First and foremost, physics strikes again with the speed of light. Pretty much all modern processing is done synchronously which means that it requires a clock signal that changes everywhere at the same time.
To put a number on that: at 4.5 GHz (which is perfectly doable with current processors) light can travel about 6.5cm.
Take a look at your motherboard. 6.5cm is barely the distance to the RAM slots; the PCI-E slots are further away than that. The CPU die is of course smaller, but it's interesting to realize that CPUs can process quite a few instructions in the time it takes light to go from one end of the motherboard to the other.
Canada uses first past the post voting, which makes it very difficult to set a new party up. If you try, you end up splitting the vote with whichever of the two main parties most closely aligns with you, which leads to the other main party being more likely to win -- as a result most people won't vote for you, even when they support you more than either of the two leading parties.
"Set up a new party" would be rather a lot viable if that was fixed... but good lucking getting FPTP replaced by anything else.
This is a good example of something that's easy, simple and incredibly wrong (or at least incomplete).
Imagine an AI that's been asked to do something. The AI decides that the best way to do it is to do X. But it's also smart enough to know that if anybody discovers that it's going to do X, they'll hit the Off switch, which will stop it from doing the original task. So what's it going to do? It'll hide the fact that it's going to do X, while trying to manoeuvre itself into a position where it can do X without getting shut down (which might mean disabling the Off switch, getting the ability to prevent anybody from pressing it, or perhaps just by setting things up so that it can do X so fast or stealthily that nobody realizes or can react until it's too late).
An Off switch isn't enough. You need to figure out how to program the AI so that it doesn't try to disable its own Off switch, so that it doesn't disable it accidentally, so that it doesn't mind someone pressing it (even though that'll kill it/stop it from doing its job), but most importantly so that it doesn't even try to do anything that would have you want to press the Off switch in the first place, since you can't guarantee you'd get a chance to do so. We don't really know how to do any of those.
Perhaps not "want", no. But what about indifference? What about an AI that's been ordered to do something, and the most efficient way happens to involve disassembling you and it just doesn't care about the consequences?
It may well be true that AI won't want to destroy humanity without being programmed to, but it's also not going to want to do the right thing either unless we program it to -- but not only do we not really know how to do that, if you look around the/. comments on these articles you'll see there isn't even general agreement that we should be trying. This seems like an incredible risk to be taking to me.
You mean those Chinese engineers whose native language actually does benefit from high resolution rendering?
Admittedly LG are Korean which probably benefits less for most of its characters, but I expect they're still interested in the Chinese (and Japanese) markets.
No, another one won't fill the gap. ISPs require massive startup costs (digging up the ground to put new cables in isn't cheap) and are legally prevented from providing service in many areas anyway (due to exclusivity agreements).
This is a sane position, but the problem isn't quite so simple as that. AI development is competitive: whoever builds the first super-intelligent AGI is probably going to win big time. Any team that bothers to spend time considering safety is likely to lose to teams that don't.
I'm not entirely sure how we can avoid that. Even if you managed to pass global laws, how do you deal with people secretly breaking the law?
(Of course there's a big difference between AGI and driverless cars; the latter is pretty easy to manage the risk of. But when people start throwing around phrases like "existential risk", they're not talking about the cars.)
Hopefully, WebExtensions will provide all the same functionality as the deprecated APIs
You can hope all you like, but not doing this is explicitly one of the goals of WEs. It's thus highly likely that they won't provide the same functionality.
I think we can be fairly sure there's nothing non-physical going on in our brains. Nothing else the universe does works like that, our brains are constructed out of perfectly normal matter and thus appear to run on normal physics, and it would make human brains magically special which is crazy. None of that means we're not conscious, it just means that consciousness is something boring and repeatable once you know how to do it.
Prove otherwise and I won't refuse to believe you, but I'm not going to expect that to happen.
There are some scientific indicators though that there may be more to the human mind than physics as known, for example the constant long-term failure to create general ("strong") AI even on the level of an utter moron. It seems this is either excessively hard or impossible.
