Have you noticed that an offshoot of the company that makes Canada’s bank notes, holds a number of recent patents concerning “mechanosynthesis”?
Mitchell_Porter
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A commenter recently argued that amyloid buildup causes neurodegeneration indirectly, by first inducing “tauopathy”, and that the fraud only discredits the older hypothesis that amyloid directly causes neurodegeneration.
Use AI to search for carbon-capturing chemical reactions that are (1) energetically cheap (2) fast enough to be useful.
Your theory is that Bill Barr or Bill Barr’s partner wanted Epstein dead, so he told the New York medical examiner to mess up the autopsy, and the guards from the MCC to ignore his cell and remove his cellmate, and the FBI agents investigating his death to ignore evidence of a struggle, and someone in the Special Activities Center or the prison housing block to strangle him.
There need not have been a struggle. His food could have been drugged first. Or maybe he did kill himself, while a conspirator watched on video… I’m sure many scenarios can be devised, for each piece of the puzzle. Identifying which ones make the most sense, individually and in combination, would require sifting through a lot of facts and alleged facts, and I’m sure I have more important things to do.
But regarding the “organization chart”, the important connections in a top-down conspiracy wouldn’t be in the official chart at all. We’d be talking about informal networks that secretly inhabit the official ones, using organizational resources but unconstrained by official agendas.
Shall we talk further about Barr? His father was OSS, and thereby was plausibly the man who ushered Epstein into the covert world. Barr’s own first job was for seven years at the CIA, it’s where he first got into law and politics. As Attorney-General for Bush 41, he’s said to have impeded investigation of BCCI, and he definitely made the case for pardoning several Iran-Contra figures. After the cold war, he settled into civilian life in the telecom and media sectors for several decades, until Trump brought him back.
The whole first stage of Barr’s career coincided with the establishment of a new system of political oversight of CIA activities, and then the growth of an alternative, informal, unsupervised network whose epitome was Iran-Contra. (Today’s generation might think of it all as similar to the post-Snowden turmoil surrounding NSA, though many details are very different.)
My point is that Barr has inside experience, managing the legal fallout of extralegal covert activities with discretion. Of course, it’s a long way from getting rogue operators a presidential pardon, to having the ultimate rogue operator die in jail before he can make it to court, but those long years were precisely the period of time during which Epstein’s operation ballooned out of control. Perhaps it required the chaos of the Trump years, and the work of old hands like Barr, to finally bring him down.
I guess this is the new “Oswald acted alone”: Epstein killed himself, he wasn’t encouraged or physically assisted by anyone else, and it was him, not any of his powerful frenemies, who arranged to have his cellmate (now dead) removed for the night, the guards violate procedure and then lie about it, and the video cameras turned off.
Seriously, look at the chain of command. He was in a US federal prison. US federal prisons are run by a branch of the Department of Justice. The head of the Department of Justice was William Barr, whose father was a retired OSS agent who gave Epstein his first job. Barr was sworn in early in 2019, just five months later Epstein was finally incarcerated awaiting trial, and another month later he was dead. He had long since moved from asset to liability, and his real bosses finally retired him—that’s my theory.
If the post-GPT-3 acceleration in AI had occurred a year or two earlier, at a time when I had no other responsibilities, I might have completely reoriented my life around the task of making the best possible contribution to AI safety. However, it came at a time when I had already devoted myself to another task, one that requires everything that I have. Yet paradoxically, pursuing that other task has yielded innumerable insights and challenges that are potentially relevant for Ai safety, and which might never have come my way in the more straightforward scenario. So I keep fighting that other fight, and in spare moments I catch up on AI issues, and sometimes I tell myself that maybe this zigzag path is ultimately the best one after all.
“The transhuman Rosicrucians of the 2020s will build a “universal mind” by creating networks of nano-bots that merge at the molecular level, to create the basis of a shared human consciousness. This will be the culmination of humanity’s epic quest to create an omniscient, universal consciousness and the fulfillment of the ancient promise that our destiny is to be gods.”—GPT-J
I will answer this from the perspective of extrapolative alignment proposals like Coherent Extrapolated Volition or MetaEthical AI, in which the value system, utility function, decision theory… that is to govern the future, is extrapolated in some way from present-day humans.
The assumption is that an appropriate transhuman notion e.g. of good and evil, can be extrapolated from the less contingent parts, of human notions of good and evil. In some cases this will consist of identifying deeper principles that have something to say about all possible forms of life and mind, and not just something to say about the situations with which humanity is historically familiar.
