[-] imadabouzu@awful.systems 9 points 2 months ago

Imagine, a corporation finding their own voice, as a proper signal of their awareness of their customers. Nope, gotta sell your soul to tech stocks.

[-] imadabouzu@awful.systems 11 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

This kind of thing is a fluff piece, meant to be suggestive but ultimately saying nothing at all. There are many reasons to hate Bostrom, just read his words, but this is two philosophers who apparently need attention because they have nothing useful to say. All of Bostrom's points here could be summed up as "don't piss on things, generally speaking."

As for consciousness. Honestly, my brain turns off instantly when someone tries to make any point about consciousness. Seriously though, does anyone actually use the category of "conscious / unconscious" to make any decision?

I don't disrespect the dead (not conscious). I don't bother animals or insects when I have no business with them (conscious maybe not conscious?). I don't treat my furniture or clothes like shit, and am generally pleased they exist. (not conscious). When encountering something new or unusual, I just ask myself, "is it going to bite me?" first. (consciousness is irrelevant) I know some of my actions do harm either directly or indirectly to other things, such as eating, or consuming, or making mistakes, or being. But I don't assume myself a hero or arbiter of moral integrity, I merely acknowledge and do what I can. Again, consciousness kind of irrelevant.

Does anyone run consciousness litmus tests on their friends or associates first before interacting, ever? If so, does it sting?

[-] imadabouzu@awful.systems 9 points 3 months ago

Oh man, anyone who runs on such existential maximalism has such infinite power to state things as if their conclusion has only one possible meaning.

How about invoking Monkey Paw -- what if every statement is true but just not in the way they think.

  1. A perfect memory which is infinitely copyable and scaleable is possible. And it's called, all the things in nature in sum.
  2. In fact, we're already there today, because it is, quite literally the sum of nature. The question for tomorrow is, "so like, what else is possible?"
  3. And it might not even have to try or do anything at all, especially if we don't bother to save ourselves from ecological disaster.
  4. What we don't know can literally be anything. That's why it's important not to project fantasy, but to conserve of the fragile beauty of what you have, regardless of whether things will "one day fall apart". Death and Taxes mate.

And yud can both one day technically right and whose interpretations today are dumb and worthy of mockery.

[-] imadabouzu@awful.systems 9 points 4 months ago

Maybe I'm old fashioned but,

I still start by asking someone who knows about the thing what books they might recommend. And I know mushrooms are especially problematic, so I go look for um, active communities of people who aren't dead from eating the wrong mushrooms.

Is it possible, that we're looking too far away from accountable sources when we route our knowledge searches through noisy corporate slops?

[-] imadabouzu@awful.systems 9 points 4 months ago

LLM, tell me the most obviously persuasive sort of science devoid of context. Historically, that's been super helpful so let's do more of that.

[-] imadabouzu@awful.systems 10 points 4 months ago

I'm so happy for appends. ~and edits~

[-] imadabouzu@awful.systems 9 points 4 months ago

It can be both. Like, probably OpenAI is kind of hoping that this story becomes wide and is taken seriously, and has no problem suggesting implicitly and explicitly that their employee's stocks are tied to how scared everyone is.

Remember when Altman almost got outed and people got pressured not to walk? That their options were at risk?

Strange hysteria like this doesn't need just one reason. It just needs an input dependency and ambiguity, the rest takes of itself.

[-] imadabouzu@awful.systems 9 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago)

Audacious and Absurd Defender of Humanity

Your honor, I'd rather plea guilty than abide by my audacious counsel.

[-] imadabouzu@awful.systems 10 points 4 months ago

It can't stop the usage, it can raise the cost of doing so, by bringing in legal risk of operations operating in a public way. It can create precedence that can be built upon by other parts.

Politics and law move slower than and behind the things it attempts to regulate by design. Which is good, the atlernative is a surveilance state! But it definitely can arrange itself to punish or raise the risk profile of doing something in a certain patterned way.

[-] imadabouzu@awful.systems 11 points 4 months ago

Kurzgesagt

Yeah I'm not surprised. Kurzgesagt has always had that sort of forced, fragile, veneer of optimism and scientific inquiry that can only be described as "all I can imagine about the future I read about in the 60s".

[-] imadabouzu@awful.systems 12 points 4 months ago

It's the same story as has ever been. "Smart People"'s position on anything is often informed by their current economic relationship wrt to the things they care about. And maybe even Yud isn't super happy about his profession being co-opted. What scraps will he have if his own delusions became true about GPT zombies replacing "authentic voices"?

No one is immune to seeing a better take when it's their shit on the line, and no is immune from being in a bubble without stake.

[-] imadabouzu@awful.systems 10 points 4 months ago

Why so general? The multi-agent dynamical systems theory needed to heal internal conflicts such as auto-immune disorders may not be so different from those needed to heal external conflicts as well, including breakdowns in social and political systems.

This isn't, an answer to the question why so general? This is aspirational philosophical goo. "multi-agent dynamical systems theory" => you mean any theory that takes composite view of a larger system? Like Chemistry? Biology?Physics? Sociology? Economics? "Why so general" may as well be "why so uncommitted?"

I feel bayesian rationalism has basically missed the point of inference and immediately fallen into the regression to the mean trap of "the general answer to any question shouldn't say anything in particular at all."

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imadabouzu

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