It's mere slander. It reminds me of the Smithsonian's insistence that punctuality, hard work, objectivity, and politeness were aspects of "white dominant culture" and "white supremacy".
Some Inuit practiced senilicide up through the 20th century.
"On the other hand, when food did run short, the old and sick were looked upon as drains on the community’s resources. Sometimes they were killed – thrown into the sea, buried alive, locked out in the cold, or starved to death. Far more commonly they were simply abandoned to die. The victim might be taken out in the wilderness and left there, or the whole village might pick up and move away while the old person slept. If the villagers were unexpectedly restored to prosperity, they might go back to rescue those left behind. An abandoned person would also be welcomed back as a full member of the community if he could manage to make his way back to the village on his own. But usually he couldn’t."
"There were no needy ones among them, because those who owned lands or houses would sell their property, bring the proceeds from the sales, and lay them at the apostles’ feet for distribution to anyone as he had need." Acts 4:34-35
The Catholic Church has an ancient tradition asserting the inherent dignity of the human person (imago Dei), regardless of circumstance, including the very recent Encyclical Magnifica Humanitas (Magnificent Humanity) subtitled On Safeguarding the Human Person in the Time of Artificial Intelligence.
In our supposedly rational age we've discarded structures which encoded timeless wisdom because we didn't recognize the value. We thought we'd outgrown it, but it turns out that now is when we need it the most.
"So I'd like to engage AI risk from both these perspectives. I think the arguments for superintelligence are somewhat silly, and full of unwarranted assumptions.
But even if you find them persuasive, there is something unpleasant about AI alarmism as a cultural phenomenon that should make us hesitate to take it seriously.
First, let me engage the substance. Here are the arguments I have against Bostrom-style superintelligence as a risk to humanity"
--
The framing here seems to me to equate "AI risk" and "AI alarmism" with buying in to belief in "Bostom-style superintellgence".
I'm not sure if the author meant to put anyone who is alarmed by developments in what we're calling "AI" into the same bucket as "AI obsessives want to make it into a programming problem, by designing a God-like machine", but I think this conflation is unfair and, frankly, dangerous.
I don't know what superintelligence is. I don't even know what intelligence is. And I don't really know what either "artificial" or "general" mean either when talking about "AGI".
You can believe, as I do, that these things can be, and will inevitably will be if we don't radically correct course, used to do very bad things independent and short of being "God-like". When you have systems which can hypothesize, synthesize, and test thousands if not millions of potential infectious agents in bulk [0], and can then order the ingredients for you from dodgy websites via some "claw", and then when you put these systems under the unsupervised control of millions of people with varying levels of stability and altruism, something extremely bad is exceedingly likely to happen.
I understand that 2016 is ages ago and things change, but I came away from the article with the impression that if I'm worried about AI risk then I'm a clown like the three pictured in the "Outside Argument" section (you're a Google-Glass-wearing cringe nerd if you're alarmed). Maybe that's my fault and I'm not smart enough to understand the actual point of the article. If I have misinterpreted, I welcome the correction.
"John wore a T-shirt that featured a smiley face with a bullet hole in the forehead from which trickled a few drops of blood"
Sounds like a Watchmen Comedian logo t-shirt. It could be construed as a bold choice but was probably just what was on the top of his t-shirt stack that day.
"but I can't help but see parallels between today and the Industrial Revolution"
You're not the only one.
The current Pope Leo XIV explicitly named himself after the the previous Leo, Pope Leo XIII, who was pope during the Industrial Revolution (1878-1903) and issued the influential Encyclical Rerum novarum (Rights and Duties of Capital and Labor) in response to the upheaval.
“Pope Leo XIII, with the historic Encyclical Rerum novarum, addressed the social question in the context of the first great industrial revolution,” Pope Leo recalled. “Today, the Church offers to all her treasure of social teaching in response to another industrial revolution and the developments of artificial intelligence.” A name, then, not only rooted in tradition, but one that looks firmly ahead to the challenges of a rapidly changing world and the perennial call to protect those most vulnerable within it.”
Oh hohm. Such a great mouthpiece Pope Leo XIII was for extolling and providing cover for the excesses of the worst breed of capitalist. Whilst my experience with such religious writing is used to coming away from them not wholely satisfied one way or another, this particular piece was heavily biased toward the "Captain's of Industry" and capitalist civilizations of the time. Explicitly condemning the practices by which labor can usurp the yoke of the unjustly enriched, and no consideration whatsoever against the fact that as capital centralizes, there are fewer and fewer places to actually look for employment that isn't in one way or another unconscionable to the Soul. Which, thankfully, the fellow at least had the decency to recognize that one isn't at, nor should be at liberty to give one's soul up because the only people signing cheques are those that are most conditioned to being in service not to anyone else, but merely to themselves.
