Was the Wright brothers’ first flight useless, or did it teach us lessons that lead to the Concorde and 777?
Was the first automobile so slow and clunky it was useless, or did it lead to the F1 cars of today?
Was Alan Touring’s computer so slow it was useless, or did it lead to this comment being typed on a device that is many orders of magnitude faster and smaller?
Going to Mars will teach us a lot. In the future when we go further it will be useful in ways we can’t imagine today.
> In the future when we go further it will be useful in ways we can’t imagine today.
There. Is. No. Further.
That's my issue with all that. It's pretty basic: check how far the next solar system is (I know you don't: it's 4+ light-years). Check the speeds we get when we send something out of the solar system (e.g. Voyager).
Sending something to the next solar system at speeds orders of magnitudes faster than we reach today (which we can't reach because... orbital mechanics) would take us tens of thousands of years (hundreds of thousands actually, I can't remember and at this point it does not matter).
Unless someone discovers wormholes or a similar revolution in physics, we are not going to another solar system, period. Contaminating Mars is not even helping doing that. It's like hoping that the Wright brothers' work would help discover vaccination.
That is exactly the point.
You simply can’t know what the future holds.
After the Wright brother’s flight do you think people thought we would cross the Atlantic faster than the speed of sound sipping champagne, or go to the moon?
“Impossible”
And so on.
You have no idea what will be possible on the future, but I hope we can get there by learning, not sticking our heads in the sand.
Which is why this narrative of caring about his family is so absurd.
A defense contractor is in the business of war. In supplying the war machine, you should be living in a fortress. Tall walls, check your drink for poison, live in paranoia. Every person in the business of war knows what they are getting in to, and how to protect their family.
How is someone that is near the face of AI this naive about such an ancient thing?
The business of war is fine. It is ancient. It is part of humanity. Making some morality plea towards family and "violence is never the answer" while in the business of violence is NOT okay.
Everyone in the defense industry knows the risks. Blood money is not free. You sacrifice a peaceful life for the wealth.
To keep your family safe you have to use a meager sum of that money to have tall walls, guards, and security. DoD contractor 101.
Alternatively, live in obscurity, don't talk about your work, and it is usually fine.
A world-wide known CEO doesn't have this luxury so again, use a small portion of unfathomable wealth to protect your family. I have a feeling this war is just starting.
When in the business of death, you no longer get to live with the rules of peace.
It’s almost like these people believe Being in the business of violence and death is fine. Killing other people, making their lives a living nightmare, etc.
Suddenly it’s not ok when a tiny fraction of that violence comes home.
These arguments make perfect logical sense. Sam Altman has ceased to be a civilian, he has waived those rights with his DoD deal, I don't know why people are acting like he is one. I think it's cowardly that both of you are so downvoted without any responses at all against you, much less good counterarguments.
you could dekulak all 3500 billionaires, magically transmute their make believe money into hard cash, and that $20 trillion would yield less than $2500 per human. hooray?
You say that as if there aren’t an enormous amount of people for whom $2500 isn’t an enormous amount of money. Even in wealthy nations like the US, that equates to approximately 7% of the personal income for the average person. But for the 65% of the world’s population living on $10 or less per day, that is an increase of 77% or more on their yearly income.
But more important than the cash is the power that money buys. Defenestrating the uber-wealthy of their undue influence in society would have far reaching benefits beyond just money in people’s bank accounts.
They generally use whatever is available and cheapest. However, due to the constant power demand and the capital cost involved (you don't want your miners sitting idle), if that isn't grid power, its often either "reliable" renewables (e.g. hydro), "stranded" fossil energy (e.g. gas that would otherwise be flared off), or in the worst case, literally buying a coal power plant that was about to shut down just to power a Bitcoin mine.
Maybe. DCOs haven’t been tested. But you can at least say that the person who did this committed fraud and that you had no reasonable way to know they would do that.
LLMs can and do regurgitate code without the user’s knowledge. That’s the problem, the user has no way to mitigate against it. You’re telling contributors “use this thing that has a random chance of creating infringing code”. You should have foreseen that would result in infringing code making its way into the kernel.
That’s the difference. In practice a human has to commit fraud to do this.
But a human just using an LLM to generate code will do it accidentally. The difference is that regurgitation of training text is a documented failure mode of LLMs.
And there’s no way for the human using it to be aware it’s happening.
> You think people will put up with wildly accelerating inequality forever?
No. Nor do I think they should. But UBI, higher income tax at the top and a wealth tax for the ultra rich sound like a much better plan to me than to blow a bunch of things up.
Yes, and it's not too late! Plus, sama is one of the only ultra rich I've heard talk about policies that could actually help society cope with reduced aggregate labor demand.
But when I look at how the US handled previous rounds of globalization and automation, I have very sober expectations for our ability to pursue the "happy path." Still, one has to try.
Someone should tell the people assisting in the accelerating inequality that, because unfortunately our system is massively biased in their favor when it comes to enacting any of those things. Except the last, which some will, understandably, see as their only recourse.
Put simply: people _have_ been fighting for those things and the wealthy have fought tooth and nail against it. I don’t at all understand why anyone can be surprised when all other avenues are closed, people resort to violence. It’s literally how this country was founded.
The average person can make one of those things happen, and not the others. Yes, the alternative is obviously better, but once violence becomes the only course of action with reasonable chance at good results, violence is what you will get. Just watch, this is going to escalate. A lot.
Maybe Altman and the other oligarchs should donate money towards candidates who are actually pushing for higher taxes, UBI, and universal healthcare then. So far they've all been throwing most of their money and influence behind violent, hateful, assholes who repeatedly cut their taxes and start wars.
The theory behind the US having a large military is that it acts as a sort of fleet in being - that the US prefers other methods of engaging with countries, and having a stronger military precludes other countries from engaging militarily. In turn, having stable global relations and protected global trade provides the US with a huge economic boon to fund its large military.
That's the theory anyway - our Idiot King and his idiots have completely missed the point of the US military existing and are using it as a primary method of engagement, which is causing the economic boon used to fund the military to evaporate.
As an aside, it's not a huge issue, but China's military costs use different accounting than the US, and seem lower by comparison. Apples to apples, China probably spends about half what the US does on military.
> the US prefers other methods of engaging with countries, and having a stronger military precludes other countries from engaging militarily
If the US has such a strong military why are they always begging European countries to help them with their various totally-not-a-war "actions", like most recently in Iran?
Last time the UK got into something in the Middle East with the US we lost more people to "friendly fire" than enemy action. There's no real appetite for that any more.
I mean we could just go back to talk softly and carry a big stick. There are options between pacifism and boisterous rabble rousing and picking fights that don't particularly need to be fought without good plans.
Bullshit. Those numbers are not to be trused. China simply lies about their military spending, but independent estimates put their spending alone close to the USA.
I described any democracy in a society with private property. Even without private property, you will have issues with concentrated benefits and diffuse harms–negotiating that is part and parcel with governance.
Iowa businsses petitioning their cause is one thing. OpenAI seagulling in to take a shit in Springfield strikes me as being categorically different.
Viewed from a country with universal healthcare , 18 month’s maternity leave ( my partner just used it ) and so much more, it feels like comparing the US to “any democracy” is like comparing rocks to gold.
Was the first automobile so slow and clunky it was useless, or did it lead to the F1 cars of today?
Was Alan Touring’s computer so slow it was useless, or did it lead to this comment being typed on a device that is many orders of magnitude faster and smaller?
Going to Mars will teach us a lot. In the future when we go further it will be useful in ways we can’t imagine today.
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