pear01

You're not correcting anything. Nothing in my comment suggested I don't know what qualified immunity is or I don't understand the difference between criminal and civil liability. Quite the contrary if you are capable of reading.

You seem to be arguing with yourself, not with me. If you are satisfied with a cop only facing criminal liability (often from the same prosecutors that rely on police to make other cases, among other issues as you pointed out) fine that is your prerogative. Don't file a civil case. But don't misrepresent my position. Criminal prosecution does not preclude civil, nor the other way around. Citizens should not face such hurdles to file civil suits, irrespective of whatever happens re a criminal case. Why is that so hard for you to understand? Surely your comprehend that one can be found liable both criminally and civilly in many cases. Or tried for both but subject to different penalties (including none) depending on how each goes. Why are your LEO buddies so special as to be largely exempt from the rules that govern the rest of us?

The fact your comment history is riddled with these continued misrepresentations on this topic while you claim to educate is simply galling. Have a good day, I don't think I can continue in good faith with someone who seems to predicate engagement on this topic with unfounded assumptions about others education on the issue. Your own comments on this topic indeed are indicative of a severe projection in this respect.

This was clarifying? It reads like a sleepy undergrad's first attempt, complete with the constant meandering to satisfy some word count. The irony is a SOTA AI could make this person's case far more succinctly and convincingly. You really need to hold yourself (and the people you read) to a higher standard.

This entire brain dump of a blog post could be summed up in one famous sentence: Man is a political animal.

I never understand people who seem to have a need to grasp at such poorly written blogs for an understanding of today's affairs. Humans have really been remarkably consistent in their nature. The answer to your question has already been written, maybe even centuries ago by someone who thought about this a lot harder than you. Sometimes it feels like LLMs are so good simply because most people are far less interesting than they think they are. At some level humanity has been asking the same fundamental questions since the dawn of civilization. At a certain point what more does the average person have to say that we haven't already heard before?

Are you aware that the current US president won the popular vote? What redistricting and voter suppression came into play in that case?

I'm supposed to conclude from this election that the electorate didn't support the current president?

Your post is really unimpressive. You care about these things yet you need me to provide you the name of progressive politicians? You want to take agency away because of redistricting and voter suppression yet immediately claim that the "median US citizen is revulsed by the prospect of egalitarian organising"? So do they have agency or not? Did the politicians program their revulsion too? Or was that the corporations? Maybe they need to hang out with you for a few weeks to be sufficiently deprogrammed.

I'm sure it will look like many other such ventures in that domain. I can see the people desperately trying to crawl over the walls now as you go into another second paragraph non sequitur.

I think what is clear is you don't believe in democracy. How can you given the obvious contempt you show for the American electorate.

Unlike you I know the difference between someone who doesn't have agency and someone who isn't worth my time. Have a good day.

Wow yes excellent point, because of course a police officer facing the threat of legal action would never attempt such a low bar lie. Oops my boss told me to. Oops I didn't know. Case dismissed.

Excellent standards for people authorized by the state to run around with a badge and a gun in a free society. Your comment history on this is so unimpressive. Would you countenance the same excuses in anyone else? A man puts on his police uniform and suddenly you think he should be immune from civil prosecution because "my boss told me so" and "I didn't know"?

I wonder if you will make similar excuses for robo cop. Or if your principles merely extend to whatever human you can find in uniform willing to tolerate your friendship.

You are missing the point. The point is you can still sue the McDonalds. With the police there is a human intuition to also want to sue the officer, given the officer is a human being who has free will and thus made a choice to violate your rights.

The same intuition applies if you walk into McDonald's and a person there mistreats you. You want that person held responsible.

But the LLM is not a person. What is there to even sue? It just seems like it would simply pass through to the corporate entity without the same tension of feeling like we let a human get away with something. Because there is no human, just a corporation and the robot servicing the place.

Put another way - if the LLM is not a person, what is the advantage of a personal lawsuit?

Just sue the McDonalds. Even in a case where the LLM is extremely misaligned and acts in a way where you might normally personally sue the McDonald's employee, I'm just not sure the human intuition about "holding someone accountable" would have its normal force because again - the LLM is not a person.

So given we already have the notions of incorporation and indemnification it doesn't make sense to say what is precluding LLMs from running McDonald's is they can't be sued. If McDonald's can still be sued, then not only is there no problem, there is very likely not even a change in the status quo.