I have mostly the opposite impression. We know the brain uses neural networks, and we've only really figured neural networks out in the past few years. And in the past few years we've made massive advances in AI everything. Since neural networks are our only real avenue of attack on AGI (our only example is the human brain, and that uses them), I see the current situation as demonstrating less that AGI is hard and more that neural networks were hard. And our ability to do with software many of the things that were previously human-only definitely demonstrates that those parts of the human brain are reproducible.
AGI might still be hard, but it might also simply turn out to be a matter of combining existing neural networks in the right way. Certainly every other AI problem has had people going "oh, but that's just X" or "that's just Y" (exactly like you did). Why not this one?
Note that "we have no idea how the brain works" doesn't mean we can't reproduce it. The neural networks involved in AlphaGo, for instance, are completely inscrutable; we have no idea how they work or why they evaluate any given move they way they do. Yet they demonstrably work just fine for playing Go.
[...] but having jobs for 10-15% of the population is not going to keep the current society-models going.
Yeah. None of these attempts to predict exactly where the limits of AI are will change anything when the limits are clearly high enough that we've got a problem.
It's "universal" so by definition receiving it doesn't depend on how much money you earn or how much tax you pay (although there's probably a "for working age adults" proviso in there...). Stopping tax evasion is orthogonal to that.
No, it's not done as a trick to take from the middle and reward the wealthy. It's done as a trick to make sure that everybody can feed, clothe and house themselves. I personally don't think that's a bad thing to do.
Good point, but it should be a lot easier to verify someone's identity than to verify their identity and do means-testing for the zillions of separate welfare-related programs we have at the moment. (Not to mention that we're ploughing full speed ahead into a future where humans can't really compete for jobs at all, so the difference between "number of people without a job" and "number of people" is going to start getting smaller and smaller anyway.)
By that argument, there's likely no human creativity either. "Filter things from random searches" is probably a pretty good description of how creativity works in human brains too. We're aren't special; I don't buy that our brain does something that computers can't.
...but that ultimately doesn't even matter. If an AI can emulate the output of a human brain, and it can do so cheaper than a human can, then it doesn't matter if the AI works in the same way a brain does or not. It can still act as a replacement.
However, in current understanding, Parkinson's law is a reference to the self-satisfying uncontrolled growth of the bureaucratic apparatus in an organization.
You're missing the point. The point isn't that there won't be anything that needs doing. The point is that AIs will be able to do all of it. It doesn't matter how much bureaucracy you create; if it can all be handled by AIs then there won't be anything for humans to do.
Hardly "force". If you want to live somewhere that's more expensive than your UBI can cover, then get a job for the extra money, or move in with some friends.
(Note that a big reason that people live in big cities is because that's where all the jobs are. With a UBI, living where all the jobs are becomes less critical, and you'd probably find quite a few people who'd be more than happy to move out to more rural areas. If that happens, it would lower the cost of living in cities.)
I don't think a UBI should be set high enough to cover, by itself, living alone in one of the most expensive cities in the US (but likewise, it shouldn't be set so low that the only place you can afford with it is in the middle of nowhere with eight housemates).
You may consider it appropriate, but that's not how welfare programs work. If you don't have a job, but you're married to a spouse with a nice income, you don't get welfare benefits. So, getting rid of all the management and bureaucracies and giving everybody the same independent of circumstances means throwing away more money.
And yet doing so independent of circumstances is one of the key points of a UBI, for reasons which have been explained many times over by people who are much better at doing so than I.
I wouldn't be so sure about creativity and insight either. Check out this sketch, colored by an AI neural network based on just a few squiggled hints. You can hardly argue that coloring isn't creative, and that's an AI that exists right now -- the tech is only improving as time goes on.
I think a lot of your examples aren't really cases that would justify getting more or less money though. For example, living in an expensive neighborhood? The UBI is a universal basic income, it's supposed to cover basic needs. Not "I want to live in a big house in a posh neighborhood". If you want the extra money for that, then work.
