that nation rolls, that's their part in the dance, being a role model in all things illiberal for creepy globalist technocrats, and simultaneously a feeble, unappealing caricature that Americans won't feel too guilty erasing. Putin, too, could've been building GPU clusters Yud suggests must be bombed. Instead he preemptively bombed Mariupol. There is no «geopolitics», it's all a sham.
Not much more.
The rhetoric of schizos Leahy and Yud is on every outlet, from niche forums to highbrow magazines to popular podcasts to mainstream media to the White House and the omnipotent Chuck now. Yud must be imagining this is an anthropic shadow – since he's so smart and policymakers are stupid and cannot coordinate, it can't be that his premises are revealed as wrong now that they endorse his message, it can't be that he's a patsy, it must be some issue of broken multiversal causality! If a grown man thinks he's an anime character, one needn't deceive him any more on top of that.
Importantly they face no credible opposition – LeCun spews condescending inarticulate nonsense and doesn't call Yud out on his subtle technical misstatements; and the non-technical folks just accept the Terminator imagery because why not, it's intuitive! The Overton window is being so defined as to make their conclusion the obviously accepted one, devoid of serious opposition. Even alignment doomers like Christiano who don't live in the la-la land are sidelined.
Once more, a chance at escaping the predefined trajectory that was dangled before my eyes is being pulled away. Crypto – regulated, FUDed into the ground and drowned in speculative nonsense, many founders dead. Darknet and darkmarket – busted. Citizen science, biohacking – fizzled out, and good luck after COVID. AI could have been our shot at greater autonomy, it could've helped everyone, from the unhinged transhumanist to the paranoid traditionalist, divest from the failing body politics and global supply chains. But no, that's too rich.
The powers that be prefer preservation of the status quo more than they yearn for new capability; they've ruined several technologies with the precautionary principle already. And they'll have any capability they want if they ensure strong AIs do not leak outside the regulated state-mandated bounds.
My main bet now is the Wall Street, big tech, and their surprisingly moderate pocket regulators who throw minor bones to the politicians – but China hoped on that mercantile lobbyism, and look where this got us and them.
As usual, hope to be just overemphasizing the bad scenario.
Are darknet markets actually dead? Shame if that's the case, I'd have liked to dabble in them since I actually have money now.
Past their heyday, and never moved closer to legitimate marketplace or a no-holds-barred piratical Utopia. I'm not sure if you recall what was expected of them.
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No they're doing fine.
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The Chinese policy paper you mention:
Since when has China respected commercial ethics or intellectual property rights? This is the flimsiest fig-leaf since that US-China cybersecurity summit Barack Obama signed, which China immediately ignored and continued as usual, hacking as they please. It's a draft law in a country where laws aren't meaningfully obeyed and party priorities come first. AI is a significant priority.
Did Russia ever have the talent, state capacity and wealth to compete in AI? Maybe talent but there's been a lot of brain drain. Nuclear missiles are Russia's comparative advantage, not advanced technology. Putin could still put an end to US AI development, maybe he or someone else will finally grow a pair and shoot a hostile singleton while it's still in the womb.
What concrete goal has Yud and co achieved? They've raised awareness but what has that translated into? The six month pause they proposed has had no effect, Altman didn't sign it, nor did LeCun or anyone in any leading position. LeCun has 4x Yud's follower count on twitter, the nonsense he promulgates is easily more influential. Plus he has credentials and prestige and can smeer Yud for being a mildly successful fanfiction author. Who is the idiot boomer govt official going to find more credible? The Professor at NYU, Chief AI Scientist at Meta? Or a fellow who wrote a weird BDSM-MMT fantasy novel (that I made the dire mistake of reading)?
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