Police officers are human. In the United States in the vast majority of cases you can't sue the police, only the community responsible for them.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qualified_immunity

Assuming you can still sue McDonalds I am not sure if this is a problem in the robotic llm case. I'm also trying to imagine a case where you would want to sue the llm and not the company. Given robots/llm don't have free will I'm not sure the problem with qualified immunity making police unaccountable applies.

There already exist a lot of similar conventions in corporate law. Generally, a main advantage of incorporation is protecting the people making the decisions from personal lawsuits.

If your point is to suggest no alternatives have ever been contemplated then that is simply factually untrue and I think you know that. In some cases, such people succeed locally/statewide even if failing nationally.

My point is simply you don't get to rob the electorate of its agency because you don't like the choice its made. That's about as silly as the grandparent to your comment citing random polls to establish some authoritative notion of what Americans believe.

The Iran war is unpopular because of prices at the pump. Prior interventions in Iran (and elsewhere) that also violated rights did not garner the same reaction because to the average American they incurred no cost. If for some reason the war had caused prices to go lower the war would be popular. The fact you think otherwise would lead me to simply conclude you are in denial re the psyche of the American electorate.

You aren't telling me anything I don't already know. You cannot be pro democracy and at the same time treat the electorate like children. Propaganda is part of electioneering. Parties advocating for their own interests should be a feature in a healthy democracy. Are you suggesting the electorate is incapable of dealing with their basic obligations as citizens of a free society? And your scapegoat for this is the corporations?

What is your theory of democracy if the population is so susceptible to "corporate lobbyists"? Why trust such a body to make decisions if it can't even cope with basic propaganda?

Have you been to red counties? I think you are severely over-indexing on your own biases. Corporate lobbying has nothing on tribalism, racism, and general parochialism. You seem to be well read enough when it comes to history. I am surprised your assessment of human nature has not caught up.

The fact is most Americans don't care. If they did they would elect different leaders. If your theory is that the electorate is simply brainwashed well that seems to me as much an indictment on the notion of democracy itself as a criticism of any allegedly brainwashing entity.

Of course I put blame on citizens. Your attempt to shift all the blame to "corporate lobbyists" is about as convincing as the "they were about to get a nuclear weapon" responsibility shift.

Citizens are responsible because in a democracy they are the ultimate arbiters. You don't get to shift the responsibility, it's not optional. The notion of democracy itself rests on it. If you feel a need to control what information citizens consume so that you can personally legitimize their decisions I would suggest to you perhaps you don't really believe in democracy. As George Carlin said, garbage in garbage out.

Very few? Try none.

Unless the moral position is something akin to realist self interest, in which case the apparent "inconsistency" is actually internally quite consistent. Perhaps the lack of consistent moral positions in competing paradigms is less an interesting phenomena to point out and more a tell that someone is laboring under an extremely naive conception of human morality.

But is it not consistent to be consistently inconsistent?

But is it not consistent to be consistently inconsistent?

But is it not consistent to be consistently inconsistent?

I appreciate your optimism actually. Someone (it's me) can also share your ideal for social media while also having slightly different takes on what makes the prevailing model wrong exactly.

Thanks for the back and forth.

Indeed. Qualified immunity is a stain on American jurisprudence.

You can almost never hold anyone in government accountable. You are forced to sue your own community to get some shred of justice while the actual people who violated your rights face zero accountability.

Tell lawmakers who want your vote this November that you want an end to qualified immunity. Agents of the state should not be less accountable to the laws of the land than regular individuals.

Fair enough, I appreciate the response. Just note in this case I think the precedent should not be private company can ignore public demand. If they can unilaterally ignore the demands of the Saudi government then why not any liberal government? If you operate in a country you should have to follow their rules. If the rules themselves are bad that is a different question.

The remedy in that case then would not be a tax but to ban them from operating in that country. We already have these sorts of export controls with other countries. It is just the case that despite their egregious human rights record (bone saw, anyone?) the United States has propped up the Saudi regime since basically it first came to exist roughly a century ago.

The reason is obvious - Saudi brutality is a feature not a bug. It secures access to cheap oil.

The problem with this summation is the government is complicit in their actions. Thus it undermines this simple private gain, public pain argument.

