Nobody is going to care that the math isn't being done in the traditional way. The results speak for themselves, this is now a part of the landscape. No amount of hand-wringing is going to put the cat back in the bag. Adapt or perish.

We can and have put some ugly, hissing, spitting cats into bags, some of which weren't even in one to begin with:

* Chattel slavery is illegal, and the vast, vast majority of humans agree it's appalling it ever wasn't.

* Food manufacturers in the US are no longer allowed to put highly-dangerous additives to their products and hide the fact.

* Women are allowed to vote.

* Ten-year-old children are no longer being maimed and dying in American factories.

Claiming it can't be done is either fatalism or propaganda for execrable companies whose evil has rarely been matched in the history of capitalist business.

Do I have a clear solution for how to stop the insanity? No, not yet, but that is not a proof there's no way to do it.

You can of course choose how to spend your time in this world, but I don't see the value of either 1) assuming we're screwed and giving up before trying to fight, or 2) shilling for lying assholes like Sam Altman.

If there's a distinction being made between "using AI for math" and "the particular methods being employed by OpenAI", I think that's splitting hairs. The core of the issue is that math is being done outside of people's heads by a different thinking system and they're worried about the implications.

If you look at something like the EPA (or the FDA as you mention), it is true that certain uses and side-effects of technology have been identified to be detrimental to society and have been restricted, but this letter doesn't seem to be in that league, it really seems like sour grapes to me. Dumping toxic chemicals into the water table is one thing, saying "we don't think people will learn from these methods in the same way that they traditionally have" doesn't hold as much water to me.

Perhaps I'm looking at this from a too zoomed-out or detached perspective. I'm just thinking about the concept of the technology at play and its future impacts regardless of who owns or controls them. But maybe that's naive. In today's connected world you can't separate those things, and I think I'm understanding that a lot of the outrage here is more about the socioeconomic implications of a big corporation suddenly "disrupting" a field that was largely owned by more altruistic academic institutions.

I do still think that the internet, despite largely being owned and controlled by the powers that be, has represented a great shift of power and agency to the individual, and is ultimately a socialist construct, and we will continue to see those changes over time, and that AI is an extension of that.

Everything is sensationalized, every super niche happenstance is sold as earth-shattering drama, the outrage arms race is so tiresome.

Man, the people who want to just get away with open corruption sure love you.

The cops will find a way, the criminals will find a way. It's ultimately people v. people with access to the same level of technology.

It's somewhat sad to me that this phenomenon is borne out in the comments (of this thread and, I would say, generally across HN in my experience). It's so easy to prophecy doom, ignoring the fact that life and humanity has generally prevailed and continued "progress" in the face of adversity, evil, extinction events, and other setbacks.

I'm generally in agreement with this article, although, I'm not sure I'm onboard with the dismissal of utopia. Utopia can be whatever you want it to be, it doesn't have to be defined as impossible nonsense. If we're in a protopia, and we want to see protopia, there's sort of a tautological nothingness, akin to pointing out that there's no such thing as free will. The message then boils down to "well just keep on truckin' as is."

The Millenium Scholarship program in Nevada paid for tons of kids' education by taxing casinos. It's not perfect but it's channeling economic activity to the people.

That gives the local voting population the ability to decide how much they're willing to put up with data centres. And a state that has excess water and electricity can have tax breaks and then that's where more data centres go.

Pay the citizens the price, or don't burden them in the first place. There are two options, and the data center builders may pick either.

Zero-sum scarcity mentality needs to end. Don't push back on prosperity. Push to have those gains distributed more evenly.

Push for a ridiculous tax on data centers that goes directly to the local economy. If they don't buy it then it's the same result as blocking them on vibes.

Calling people stupid for not accepting it is telling, and disconnected. Americans in particular will accept violence first (demonstrably), and this is in fact one of the defining virtues of Americans (yes, violence in the face of the imposition of misery by the wealthy is a virtue - not all cultures exhibit this virtue).

I don't understand this. It's the endgame. Compromise for what? Working an invented job they don't actually want to work? What is your idea of a solution that combats misery better than a free paycheck?

People are confused into voting against their own interests all the time. Socialism is a bogeyman but Social Security is great (if UBI is too odious just call it lowering the social security age).

I'm to be seen as "you filthy masses" guy when you seem to be advocating some form of mass violence? You could actually, just, exercise democracy to redistribute the wealth. I daresay that would be smarter.

1. "Compromise" means that UBI is in-between how it is now ("Everybody is very miserable") and the American Dream ("if you're hard-working and lucky, you get a middle-class lifestyle").

2. I don't have a solution. I'm speaking pragmatically, not as a solution-giver.

3. I love Socialism and smartly-managed wealth distribution. I am not arguing against UBI (I even said "it would help"). I'm arguing against UBI as an answer to AI.

Compared to the activism of the 60s and 70s, where so many people seemed willing to put their entire lives on hold for the cause, the fact that there is no major populist uprising against the dismantling of the institution of the presidency leads me to believe there is a threshold of contentment afforded by modern technology and QoL.

In either case it is about populism though. Hopping on a bus to California to protest was a cool thing to do. Somehow this data center thing happened to catch on and become a lever people felt they could move with mere outrage, even if it does seem pretty misguided.

They did. They elected Trump.

> no major populist uprising against the dismantling of the institution of the presidency

Some people view the president as the only directly-elected person powerful enough to fight for them in dismantling the rest of a government that isn't working (or even actively working against them). So they implicitly want a strong president.

This only goes as far as the president agrees with them of course.

I would say that speaks more to apathy than activism.

> Some people view the president as the only directly-elected person powerful enough to fight for them in dismantling the rest of a government that isn't working

I think consciously verbalizing a position even that nuanced and esoteric is niche, but there is certainly something to be said for peoples' susceptibility to a type of "strong" cult leader.