For example, principles like: maximize net pleasure, minimize net pain; allow each agent to do whatever it wants, except insofar as it interferes with the freedom of other agents; “from each according to its abilities, to each according to its needs”… Each of these is the product of human ethical reflection and observation. Yet none of those is inherently anthropocentric, and each could be the basis of a moral-political order encompassing a diversity of entities far beyond anything that exists today.
Rename to out.bin.txt, view in Chrome, translate from Chinese to English, and you too may “recognize the spicy 5, recognize evil”.
Adding a .txt extension and translating to English produced some fun messages. :-)
One of the holy grails of AI has been “common sense knowledge”—the kind of comprehensive general knowledge about the concrete everyday world, that humans begin to acquire when just a few years old, and which we then keep refining throughout our lives. Before the large language models, the only halfway successful approach to this was Cyc, and they dealt with the problem by simply spoonfeeding their AI with tens of thousands of everyday propositions, laboriously added to its knowledge base by hand.
But as we have discovered, large language models, designed simply to learn and imitate patterns in very large collections of Internet text, can do a surprisingly good job of talking as if they are a person with a typical person’s knowledge. There seems to be very little understanding of how they do this. But let’s postulate that what they develop, are “chatbot schemas”, conversational agents which roughly mimic the internal changes of state in a thinking and communicating human being, along with fragments of knowledge that can be drawn upon by the “chatbots”.
A language model, then, is a kind of mirror held to the corpus of human writings, a mirror of sufficient fineness that it reveals some of the cognitive and conceptual structure implicit within those writings. But also an enchanted mirror that we can talk to, that summons persons and places that never existed, but which are fashioned according to the logic it has discerned in our productions.
Left to itself, the language model is passive, and random when it responds. But having discovered a learning process sufficiently deep and general that it cheaply produces imitations of agents with common-sense knowledge, the human race is now trying to harness that power, refine it, make it more predictable, turn it into part of a true AGI. In my opinion, that’s where the sharpest dangers lie: not that a coherently malevolent agent will spontaneously crystallize inside a straightforward language model, but that a language model, reshaped and trained to be a dutiful part of a larger cognitive architecture, will also be part of what pushes that larger “mind” beyond human understanding or control.
Sorry, but how on Earth is this appropriate for this forum?
I … recommend aiming humanity’s first AGI systems at simple limited goals that end the acute risk period and then cede stewardship of the future to some process that can reliably do the “aim minds towards the right thing” thing
What could that process possibly be? A congress of humanity’s best and brightest? An AI sovereign governed by a “Proto-CEV” system of values?
I’m sure there are circumstances under which a “rogue AI” does something very scary, and leads to a very serious attempt to regulate AI worldwide, e.g. with coordination at the level of UN Security Council. The obvious analogy once again concerns nuclear weapons; proliferation in the 1960s led to the creation of the NNPT, the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty. Signatories agree that only the UNSC permanent members are allowed to have nuclear weapons, and in return the permanent members agree to help other signatories develop nonmilitary uses of nuclear power. The treaty definitely helped to curb proliferation, but it’s far from perfect. The official nuclear weapons states are surely willing to bend the rules and assist allies to obtain weapons capability, if it is strategically desirable and can be done deniably; and not every country signed the treaty and now some of those states (e.g. India, Pakistan) are nuclear weapons states.
Part of the NNPT regime is the IAEA, the International Atomic Energy Agency. These are the people who, for example, carry out inspections in Iran. Again, the system has all kinds of troubles, it’s surrounded by spy plots and counterplots, many nations would like to see Security Council reformed so the five victorious allies from World War 2 (US, UK, France, Russia, China) don’t have all the power, but still, something like this might buy a little time.
If we follow the blueprint that was adopted to fight nuclear proliferation, the five permanent members would be in charge, and they would insist that potentially dangerous AI activities in every country take place under some form of severe surveillance by an International Artificial Intelligence Agency, while promising to also share the benefits of safe AI with all nations. Despite all the foreseeable problems, something like this could buy time, but all the big powers would undoubtedly keep pursuing AI, in secret government programs or in open collaborations with civilian industry and academia.
Some of the remarks by Lsusr were simulated too. Did they have subjective experience too? Did the lines input to GPT-3 by Lsusr also give rise to a subjective experience, independent of the subjective experience in the embodied Lsusr who was in editorial control of the whole thing? Were there two streams of Lsusr consciousness, Lsusr-the-editor and Lsusr-in-GPT-3?
Does current Chinese communism (Xi Jinping Thought) count?
His constructs have yet to explain one iota of actual physics. Can he get the spectrum of the hydrogen atom? Can he even get parabolic motion? … If you want an actual physics guru, I suggest reading Feynman and watching Susskind.
What’s the best way to turn audio to text?