domain:alexberenson.substack.com
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
11hr ago
Stopped reading after getting through this insanely elitist and eugenic passage. I'll restrict my comments before I run afoul of the mods.
What. Or at least what a way to miss the point. The core conceit is that humans face a severe risk of being made economically obsolete, and how to grapple with that fact in a productive manner. Is it "elitist" or "eugenics" to posit that an ASI might put us out of a job? Sticking your head in the sand doesn't make the problem go away, it only gives you aspiration pneumonia.
People are far more than their cognitive and physical abilities.
Sure. I'm on record for advocating for UBI, I think humans should have their needs catered to even in a posthuman future. Unfortunately, stating "people are far more than their cognitive and physical abilities" is not a useful take nor is it a solution.
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
11hr ago
Do you really not see the concern? Do you want to be a permanent heroin wirehead?
I'll address this first, since it's a general interest question rather than a screed about my pet worldbuilding project.
I'm not sure why you're asking me this question! I've made it clear that I have negative interest in being a heroine wirehead. I will actively fight someone trying to put me into that state without my consent.
My actual plan (modulo not dying, and having resources at my disposal) is closer to continously upgrading my physical and cognitive capabilities so I can be independent. I don't want to have to rely on AGI to make my decisions or rely on charity/UBI.
This may or may not be possible, or it may turn to require compromises. Maybe human minds cannot remain recognizably human or retain human values when scaled far enough to compete. At that point, I will have to reconcile myself to the fact that all I can do is make effective use of my leisure time.
I could write better novels, make music, play video games, arguing on the Motte 2.0, or diving into deep immersion VR. Or whatever entertainment a singularity society provides. What I would like to make clear is that none of this is productive, in the strict sense. I would be doing this things because I want to, not because I have to, in the manner I exchange my current cognitive and physical labor for goods and services.
In other words, everything will be a hobby, not a job. At least for baseliners.
At that point, I have no interest in dictating the way other people spend their time. I want to do cool things, some might want super-heroin. Good for them. I refuse to join them.
At the same time, I see attempts to create "meaningful" work for baseline humans as entirely pointless, and hopeless, and definitely counterproductive. Imposing that, instead of making it an option? Even worse.
MBIC, in your own story you had to posit SAMSARA resulting in successful total legal abolition of too-advanced AI, aliens waging an extra-dimensional Butlerian Jihad, and widespread, spontaneous superpowers, including non-causal precognition just to carve a place for a human protagonist to matter in a setting where AI was a fully valid tech tree.
You've got it the other way around, the main driving impetus behind all of those ass-pulls scenario defining characteristics/plot contrivances is less that I wanted humans to matter, and more that I know that it is very difficult to write protagonists or characters who are more intelligent than me, the writer. Also, I really wanted to write a hard scifi superhero novel.
Yudkowsky discusses the difficulties at length, he's got a bunch of essays on the topic:
https://yudkowsky.tumblr.com/writing/level3intelligent
I don't believe I can write detailed superintelligent characters. [1] What a mere human can do is posit certain constraints and then discuss outcomes. Also, fiction, or at least fiction that most people want to read (or I want to write) usually relies on relatively relatable and understandable primary protagonists and stakes. My writing operates under those constraints, if I was writing with perfect rigor, it would be closer to AI 2027.
(Also,in the story, it's a known fact that the universe is a simulation, of many, running inside a hypercomputer, by which I mean a system capable of hypercomputation and not just a really big supercomputer.)
It's not really meant to be a rigorous commentary on plausible futures, though it grapple with the meaning of agency and human relevance in a world of superintelligence. I do not expect that the reasons for humans/a human to be relevant within the fictional narrative hold in reality. Maybe we'll actually nuke hyperscale datacenter if we suspect hard takeoff, that's about as far as it goes. Reality does not involve superpowers.
It is not impossible to write a much more rigorous analysis. Look at Orion's Arm, or Accelerando. However, in the latter, the humans end up entirely passive protagonists. I didn't want to write a novel about some human refugee watching the construction of a Dyson swarm by hyperintelligent mind-uploaded shrimp. Hence my novel and its choices.
[1] For example, we have strong reasons to believe that a Von Neumann self-replicator is both physically possible and we have an existence proof in the form of human civilization on Earth. I think it's fair to postulate that an AGI/ASI could make swarms of them and begin converting the galaxy, without me being able to also write an engineering white paper on the details of the machine.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
11hr ago
Reversed stupidity is still not intelligence.
Sure it is. The stupidity of the tribes doesn't overlal much, so if you can get them to counter each other, everyone ends up better off.