Whatever else you'd want to say about Trump supporters, I wouldn't call them apathetic. Maybe I'm reading your comment wrong, but I can't see how anyone could characterize Trump's base as "apathetic."

I was more referring to "everyone else" as apathetic. Generally, I don't think voting is itself considered an act of activism. Somebody will always win the election regardless of overall levels of activism and apathy. January 6 could be considered activism, however (the bad kind that's closer to a riot). "Get out the vote" grassroots efforts are activism.

I think there is currently a general lack of enthusiasm for the political system and process in the US, and a lack of faith in the government. Trump has tapped into that, and riled people up. Tapping into fear and aggression and anger does not inspire what I would consider to be traditional political and civic activism which IMO is more rooted in "let's work together to make things better for our people."

As opposed to, "let's say MAGA but actually start foreign and domestic conflicts and squander resources on pointless personal ego projects." It is disturbing to me that people continue to support that but I'm still calling it more apathetic than activist.

I do see the failure of either party to produce a truly constructively inspiring candidate as something seriously wrong with the system. Thanks for the link, it does seem interesting.

I don't follow. What I said is in alignment with the idea that activism is out of vogue. The comment I replied to implied that electing Trump was an act of activism (or "doing something about it").

Anyway, we already had Hitler. Sadly too often, these guys pop up at the right time and wreak havoc but I would say they're outliers (and in general the world is globalizing and trending away from them).

Talking to people on HN, the answer is a resounding "NO." If I point out that smart phones are contributing to mental illness and have enabled mass-scale surveillance larger than ever previously thought possible, the response has been "but I might have trouble paying for parking and some restaurants don't have menus."

- touch controls rather than a real UI

- a terrible app store full of monetized garbage

- incredibly bad privacy options

- etc ..

In addition to that, modern society is moving towards requiring the usage of these devices. It's harder to opt out more and more every year. This is very much not a choice I can make. My employer would NOT accommodate me if I did not have a place to install their OTP app.

It's like when Facebook was the bogeyman. Facebook is just a mirror. If you see bad stuff happening (e.g. people spreading and engaging with misinformation), that's the people, not the platform. Unless one is claiming specific intent on their part, Facebook (like most tech) enables good and bad in equal measure.

Getting rid of, or pushing back on, Facebook, or data centers, or smart phones, isn't going to move the needle toward a more caring and empathetic society. Those are all red herrings. Build schools. Pay teachers. Push back on fearmongering, xenophobia, and greed. Educating people to be good participants in the global community is the only chance we have.

The major thing that's always stumped me is how to design a universal fitness function that can take you from soup to a brain. IRL there is "the environment" which contains resources that need to be consumed to survive, and the majority of evolution (senses, bodyforms, metabolic pathways, etc) is based on navigating this environment and extracting energy. Can we say that life or intelligence is a meaningful concept without this universal background reference plane and survival game?

One of the things I think is limiting about conventional systems is what I call the "brain-in-a-vat" problem. They don't "exist" in any meaningful sense, they don't "experience" anything, they don't have any "reason" or "motivation" to do or develop anything.

I think of something more like a video game. The world of World of Warcraft or Call of Duty is a mathematical construct that doesn't truly reflect how our world works, but, through a window we can interpret it in a way that we understand and relate to. Some kind of video game environment with more relaxed and "open-ended" parameters and a simulated survival mechanism would be an interesting experiment.

The abstract mentions metabolic constraints. Can you share more of your thoughts or conceptual approach to this?

I agree, for the same reasons you mentioned, resource constraints will need to be baked in (they are already, to some extent, if you consider the constrained resource to be z80-CPU-seconds the program has access to). something more akin to energy in our real world, which can be manipulated, aggregated, shared, pooled, stolen, etc feels more natural, however.

imo meaningful intelligence could conceivably developed in a soup (even in-silico), unclear on what timeline, but grounding it with human and/or real-world data is necessary to make it useful to us (bio-compatible, if you will?)

Obviously, you have to "cheat" biology somewhere, we don't have hundreds of millions of years. Neural networks cheat by essentially throwing out the whole evolutionary process and environment that led to the brain, attempting to make a model that works like the brain. IMO that is too much cheating.

Starting with a substrate of random bits of assembly code strikes me as a little too low-level (which is not to dismiss this research at all, I think it's valuable, I'm just spitballing big-picture ideas). Have you considered starting with something like the Unreal or Unity engine, or even Minecraft?

You would lose the elegant and unopinionated search space of all programs, and you would have to engineer a more structured system (kind of like Spore but more simulation than game), but I feel like you might be able to get some more readily relatable behaviors sooner?

it is of course entirely possible we are on the flip side and too low-level - this is something we're trying to find out.

I once had an idea for a system that basically took in multiple video inputs and produced video output. Individuals would then run instances (that they could tweak) that were connected to a larger network. Somewhere between an MMO and Folding@home. Not only would it distribute the compute load but it would simulate the chaos of large numbers of individuals trying out different things.

Again I think it comes back to the fitness function and how things get nudged "upward." In any case it seems all you need to do is get fitness right and then let it rip...

Have you explored any distributed concepts like that?

Maybe there is the possibility of some kind of stack? Something that starts low level and somehow can be composed or integrated into higher levels of abstraction?

What I'm tired of is zero-sum jingoistic nationalism of any kind. Can we just be happy for all of the world to prosper?

edit: I didn't downvote you but it's probably the uncalled-for cynicism.

I do wonder though how much of what you describe, or some form of it, is still happening in dorm rooms. As we get older we just do less of that kind of stuff. I still connect with a large circle of friends through music, and discuss different artists and such, mostly at events.