Similarly, two people living together in the same house saves resources, and it's only appropriate that they can spend the saved money elsewhere (perhaps on the children that often accompany living together).
You're right that they wouldn't offer the same amount, but surely you see the advantage of not having a big trap around welfare that encourages people to not take a job once they're on it.
You're being short-sighted. A robot that can serve you pizza won't change much, no. But what about a robot that can do all of the things we're currently doing, and all of those "things to do that other people will want done"?
Our automation for physical tasks is improving, but we're also rapidly approaching the point of having AIs that can do cognitive or creative tasks as well as we can. It's easy to say "we'll come up with something", but there's not going to be a whole lot of things left that humans can do better than some combination of robot and AI can.
Some people may be like that, but I see two problems with that observation.
Short term: current welfare strongly encourages people to not get a job, because when you get a job you automatically lose the welfare. Let's say you get offered $1100/mo to work a 30h/week job, but your welfare gives you $1000/mo. Essentially you're being offered $100/mo for 30 hours of work per week. Would you take that offer? With a UBI, suddenly the same job would be paying 11x as much for your time, and I suspect that would make you more likely to say "yes". In other words, a UBI would remove the boredom for many people, and thus improve the situation.
Long term: between automation and AIs, jobs are going away. There's just not going to be enough work out there for humans to do (and this probably isn't a very far future either, because AI research is moving really damn fast). Having lots of people with no work to do is something we're going to have to deal with whether or not we do a UBI, so it doesn't constitute a reason not to do a UBI. Also, without a UBI, those people are either going to be on welfare (with its associated high per-person administration overhead), or they aren't -- in which case they won't be bored, they'll be bored and desparate. I'd say that wouldn't be an improvement.
A UBI is very simple to administrate and requires very little bureaucracy. Our current collection of welfare systems are not. The reduction in bureaucracy won't come from increasing the number of people on welfare, but by reducing the per-person administration overhead.
I have absolutely no idea how you managed to misunderstand that from the GP's post.
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First and foremost, physics strikes again with the speed of light. Pretty much all modern processing is done synchronously which means that it requires a clock signal that changes everywhere at the same time.
To put a number on that: at 4.5 GHz (which is perfectly doable with current processors) light can travel about 6.5cm.
Take a look at your motherboard. 6.5cm is barely the distance to the RAM slots; the PCI-E slots are further away than that. The CPU die is of course smaller, but it's interesting to realize that CPUs can process quite a few instructions in the time it takes light to go from one end of the motherboard to the other.
Canada uses first past the post voting, which makes it very difficult to set a new party up. If you try, you end up splitting the vote with whichever of the two main parties most closely aligns with you, which leads to the other main party being more likely to win -- as a result most people won't vote for you, even when they support you more than either of the two leading parties.
"Set up a new party" would be rather a lot viable if that was fixed... but good lucking getting FPTP replaced by anything else.
This is a good example of something that's easy, simple and incredibly wrong (or at least incomplete).
Imagine an AI that's been asked to do something. The AI decides that the best way to do it is to do X. But it's also smart enough to know that if anybody discovers that it's going to do X, they'll hit the Off switch, which will stop it from doing the original task. So what's it going to do? It'll hide the fact that it's going to do X, while trying to manoeuvre itself into a position where it can do X without getting shut down (which might mean disabling the Off switch, getting the ability to prevent anybody from pressing it, or perhaps just by setting things up so that it can do X so fast or stealthily that nobody realizes or can react until it's too late).
An Off switch isn't enough. You need to figure out how to program the AI so that it doesn't try to disable its own Off switch, so that it doesn't disable it accidentally, so that it doesn't mind someone pressing it (even though that'll kill it/stop it from doing its job), but most importantly so that it doesn't even try to do anything that would have you want to press the Off switch in the first place, since you can't guarantee you'd get a chance to do so. We don't really know how to do any of those.
