How did you do this? Did you simply ask yourself “how does this person feel” in a social context? Did you get feedback through asking people how they felt afterward? If so, how do you deal with detecting states of mind that others are unlikely to openly admit (e.g. embarrassment, hostility, idolization)?
joec
Karma: 36
Wow, this story is disturbingly well-written. While there aren’t any explicit references to slavery, I can’t help but be reminded of Frederick Douglass’s description of Mr. Severe and Mr. Gore, two spiteful and vicious overseers at a plantation.
Continuing with this, I’m also reminded of Douglass’s argument that slavery had a terrible effect not only on the slaves but on the slaveowners and overseers too. Specifically, that it somehow awakened a brutality in many of them that otherwise wouldn’t be there. I wonder if this story’s narrator would have been just as cruel if he never had this kind of power over others.
I’m also now somewhat concerned about the higher-order effects/social risks of people having absolute power over AIs, even if the AIs don’t suffer. Even access to an AI which only appears to suffer might bring out a kind of cruelty in some people that they otherwise wouldn’t have known they were capable of.
I both think and hope that you’re right and a smallpox outbreak could be easily contained, but I’m not confident enough in this to be unconcerned. If large amounts were released to overwhelm the system, this could cause a lot of death, particularly in urban areas. I would be particularly concerned if I lived in a crowded slum/favela, because I imagine smallpox could rapidly spread through the populace before quarantine efforts could do much.
Another thing is that smallpox symptoms appear flu-like for the first several days of the infection. During this period it’s quite contagious. It’s plausible that, in the case of smallpox being released, people will assume it’s just a respiratory illness (“Whew, looks like I tested negative for Covid!”) and spread it before the characteristic pustules appear and the authorities react. (Disclaimer: I am not an epidemiologist, merely a concerned citizen)
According to the CDC, vaccination lasts 3-5 years, with protection waning after that. How fast the protection decreases is not entirely clear, especially on the scale of decades, but I did find this Scientific American article claiming that mortality rates were reduced from 52% among the unvaccinated to 1.5% for those vaccinated within ten years and to 11.5% for those vaccinated between 10 and 20 years prior in a study. This article suggests that vaccination during infancy reduced the mortality rate to under 5% for 30 years, and the mortality rate for vaccinated individuals was never above half that for unvaccinated individuals of the same age range. Similarly, mild cases of smallpox are far more common among infected vaccinated individuals than unvaccinated individuals. All this is to suggest that vaccination confers some kind of lifelong protection, at least statistically.
As for the difficulty, I would like to emphasize that this was very easy for me to do. Getting the appointment and vaccine took about 2 hours, and they were completely free. The swelling was a tad annoying but not too bad.
I think with a decent training set, this could make a pretty nice Anki deck. The difficulty in this would be getting the data and accurate emotional expression labels.
A few ideas:
1. Pay highschool/college drama students to fake expressions. The quality of the data would be limited by their acting skill, but you could get honest labels.
2. Gather up some participants and expose them to a variety of things, taking pictures of them under different emotional states. This could run into the problem of people misreporting their actual emotional state. Learning with these might make the user more susceptible to deception.
3. Screenshot expressions from movies/videos where the emotional state of the subjects are clear from context.