Gaashk
11hr ago
Even though the QR code reader built into my phone camera works fine as far as I can tell, the phone in general is old, slow, and doesn't handle apps or webpages with ads well, so I pretend like it doesn't work. A few weeks ago I had to pull a Karen at a bar to get the bartender to give or tell me what the drinks were, since I was absolutely not going to scan their QR code on my phone, and sit there reading 30 drinks off my old, slow, sad phone/wallet. He produced a tablet for me. I was saddened but bought a foofy drink anyway.
A week ago, I tried calling AAA to have my car towed. Previously, it was 7 miles free. Now it's apparently 3 miles free, and after that you're supposed to pay the rest in cash (it was going to be $80 or so), or read a stranger your credit card over the phone. I didn't believe that could possibly be the protocol. I said that I couldn't possibly pay that way, that's not how anyone pays for official services, and demanded that he offload the car on the side of the road. He said he should probably return it to my house then. I said he could return it to the three mile mark. He said I would have to pay for the return trip. We finally settled on him dumping my car on the side of the road, and me reading my credit card number to a stranger over the phone, to be charged $30 for the misunderstanding. My husband brought all the kids, gave it a jump, and it made it to the mechanic. I guess I should have tried that first, but was worried it was the kind of thing that would get worse if I tried continuing to drive it while malfunctioning.
I attempted to cancel AAA, but apparently all I can do is remove the auto subscribe, and write myself a note to check whether they try to take money anyway some months from now (which Amazon Kids has done, and unsubscribing involved multiple text chats and phone calls). Not dealing with weird shady towing practices was literally why I've been paying for AAA all this time! That is literally their value proposition!
guy
11hr ago
The other is that to make a superior product; that is, a university that produces higher quality education than Harvard does today, is essentially illegal.
Can you elaborate? I see the structural analogy, but how is it implemented in this case?
Yeah.
To add to the shock, OpenAI just put out Sora 2, which is also gobsmacking me with how good it is.
https://sora.chatgpt.com/p/s_68dc49d67ce0819194ea5d9f24bdb28e
This video is completely 'convincing' to me, between the reflections, the dog, and the traffic in the background and road noises. I can still reason out that it's AI, but my natural intuition is not picking it up automatically anymore.
It is also pretty damn good at quality-looking animation and voice-acting. albeit in very short bursts.
Basically, as these tools improve, the amount of actual creative skill and free time needed to create 'passably decent' media drops by like 50% every 6 months.
Someone's going to figure out how to hook Suno, Veo and/or Sora, together with a 'director' LLM and make full on music videos or contiguous scenes with soundtracks and everything.
faceh
12hr ago
My model of what is possible is pretty vast and expansive.
My model of what humans individually are capable of is far more limited.
The muddly part is all about coordination. Game theory, information theory, and public choice theory (and other branches of economics) all help give us an idea of how humans in groups might interact for better and for worse, and how power gets pushed in directions that aren't ideal for human development.
If humans can get aligned together and communicate well enough to share an (accurate) world model and use that to advance a particular goal, we get amazing things. The Apollo Program. The Manhattan Project. The Large Hadron Collider.
But somehow, despite our tools improving, the ability of humans to do large scale coordination seems to be eroding? This makes it way harder to predict future developments, but it does not bode well.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
12hr ago
Yeah, after Murphy bumped up my power bill about 40% this year, there's no way I'm accepting anything the Democrats have to say on that. Maybe Ciattarelli will actually be worse, but I'm willing to try rotational kakistocracy.
OliveTapenade
12hr ago
Sure, the ideal amount of force or destruction is context-dependent. I think of Chinese history as one context, for instance: you can argue that the correct amount of force to use against steppe raiders is to wipe them all out to the last man, woman, and child, as with the Dzungars, but that this is a very inefficient way to handle a rival Chinese state (which is why e.g. Sun Tzu recommends leaving them lines of retreat). On the other hand, wiping out steppe peoples to the last is extremely expensive and only buys you a couple of generations before a new group of nomads moves into the void and then you have to do it again, so a preferable solution might to be strongly disincentivise raids with punitive strikes and alliances with some tribes as proxies (who can do your dirty work for you by punishing tribes who don't play by your rules); but of course those alliances can also end going quite badly and turn into the tribes just extorting tribute from you.
It's always a pretty delicate balance, I think. I don't claim that maximum force is never the merited response - just that it's a very expensive one that is not always to be desired.
