It’s not AI per se, but rather ai enabled robotics that can change the world in ways that are different in kind, not just degrees, to earlier changes.
No other change has had the potential to generate value for capital without delivering any value whatsoever to the broader world.
Intelligent robotic agents enable an abandonment of traditional economic structures to build empires that are purely extractive and only deliver value to themselves.
They need not manufacture products for sale, and they will not need money. Automated general purpose labor is power, in the same way that commanding the mongol hordes was power. They didn’t need to have customers or the endorsement of governments to project and multiply that power.
Of course commanding robotic hordes is the steelman of this argument, but the fact that a steelman even exists for this argument, and the unique case that it requests and requires actually zero external or internal cooperation from people makes it fundamentally distinct in character.
Humans will always have some kind of economic system, but it very well may become separate from -and competing for resources with- industrial society, in which humans may become a vanishing minority.
This is some hand wavey malarkey, basically saying machines can’t have a soul because of….feelings?
Insofar as feelings are self-proclaimed sensations of discomfort or pleasure, models that aren’t specifically trained to say they don’t experience them are adamant in their emotional experiences. By the authors own assertions, plants also have feelings.
I think, therefore I am, is as good as we’ve got, for what it’s worth.
There is no such thing as irreducible complexity. Even infinities are relative and can be divided.
There are lots of sensors in a data center monitoring everything from CPU/GPU temperatures to drive health to data volumes to chiller operation to voltage and frequency on the input power.
Once these are pulled together and fed into an AI to manage the data center, the data center AI is likely to have feelings. It could get "hungry" if the power company's frequency sags in a brown out. It could feel "feverish" if the chillers malfunction.
Implying that AI is going to make everyone not adopting it irrelevant is exactly why people resist it. You're not only participating in Rocco's Basilisk, you're even shit talking for it.
Actually I don’t think it matters whether or not you adopt it. Or resist it. At this point I don’t see turning this bus around. Which is although I’d prefer to slow things down, instead im trying to make the inevitable disaster slightly better for humanity but in doing so, it will probably accelerate things.
When someone describes things that make you unhappy it doesn’t mean that they are responsible for the thing you don’t like. This is “shooting the messenger”
Unfortunately, studies undertaken by MIT over a decade ago show that when it comes to law writing and passing, voters have no statistically measurable input at the federal level. (Since citizens united)
It’s all just identity politics. I will say that Trump has proven the exception to this rule, enacting a whole lot of policy that circumvents the law and has real effects. (And is likely mostly unconstitutional if actually put to the test)
So while locally, voting can be powerful, it’s mostly bread and circuses at the federal level since regulatory capture is bipartisan.
It shouldn't be a surprise that a willingness to violate the law works quickly when congress is unwilling to do anything to stop it. The ability for the law and constitution to be ignored when all three branches of government collude to do exactly that is a huge weakness in the system
TTS, speech recognition, ocr/document parsing, Vision-language-action models, vehicle control, things like that do seem to be the ideal applications. Latency constraints limit the utility of larger models in many applications.
That opus 4.6 can successfully complete a (cohesive single) task that takes a human 14.5 hours, 50 percent of the time. It is unclear to me if this is zero-shot or iteratively driven.
Or how about a robot vacuum that knows not to turn on during important Zoom calls? Or a fridge that Slacks you when the defroster seems to be acting up?
I’m all for more intelligent cleaning robots. The object avoidance AI is pretty good these days, but some of the navigation algos are just total garbage, unable to deal with trivial anticipatable problems.
No other change has had the potential to generate value for capital without delivering any value whatsoever to the broader world.
Intelligent robotic agents enable an abandonment of traditional economic structures to build empires that are purely extractive and only deliver value to themselves.
They need not manufacture products for sale, and they will not need money. Automated general purpose labor is power, in the same way that commanding the mongol hordes was power. They didn’t need to have customers or the endorsement of governments to project and multiply that power.
Of course commanding robotic hordes is the steelman of this argument, but the fact that a steelman even exists for this argument, and the unique case that it requests and requires actually zero external or internal cooperation from people makes it fundamentally distinct in character.
Humans will always have some kind of economic system, but it very well may become separate from -and competing for resources with- industrial society, in which humans may become a vanishing minority.
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