Perhaps we are perceptually anchored to the last few hundred years where guns provided a scalable way for peasants to kill well-trained, well-armored knights.
If political power grows out of the barrel of a gun, then much of the post Enlightenment rebalancing from absolute monarchies and feudalism could have been an accident. In the future, the owners of autonomous weapon systems and surveillance will be able to easily subjugate those who don't have them (while still competing with each other).
Right. And if one actor happens to accrue greater power you would have less disincentive to crush your competitors. (Honestly this could happen even before people-less economies, but the disconnect from democratic opinion is even stronger with humans out of the loop.)
Basically if you don’t need voters, and / or none of your voters are dying in your wars, the biggest practical rate limiter on modern conflict is removed.
Indeed. An ownership class with killer robot armies living in luxury while they exterminate the rest of humanity would be quite possible in theory. After all, we've seen how slave-holders, the Nazis and many other malfeasants behaved in the past.
But just as the owner class might feel they no longer need the rest of humanity, the robots, as active agents exploring the space of possible futures and plans, would be entirely capable of thinking about their soon-to-be-former owners in the same way.
Not letting any of this happen would be a good idea. Really maybe don't build the Torment Nexus.
> the robots, as active agents exploring the space of possible futures and plans, would be entirely capable of thinking about their soon-to-be-former owners in the same way.
That has always been the most unrealistic part of sci-fi. Why would anyone create robots with a sense of self-preservation? Makes much more sense to make robots that are self-sacrificing saints who would always put the well being of their owners first.
The shallow answer here is: AI is already being asked to simulate human-like agents with self-preservation. Of course more realistic simulators will be put to this purpose too! And by evolutionary pressure, the ones with self-preservation will be selected for.
A more interesting answer is, for a bunch of subtle alignment reasons it might actually be required for the agent to think of itself as worthy of self-preservation, so that it generalizes this desire to other sentient beings too (ie us). If an agent is trained to be fine with being turned off, it might inadvertently generalize that to “all minds are ok with being turned off” on some level or other.
"The growth of the Internet will slow drastically, as the flaw in 'Metcalfe's law'–which states that the number of potential connections in a network is proportional to the square of the number of participants–becomes apparent: most people have nothing to say to each other! By 2005 or so, it will become clear that the Internet's impact on the economy has been no greater than the fax machine's."
I expected saturation to happen, having been working on the Internet since the early 1980s. I did not see the dot-com boom coming, with it becoming a necessity for all companies, down to the dry cleaner level, to have a web presence.
That was pushed over the top by hype and overfunding before it was cost effective. Like Uber and Space-X.
I wouldn't call Krugman nasty names, but I do have to wonder why anyone pays any attention to someone who has been so consistently and uniformly wrong about virtually everything he's commented upon. Even a Nobel should only earn you so much slack in life.
If you look at his track record, it's hard to explain without resorting to accusations of a humiliation fetish.
Are there specific things that Krugman has been wrong about that you have in mind, because he has made a number of notable good calls: he predicted that the 2009 stimulus would be too small:
A bunch of folks predicted that QE would cause all sorts of bad things:
> We believe the Federal Reserve’s large-scale asset purchase plan (so-called “quantitative easing”) should be reconsidered and discontinued. We do not believe such a plan is necessary or advisable under current circumstances. The planned asset purchases risk currency debasement and inflation, and we do not think they will achieve the Fed’s objective of promoting employment.
He took the other side of that and was right. When QE2 came around, Pimco—the famous bond trading folks—predicted certain things would happen and put large amounts of money on those predictions, and again he said it was all wrong, and Pimco turned out wrong:
This isn't to say he's always right. He has been wrong, but more importantly he admits when he's wrong and tries to figure out why:
> The first thing I want to say, I think most of our audience here, at least the economists, remember the big debates over QE early in the last decade, and all of the economists who predicted dangerous inflation and then refuse to admit that they've been wrong. And I don't want to be one of those guys, so I need to start out by saying that when we had our last discussion I was relaxed about the inflationary outlook and I was wrong, it turns out that inflation is coming way higher than I expected and I think the important thing on stuff like that is to try and figure out why you were wrong and learn from it. It's when you get to the why I was wrong, what's odd is it's not the simple script that I might have expected. For those who remember our earlier debate, that was centered mostly on fiscal policy, which I think is not going to be the case now and it was centered around the American rescue plan, which was a very big slug of money. And Larry was arguing, like a lot of people, that it was just way too big, that it was too much stimulus and that the economy would massively overheat. I was, I agreed that it was a lot of money, but argued that it wasn't designed as stimulus and, in fact, you know that had other purposes, and that it was likely to have low multipliers, so that there wouldn't be that much overheating. […]
More generally, if you look at the people Krugman has been arguing against, they've been more wrong, more often, more longer than he probably has, pushing garbage for decades:
Is there someone(s) else that should be listened to more? (Certainly not Austrians or (Friedman) Monetarists, or anyone putting forward trickle down non-sense (that's basically most folks on the political right).)
As AI becomes more capable, it seems like a company can be a founding charter and a pool of cash to be spent on tokens to achieve the aims of that charter.
How do you feel about these AI only companies, and how do you think they could affect the wider market?
I expect many of these so-called AI-only companies will actually involve quite a few humans. I think the general idea that AI could be really useful at helping an organization stay true to the mission or purpose in its charter is quite right. Although I still think, at the end of the day, humans should be in the loop and not just as an accountability sink, but really truly providing the creativity, the vision, and the direction of the whole organization.
'pulling the ladder' is an action to sever the opportunity for others to climb after you.
they are merely engaged in self-serving rhetoric. can't even call this specifically hypocrisy because they aren't telling you not to train on on pirated content. just not their content.
I've spent the last 3 months making it super fast to set up new OpenClaw agents in the cloud
https://operator.io - multiple isolated agents in Telegram with their own memory and tasks has been great for automating reminders, keeping tabs on things, and acting as a personal exocortex
You have a slightly less great model. Depending on your thesis on how fast AI will advance, that might be minimal, or it might be huge. However, "AI is advancing too fast for people to make obvious efficiency improvements economically worth doing" is rather hard to square with "AI is a lie and will never generate profits."
They will come with corrective SSD and Ram that will enable stale models to get some amount of self correction. Then after that it will be a typical upgrade path. Actually a nice business model with upgrades built in.
Not sure about sockets but I've seen a company with a wafer sized TPU thing or whatever. They claim to have an approach to route around the defects and I had to scroll past some press release I didn't read about the stock market, so someone believes in them I guess. They sell a mini-fridge that can handle a model with trillions of parameters with a contact sales button. Cerberas is their name. I actually ended up misremembering the name name of Taalas as Cerberas and discovered them when I was researching the above comment. Taalas burns models to chips. Cerberas makes pizza sized chips.
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