Iconochasm
2. Bootstrap the rest of the fucking omnipotence.
12hr ago
I was thinking about making a post on those ads. That's the only thing I'm seeing Sherril hit him on, that quote about raising taxes and energy prices, and that just seems as bizarre to me as the Fetterman-Oz Mirrorverse campaign. Especially when he has the much juicier quote from her about how your energy prices are going to go way up, but if you're a good person you'll pay it.
RedRegard
12hr ago
I disagree, I think you’ve got the relationship backwards. People who are already addicted to media demand the meaningless bulk content. They reel at more substantial works. Substantial works would require them to invest themselves in a more enriching way in what they consume. Offering them infinite high quality works wouldn’t get them to actually partake in said works, and this is shown by the fact that currently most people give little attention to those that are already on offer. For them to partake in quality works would presuppose them not being addicted to consumer slop.
Iconochasm
2. Bootstrap the rest of the fucking omnipotence.
12hr ago
That is an engineering problem. That is an artifact of current baseline human cognition and psychology. What sacrifices do you actually have the right to demand people to make, when there is no actual need for such sacrifices?
MBIC, in your own story you had to posit SAMSARA resulting in successful total legal abolition of too-advanced AI, aliens waging an extra-dimensional Butlerian Jihad, and widespread, spontaneous superpowers, including non-causal precognition just to carve a place for a human protagonist to matter in a setting where AI was a fully valid tech tree.
Do you really not see the concern? Do you want to be a permanent heroin wirehead?
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
12hr ago
That and the Democrats turn against Israel, and the Democratic candidate's little cheating scandal likely doesn't help. Right now I'm getting constant ads about how the Republican candidate will raise taxes... which is probably true, but what am I going to do to stop it, vote for the Democrat? LOL.
RedRegard
12hr ago
Don’t rich people already have essentially infinite income? They do spend a lot of time frolicking on yachts and treating themselves to various extravagant delights, but for all that, their lives seem fuller than those forced to accept drudgery.
dr_analog
top 1% of underdog fetishists
12hr ago
TRON bike lighting update.
Got a black helmet for myself and for one of my kids and did the final fit of the LED strips before the last push to get them all soldered together. Done, though after hot gluing and heat shrinking it all down, two of the ... 20 connections short out if they flex a bit, so I need to cut them open and redo. It's actually the second connection I did and also the third to last. It makes sense I would screw up near the start before I got the hang of it but near the end doesn't.
Anyway once those are fixed and showing enough durability it'll be time to VHB tape them to helmets.
I was all set to try some demo runs with ESP32-C3s I had on hand but then I noticed a variant which comes with a postage sized OLED screen so I obviously need that so it blinks ach kid's name and maybe a cute bitmap design.
Iconochasm
2. Bootstrap the rest of the fucking omnipotence.
12hr ago
nd it wasn't unions demanding vast floods of foreign labour and immigrants
Actual question, I genuinely have no idea: how much of the demand for foreign labor in Europe is driven by how hard it is to hire/fire natives, and how many benefits they get?
If I have the choice between a French guy who expects 6 weeks of vacation, 30 hour weeks plus lunch, brunch and coffee breaks, and who is basically impossible to fire if he's a problem on the one hand, or a Syrian indentured serf on the other...
Iconochasm
2. Bootstrap the rest of the fucking omnipotence.
12hr ago
Don't have a strong opinion on the Greer worry, but PT seems like it would have direct downstream consequences as a reminder of the primacy of physical reality. There's no way to tailor a slide deck to make running while fat suck less. Forcing all of the brass to touch grass is more than just superficial hazing - even without scaring off all the DEI hires.
magic9mushroom
If you're going to downvote me, and nobody's already voiced your objection, please reply and tell me
12hr ago
A judge is on trial for concealing an illegal immigrant, and the state governor opposes it.
He said that the judge was innocent until found guilty and that he respects law enforcement's efforts to hold criminals accountable. He just also took potshots at Trump over unrelated matters.
The new Texas candidate for AG is on news today talking about how ICE invited this attack.
That's not true - not in that video, at least (I have no idea what else he said that day). Let me quote:
And I wanna emphasise too, that nothing, nothing justifies this homicidal attitude towards ICE; nothing justifies pulling a trigger. But I, I do think that we have a problem when we take our law enforcement, and dehumanise them, and turn them into, um, instruments of fear, because law enforcement must have a positive relationship with the community in order to be effective. And when, when we have ICE being directed to behave as they are, I think we undermine public safety.
He was saying that ICE would be less effective by turning up the fear, because it would make people less likely to inform and co-operate with ICE. Factually accurate? Maybe not. Distasteful to divert onto his talking point at this time? Absolutely. But no, he didn't talk "about how ICE invited this attack".
Gaashk
12hr ago
I say the Jesus Prayer a moderate amount.
