HN user
bostonw (at) proton (dot) me
RE your link, I am not sure that anything of value has been articulated in describing this vague notion of "Collective Flourishing". After reading the page two or three times, the best I can understand is that it seems to be a call for technical solutions to problems that are actually deeply social in nature and require social solutions. Strange to see such nebulous slop coming from an official government agency.
Not in my back yard!!
Alarmist title and poor article. I don’t agree that prompting an LLM to write targeted emails for your lobbying campaign counts as “weaponizing” AI —this is just common practice e.g. in sales and marketing.
The world is a business, Mr. Beale. It has been since man crawled out of the slime. And our children will live, Mr. Beale, to see that perfect world in which there's no war or famine, oppression or brutality... all necessities provided, all anxieties tranquilized, all boredom amused.
Network (1976)
I seem to recall there was an article posted here recently which noted that galaxies have a preferred direction of rotation. Seems like the universe itself rotating could be a reason why?
And if we want to apply tariffs, do it slowly. Instead of saying that products will be tariffed at 100% tomorrow, say they’ll be 25% next year, 50% after that, 75% after that, and 100% in year four. And then make it a law instead of a presidential decree
This is the big difference between a tariff regime that is credible in such a way that the business community can plan investment around it, and the current one that has mostly just caused chaos and confusion.
Doping potential aside, this sounds like a very promising area of research. The article mentions increased endurance, peak performance, and anti-aging potential. What are the downsides to having more mitochondria in our cells and why did we evolve to have the levels we currently have?
Source on his backstory being made up?
My kid is about the same age. We recently bought a safety lock to prevent him from getting into cupboard under our sink. It had great reviews on Amazon.
The first time he went into the kitchen after I had installed it, he notices it immediately, walks straight up to it, grasps it with both hands like an adult would, and has it unlatched within 5 seconds. He then proceeds to look at me like "Is this some sort of test?"
RCMP said they don't believe the two Nova Scotia incidents are national security threats.
Are they joking? Seriously, with everything that is going on the world right now, the authorities in this country need to get their heads out of the sand and realize that we are not isolated from geopolitics.
Naively, I would think the same. But in the first part of AOTD, Neil Postman argues pretty convincingly that America in the 18th and 19th centuries was the most literate, bookish society on Earth and in the later parts of the book that that heritage was lost with the invention of the telegraph, radio, and later TV.
In other words, TV and the internet as technologies are not "neutral" in their effect on society, they have actually made us dumber in a real sense.
Predictably, I see a lot of concern being expressed here about how this will be implemented and enforced. There is an underlying assumption, which seems fairly reasonable, that the government is going to use this opportunity (à la Louisiana) to overreach and require people to provide their identity to access these services.
One question I have for other HN commenters though, does it necessarily need to happen this way? Political realities aside, is there a way for the government to set up an age verification service in a way that preserves privacy?
If so, the time is ripe for this community to put forward such a solution and advocate for it loudly. If current sentiment is any indication, social media age restrictions are going to go global and Australia is going to set the precedent for the rest of the world.
Just finished reading Amusing Ourselves to Death on the recommendation of some commenters here.
Strange that Neil Postman's work is not once mentioned in the article. His basic argument in 1985 was that the shift from print to TV was already causing epistemological collapse through the transforming of not just education, but also news reporting, political discourse, and the functioning of government into forms of entertainment.
One thing that stuck out for me was his description of TV news as a "psychotic" series of "Now... this" context switches, where each event had to be over-simplified into a basic narrative that people could grasp within 15-45 seconds, and where the most disturbing story (e.g. a gruesome rape and murder) could be chased up in the next second by a fluff piece about a group of grannies having a bake sale, with no ability of the viewer to reflect on and absorb what they just saw and heard.
Viewed that way, the YouTube algorithm and TikTok represent a natural progression of the way that TV news has already primed us to consume information. In fact, almost all of the arguments made in Amusing Ourselves to Death have only become more relevant in the age of social media. More than ever, we are losing our ability to place information in context, to think deeply, and to tolerate what makes us uncomfortable. No doubt these things would be reflected in test scores.
On the other hand, the one possible saving grace of an internet world vs. a TV world could be the relaxing of the restrictive time and ratings constraints. I would argue there are niche content producers out there doing better contextualizing, deeper thinking, and harder-hitting investigative work than was ever possible on TV, and that this content is hypothetically available to us. The only question is: are we able to withstand the firehose of highly available, highly irrelevant short-form dopamine hit entertainment in order to find it? On the contrary, I think most of us are getting swept up in the firehose every day.
Maybe position someone on shore with a megaphone to read out The Funniest Joke in the World?
The evolutionary transition from single-celled to multicellular life has actually been repeatedly accomplished in vitro [1]. So highly unlikely to be a Great Filter.
Not loud at all but it gives you a distinctive feeling like you've been slapped in the base of the skull by God. The Carl G was the first thing that came to my mind when I read the article.
brought the world to the brink of annihilation
Should read *has brought*. As in the present perfect tense, since we are still on the brink of annihilation, more so than we have been at any time in the last 60 years.
The difference between then and now is that we just don't talk about it much anymore and seem to have tacitly accepted this state of affairs.
