I listened to this podcast and it was maddening. A few of his frames :
AI is just software, nothing new to see here.
AI safety is primarily a sandboxing problem.
There is no collective action problem, and every company should just slow down if they think they need to slow down.
There is no need for regulation because the existing incentives in the market keep companies from acting badly, which is why no company has ever done anything bad.
If something bad does happen, then we can regulate after the fact.
We will end up creating more jobs than we destroy, so don't worry about it.
Our kids might forget a whole bunch of stuff or never learn it in the first place. But don't worry, they'll come up with new things to learn instead.
The only way to get safety is to move faster because then we will more quickly arrive at safety.
Recursive self-improvement is just what we've always done.
The real danger is alarmism that might scare the public and the young people.
You’re underselling how insane he seemed. Jenson’s behavior on that podcast was completely unacceptable. So much hubris and interrupted constantly. He presented so many complete unknowns about the future as obvious and matter of fact to him. The man has completely lost his mind.
It’s feeling less and less like human progress and more and more like progress for a small group at the top of our economic structure who are hoovering up everything for themselves.
Who gives a fuck if some techno barons can deploy novel software at the drop of a hat if it means I lose my career in an environment without social safety nets.
It’s not progress from my perspective when my life quality regresses.
Answer the question: who's coming to save you? Bernie? Donald? AOC? J.D.?
Better if you don't need saving at all, because you've been empowered to help yourself at your job. Ultimately the goal is to free you entirely from dependence on a day-to-day occupation.
You may have noticed that no one else is even trying to help.
It’s not great, and I wasn’t arguing for it. I was saying AI isn’t going to lead to that on its own.
Mechanically how is AI going to lead to a social safety net? You can’t just handwave the productivity increases when they are all owned by a handful of concentrated wealth
I see it as a second Industrial Revolution. After the IR, everybody still had a job, but most of those were (in the words of one personal friend) "bullshit jobs." Jobs that didn't involve growing food or building tangible things. What we'd call "white collar jobs," in other words. The economic value associated with those jobs simply didn't exist before the IR. It couldn't.
After this incarnation of the Industrial Revolution, those white-collar jobs will be mostly gone, and nothing will replace them. I personally don't think CEOs and politicians will end up being any more immune than junior programmers. New forms of organization will have to emerge on both the labor and management sides. (Democracy at the nation-state level is pretty much toast anyway, so something else is going to have to replace it, AI or no AI.)
Blue-collar labor will eventually be subsumed by robotics, but that will take longer. Things like UBI will make more sense in this environment than they do now, and I think that'll be a big part of it. Not to say that all gains will be equally distributed, or that they should be, but I don't things can get much worse than where they are headed today with regard to the tilted economic playing field.
The worst case scenario would indeed be if all the gains get concentrated and centralized, as the major AI labs seem to want, but I don't think it'll work out that way.
>The worst case scenario would indeed be if all the gains get concentrated and centralized, as the major AI labs seem to want, but I don't think it'll work out that way.
Youve laid out an idealistic view of how the world will work. You have not laid out how the transition between the current world where wealth is being concentrated somehow turns into UBI.
Even this sentence
> I personally don't think CEOs and politicians will end up being any more immune than junior programmers.
Implies that you think the capitalists who own these systems are going to be in charge since CEOs work for their boards and politicians largely follow their donors.
Again, lay out exactly how you think we move from our current system to UBI via AI technology.
>but I don't think it'll work out that way.
Is not you laying out how you think it will work, but a dogmatic religious belief with no evidence or logic behind it.
edit: Im sorry, I glossed over this sentence.
> Democracy at the nation-state level is pretty much toast anyway...
Are you a rationalist, e/acc, or someone related to TESCREAL, or especially anything touching on Curtis Yarvin? If so no need to answer, I think you guys are in a cult with the modern equivalent of Dianetics, so we are never going to see eye to eye.
Youve laid out an idealistic view of how the world will work. You have not laid out how the transition between the current world where wealth is being concentrated somehow turns into UBI.
Nor have you laid out how traditional political and social structures are going to save your job (or anyone else's) in the long run. You say you're "Angry and opinionated." We've seen the anger part, so let's hear some opinions.
Are you a rationalist, e/acc, or someone related to TESCREAL, or especially anything touching on Curtis Yarvin? If so no need to answer, I think you guys are in a cult with the modern equivalent of Dianetics, so we are never going to see eye to eye.
I'm e/acc-curious, you could say. Lots of philosophical overlap but I'm not much of a joiner. Not sure who the rationalists or TESCREAL are.
I know who Yarvin is, though, and would generally take the opposite side of any argument with him. If there's a "cult" in play here, it's the voters who were duped into electing and then re-electing Trump. Democracy simply cannot survive if it continues to grant stupid people the same political power as smart people. The stupid people will be herded to the polls by unethical smart people like Yarvin, using the power of mass media and social media as we've seen.