For instance, it places the burden of the yoke of thrift equally on all men, without recognizing that that yoke provides exactly the spiritual cover required for the pernicious greedmonger to sleep soundly after condemning thousands to a situation where in their self-preservation is not guaranteed.
I see some mild concessions to the working class, which we have plenty of history from which to reason that even with a Papal acknowledgement, these words did not suffice to tilt the behavior of men away from ungodly and abusive treatment of their fellow men until such time as they were confronted with force. That the Pope of all people then doubled down by pointing out that "agitators would arise to foment violence and revolt" without taking into consideration that is the only language left that will be understood by the man whose heart has sufficiently hardened to enable him to with a stroke of a pen condemn thousands to millions, nay billions at a time to suffering. To usurp their livelihoods as his own to be rented back, ensuring that no ownership is onto his potential competitors conferred upon which could be built the means to diminish his own prosperity.
No... Pope Leo XIII, your encyclical is in places valid, but woefully out of date and in need of a massive update. Even in it's time, that wording would have been fairly what we today call "milquetoast" in terms of providing the necessary spiritual force to temper the excesses of man's vices. Our current day, is evidence enough of that. Where instead of true virtue and the ability of all to live prosperously, we have a divided class of those seeking desperately to get by, and those seeking desperately to ensure no one gets by them.
Whilst I'm not Catholic, I do do tend to honor the tradition of firmly worded letters nailed to their doors to keep them honest. This encyclical in it's time may have seemed fine, but with hindsight reeks of inadequacy and hedging, with excessive pandering to the already wealthy. This alone explains to me greatly why the labor movements of the late 1800's and early 1900's were not only as bad as they were, but absolutely necessary. If Leo XIV can't do any better than this, then it may once again come to bloodshed. The feedback loop is much tighter, and news travels much faster. Likely why the wealthy are doing everything they can to weight media outlets in their favor, and destroy any unregulated medium of anonymous communication. For these men are greedy, but not stupid. They know deep down the Lord dost tolerate the machinations of the Devil to test the tendencies of humankind, and they fear the inevitable outcome that will arise when the rest of mankind through privation is forced to harden their hearts as they (the wealthy) have. For in the eye's of one who has only their Soul left to bargain with, laid bare is the banal veil of Evil, and if one is to meet their Maker earlier than planned as a result of another man's artifice... Well. Justice doth favor action, whereas the banal finds fertile sustenance in the inaction of vacuous platitude debated endlessly.
Perhaps I am one of the Agitators of which the Pope spoke. Yet I feel no pause at any of the words I have hitherto written. So do with them what you will. If what we have to live with is supposed to be fine, I do not agree that anything about it is what one could conscionably call just.
“The laws of nature should be expressed in beautiful equations.”
- Paul Dirac
“It is, indeed, an incredible fact that what the human mind, at its deepest and most profound, perceives as beautiful finds its realisation in external nature. What is intelligible is also beautiful. We may well ask: how does it happen that beauty in the exact sciences becomes recognizable even before it is understood in detail and before it can be rationally demonstrated? In what does this power of illumination consist?”
- Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar
“I often follow Plato’s strategy, proposing objects of mathematical beauty as models for Nature.”
“It was beauty and symmetry that guided Maxwell and his followers.”
- Frank Wilczek
“Beauty, is bound up with symmetry.”
- Herman Weyl
"Still twice in the history of exact natural science has this shining-up of the great interconnection become the decisive signal for significant progress. I am thinking here of two events in the physics of our century: the rise of the theory of relativity and that of the quantum theory. In both cases, after yearlong unsuccessful striving for understanding, a bewildering abundance of details was almost suddenly ordered. This took place when an interconnection emerged which, thought largely unvisualizable, was finally simple in its substance. It convinced through its compactness and abstract beauty – it convinced all those who can understand and speak such an abstract language."
- Werner Heisenberg
Maybe (just maybe) these things (whatever you want to call them) will (somehow) gain access to some "compact", beautiful, "largely unvisualizable" "interconnection" which will be the self-evident solution. And if they do, many will be sure to label it a statistical accident from a stochastic parrot. And they'll right, for some definitions of "statistical", "accident", "stochastic", and "parrot".
Donald Knuth is an extremal outlier human and the problem is squarely in his field of expertise.
