Mettaben @mettaben@qoto.org
I've been closely following the ongoing drama regarding the "coup" of OpenAI. In a shocking move, CEO Sam Altman was fired by the OpenAI board, catching seemingly everyone off guard, even Microsoft which has invested north of 10B.
Latest I hear is that a huge number of OpenAI employees have threatened to quit if Altman is not reinstated, and Sam Altman may be negotiating to get his job back along with governance reform to place himself more firmly holding the reins of power.
Lots of theories have been made to explain this turn of events, and many are framing this as a battle between Effective Altruism vs Effective Accelerationism.
It's important to note both philosophies are not polar opposites of each other, in fact, they share many of the same assumptions, and are held by more or less exactly the same demographic of rich silicon valley men.
But as OpenAI explodes towards a 90B valuation and the rumors that AGI (artificial general intelligence) has already been invented or or is about to be, small differences in philosophy can still lead to monumental power struggles.
As a reminder, whichever company capitalizes on AGI first will likely be worth more than all of the other megacap tech companies put together. This is a world-altering amount of money and power we could be talking about here.
Om the other hand, it could all still be decades off. LLM architecture, although a major innovation, has not shown to be capable of simply scaling up to human level intelligence. OpenAI might have actually run up against a wall.
Sam Altman is seen as doing everything he can to accelerate, including using capitalism to build products, to make huge amounts of money. In contrast, the OpenAI board, led by Ilya Sutskever, may want to take a more careful approach, with less focus on capitalism, and more focus on deliberate academic research. They want an AI that is perfectly aligned to their own corporate goals even if that means slowing down the release of new products. And they want OpenAI to go back to its roots as a genuine nonprofit again.
Effective Altruists have been maligned as doomers or decelerationists but this isn't accurate. They want AGI also. But they want AGI to be protected and safe. They want regulatory capture, they want open source AI stopped. In short, they want themselves to be fully in control, to be the priests who protect the rest of the world from the AGI god. And it just so happens that by doing this they will make a shit-ton of money which they will rationally spend on altruism such as ending poverty or colonizing Mars.
Both EA and e/acc are essentially variants of an AGI cult, much in the same way Abrahamic religions are very similar to each other yet behave diatrically opposed to each other in the global struggle for dominance.
I can't predict what will happen with Sam Altman and OpenAI. But I will say if Altman is reinstated, it could be interpreted as a major victory for the hypercapitalist accelerationists.
The battle over open AI research intensifies at the AI Safety Summit. On one side sits advocates such as Meta's Yann LeCun, on the other, former Google AI Researching Geoff Hinton, etc.
LeCun accuses the anti-open AI team of being in the pocket of corporations.
Yann LeCun writes (and I agree):
"Now about open source: your campaign is going to have the exact opposite effect of what you seek. In a future where AI systems are poised to constitute the repository of all human knowledge and culture, we *need* the platforms to be open source and freely available so that everyone can contribute to them. Openness is the only way to make AI platforms reflect the entirety of human knowledge and culture. This requires that contributions to those platforms be crowd-sourced, a bit like Wikipedia. That won't work unless the platforms are open.
"The alternative, which will *inevitably* happen if open source AI is regulated out of existence, is that a small number of companies from the West Coast of the US and China will control AI platform and hence control people's entire digital diet. What does that mean for democracy? What does that mean for cultural diversity? *THIS* is what keeps me up at night."
https://twitter.com/ylecun/status/1718670073391378694
The _real_ doomsday scenario with AI is that it is monopolized by the 1% and consolidates their power vs everyone else.
A sober, rational person can look at a chart like this and only draw one conclusion: space lasers have been working overtime to try to convince us climate change is real.
According to RCP, Trump vs Biden is a statistical tie. For the popular vote. Which, students of US politics will tell you, is a disaster for Biden since low population rural states that trend toward Trump have a massive electoral college vote advantage. This has nothing to do with the Green Party or Cornel West, this is ALL inherently the weakness of Joe Biden himself with respect to the massively flawed and idiosyncratic US realpolitik.
Biden is losing momentum in the polling. It's not too late for him to step down from the 2024 run and let the Dem Primary have vigorous debates to find the strongest candidate. If Biden persists on running in 2024, and loses to Trump, it's on him (and his DNC handlers), not Cornel West. Biden is, according to the best statistics we have so far, the real spoiler.