Meanwhile, the remaining smart people get along together like cats in a sack, ensuring they have only sporadic political influence that is bound to diminish further over time.
At the same time, democracy cannot retain the support of the people if it disenfranchises voters on grounds of education or intelligence. That leaves one obvious conclusion: that it won't survive. How AI will get us past that, I have no idea. But if you want to predict the future you're going to have to account for both the rise of AI and the fall of democracy.
> Nor have you laid out how traditional political and social structures are going to save your job (or anyone else's) in the long run.
I never stated that they would. That’s an opinion you manifested from thin air because I stated that I don’t think AI is going to lead to a social safety net on its own.
I think things are generally going to get worse for the average person with AI as all the benefits accumulate at the top.
Assuming the rise of AI and the fall of democracy doesn’t have a default mode of social safety nets, and we’re seeing leadership increasingly divorced from the will of the people already.
lol, no. It’s currently being deployed in feverish attempt to remove jobs.
I see company doing layoffs left and right because they can do the same or more with less employees. I’m not seeing any companies feverishly hiring engineers because the productivity per hour of labor is higher.
There is also no guarantee that AI will lead to any social safety net, they are orthogonal concepts.
The only thing that would lead to a social safety net is political will and currently all the political will behind the technology firms building AI appears to be firmly behind dismantling democracy and becoming oligarchical leaders of their little fiefdoms while the rest of us can get fucked.
Two questions: 1. Have the "fud-spreaders" actually held anything back so far? Seems like we're barreling forward, even though some of the FUD spreaders appear to be in charge of the main companies. 2. Do you, like Huang, see absolutely no risk in our current approach? Is everyone who disagrees with your perspective on this subject just plain wrong? Misguided, or actively malicious/in bad faith?
Have the "fud-spreaders" actually held anything back so far?
I don't know. Astroturf campaigns to subvert data center construction seem to have had an impact, for example, but ultimately I can only fall back on vague vibes picked up from the news and social media. I don't know the specific success rate.
Some of those campaigns seem justified to me (why in the world do these things have to be built in populated areas?) while other arguments made by the anti-data center movement are certainly propagated in bad faith (Water usage? Really?)
Seems like we're barreling forward, even though some of the FUD spreaders appear to be in charge of the main companies.
That's just so much kayfabe. Don't listen to what they say, watch what they do.
Do you, like Huang, see absolutely no risk in our current approach? Is everyone who disagrees with your perspective on this subject just plain wrong? Misguided, or actively malicious/in bad faith?
I can't speak for Huang as I don't know him personally, but he has to walk a tightrope between an infantilized POTUS with essentially unlimited power to wreck his business, and his own stockholders who have elevated his company's market cap to a level that probably doesn't make sense even to him. As far as I can tell he's just going the obvious, predictable, and safe route of trying to sell as many shovels and tents as he can while the selling is good.
I see a bigger downside in the precautionary principle than in accelerationism. We are going to face immense societal disruption due to AI over the next couple of decades. That is as unavoidable as an earthquake. It is going to happen regardless of who prevails in the political and social arguments going on today. There is no possible way that every actor in every country on Earth is going to be convinced or compelled to "pace the frontier." Consequently, all that matters is how we react, adapt, and take advantage of the new ground rules of reality.
As usual, there will be those who thrive and those who get steamrolled. But I see no reason why we won't all end up better off in the end, as with the rest of the history of technology since the invention of fire.
I was just having fun and pointing out that some dangerous technologies (or at least their applications) were pretty cool, at least if one ignores the danger. Radium dial watches and clocks were also pretty cool, but also remain radioactive long after they stop emitting light. Uranium glassware is attractive and fluoresces beautifully under UV light (and somewhat under daylight) but is mildly radioactive and can also potentially result in ingesting uranium.
GP might have been thinking of things like the inventions of the illustrious Thomas Midgley Jr. and his vigorous promotion of tetraethyl lead, etc.
GP might have been thinking of things like the inventions of the illustrious Thomas Midgley Jr. and his vigorous promotion of tetraethyl lead, etc.
Yep, that would be a much better example. Defending Midgley is a task for superintelligent AI if there ever was one.
Still, the underlying technology is not "leaded gasoline" but "internal combustion engines." The human condition would certainly be better if you could erase Midgley from history, along with the people who invented shoe-store fluoroscopes and radium paint, but it would be worse if you erased Roentgen, Otto and Diesel. Horses weren't the global-max of mobility and human brains aren't the apotheosis of reason.
No dude, it was an analogy. Sorry to pick on you, you're just another ignorant uninformed take in this thread, but come on. This technology is progressing at an insane rate, the shit it's doing now is science fiction from just a year or two ago, and people just keep on moving the goal posts, it's maddening. The technology is unpredictable and that in itself has risks. You must realize that the window of possibility is widening the further into the future we go! Can you pick people with epistemology you trust and see if there's anything you can learn in this moment? Can you try to challenge your own ideas instead of retreating into comfortable certitude? There are real risks here, they are worth taking seriously, and serious people are doing so!