AI posing as human customers to promote your product on the web is fraud, change my mind.
When I first heard that the gov't is trying to protect children from online harm, for some reason I thought it meant we were going to regulate their access to the highly addictive forms of social media that have been destroying their experience of childhood and setting them up to be a failed generation. But I guess they decided instead to go after the politically low-hanging fruit of hate speech, bullying, and sexual exploitation, as if the heavy hand of government speech regulation is somehow going to solve these problems this time around in history at no major cost to free societal norms.
This is putting it mildly. The Interac network went down and no one could use their debit cards nationwide.
I agree and am in favour of carbon taxes. However this particular carbon tax is weak virtue signaling exactly because it is not sufficiently priced.
Q: Who decides whether the policy focus is on the supply side or consumption side?
A: The government and its voters.
That’s it. That’s who I am going to hold accountable.
Now, the point I am making that you seem to miss is that in Canada, the supply side is the larger issue. This is because we are a net energy exporter. So hence why to most Canadians outside of Alberta, blaming the consumer while giving the oil sands a pass feels like cheap political theatre.
OTOH Albertans feel very threatened any time the government starts to talk about doing something supply side, and I think many are actually very happy to go along with the political theatre of the demand side focus because they know it doesn’t directly threaten their jobs.
What should we do in an ideal world? Target both. But if I were designing an effective climate policy and had to pick only one, I would do supply side first.
On a side note, studies have estimated that the current carbon tax levels are 5-10x too low to effectively price in the externalities due to releasing the carbon. So yes, it’s virtue signaling.
This is currently our biggest unsolved political issue IMO. Without a focus on the supply side, all of our current consumption-focused climate change policies (carbon tax on consumption, electric vehicle mandates, most recently infrastructure issues etc.) effectively amount to weak virtue signaling that has mostly succeeded in dividing voters and provinces against each other, when we should instead be tackling the 500 lb gorilla in the room (Alberta’s oil sands). Hence the well-deserved Greta Thunberg snark towards Trudeau a while back.
How do we do that? Some think we should just leave the oil in the ground. Others think we should avoid building further export infrastructure (i.e. pipelines). These options strike me as politically unpalatable, and even our current government stepped in at one point a few years ago to bail out the troubled Trans Mountain pipeline.
One option I am strongly in favour of is nuclearizing the oil sands. AFAIK right now the process for extracting crude from the oil sands is very energy-intensive and is currently powered by nat gas since the producers have it on hand. There was a proposal a while back to power this process by nuclear energy, which failed because: a) nuclear energy was scary, and b) crude prices took off and reduced the economic incentive for cost savings.
I imagine that the nuclear option could be resurrected now alongside government investment in LNG infra as well as a supply-side carbon tax to provide extra incentive to push producers on board. Since we’re not going to leave the oil in the ground anyway, this would allow us to extract it in the cleanest possible way, while actually creating jobs and making our energy exports more competitive overall.
Now, if only Canada could elect a visionary government that actually cared about climate change and not just about virtual signaling…
2022: World's first psychopathic AI hailed as major breakthrough
edit: 2022. Didn't realize this was already around.
(Sutskever) has an exemplar in mind for the safeguards he wants to design: a machine that looks upon people the way parents look on their children
The most troubling statement in the entire article, buried at the bottom, almost a footnote.
Imagine for a moment a superintelligent AGI. It has figured out solutions to climate change, cured cancer, solved nuclear proliferation and world hunger. It can automate away all menial tasks and discomfort and be a source of infinite creative power. It would unquestionably be the greatest technological advancement ever to happen to humanity.
But where does that leave us? What kind of relationship can we have with an ultimate parental figure that can solve all of our problems and always knows what's best for us? What is left of the human spirit when you take away responsibility, agency, and moral dilemma?
I for one believe humans were made to struggle and make imperfect decisions in an imperfect world, and that we would never submit to a benevolent AI superparent. And I hope not to be proven wrong.
Less than a year old, but I have been thinking about the issue proactively and there are things you can do for them even at this age. For instance, I set my son up with a Proton email account on the family domain name before we left the hospital (see my reply to sibling comment for reasons why).
Congrats on that!
My kid is too young for tech so far so I haven't fully dived into the issue yet, but one thing I've already done for him to start him off on the right foot is set up with a Proton email account on the family domain name.
It's great because family members have been sending notes for him to read when he grows up and we have been cc'ing him on baby pictures, medical records, and vital stats. And when you think about it, our email accounts are the foundations of our online identities, so it's kind of messed up that we normalize surveillance of our children's online activity from Day 1 by setting them up with inboxes from Google, etc. and you owe it to your kids to give them privacy and, eventually, agency.
I'll turn over the keys when he's old enough (of course I'll probably make a backup of things first)!
Parenting. I’m spending a lot of time thinking about how to prepare my kid to grow up around the internet, smartphones, and AI. Our technology often takes an indifferent or even cynical view of children, and I can’t understand why there aren’t better tools available (e.g. smartphone designs) that put their developmental needs ahead of the need to exploit them for immediate profit.
What’s the difference between Honecker and a telephone? No difference! Hang up, try again.