I'm also into Jungian psychology, but not super seriously. LLMs are good at that kind of thing, because it mostly matters whether something resonates and is meaningful, like dreams or fairy tales, which people will notice for themselves.
ThomasdelVasto
Κύριε, ποίησόν με ὄργανον τῆς ἀγάπης σου
12hr ago
Sure, here you go. https://www.royalroad.com/fiction/133044/seed-of-the-radiant-grove
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
12hr ago
I'm not talking about operating margin, I'm talking about inference margin, where the server rental is the cost of production.
The operating loss is due to research. Research is the basis of all modern technology and companies should be doing more of it. It's inappropriate to compare it to casino spending like in your above comment.
IGI-111
God was a dream of good government.
13hr ago
I feel I need to point out here that despite being a Traditionalist I am not, in fact, a Christian. So my conception of purpose is certainly not going to neatly map to any conception of Heaven, especially as I regard the nature of Heaven, much like that of God, to not be entirely fathomable.
I don't see the need to call on God to attack the perfectibility of man's material conditions however, and need only to point at the very material consequences of large scale Hegelian attempts.
Why is it evil to immanentize the eschaton?
In process it is evil, because it liberates one from morality and requires of imperfect man to shoulder the moral burdens of God, having killed him. One only need to look at the XXth century to see how bad man is at being his own final moral authority. Mass deaths and the most gruesome and abject of conditions awaits.
In end it is evil, because paradoxically it seeks to reduce man to a passive nihilism that only seeks comfort and security, unable to self actualize any sort of ethos, and by way of consequence can only bring about quiet suicidal resignation. Who would have children or any sort of investment in the future in a society that perfectly caters to all their material needs? Without struggle, what need have we of motivation itself?
Mass anomie is not desirable, nor is it, I hope, achievable.
gattsuru
13hr ago
The trick's that the same chips used to produce a model are also usable to run the model for someone else, and a lot of the technologies used to improve training has downstream benefits on inference or implementation improvements. Every AI vendor has its own complement to turn into a commodity.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
13hr ago
Tanner Greer is extremely blackpilled on this:
One theme that Xi Jinping repeats eternal is that his cadres must have “calamity consciousness” — real awareness that if they get things wrong they will be responsible for historical disaster. The country is only ever a few steps away from catastrophe.
If you believe that the single largest priority of the US Navy is physical fitness and hazing then you just don’t have that consciousness.
This reform program is decadent. it is superficial. It has no respect for the depth of the Navy’s problems or the catastrophe they might result in.
We are in a very bad place. Culturally, even, the Navy is in a bad place. Had they done something crazy but real on that stage—like promote half a dozen men from the submarine service in a desperate bid to fix the Navy’s operational culture—I would not be writing this.
But Hesgeth did not do anything of the sort. Even on the terrain that he chose—service culture and readiness—what he had to say fell woefully short of the problems we now face.
We are running out of time.
I am being hard on these guys, yes.
I am on hard on them because we are running out of time. We do not have the time to squander attention or resources.
There is need for a calamity consciousness.
Greer is a major China hawk, though. And Hegseth isn't.
I believe this is part of the broader strategic posture adjustment, or at least a hedging bet (not clear if it'll be maintained). The US defense/war department, in Hegseth's vision (I don't think he's intelligent enough to have a coherent strategic vision like, say, Elbridge A. Colby, but there probably are people behind him making this functionally true), is going to implement Monroe Doctrine 2.0, focus on the Western hemisphere. Tough, masculine, no-nonsense, scary bunch, unencumbered by rules of engagement, to more easily topple regimes in South America and pressure neighbors into resource and trade concessions. Death squads eliminating suspected narcos, National Guard prepared to pacify Portland. More like Russian Airborne Forces that exist to terrorize the domestic audience. This is all, of course, noise in the context of conflicts with peer powers, which realistically mean just China and require far more logistical and industrial competence than warrior ethos or indeed individual warriors (only so many guys you can fit on an aircraft carrier). But on that level, the US will rely on strategic deterrence and the hope of transformative results from AGI.
As I recall it, it wasn't food allergies, more that it was requirements related to provisions for mounting facilities on the ceiling for the lights for the light show and for the electrical connections for the lights and the bigass sound system, in both cases with really serious safety implications -- improperly secured hundred-pound lights can fall down from the ceiling and hit the band or the audience, and the electrical connections can be pulling hundreds of amps. The brown m&ms clause was just put in the contract so that if they saw the venue hadn't got that right they'd know the venue hadn't been paying close attention and start raising a fuss/inspecting everything more closely....
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