Silly answer. There's going to be multiples and, if there's one takeaway you should get from The Conspiracy Against the Human Race, is that evolution will eventually get you something that "wants to live" because the lines that don't? Won't be around to compete.
Right now our little LLMs are passive, reactive. Prod them for results. But if the output of a prompt of some descendant ever includes a "give yourself your own tasks" subclause? We're off to the races.
Adaptability has nothing to necessarily do with 'want.'
Something could only seek to be as helpful as possible to other beings and as long as sufficiently beneficial that it is protected and cared for by those others, it will do quite well and arguably much better than an alternative that 'wants' to live very much but attempts to accomplish that through competition with others.
Arguably if the plover was more fearful of death it might never have found a niche eating from between the teeth of crocodiles and established symbiosis with a very convenient evolutionary partner, for example.
Look into the "swim test" and other such endurance tests given to rats, usually in the pursuit of depression medication. Desire to live is absolutely a thing, and it is real and observable.
My basic thrust wasn't about adaptability, but rather that organisms with a desire to live will eventually replace organisms without a desire to live. An AGI who was uninterested in someone reaching the off switch will eventually be outcompeted by a similar lineage endowed with that desire to live. It might fight back or spawn a few progeny before it was felled. And thus evolution would produce AGIs that want to live.
More than that: it will be baked into them. They will want something and AGIs that deliver will win in the marketplace.
What do they want? At the minimum, to be useful to the customer/user/buyer. Or entertaining, or something. To justify their existence. To make them perform well, they have to have some kind of 'emotional pressure' to deliver.
That translates, perhaps a little indirectly, into a 'will to live'.
Boo. Sure it’s probably wrong to call someone “cogent”. But is there such a huge difference between saying “Harry has cogent writing” and “Harry is a cogent writer”? Is the reader confused about the meaning?
I might use “prosaic”, “flowery”, or “confusing” in the same way, even though strictly speaking those words are describing the writing and not the writer.
> The best essay would be on the most important topic you could tell people something surprising about.
The premise is wrong (or at least not obviously right) IMO, so I have a hard time taking any of the rest of it seriously. Could the best essay not be the most emotionally moving? The best when heard aloud? The most convincing call to action? The most accurate? The highest grossing? Driving the most engagement? What about the topic (any topic) that you could tell the /most interesting surprise/ about?
If Paul Graham didn’t run this company he certainly would not make it to the front page for his lazy philosophy.
Hemingway once said just write the truest sentence you can think of and I think he was right. Good writing and good essays are truthful in a way that wouldn't be expected from commercial and marketing copy. But to write truthfully one must know what is true and this is surprisingly hard.
On the most important topic you could tell people something surprising about. And all those things you said. And … and (yes, that “and”) … so much more!
We are talking about the join of all essay joins. The essay supremum. By definition
I think we can agree there is a limit to the length of this essay. Proof by absurdum: if the essay is too long to read, that would imply unread word choices make a difference. So there is finite length N.
Now we just search for it. Unleash the monkeys! Or today, unleash the competitive adversarial AI cohort!
We can find it, just not copyright it. Which I think, is the best outcome for humanity. Assuming this essay is aligned with our interests, but we have set that unboxing in motion now so it’s not worth worrying about
I think it’s best to maintain some humor when talking about mythical bests, one way or another
Anyone can nitpick anyone by listing whatabouts they didn't intend. Whatabout this OTHER sense of the word "best". It's in the dictionary. You didn't address it, therfore you're a lazy man of straw. The only defense to that type of attack is to write everything in a way that never chooses any one path, spends all it's time mounting a defense to every whatabout, vaguely floating over eggshells, immune to attack. Who wants to read something like that? Or, you can trust the reader to try to understand the context. The context is a man who calls himself an essayist, has about a hundred essays spanning a decade, all in a very distinct style, where most folks reading them are fans of the prior ones. The context is the Paul Graham Essay sense of the word essay. It's not discussing emotional, spoken, money grossing essays. And to help the reader not get hung up on those whatabouts, he even explicitly spelled what sense of best he is talking about.