A lot of the times when Meta does something like this the fact the governments in question essentially demand that action seems to be ignored. Would you have a better view of corporate power if corporations could unilaterally ignore the laws of sovereign countries in which they operate?

Wouldn't it normatively be more in keeping with a proper distinction between public and private to say lobby your congressman to stop the ceaseless funding and weapon deployments to countries in the ME that don't share our values? I have the same feeling when people complain about Meta and privacy. I mean at least they are giving you a "free" service and you essentially take part in a transaction. The NSA has all your data anyway. Does anyone remember their congressional rep trying to convince them this is a good idea? You can log off from Facebook at any time. In some jurisdictions you can even claim a right to be forgotten. Try sending such a request to the NSA or your local police department. Do you really think such public entities are more trustworthy than their private bedfellows merely because they fall on opposite lines of the public/private divide?

If you want a new public culture you should probably identify the real target is not private companies which really don't care about these questions and just want to do whatever moves margins. Your real problem is a lot less easy to propagandize about - the fact that a majority of your fellow citizens (in the USA at least) don't actually care about their (and by extension - your) privacy or human rights in the Middle East. They want cheap oil and cheap products.

Not sure how many election cycles American liberals need to live through to get this through their heads.

Whatever he had in mind there is surely a warning in how rapidly his efforts were reversed once he passed from the scene.

This is not merely a matter of "favorites" or "imitation" but one of legitimacy. Rome was not built in a day and so forth. Often the most successful paradigm-shifting leaders are ones who can deftly command the legitimacy of the past while adapting their society to a new future. But attempting the latter while disposing of the former usually fails, as in the case of Akhenaten.

By virtue of its position, the state often does things it forbids all other actors under its jurisdiction from doing. Thus your comment has much less force than it would seem, even if the apparent contradiction you pointed out is somewhat amusing.

That may all be true.

However it seems odd to not follow your ending paragraph with more circumspection re the earlier ones.

If we stipulate that the USA is ending a trend of relative reliability and stability and as such constitutes more of a risk to Europe - including invasion of Greenland - why would we assume from this a stability in European regulatory regimes?

You don't think changes in the United States portend changes on the European continent? Do you imagine the USA descends into apocalypse while Europe remains unchanged? Will the incentives that push the American government to threaten "digital sovereignty" not loom in a Europe that has to increasingly face a more dangerous (given your own premises) world alone?

Yes, the current American administration is a disgrace. That is quite obvious and no achievement to point out, as you seem to well know. Don't let that automatically lead to the conclusion that Europe is some sanctuary. That does not logically follow. A relative improvement in conditions may end up being temporary. Caution is warranted. Especially from Americans who follow this "move my infra to Europe" trend without knowing Europe or its conditions with any intimacy.

As I said it's a good idea in principle. But some skepticism and caution is warranted.

The term/design is not his but he offered an interpretation or extrapolation inspired by the concept that was unique enough that if you mention panopticon in the context of Foucault it means something unique.

More information: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discipline_and_Punish

It is good to diversify but people should really not make Europe out to be some sanctuary. European governments (and thus companies) are still going to cooperate with America. When the day comes when they do not, America's reach will still be long.

Never mind the fact that incentives in Europe are not so different from the USA. It may look that way now, but often moving across the globe just means trading one villain for another.

Still a good idea, just a word of caution. If people make a move such as this based on some assumption about the stability of the European regulatory scheme you may want to examine that assumption with a little more rigor.

Just to volunteer an example: An editorial by Assange that explicitly called out the panopticon was on my mind today.

The rise of "meta glasses" and reading ICE also wishes to employ them was what reminded me of this I believe.

Sociology (like philosophy, like math) is one of these subjects were a good teacher makes all the difference. I guess true of any subject. Many people come away from a subject thinking it's bunk or not relevant to them for all sorts of reasons. Teachers are not meant to be babysitters or proctors they are supposed to offer context and connect the dots.

The amount of bad teachers (it is a hard job) is quite staggering. Education is in large part a mess because we've tried to scale a system that was designed for the very few to the very many without the proper investment.

Except a cursory glance at their comment history shows otherwise. You could have put in some basic effort.

Also don't insult our intelligence. It's pretty clear what side of the partisan line someone who says both - "I'm a free speech absolutist" citing Musk while in the same breath complaining someone is being mean to Jesus - is on.