#Biden #Trump #GreenParty #CornelWest #ElectoralCollege #polling
I should add that Republicans/conservatives play right into this when they conflate Democrats with leftists, falsely implying that leftist (that are actually Democrat/corporatist) policies are to blame. Democrats and Republicans are really on the same team when it comes to waging information warfare against genuine social and economic justice. This is a key reason why a strong Green Party alternative is crucial.
"The democrat party is the graveyard of political movements"
AI doomerism has some similarity to Abrahamic God worship: AI is a vengeful God, who will doom all humans with catastrophe if the instructions of the high priests are not followed. Our original sin is recklessly allowing AI to get this far, and our salvation is to follow the instructions of the priests and their written proscriptions to stop AI, before it smites all of humanity with robot locusts or some such.
The priesthood must carefully manage or "worship" AI in secret chambers only for the chosen few). AI, if it is to exist at all, must be carefully studied or placated by the priesthood, and most importantly the priesthood must be entrusted to keep it secure with the urgency of the eternal fate of humanity.
Surprising nobody, if you are rich, you are significantly more likely to get in elite schools. If you are very poor, you have an extremely slight advantage. If you are between very poor and very rich.... tough luck kid, roll the dice better next time. Somebody has to pay the price for other people's advantages.
I really hope stats like these really put to bed the notion that getting into elite schools are even remotely close to meritocracy.
#EliteSchools #university #admissions #ClassWarfare #meritocracy
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2023/07/24/upshot/ivy-league-elite-college-admissions.html
Only a small handful of offices have been successfully converted to housing even though there is a clear market demand for such a conversion on both the supply and demand side. The major hindrances cited:
(1) deep floor plans mean lack of natural light
(2) centralized plumbing and other utilities so retrofitting is very expensive
are exactly why offices are literally not fit for human habitation. Offices buildings were designed to help executives monitor and control cube farms at the absolute lowest cost possible. No sane person would want to live there, even taking into account the massive housing shortage. It'd be like living in a former dungeon.
According to Chris Hedges, Green Party has had to pay over a million dollars in legal fees to defend their right to ballot access. That's a lot of money for a small, grassroots party with no corporate backing. Make no mistake: the Democrat party is vicious and will sue and litigate against the Green Party every step of the way. They blame the Green Party for Hillary Clinton's loss to Trump since Green Party exceeded the margin of Trump's victory in some key states. Yet democrats have also not lifted a finger to fight for Ranked Choice Voting nor Star Voting and indeed have often fought against it. Nor do many Dems acknowledge many GP voters would not have voted for Clinton under any circumstance.
At this point, I think the Green Party has only secured ballot access in about 20 states. In the best case scenario, GP might be able to secure 20 more. Every state has different laws and hurdles to jump thru, and many of them are ruled by aggressively hostile Democrats, the very same ones who put their finger on the scale to try to keep progressives within their own party from winning.
It's a long, sad, expensive journey. But democracy is worth fighting for.
If we can't think outside the box of the Dem party, then we are already doomed. Apparently dem-aligned "progressives" are ok with war crimes now?
AOC announced endorsement of Biden "given the field" on the VERY SAME day Biden admin announces US will send cluster bombs to Ukraine.
Worldwide, civilians represent 97% of all cluster munition casualties, according to a report in August by the Landmine and Cluster Munition Monitor. Unexploded "bomblets" will kill and maim children decades after the war. To this day, vietnam war era UXO (unexploded ordinance) is killing children and civilians in Laos and elsewhere. 20,000 in Laos since the war ended, and still counting.
What makes diabolical UXO especially deadly for children is that they often look like toys or balls.
"The US government’s congressional research service recently estimated that, at the current rate of clearance, it would take another 100 years to make Laos UXO-free."
Many US allies have banned the use of cluster munitions long ago. The world was making good progress relegating these things to the dust bin of history.
Am i the only one who thinks expanding their use like is insane? Is this an admission that the war in Ukraine is going so badly that we now need to start propping it up with war crimes? Does the word "progressive" have any actual semantic meaning left?
Thank God the Green Party exists.
#GreenParty #AOC #Sanders #Biden #ClusterBombs #WarCrimes #GreenParty
