What extreme advantages were those? What nuclear age conquests are comparable to the era immediately before?
RedMan
So you asked anthropic for uncensored model access so you could try to build scheming AIs, and they gave it to you?
To use a biology analogy, isn’t this basically gain of function research?
Food companies are adding sesame (an allergen for some) to food in order to not be held responsible for it not containing sesame. Alloxan is used to whiten dough https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0733521017302898 for the it’s false comment. And is also used to induce diabetes in the lab https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0024320502019185 RoundUp is in nearly everything.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_withdrawn_drugs#Significant_withdrawals plenty of things keep getting added to this list.
We have never made a safe human. CogEms would be safer than humans though because they won’t unionize and can be flipped off when no longer required.
Edit: sources added for the x commenter.
The hypothetical movie you’re talking about exists: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ichi_the_Killer_(film)
I won’t elaborate on specific scenes, but I think you’ll agree if you watch it.
A lot of cultures circumcise, one thing that’s kind of cool is the Kenyan customs where it is done to young teenagers, often with a rock, in the context of a ‘camp’ in the woods. You choose to become a full member of your tribal subgroup by doing it, all subgroups have slightly different techniques, some have a reputation for feeling better for women than others. Yes, teenagers do die, no, this does not deter anyone from making their kids partici ate : https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Circumcision_in_Africa
There are analogies here in pollution. Some countries force industry to post bonds for damage to the local environment. This is a new innovation that may be working.
The reason the superfund exists in the US is because liability for pollution can be so severe that a company would simply cease to operate, and the mess would not be cleaned up.
In practice, when it comes to taking environmental risks, better to burn the train cars of vinyl chloride, creating a catastrophe too expensive for anyone to clean up or even comprehend than to allow a few gallons to leak, creating an expensive accident that you can actually afford.
Based on your recent post here: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/55rc6LJcqRmyaEr9T/please-stop-publishing-ideas-insights-research-about-ai
Can I mark you down as in favor of AI related NDAs? In your ideal world, would a perfect solution be for a single large company to hire all the capable AI researchers, give them aggressive non disclosure and non compete agreements, then shut down every part of the company except the legal department that enforces the agreements?
Thankfully, the Chinese seem to have figured out how to thread this needle: https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/industry/healthcare/biotech/healthcare/chinese-scientists-develop-cure-for-diabetes-insulin-patient-becomes-medicine-free-in-just-3-months/articleshow/110466659.cms?from=mdr
Edit: paper here https://www.nature.com/articles/s41421-024-00662-3
A lot of AI safety seems to assume that humans are safer than they are, and that producing software that operates within a specification is harder than it is. It’s nice to see this paper moving towards integrating actual safety analysis (the remark about collapsing bridges was a breath of fresh air), instead of general demands that ‘the AI always do as humans say’!
A human intelligence placed in charge of a nation state can kill 7 logs of humans and still be remembered heroically. An AI system placed in charge of a utopian reshaping of the society of a major country with a ‘keep the deaths within 6 logs’ guideline that it can actually stay within would be an improvement on the status quo.
If safety people are saying ‘we cant build AI systems that could make people feel bad, and we definitely can’t build systems that kill people’ their demand for perfection is in conflict with improvement.*
I suspect that major AI alignment failure will come from ‘we put the human in charge, and human error led to the model doing bad’. The industrial/aviation safety community now rightly views ‘pilot error’ as a lazy way of ending an analysis and avoiding making the engineering changes to the system that the accident conditions demand.
*edit: imagine if the ‘airplane safety’ community had developed in 1905 (soon humans will be flying in planes!) and had resembled “AI safety” Not one human can be risked! No making planes that can carry bombs! The people who said pregnant women shouldn’t ride trains because the baby will fly out of their bodies were wrong there, but keep them off the planes!
November 17 to May 16 is 180 days.
Pay periods often end on the 15th and end of the month, though at that level, I doubt that’s relevant.
