H5N1 has spread to cows. Should I be worried?
CronoDAS
Karma: 16,094
I’d guess that you have to rely a lot more on persuasion and positive reinforcement—if you want them to do something, it’s probably not going to happen unless they willingly agree to do it.
I wasn’t really like this until I was about 12-13 years old, though; as a younger child I often went into violent rages instead of displaying submissive behavior. I eventually did grow out of hitting peopIe and now only rarely feel genuine anger (as opposed to anger-adjacent feelings such as frustration), but 15-year-old me was still willing to passively resist by laying in a limp ball and enduring the consequences for as long as I needed to!
My depression is currently well-controlled at the moment, and I actually have found various methods to help me get things done, since I don’t respond well to the simplest versions of carrot-and-stick methods. The most pleasant is finding someone else to do it with me (or at least act involved while I do the actual work).
On the other hand, there have been times when procrastinating actually gives me a thrill, like I’m getting away with something. Mediocre video games become much more appealing when I have work to avoid.
Antonie van Leeuwenhoek, known as the Father of Microbiology, made the first microscopes capable of seeing microorganisms and is credited as the person who discovered them. He kept his lensmaking techniques secret, however, and microscopes capable of the same magnification didn’t become generally available until many, many years later.
Yeah, I did some Googling and packaged supermarket bread has all kinds of stuff added to it. (There’s a reason the bagels from the bagel store nearby get moldy and the “Thomas’s Bagels” from the supermarket last forever...)
Bread is ultra-processed? O_O
I have a bad history of not being responsive to the threat of punishment. When I have an aversive task, and the consequences for not doing that task suddenly get much worse, I start acting like the punishment is inevitable and am even less likely to actually do the task. In other words, I fail the “gun to the head test” quite dramatically.
Guy with a gun: I’m going to shoot you if you haven’t changed the sheets on your bed by tomorrow.
Me: AAH I’M GOING TO DIE I’TS NO GOOD I MIGHT AS WELL SPEND THE DAY LYING IN BED PLAYING VIDEO GAMES BECAUSE I’M GOING TO GET SHOT TOMORROW SOMEONE CALL THE FUNERAL HOME AND MAKE PLANS TELL MY FAMILY I LOVE THEM
Guy with a gun: You know, you could always just… change the sheets?
ME: THE THOUGHT HAS OCCURRED TO ME BUT I’M TOO UPSET RIGHT NOW ABOUT THE FACT THAT I’M GOING TO DIE TOMORROW BECAUSE THE SHEETS WEREN’T CHANGED TO ACTUALLY GO AND CHANGE THEM
Also I have a bad history with this kind of thing in general—one thing that I was always bothered by when I was in school and college was that the only motivation I really had for doing my work was to avoid bad consequences—I was so sick of spending my life making myself miserable in order to avoid things that ought to be even worse. I also have a hard time being motivated by money: bad consequences for having insufficient money have the problem I’ve already described, and, well, video games are cheap.
(In case you’re wondering, no, I don’t work, and my parents still support me financially.)
So when I think of commitment apps, I tend to react to them as entirely downside: I don’t expect my behavior to change very much, and I do expect to predictably lose money. :(
What he said. Analyzing politically volatile data and determining that it’s clearly made up feels on-brand for LessWrong regardless of what one thinks about the underlying issues...
“How the Gaza Health Ministry Fakes Casualty Numbers”
Writing correct code given a specification is the relatively easy part of software engineering. The hard part is deciding what you need that code to actually do. In other words, “requirements”—your dumbass customer has only the vaguest idea what they want and contradicts themselves half the time, but they still expect you to read their mind and give them something they’re going to be happy with.
Possibly one of the only viable responses to a hostile AI breakout onto the general Internet would be to detonate several nuclear weapons in space, causing huge EMP blasts that would fry most of the world’s power grid and electronic infrastructure, taking the world back to the 1850s until it can be repaired. (Possible AI control measure: make sure that “critical” computing and power infrastructure is not hardened against EMP attack, just in case humanity ever does find itself needing to “pull the plug” on the entire goddamn world.)
Hopefully whichever of Russia, China, and the United States didn’t launch the nukes would be understanding. It might make sense for the diplomats to get this kind of thing straightened out before we get closer to the point where someone might actually have to do it.
(This is because eventually they do lose an election, and then they do fight a civil war. For example, the American South fought a civil war rather than allow Lincoln to become their President.)
I brought it up with him again, and my father backpedaled and said he was mostly making educated guesses on limited information, that he knows that he really doesn’t know very much about current AI, and isn’t interested enough to talk to strangers online—he’s in his 70s and figures that if AI does eventually destroy the world it probably won’t be in his own lifetime. :/
Representative democracy can only last so long as people prefer losing an election to fighting a civil war.
He might also argue “even if you can match a human brain with a billion dollar supercomputer, it still takes a billion dollar supercomputer to run your AI, and you can make, train, and hire an awful lot of humans for a billion dollars.”
Because there were enough people selling for prices lower than $40 to satisfy the demand for greater fools?
Also, stocks can be sold short if the price goes too high.
Yes, I know.
My father thinks that ASI is going to be impractical to achieve with silicon CMOS chips because Moore’s law is eventually going to hit fundamental limits—such as the thickness of individual atoms—and the hardware required to create it would end up “requiring a supercomputer the size of the Empire State Building and consume as much electricity as all of New York City”.Needless to say, he has very long timelines for generally superhuman AGI. He doesn’t rule out that another computing technology could replace silicon CMOS, he just doesn’t think it would be practical unless that happens.My father is usually a very smart and rational person (he is a retired professor of electrical engineering) and he loves arguing, and I suspect that he is seriously overestimating the computing hardware it would take to match a human brain. Would anyone here be interested in talking to him about it? Let me know and I’ll put you in touch.Update: My father later backpedaled and said he was mostly making educated guesses on limited information, that he knows that he really doesn’t know very much about current AI, and isn’t interested enough to talk to strangers online—he’s in his 70s and if AI does eventually destroy the world it probably won’t be in his own lifetime. :/
Thank you!