Perhaps not "want", no. But what about indifference? What about an AI that's been ordered to do something, and the most efficient way happens to involve disassembling you and it just doesn't care about the consequences?
It may well be true that AI won't want to destroy humanity without being programmed to, but it's also not going to want to do the right thing either unless we program it to -- but not only do we not really know how to do that, if you look around the /. comments on these articles you'll see there isn't even general agreement that we should be trying. This seems like an incredible risk to be taking to me.
You mean those Chinese engineers whose native language actually does benefit from high resolution rendering?
Admittedly LG are Korean which probably benefits less for most of its characters, but I expect they're still interested in the Chinese (and Japanese) markets.
No, another one won't fill the gap. ISPs require massive startup costs (digging up the ground to put new cables in isn't cheap) and are legally prevented from providing service in many areas anyway (due to exclusivity agreements).
Fix those problems and then you'll have a point.
This is a sane position, but the problem isn't quite so simple as that. AI development is competitive: whoever builds the first super-intelligent AGI is probably going to win big time. Any team that bothers to spend time considering safety is likely to lose to teams that don't.
I'm not entirely sure how we can avoid that. Even if you managed to pass global laws, how do you deal with people secretly breaking the law?
(Of course there's a big difference between AGI and driverless cars; the latter is pretty easy to manage the risk of. But when people start throwing around phrases like "existential risk", they're not talking about the cars.)
Except they don't. Their replacement is WebExtensions which isn't even close to being a reasonable replacement.
Hopefully, WebExtensions will provide all the same functionality as the deprecated APIs
You can hope all you like, but not doing this is explicitly one of the goals of WEs. It's thus highly likely that they won't provide the same functionality.
I think we can be fairly sure there's nothing non-physical going on in our brains. Nothing else the universe does works like that, our brains are constructed out of perfectly normal matter and thus appear to run on normal physics, and it would make human brains magically special which is crazy. None of that means we're not conscious, it just means that consciousness is something boring and repeatable once you know how to do it.
Prove otherwise and I won't refuse to believe you, but I'm not going to expect that to happen.
I have mostly the opposite impression. We know the brain uses neural networks, and we've only really figured neural networks out in the past few years. And in the past few years we've made massive advances in AI everything. Since neural networks are our only real avenue of attack on AGI (our only example is the human brain, and that uses them), I see the current situation as demonstrating less that AGI is hard and more that neural networks were hard. And our ability to do with software many of the things that were previously human-only definitely demonstrates that those parts of the human brain are reproducible.
AGI might still be hard, but it might also simply turn out to be a matter of combining existing neural networks in the right way. Certainly every other AI problem has had people going "oh, but that's just X" or "that's just Y" (exactly like you did). Why not this one?
Note that "we have no idea how the brain works" doesn't mean we can't reproduce it. The neural networks involved in AlphaGo, for instance, are completely inscrutable; we have no idea how they work or why they evaluate any given move they way they do. Yet they demonstrably work just fine for playing Go.
Yeah. None of these attempts to predict exactly where the limits of AI are will change anything when the limits are clearly high enough that we've got a problem.
It's "universal" so by definition receiving it doesn't depend on how much money you earn or how much tax you pay (although there's probably a "for working age adults" proviso in there...). Stopping tax evasion is orthogonal to that.
No, it's not done as a trick to take from the middle and reward the wealthy. It's done as a trick to make sure that everybody can feed, clothe and house themselves. I personally don't think that's a bad thing to do.
Good point, but it should be a lot easier to verify someone's identity than to verify their identity and do means-testing for the zillions of separate welfare-related programs we have at the moment. (Not to mention that we're ploughing full speed ahead into a future where humans can't really compete for jobs at all, so the difference between "number of people without a job" and "number of people" is going to start getting smaller and smaller anyway.)
By that argument, there's likely no human creativity either. "Filter things from random searches" is probably a pretty good description of how creativity works in human brains too. We're aren't special; I don't buy that our brain does something that computers can't.