I would bet that using this, you could get pretty close to shippable PCB on first try. This is being used by some pretty big players to design complicated high frequency boards, and that's the main focus of the product, but it can handle basic designs just fine.
Visions of vast data centers surrounded by fields of browning grass, in which aging, rusting, formerly extremely expensive hardware is spending billions of compute cycles looking at anime catgirls
Warmer water holds less dissolved gases of all kinds, including CO2. You can see this yourself by heating water in your kitchen. Well below the boiling point, you can observe tiny bubbles, which are composed of nitrogen and oxygen dissolved in the water coming out of solution. The oceans will eventually become carbon sources, not carbon sinks, if they warm enough, but that's not projected to happen this century.
However, there are regions of the oceans which currently absorb lots of CO2 which will absorb much less as time goes on. One important example is the AMOC, which, by turning over lots of water, helps sink surface dissolved CO2 into the deeper ocean. In recent years, oceanographers have observed a weakening of the AMOC, which was predicted but is happening much earlier than expected. This is one of the important planetary tipping points, which could cause a dramatic shift in the planet's climate.
But don't worry -- the Trump administration is defunding programs like the Office of Oceanic and Atmospheric Research, decommissioning the Ocean Observatories Initiative, and is planning to shutter NOAA's research arm altogether -- thus solving the problem once and for all.
And one scary observation related to this is that warm water will also hold less oxygen for marine life, literally throttling that part of our life-support.
Back when I still used Google, in the dark old days of mid-late 2025, it sure seemed like the SEO was winning. Once you got to page 3, where the ads ran out, you would then smoothly transition into total scam. A common one was where they'd show you scraped SO (remember that one?) content which somehow placed higher in the rankings than actual SO, and there'd be like 3 of those in various skins. I assumed they wanted to show me more ads, though those were much more easily handled with an ad blocker, unlike Google's search results. I assume it's continued to deteriorate from there, does anyone know?
This is a genuinely huge deal, and I think it's worth appreciating why hydro makes sense here specifically, even though the headline cost looks steep.
On paper, this project runs around $5M per megawatt of capacity, while utility solar can be built for roughly a fifth of that. But that comparison is misleading once you factor in capacity factor --Churchill Falls runs near 74% of its max output almost all the time, while solar in most places only hits 20-25%. To match the same annual output, you'd need to build solar at more than 3x its nameplate capacity.
And even then, batteries only solve the day/night problem. Labrador can get stretches of overcast, snowy weather for a week or more at a time, and multi-day battery storage is still wildly expensive compared to a reservoir that just stores water until it's needed.
Try this same approach somewhere sunny and cloud-free like Texas, and solar+storage would almost certainly win, especially when accounting for the land area that needs to be submerged by the reservoir. This project makes sense because it's matched to the geography.
One problem with hydro is we've long ago exhausted the easy wins, and then went on to build the kinda wash outs. See the fight over Glen canyon, which even its architect went on to admit was a mistake. The wins now are in closed loop pumped hydro; see https://www.volts.wtf/p/whats-the-deal-with-pumped-hydro
> A number of prominent Westerners have spoken out against the dam over the years - Republican icon Barry Goldwater, former congressman and interior secretary Stewart Udall, his brother and another former congressman, Mo Udall, and David Brower, a patriarch of the environmental movement.
> All supported dam legislation in 1956. All now say it was a mistake. Goldwater calls the dam "the one vote I wish I could take back."
Thanks for providing an update, but none of those people were the "architect" in any sense, political or otherwise.
The main person responsible for getting the dam built was Floyd Dominy, and he still supported the dam up to his death, which is why I asked in the first place.
I tried repeatedly with several credit unions, with poor results. The final straw was the patelco hack that made the entire bank unavailable for over a week. In the aftermath they implanted crazy security measures where talking to a rep required 6 layers of increasingly invasive authentication. But... The hack was of the bank infrastructure. It had nothing to do with individualized fraud, all accounts were affected --it was just security theater. I went back to a major bank after that.
AI is just software, nothing new to see here.
AI safety is primarily a sandboxing problem.
There is no collective action problem, and every company should just slow down if they think they need to slow down.
There is no need for regulation because the existing incentives in the market keep companies from acting badly, which is why no company has ever done anything bad.
If something bad does happen, then we can regulate after the fact.
We will end up creating more jobs than we destroy, so don't worry about it.
Our kids might forget a whole bunch of stuff or never learn it in the first place. But don't worry, they'll come up with new things to learn instead.
The only way to get safety is to move faster because then we will more quickly arrive at safety.
Recursive self-improvement is just what we've always done.
The real danger is alarmism that might scare the public and the young people.
Nothing bad can happen, it can only good happen.
reply