As it turns out, von Neumann was good at lots of things.
https://qualiacomputing.com/2018/06/21/john-von-neumann/
Von Neumann himself was perpetually interested in many fields unrelated to science. Several years ago his wife gave him a 21-volume Cambridge History set, and she is sure he memorized every name and fact in the books. “He is a major expert on all the royal family trees in Europe,” a friend said once. “He can tell you who fell in love with whom, and why, what obscure cousin this or that czar married, how many illegitimate children he had and so on.” One night during the Princeton days a world-famous expert on Byzantine history came to the Von Neumann house for a party. “Johnny and the professor got into a corner and began discussing some obscure facet,” recalls a friend who was there. “Then an argument arose over a date. Johnny insisted it was this, the professor that. So Johnny said, ‘Let’s get the book.’ They looked it up and Johnny was right. A few weeks later the professor was invited to the Von Neumann house again. He called Mrs. von Neumann and said jokingly, ‘I’ll come if Johnny promises not to discuss Byzantine history. Everybody thinks I am the world’s greatest expert in it and I want them to keep on thinking that.’”
____
According to the same article, he was not such a great driver.
Now, comparing him to another famous figure of his age, Menachem Mendel Schneerson. Schneerson was legendary for his ability to recall obscure sections of Torah verbatim, and his insightful reasoning (I am speaking lightly here, his impact was incredible). Using the hypothetical that von Neumann and Schneerson had a similar gift (their ability with the written word as a reflection of their general ability), depending on your worldview, Schneerson’s talents were not properly put to use in the service of science, or von Neumann’s talents were wasted in not becoming a gaon.
Perhaps, if von Neumann had engaged in Torah instead of science, we could have been spared nuclear weapons and maybe even AI for some time. Sure, maybe someone else would have done what he did...but who?
Temporary implies immediately reversible and mild.
People who are on benzos often have emotional regulation issues, serious withdrawal symptoms (sometimes after very short courses potentially even a single dose), and cognitive issues that do not resolve quickly.
In an academic sense, this idea is ‘fine’, but in a very personal way, if someone asked me ‘should I take a member of this class of drug for any reason other than a serious issue that is severely affecting my quality of life?‘, I would answer ‘absolutely not, and if you have a severe issue that they might help with, try absolutely everything else first, because once you’re on these, you’re probably not coming off’.
What are the norms on drug/alcohol use at these events?
On a scale from ‘absent from the campus and if found with legal substances you will be expelled from the event and possibly the community’ to ‘use of pharma or illegal drugs is likely to be common and potentially encouraged by mild peer pressure’?
In computer security, there is an ongoing debate about vulnerability disclosure, which at present seems to have settled on ‘if you aren’t running a bug bounty program for your software you’re irresponsible, project zero gets it right, metasploit is a net good, and it’s ok to make exploits for hackers ideologically aligned with you’.
The framing of the question for decades was essentially “do you tell the person or company
with the vulnerable software, who may ignore you or sue you because they don’t want to spend money? Do you tell the public, where someone might adapt your report into an attack?
Of course, there is the (generally believed to be) unethical option chosen by many “sell it to someone who will use it, and will protect your identity as the author from people who might retaliate”
There was an alternative called ‘antisec’: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antisec_Movement which basically argued ‘dont tell people about exploits, they’re expensive to make, very few people develop the talents to smash the stack for fun and profit, and once they’re out, they’re easy to use to cause mayhem’.
They did not go anywhere, and the antisec viewpoint is not present in any mainstream discussion about vulnerability ethics.
Alternatively, nations have broadly worked together to not publicly disclose technical data that would make building nuclear bombs simple. It is an exercise for the reader to determine whether it has worked.
So, the ideas here have been tried in different fields, with mixed results.
Clive Wearing’s story might be interesting to you: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=k_P7Y0-wgos&feature=youtu.be
O man, wait until you discover nmda antagonists and anti-cholinergics. There are trip reports on erowid from people who took drugs with amnesia as a side effect so...happy reading I guess?