...but that ultimately doesn't even matter. If an AI can emulate the output of a human brain, and it can do so cheaper than a human can, then it doesn't matter if the AI works in the same way a brain does or not. It can still act as a replacement.
This?
You're missing the point. The point isn't that there won't be anything that needs doing. The point is that AIs will be able to do all of it. It doesn't matter how much bureaucracy you create; if it can all be handled by AIs then there won't be anything for humans to do.
I'll take that as a "no" then.
Hardly "force". If you want to live somewhere that's more expensive than your UBI can cover, then get a job for the extra money, or move in with some friends.
(Note that a big reason that people live in big cities is because that's where all the jobs are. With a UBI, living where all the jobs are becomes less critical, and you'd probably find quite a few people who'd be more than happy to move out to more rural areas. If that happens, it would lower the cost of living in cities.)
I don't think a UBI should be set high enough to cover, by itself, living alone in one of the most expensive cities in the US (but likewise, it shouldn't be set so low that the only place you can afford with it is in the middle of nowhere with eight housemates).
And yet doing so independent of circumstances is one of the key points of a UBI, for reasons which have been explained many times over by people who are much better at doing so than I.
They shouldn't. Setting the payment at $1000 vs $1500 (or whatever) shouldn't change the administration overhead.
I wouldn't be so sure about creativity and insight either. Check out this sketch, colored by an AI neural network based on just a few squiggled hints. You can hardly argue that coloring isn't creative, and that's an AI that exists right now -- the tech is only improving as time goes on.
Perhaps one UBI should only be enough to rent an apartment, then.
And it costs a bunch of money to handle all that.
I think a lot of your examples aren't really cases that would justify getting more or less money though. For example, living in an expensive neighborhood? The UBI is a universal basic income, it's supposed to cover basic needs. Not "I want to live in a big house in a posh neighborhood". If you want the extra money for that, then work.
Similarly, two people living together in the same house saves resources, and it's only appropriate that they can spend the saved money elsewhere (perhaps on the children that often accompany living together).
Or not. Would you take the offer I described?
You're right that they wouldn't offer the same amount, but surely you see the advantage of not having a big trap around welfare that encourages people to not take a job once they're on it.
People who are earning a lot will end up giving their UBI back in taxes, so in net terms we won't end up spending much money on them.
You're being short-sighted. A robot that can serve you pizza won't change much, no. But what about a robot that can do all of the things we're currently doing, and all of those "things to do that other people will want done"?
Our automation for physical tasks is improving, but we're also rapidly approaching the point of having AIs that can do cognitive or creative tasks as well as we can. It's easy to say "we'll come up with something", but there's not going to be a whole lot of things left that humans can do better than some combination of robot and AI can.
Some people may be like that, but I see two problems with that observation.
Short term: current welfare strongly encourages people to not get a job, because when you get a job you automatically lose the welfare. Let's say you get offered $1100/mo to work a 30h/week job, but your welfare gives you $1000/mo. Essentially you're being offered $100/mo for 30 hours of work per week. Would you take that offer? With a UBI, suddenly the same job would be paying 11x as much for your time, and I suspect that would make you more likely to say "yes". In other words, a UBI would remove the boredom for many people, and thus improve the situation.
Long term: between automation and AIs, jobs are going away. There's just not going to be enough work out there for humans to do (and this probably isn't a very far future either, because AI research is moving really damn fast). Having lots of people with no work to do is something we're going to have to deal with whether or not we do a UBI, so it doesn't constitute a reason not to do a UBI. Also, without a UBI, those people are either going to be on welfare (with its associated high per-person administration overhead), or they aren't -- in which case they won't be bored, they'll be bored and desparate. I'd say that wouldn't be an improvement.
A UBI is very simple to administrate and requires very little bureaucracy. Our current collection of welfare systems are not. The reduction in bureaucracy won't come from increasing the number of people on welfare, but by reducing the per-person administration overhead.
I have absolutely no idea how you managed to misunderstand that from the GP's post.