wayfwdmachine

"With powerful computers, I sometimes feel less motivated to study deep mathematical topics like differential equations and statistics. Computers can math quickly, which makes the effort of learning the fundamentals feel less urgent. For those who have been in the industry longer, why do you think it’s still important to stay strong in mathematical fundamentals?"

Because otherwise you are training to become a button pressing cocaine monkey?

Yeah, nefarious or anonymous people have never used the internet so they could never find out that this was all public information.

Ok, some important context for non-Swedes. Anyone can get access to all Swedish (non-protected but those are a very VERY small subset) personal identification numbers by simply signing an agreement with SPAR[1] (the Swedish national people database). Identification numbers per se are not particularly useful or hard to get, they are effectively public information. Using SPAR you can also get the home (and any additional) addresses of individuals

A Swedish citizen database is... you know. fun. But not exactly hard to get hold of.

[1] https://www.statenspersonadressregister.se/master/start/engl...

Everyone will define the Singularity in a different way. To me it's simply the point at which nothing makes sense anymore and this is why my personal reflection is aligned with the piece, that there is a social Singularity that is already happening. It won't help us when the real event horizon hits (if it ever does, its fundamentally uninteresting anyway because at that point all bets are off and even a slow take-off will make things really fucking weird really quickly).

The (social) Singularity is already happening in the form of a mass delusion that - especially in the abrahamic apocalyptical cultures - creates a fertile breeding ground for all sorts of insanity.

Like investing hundreds of billions of dollars in datacenters. The level of committed CAPEX of companies like Alphabet, Meta, Nvidia and TSMC is absurd. Social media is full of bots, deepfakes and psy-ops that are more or less targeted (exercise for the reader: write a bot that manages n accounts on your favorite social media site and use them to move the overton window of a single individual of your choice, what would be the total cost of doing that? If you answer is less than $10 - bingo!).

We are in the future shockwave of the hypothetical Singularity already. The question is only how insane stuff will become before we either calm down - through a bubble collapse and subsequent recession, war or some other more or less problematic event - or hit the event horizon proper.

You know that this is bullshit right? We can all, regardless of our age, differentiate between meaningful and meaningless work. The fact that we need money to fulfil our obligations to our family, the bank or whatever it might be is completely separate from that. We can do meaningless jobs if we have to at any age. This does not make them meaningful. If a person, at any age, can choose between a meaningless and meaningful job - which do you think they would take?

If they have to choose between a meaningless job and starvation?

Cool. Now grow up and do some meaningful with your time. And so should I.

"Hello? We have a cheese emergency."

They probably wrote their own spellchecker. QED.

Cool, so this is nonsense through and through. These are either obvious or downright weapons grade idiotic:

1: Simplicity is better than complexity all things being equal. Guess how often that happens. (Hint: for any non-trivial problem it doesn't.)

2: Yes, it's better to solve problems than to create them. Also water is wet.

3: Spoken like someone who wouldn't recognize true mastery if it bit them on their bony behind.

4: Yeah design your own CPU while you are at it.

5: Just... no.

6: You can certainly make computing less secure though. By doing everything yourself for example.

7: Cool. And nobody except people who have a keyboard and a mouse will every use whatever shit you produce.

8: Welcome to North Korea. I'll stick to juicing things up and making sure people have a great experience.

9: Cool. Tools are tools. Whoever wrote this is a tool too.

10: Ok humblebrag Inc.

11: Wow. Really?

12: Cool. This is really a special kind of weapons grade stupid.

Yes. And it's fiction. We might as well discuss Excession, Agency, Diaspora (Banks, Gibson and Egan respectively) all of whom have more interesting and insightful things to say about humanity, game theory and ... seriously, as a life long (and I am OLD) science fiction fan, the fawning over The Remembrance of Earth's past is just silly. The concept of "suspicion". Might I suggest that people read Thomas Schelling's seminal work The Strategy of Conflict to begin with since if you want to understand concepts like brinksmanship and the push and pull of actual inter-civilization (or society or nation state) conflicts then you might want to start there and not with fiction riddled with silly concepts, weird misogyny and stuff that seems to be right out of the discarded parts of a Gregory Benford trilogy. I mean seriously.

But ok. Let's dig into this

"We can apply this concept of suspicion to the phenomenon in the field of modern artificial intelligence research. In AI research, some researchers believe that humans should pause the development of AI technology because of the potential unforeseeable risks it may bring."

An analogy would be that some of the scientists involved with the Manhattan project (see Szilárd petition) attempted to file an official protest against the use of nuclear weapons against civilian population and arguing that the weapons constructed were too dangerous to be a part of an arms race and should be placed under an international control body.

"However, another group of researchers believe that we should not stop because we cannot be certain whether those who are trying to catch up with us will use the advancement of AI technology as a hidden weapon."

Researchers are not decision makers in this or any other scenario. AI technology as a weapon? Sure but unless you are Bombs Away LeMay circa 1961 this really isn't a winnable or even useful use case. We're still in a blue sky phase. The fun thing about nuclear weapons is that if any nation feels that another is pulling too far ahead they can be used as a way to push for bi/multilateral discussions and eventually treaties limiting the production and/or deployment of weapons that risk of increasing tensions/lethality and so on . (see SALT I/II and START etc)

"This suspicion leads to a chain reaction, where people continue to worry about each other's motives and abilities, making it difficult for all parties to establish trust. Therefore, although there are good intentions, such proposals are unlikely to be implemented."

Again... read Schelling... this is just nonsense.