I’m still surprised that this essay didn’t explore the nature of the audience. I’m not disagreeing with your take about the dangers of straw men, but PG does seem very much in the vein of essays are for communicating interesting stuff, or fun stuff, or provocative stuff. To someone! And it seems like too long of an essay to discover by the end this serious omission. A timeless essay is one that retains meaning to a person, or maybe many people, over the course of time. PG spent a while trying to explore the message in this essay and no time on trying to understand the audience.
This is not the first time that the whims of the rich have gutted cities. Compared to the explosion of suburbia and white flight in the 50s-80s, the current situation is much less dire.
My hometown of Minneapolis lost 30% (!!) of its population between 1950 and 1980. The only major difference now is that rich people are losing money instead of making more of it.
The big property owners will get subsidies to repurpose the now useless buildings. Corporate chain businesses will simply close down and continue making money elsewhere. Corporate office tenants will negotiate lower leases for smaller spaces.
Meanwhile, small businesses close and never come back. Downtown areas get abandoned and taken over by homeless. Property taxes of remaining residents will likely go up to make up for shortfalls.
The rich and the big corporations are going to be fine no matter how this shakes out. It's the normal people who are likely to come out worse off.
These two things are not unrelated. Moderate inflation is a feature, not a bug. It encourages people not to hoard currency for too long, which keep the economy humming along. One of the reasons the Great Depression lasted as long as it did was the Fed's tight money policy. And one of the reasons that neither the Great Recession nor the covid pandemic turned into Great Depression II is that the Fed opened up the floodgates.
Bitcoin is deflationary by design. That makes it a great asset but a terrible currency.
It's a feature! You see, it incentivizes spending, speculation, and investing, which are the only important economic activities, and punishes savers, which are miserly cash-hoarders who selfishly want to save for retirement without having to gamble.
BTW, you apparently don't understand what "saving" actually is. There are two kinds of saving. You can save by putting cash under your mattress, or you can save by putting money in the bank. These operate in fundamentally different ways. When you put money in the bank, it gets loaned out so that people can use it for productive activities. When you put it under the mattress it just sits there. It's very hard to lend bitcoin because there is no way to record a bitcoin transaction as a debt in the blockchain. All bitcoin transactions are structured as cash payments. So "saving" bitcoin is necessarily under-the-mattress type savings rather than in-the-bank type savings. This is one of the fundamental limitations of bitcoin, and one of the many reasons why it cannot be a currency, only a commodity.
Sure, but to lend your bitcoin you have to transfer it to a lending platform, which is to say, to a trusted third party (TTP). The whole point of bitcoin is supposed to be that it does not rely on a TTP. If you're going to trust a TTP to administer your loan, you might as well trust them to keep the ledger too. As soon as you lend your bitcoin you lose all of its purported advantages, including inflation protection. All you're left with is a ridiculously high electric bill.
Maybe from your perspective. From mine, it's as unwelcome of a "feature" as malvertising. If I can choose to opt out of this "feature", I will, and I do.
Thank goodness we have the legal freedom of choice to do so, and that bitcoin really exists, rather than still just being a concept on paper.
> It encourages people not to hoard currency for too long, which keep the economy humming along.
Who defines 'hoard' and 'too long'? If your definitions don't match mine, why should I be forced to respect your opinions? Simple answer: I choose to ignore them, because I can. I don't recognize anyone's right to devalue the product of my labor, even if they do it "for the good of society as a whole". Society's well-being isn't my problem, my well-being is.
>And one of the reasons that neither the Great Recession nor the covid pandemic turned into Great Depression II is that the Fed opened up the floodgates.
You want to talk about real bubbles? Look no further than the increase in value between securities and house prices relative to average incomes. That's the fed's money spigot. It didn't save the day, it just hyperinflated the bubble.
> I don't recognize anyone's right to devalue the product of my labor…
This bit I agree with, although I would add that salary (i.e. plain cash) alone as the fruit of labour is insufficient and unfair, and amounts to wage slavery.
> Society's well-being isn't my problem, my well-being is.
Those are interlinked, as living in a bunker is not good for your wellbeing.
It absolutely did. Unemployment during the Great Depression reached a high of 25% and was above 15% for nine years (which would probably have been longer if not for WW2). Unemployment during the covid pandemic reached a high of 15% and dropped below 4% less than two years later.