I’m going to summarize this post with “Can one of you take an online IQ test after dropping a ton of benzos and report back? Please do this several times, for science.”
Not the stupidest or most harmful ‘lets get high and...’ suggestion, but I can absolutely assure you that if trying this leads you into the care of a medical or law enforcement professional, they will likely say something to the effect of ‘so the test told you that you were retarded right?’ In response to this, you, with bright naive eyes, should say ‘HOW DID YOU KNOW?!’ as earnestly as you can. You might be able to make a run for it while they’re laughing.
I wrote about this, but didn’t use the s-risk term. I’m fine with exposing future me to s-risk, please don’t pulp my brain.
If you can get a salesforce cert, you can get any of the other baseline IT certs. Being a female and being native is actually massive for hiring at companies that care about that stuff.
Apply for government IT jobs, help desk type stuff, a lot of it is hybrid or remote, if it’s a hybrid position, ask to be remote for the first month (two paychecks) to manage moving.
Six months in, open a business, ask your company to switch you to 1099, route the job through your business, work it for another year, this creates a performance history.
Now you are a poor, native american woman owned small business, and you can apply for 8A set aside contracts as the prime. This allows you to take 10% or so off the top when teaming with a large company that will actually staff the thing. Grow to around 40 employees, sell for 5-10mil in 15 years.
It’s not honest work, but lots of people have done this. If you think I’m full of it, I literally worked on a contract where one of the companies on the winning team was called “Native American Woman”.
Good luck.
Aella has written a bunch on camgirling, including questions to ask yourself about suitability. The advice is probably applicable to twitch streaming or tiktok video creation too.
Content or product creation online and sales has never been easier, but it’s hard work with no guarantee of payoff.
There is a lot written/on youtube about retail arbitrage, if you have stores nearby you might be able to do that.
Fully remote entry level call center/sales jobs are pretty much always hiring, they’re pretty demanding though. Staffing agencies can potentially set you up, be ready to do things like convince elderly people to give to a charity.
Longer term, professional certifications in healthcare or IT can usually make a big difference in someone’s life.
I’m guessing the funding environment for entrepreneurs isn’t great right now, but something is always happening somewhere.
Amazon Mechanical Turk used to be a decent way of doing boring work for a little money.
Free money from the government is a thing, but services for people who don’t have kids are few and far between.
Starting from zero today is hard, but the best thing you can do is get out there and start trying stuff. You don’t have any opportunity cost for trying things, which isn’t true for a lot of people. You can go into the unknown knowing that the alternative (your present situation) is complete crap.
Good luck!
Unfortunately, I haven’t found a solution that scales, and I don’t think there is one.
I suspect that a clean environment is incompatible with most technological infrastructure. Microplastics, oilfield brines, combustion products, industrial/agricultural/mining waste, etc all accumulate in the environment and concentrate on the way up the food chain. Even a strip mall generates a ton of pollution in the nearby water table.
I’ve given up on ‘pure’ and just try to have a clear understanding of how I’m poisoning myself. The most depressing thing about this is that I’ve been to absolutely beautiful farms, with happy animals...and in my due diligence discovered that the reason it was affordable to homestead there is because the textile plant closed in the 70s, so all the jobs left...but the PFOAs stuck around.
So… I try to know what’s going into my body, avoid poison where possible, and do my best to get whatever garbage is accumulating out.
That being said, I think the stuff that has done the most damage to my body are medical products. Read those labels carefully!
States that have nuclear weapons are generally less able to successfully make compellent threats than states that do not. Citation: https://uva.theopenscholar.com/todd-sechser/publications/militarized-compellent-threats-1918%E2%80%932001
The USA was the dominant industrial power in the post-war world, was this obvious and massive advantage ‘extremely’ enhanced by its’ possession of nuclear weapons? As a reminder, these weapons were not decisive (or even useful) in any of the wars the USA actually fought, the USA has been repeatedly and continuously challenged by non-nuclear regional powers.
Sure, AI might provide an extreme advantage, but I’m not clear on why nuclear weapons do.