Maybe you are simply projecting some guilt about your electoral choices. I can't come up with a better reason for your comment beyond empty moral posturing.

Just remember you don't need AGI to see massive societal change. Certainly not mass layoffs. AGI is not the bar. By the time we all agree AGI has come the world will have already changed.

You just need AI to be just good enough to win the tradeoff over a human employee. Just take your average office. Then ask yourself if the bar is really that high. AGI strikes me as an extremely nebulous concept. Better to just list everyone at your office and bucket them with a guess of how soon you think AI will replace them. Or weaken their market power. This is what every corporate boss in America is already doing. I'm merely suggesting rather than hope a graph curves in our individual favor we try to act more collectively as a species. Of course, I don't hold my breath.

I also don't find myself compelled by the notion that the danger to humanity is "AGI". The true danger is as it always has been - each other.

No one said it's going to zero. It doesn't have to go to zero for lives to change. Would you rather be a cowboy or a factory farmer? The latter are some of the least desirable jobs in the entire world. The fact that millions of people still do them isn't the point in your column you think it is.

No one said unlimited progress. Let's not revert to straw man claims.

If you think the potential of LLMs is overblown feel free to short the market. I don't pretend to know the future. But if I may, I don't think you are framing the debate in the correct terms. Evidence is an important facet of human affairs. So is risk. Best of luck with your predictions.

Ranchers, butchers... and factory farms. Most meat Americans consume have had very little interaction with a person until they are being devoured on the plate.

I appreciate your points. I agree with you that not all "technically specialized humans will be completely removed" but let's not pretend the comparison is going from a caveman with a spear to a cowboy with a lasso. If you concede it is likely to be very different at some point calling it SWE is no longer useful.

I think SWEs would be better off realizing they have enjoyed a relatively extreme level of privilege, and rather than trying to hold onto it, use what time they still have to advocate for a more egalitarian society, even if that means giving up some of their gains. Otherwise speaking of farming, the mass layoffs to come when software has been disrupting blue collar jobs for decades will really be a chickens coming home to roost moment.

There may be gains to be had in such emergence but that is not where I see the gains in the next five years. Those gains will be made by connecting LLMs more robustly with formal reasoning, which computers are already very good at. Continued iteration on connecting these right/left brain faculties could then lead to further emergence down the line.

The present notions of harnesses, structured output or looping in the LLM to some external state or sandbox be it debugger output or embedding into a runtime already show early promising results along these lines. I see no reason to believe these gains will not continue over the next five years.

If you have some theories in the converse in that regard I am all ears.

We live in a world with nuclear weapons. Somehow we all cope and get up every morning. I think you are missing the point - the world is already grim. It always has been. What about human affairs say in the last century alone makes you think human oversight is some panacea? The impetus for civilization was not some innate desire for financial systems or medicine. It was not having other humans murder you. The Leviathan is already here.

The article you shared has little to do with this. Questions of how to divide up gains technology creates are a separate question from that of the technology itself. Tbh I found what you shared so boring I could barely finish it. I already in this thread made an exhortation to support politicans who commit to erasing inequality. The idea that LLMs can only exist with inequality is nonsensical. The only thing grim about what you shared is the lack of political imagination. It's boring.

To be clear by that and "cultural corpus" I meant their skill with natural languages. It is well known for instance that early LLMs were curiously better at composing sentences in English than doing basic math.

Regarding such formal reasoning we have already seen marked improvement in the last year or two alone. The question is how this weighs on your prediction re their capabilities in the next two, five, ten, etc years.

This is an interesting answer for questions about human agency and accountability/personhood questions but I don't see how it leads to increased confidence in the role of human as SWE.

If LLMs get good enough, one might be tempted to ask so what if most humans can't understand the output? Human civilization has by and large been a constant exercise in us collectively accomplishing more and more while individually comprehending less and less.

Our ancestors likely understood more about hunting live game or murdering each other than we do. Most of us do not consider that a great loss. Most of us living in the modern world depend on things we don't fully comprehend. I'm just not sure how this would lead to being reassured re the human as SWE.

This is temporary. What is the SKILL.md equivalent going to be in five years? In ten? You don't already see a pattern emerging around solutions to encode that "professional experience" into the tools themselves?

These LLMs can already incorporate our entire cultural corpus yet your "professional experience" is the threshold they won't cross?