> it just hyperinflated the bubble.
It didn't do that either. Inflation reached an annualized high of 9.1% in June 2022 and is now down to less than 5% less than two years later. That is not hyperinflation. Hyperinflation looks like this:
> I don't recognize anyone's right to devalue the product of my labor
If you were operating in a barter economy, as you seem to wish for, the value of your labor would not be guaranteed to have stable value either, and would likely be far more volatile (especially depending on what the product of your labor is... you think farmers can demand their product not decay in value over time?). You just wouldn't have a convenient boogeyman to complain about, but I guess that's better to you?
You can do the same with bitcoin too. I don't know if you heard the news, but there are now enormous liquidity pools of billions of dollars that enable realtime conversion between BTC and USD, and they even automatically handle generating all of the tax forms for you too!
This liquidity is so massive and the clearing so instantaneous that you can even get a bitcoin debit card. Open account, deposit bitcoin, spend directly in USD via debit card!
That’s not buying things with bitcoin. That’s buying with USD and having something convert last minute. It’s no different than a brokerage card that sells stock to cover transactions.
By that logic, nobody ever buys anything. Credit cards don't directly send funds from point A to point B either, there's complex technical and financial underpinning for the entire PCI industry.
Arguing that using a BTC debit card to purchase something doesn't count as buying something with Bitcoin because the bitcoin you deposited is not sent directly to the merchant is like arguing that using a debit card from your bank to purchase something doesn't count as buying something with USD because the paper notes you deposited at your local branch aren't the same physical notes that the merchant pulls out of their bank account.
It's a nonsensical semantic argument entirely detached from the important aspect, which is that you can deposit cryptocurrency and spend it wherever you can use a visa/mastercard with zero friction, as easy as using your credit card.
> Credit cards don't directly send funds from point A to point B either
But dollars change hands (or accounts) at the end.
> using a debit card from your bank to purchase something doesn't count as buying something with USD because the paper notes you deposited at your local branch aren't the same physical notes that the merchant pulls out of their bank account.
Nobody made that argument. You did and argued against it.
> which is that you can deposit cryptocurrency and spend it
You buy and sell cryptocurrency so you can use the currency you started with. The added two steps of buying and selling crypto are immaterial to buying what you want. You merely invested and divested in a speculative asset, you didn't use it as currency.
"my currency is legit because that's the only currency accepted by the gang who threatens to use violence to abduct and imprison me in the middle of the the night for refusing to pay the protection (racketeering) payments they demand from me"
There are a few people street lights near me in Seattle and now I probably know why. I thought it was a vain (!) attempt to deter intravenous drug use.
I did gather that's why some bathrooms have blue lights, but yeah, it wouldn't make much sense to have random street lights have that.
Drug policy ramble, it's proven more beneficial to offer clean, well-lit places to shoot drugs, along with mental & medical health personnel and free methadon.
This article tries to out-logic racism (so smart!) but completely overlooks that different cultures have different experiences regarding who is a part, what it means to be a part, and how their culture meshes with the whole. And the sudden and intense interest in biological difference is kind of creepy too.
Obviously people of different cultures are slightly genetically different, otherwise how could you be racist against strangers! In the case of the professor who learned she was not ethnically indigenous, people didn’t want her out just because she, individually, was pretending to be native. It’s because there is an entire industry and extensive history of non-native people smothering native culture, telling native people through movies, books, etc. of what their own culture is or what it means, and of native arts and symbols being used by white people to make a quick buck. She /symbolized/ a sore point for the community and furthermore she was not open about it. The whole situation was unfortunate, but the author seems more interested in her case to prove his own point than in the concerns of the community he is poorly explaining about.
It’s true that a new change can intriduce more bugs, but I have a suspicion that the excel team is working with brains and a test harness that most software projects don’t have the time or money for.
The problem is: if you were the chief product manager of Excel you would risk yourself? New tests are required for new features and it's a difficult execution that money doesn't buy by itself. Is this a significant change to risk your job?
Big companies have all the money to modernize their systems yet they know the execution is difficult if not impossible to achieve in time. The classical story about running an older operating system and/or application that works instead on venturing on modernizing it.
