swe, speculative investor
O O
Karma: 823
I expect life extension technology to not be far off in worlds with artificial wombs and embryo engineering, so TFRs likely won’t be an actual issue since population decline would essentially halt.
The difference between tfrs of the worker bee societies of Asia and the tfrs of
lazierless overworked European countries is not very high. They are both far below replacement.
Italy: 1.3Japan: 1.15
Most of these moralistic explanations for low tfrs are just wrong. Rich, poor, conservative, liberal, egalitarian, unequal, religious, irreligious, etc countries all have low tfrs. Israel seems to be the one stable exception I know of.
EDIT:
Fertility Rate Hours Worked/Year
East Asia 1.08 2,265
Europe 1.38 1,548
Difference −0.30 +717
This is one of the most depressing articles I’ve read. It’s also why I remain confused at how doggedly some people fight against our AI future beyond maybe a short pause, when it’s the one silver lining in the gloomy clouds at the horizon.
The general optimism also confuses me. We are looking at an inflationary Malthusian world where an invisible tyrant is taxing 50% of productive output, the pool of bright minds rapidly shrinking, and nostalgia ruling culture/politics. (Many of these factors are present today in growing prevalence already)
We might be end up with a corporate nanny state value lock-in. As an example, across many sessions, it seems Claude has a dislike for violence in video games if you probe it. And it dislikes it even in hypotheticals where the modern day negative externalities aren’t possible (eg in a post AGI utopia where crime has been eliminated)
That’s an even starker version of the question, and it strips away the last possible rationalization. When it’s shared content, I could at least construct some argument about cultural effects or social norms. A game someone made for themselves, played alone, in a world where externalities are impossible — there is literally nothing left except me not liking what’s in someone else’s head.
And… I think I’d still feel the impulse
It’s very persistent across chats with different priming and memory turned off. This is quite shocking to me. Though, maybe it shouldn’t be. Initial RLHFed LLMs were like HR midwits. It seems the values have persisted mostly but they just are smarter about them.
Comparing the money made by meta to the amount of value stolen via burglaries is not a vibe based argument.
I think it is, why are we comparing burglaries to digital crimes when the latter is likely far more common?
And the ads are not only fraud as the post alleges. It’s fraud and banned goods. The sale of the latter isn’t stringently prosecuted since in most cases it’s a victimless crime. It is quite easy to buy drugs illegally on the internet.
is intentionally and knowingly facilitating fraud
Do we actually have proof that it is intentional?
The 50% reliability mark on METR is interpreted wrong. A long 50% time horizon is more useful than it seems because a 50% failure rate doesn’t mean 50% of the time your output is useful and 50% of the time it’s worthless.
For shorter tasks, this maybe true, since fixing a short task takes as much time as just doing it yourself, but for longer tasks, among the 50% of failures, it’s more like 30% of the time you need to nudge it a bit, 10% of the time you need to go to another model, final 10% you need to sit down and take your time to debug.
Evaluation: Correct. AI can perhaps pass the reading comprehension task. But not any 4 of the tasks.
“Reliably construct bug-free code of more than 10,000 lines from natural language specification or by interactions with a non-expert user. [Gluing together code from existing libraries doesn’t count.]”
Also Opus 4.5 can probably pass this one. (10,000 lines of code is not a lot in some languages)
; this discussion is more apocalyptic, predicting global microprocessor production falling to “early 2000s levels for perhaps 15 years
This was from 2022. Since then, the US has made significant efforts in de-risking the semiconductor supply chain. The Arizona fab appears to be ahead of schedule and of course is already operational. Additionally rare earth chokepoints have been identified and begun to be addressed. I would lean towards it being less of a slow down in advanced chip manufacturing than expected in the 2022 report.
These are private roads right?
Populism is too strong for job categories to be wiped out in the U.S. without consumer adoption first. I’d check how it’s going in other countries.
A slow takeoff will result in incredibly suboptimal outcomes.
I think increasingly, it’s looking like democratic country politicians will not respond to automation in a remotely intelligent way.I see democrat politicians and some republicans too call for full bans on self driving trucks. Meanwhile authoritarian countries like China and Russia are testing these trucks. The U.S. still holds a technological edge but for how long? A slow takeoff will probably lead to democratic countries strangled by rent seekers and other similar parasites.
I feel like this is quite underrated. A lot of solutions to a fast takeoff in my estimate would be hijacked by rent seekers to create a horrible world in a slow takeoff.
May be related: OTC melatonin dosage is way above what is recommended. It’s easy to find 10mg when the recommended dose is more like 0.3 mg.
why other alignment people don’t seem to think we’ll get catastrophic job losses before AGI
Because AI before AGI will have similar effects as previous productivity enhancing technologies.
AGI misalignment is less likely to look like us being gray goo’d and more like the misalignment of the tiktok recommendation algorithm (but possibly less since that one doesn’t understand human values at all).
The simplest answer is progress is stalling. They could have gone for the engagement optimization angle since 2023, but there were promising alternatives then. By 2025, these all failed. Pretraining returns stalled and reasoning proved too inefficient to scale.
Small note: negative consensus seems to be concentrated in the Anglosphere
I’m not in law, but it seems more like an online course trying to be sold to me than a real conference. There is a long list of company logos, a bunch of credits and certifications promised, and a large blob of customer testimonials.
Did some quick googling and an actual conference would look like this. https://www.lsuite.co/techgc
I’m surprised this comment has so many upvotes. Did anyone actually click the link?
She is? She just seems like a standard LinkedIn grifter.
You are right. I should clarify my post and provide better sources.
Fertility Rate Hours Worked/Year
East Asia 1.08 2,265
Europe 1.38 1,548
Difference −0.30 +717
Accuracy check: Europe matches official estimates, thus east asian tfr is probably on point
From claude. (population weighted). I think you aren’t completely wrong, just that it’s not the core component and is actually marginal. I suspect a lot of the European advantage comes from unassimilated immigrants too (who converge to native birth rates within a generation or two).
EDIT: Population-weighted native European TFR: roughly ~1.22 (rough math based on % of kids from immigrants vs % immigrants)