Claude, guided by Filip Stappers, a friend of Knuth, solved a problem that Knuth and Stappers had been working on for several weeks. Unfortunately, it doesn't seem (from my quick scan) to have been stated how long (or how many tokens or $) it took for Claude + Stappers to complete the proof.
In response, Knuth said: "It seems that I’ll have to revise my opinions about “generative AI” one of these days."
Seems like good advice. From reading elsewhere in this comment section, the goalposts seem to be approaching the infrared and will soon disappear from the extreme redshift due to rate at which they are receding with each new achievement.
What goalposts do you think are being moved? I constantly see AI enthusiasts use this phrase, but it’s not clear what goalposts they have in mind. Specifically, what is it that you want opponents to recognize that you believe they aren’t currently?
We now have a tool that can be useful in some narrow domains in some narrow cases. It’s pretty neat that our tools have new capabilities, but it’s also pretty far from AGI.
Imagine hearing pre-attention-is-all-you-need that "AI" could do something that Donald Knuth could not (quickly solve the stated problem in collaboration with his friend).
The idea that this (Putnam perfect, IMO gold, etc) is all just "statistical parrot" stuff is wearing a little thin.
It’s time. According to my doctors. All further treatments are pointless. So, please donate so my kids can create a funeral worthy of my keyboard, Pixelbreaker! So I can make a worthy entrance for reuniting with my one true love, Jennell Jaquays.
My daughter Cynthia Elizabeth Heineman, will be making the arrangements
Von Neumann's mathematical fluency, calculation speed, and general problem-solving ability were widely noted by his peers. Paul Halmos called his speed "awe-inspiring." Lothar Wolfgang Nordheim described him as the "fastest mind I ever met". Enrico Fermi told physicist Herbert L. Anderson: "You know, Herb, Johnny can do calculations in his head ten times as fast as I can! And I can do them ten times as fast as you can, Herb, so you can see how impressive Johnny is!" Edward Teller admitted that he "never could keep up with him", and Israel Halperin described trying to keep up as like riding a "tricycle chasing a racing car."
He had an unusual ability to solve novel problems quickly. George Pólya, whose lectures at ETH Zürich von Neumann attended as a student, said, "Johnny was the only student I was ever afraid of. If in the course of a lecture I stated an unsolved problem, the chances were he'd come to me at the end of the lecture with the complete solution scribbled on a slip of paper." When George Dantzig brought von Neumann an unsolved problem in linear programming "as I would to an ordinary mortal", on which there had been no published literature, he was astonished when von Neumann said "Oh, that!", before offhandedly giving a lecture of over an hour, explaining how to solve the problem using the hitherto unconceived theory of duality.
A story about von Neumann's encounter with the famous fly puzzle has entered mathematical folklore. In this puzzle, two bicycles begin 20 miles apart, and each travels toward the other at 10 miles per hour until they collide; meanwhile, a fly travels continuously back and forth between the bicycles at 15 miles per hour until it is squashed in the collision. The questioner asks how far the fly traveled in total; the "trick" for a quick answer is to realize that the fly's individual transits do not matter, only that it has been traveling at 15 miles per hour for one hour. As Eugene Wigner tells it, Max Born posed the riddle to von Neumann. The other scientists to whom he had posed it had laboriously computed the distance, so when von Neumann was immediately ready with the correct answer of 15 miles, Born observed that he must have guessed the trick. "What trick?" von Neumann replied. "All I did was sum the geometric series."
> Von Neumann's mathematical fluency, calculation speed, and general problem-solving ability were widely noted by his peers
I'm impressed by LeBron's basketball skills. I'm not sure what that has to do with IQ.
Certainly von Neumann's quickness helped him solve problems faster, but I'm not sure what this has to do with the discussion at hand. The story of Polya is not dependent upon von Neumann's speed, but it certainly makes it more impressive. The quote says "unsolved problem." It would be impressive if a solution were handed back in any amount of time.
https://web.archive.org/web/20200715153724/https://nmaahc.si...
Some Inuit practiced senilicide up through the 20th century.
"On the other hand, when food did run short, the old and sick were looked upon as drains on the community’s resources. Sometimes they were killed – thrown into the sea, buried alive, locked out in the cold, or starved to death. Far more commonly they were simply abandoned to die. The victim might be taken out in the wilderness and left there, or the whole village might pick up and move away while the old person slept. If the villagers were unexpectedly restored to prosperity, they might go back to rescue those left behind. An abandoned person would also be welcomed back as a full member of the community if he could manage to make his way back to the village on his own. But usually he couldn’t."
https://www.straightdope.com/21343302/did-eskimos-put-their-...
(His title is sarcastic. They aren't known to have done that in particular.)
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