Erik Haugen @ech@qoto.org

@vidar @Benhm3 @pluralistic Yeah, I think a proper paperclip maximizer needs to be pretty "smart" to be a real problem, good point. (But it probably doesn't matter if it is conscious or not.)

Killer viruses/nanotech, building so many data centers that earth becomes too hot to support life, etc; all the ai doom scenarios I know of seem to require extreme smarts.

Those don't seem like the kind of things that llms are about to do to us.

@vidar @Benhm3 @pluralistic to tie this back to AGI instead of the "consciousness" distraction, you make a good point that these "next-word-predictor programs" are pretty impressive.

But I think I'm convinced by the argument that they aren't the category of things that are going to be able to order up a batch of killer viruses or whatever, though. (But it would be nice to read something making a robust argument for that...)

@Benhm3 @pluralistic With that said, this is one of my favorite takes on the theme. "Spicy autocomplete" is gold.

@vidar @Benhm3 @pluralistic The other problem with the argument is that consciousness isn't the point. The e/acc vs. doomer debate about AI risk of human extinction has nothing to do with consciousness. There is no sense in which the AI doom argument requires the super-intelligent AI to be conscious.

@Benhm3 @pluralistic Doctorow knows very well that there's like thousands of articles already that make this same point. (humanity's extinction isn't the threat, it's climate/racism/capitalism/whatever.)

Why do so many people write this same article? Is it like a standard essay where everyone tries to write the best version, or put their own spin on it?

@freemo "free speech instances where hatespeech is the norm" yeah this is what I was getting at by saying "non-nazi Mastodon". There are certainly plenty of instances like that.

And a certain population of non-hate righty instances/users/content, of course.

But if you browse like mastodon.com/explore unlogged-in or whatever, I feel like it definitely has a id-left tilt, at least relative to US' overall political distribution. Just a guess, I suspect maybe you don't see this usually because (a) don't browse there and (b) are blocked by lots of them by this point anyway 😂

@freemo Blocked here on non-nazi Mastodon? If so, two theories:

I would think you run into very few righties. For various historical reasons, culturally this place is dominated, politically, by the identarian left. One of my least favorite things about the id-left is they sorta don't tolerate dissent. In US politics it's probably the most significant anti-free-speech group. (speech is violence, etc, etc)

Second: we righties here on Mastodon can't really afford to block anyone, we're getting blocked so much that if we did we'd have nothing in our feeds.

@freemo I don't always agree with you, but sometimes you say it perfectly. 😂

I feel like the fraud trial has more of a leg to stand on. We'll see, I guess.

@freemo I've been wondering this also – he said things like "We fight like hell. And if you don't fight like hell, you're not going to have a country anymore." in the speech right before. To people who think everything Trump does is axiomatically evil, this is an obvious smoking gun. But, of course, that is embarrassingly absurd: lots of politicians regularly use metaphors like that in their rhetoric.

From what I've heard, it's pretty clear he didn't want any violence or do anything to try to make that happen. He just wanted a protest outside the Capitol building: "we're going to the Capitol, and we're going to try and give... them (republican senators) the kind of pride and boldness that they need to take back our country." and "I know that everyone here will soon be marching over to the Capitol building to peacefully and patriotically make your voices heard."

I don't think you're going to get anyone to point to anything better than that.

If he was trying some kind of violent takeover on 1/6, there would have been someone there with something a bit more potent than zip ties.

@1br0wn I wonder how many of these "ai doomers are so obviously wrong no coherent rebuttal is warranted, the real problem is racism and capitalism" articles have been published in major outlets. #aihype

@shuvit @danluu Not really sure what to make of this comment.

Privileged people are the ones selling way too cheap just to get someone to come take away their old furniture ASAP so they can get new stuff. The people scouring these markets to find the arbitrage are not the ones with money to spare; it's actually kind of hard work.

It's not harmful at all? It's instead super-helpful:

* if you're quickly snapping up low-priced items on CL or whatever, then that is great for the guy who really just needs to get rid of his couch so he can move ✓
* if you're finding buyers who want to pay more, then those buyers are happy ✓
* the more people who do this job the more efficient the market will be ✓

So, thanks, to the folks doing this! You deserve the $$!

@slcw @thomasfuchs Yeah, I don't know if there's a non-military solution here to stop Hamas, which has said it will do this again and again. If there is, great, we (the US) should push them to do it.

But if not, then what else could they do?

@oliver_schafeld "more like the other thing, though"... This is, again, the "Trump does some thing that Nazis also did" argument?

Like: So-and-so does X, Nazis did X, therefore so-and-so is evil!

If X is something harmless/beneficial, then this is a silly argument:
* The Nazis discouraged smoking
* The Nazis used certain political rhetoric like "let's make our country great!"
* The Nazis had nice innovations in film
* The Nazis had military parades

If X is something harmful, then it's a good argument:
* The Nazis committed one of the worst genocides ever
* The Nazis started expansionist wars

Conservatives sometimes make this argument, too: "you know who else banned guns? the Nazis!"

This is objectively terrible. reductio ad Hitlerum.

Trump hasn't started any wars, let alone expansionist or genocidal ones.

Don't get me wrong, I think Trump shouldn't call people vermin, of course, because that's like the lowest level on Graham's Hierarchy of Disagreement and it makes him look stupid.

@oliver_schafeld It's going to be a hard sell to convince normie americans that "make america great" is, some kind of bad thing. "what's that supposed to mean? " – this, at least, he was pretty clear about: blue collar jobs, not going to war, and immigration. (Not that he can really do much about blue collar jobs, I think.)

I think in 2016 it was easier to raise the alarm bells about fascism or whatever: he was talking about using libel laws against his detractors and that kind of thing. Nobody knew what he was going to do when in office: harmless weirdo or is he going to like nuke Tehran?

But then, when he was in office: no new wars & other foreign policy success, fewer deportations per year than under Obama, economy/jobs/etc did well. He wasn't inspiring/leader-like during covid at all, so he let us down there. But definitely more "harmless weirdo" than ""fascist dictator".

@freemo how do you chose between dvorak, colemak, hands down, etc?

@alisca @harriettmb No, isn't that pretty much settled?

@Oggie @ZachWeinersmith Isn't that kind of the point of the book?

@thetechtutor @luckytran I actually made it quite clear I wasn't in favor of that. What a bizarre reply. 😂