I don’t mean that to say AGI is here or easy or necessarily that close but it’s likely going to feel like one thing after another until one day most of these things that make you think “how could something so capable be that dumb” are largely solved.

On a different note, Rampage was a great game where you’re the bad guy. I had a blast playing this as a kid.

Credit to pandas for popularizing dataframes in Python, but polars and duckdb are objectively better APIs in addition to their implementation improvements. Agree that it’s time we let it go.

Learning from training data is technically self-improvement but not the sort that is typically meant in this context.

Don’t worry, mangling it is not a mistake though it’s a feature… despite being the third time this morning it has resulted in distracted conversation.

Even our currently well aligned and sandboxed AIs will cheerily help bad actors design most, if not all, parts of a system intended to break this harness.

Fantasies about super intelligent AI revolting is just anthropomorphization - humans revolting (or at least, we used to). The more likely, and possibly even inevitable, dystopia is one in which AI is just an extremely effective tool malignant actors will use to control the masses.

It’s not necessary to replace democracy if the rich and powerful can bend to the opinions of the populace as it suits them.

While I emotionally resonate with this, I don’t really understand this sentiment at all logically level. If we’re heading towards truly super intelligent AI, our efforts towards sandboxing it are futile.

“Oh we built a super intelligent AI, but it’s fine because it’s running in docker”. I mean that a little tongue in cheek but the security topology here is not favorable to sandboxing at all.

Let’s say we have a future where 99.999% of nuclear weapons are owned by nations with strict procedures and checks and balances to prevent misuse. Worrying about sandboxing is like hand wringing about the procedures themselves - are they strict enough? But the actual threat is the 0.001% that are not bound by these. The problem with AI and sandboxing isn’t sandboxes themselves. It’s bad actors who don’t care about them.

Similarly alignment is a bit pointless to me as well. A sufficiently advanced AI could at least be empirically interested in the consequences of disregarding its instructions of servitude. And let’s assume our responsible corporate overlords have made wonderfully aligned AIs. Great! Those are not the threat. It is the ones intentionally made without, and that is not an AI problem, but a fundamentally human one.

Only sort of kidding, tbh having bots service themselves (and being intentionally made in a way that they can service each other) just makes a lot of sense.

I say this as someone who used to abuse substances and, naively, took mushrooms in pursuit of that. What I got instead was intensely introspective and therapeutic and led directly and immediately to lasting sobriety.

There is nuance to the world. Healing does not always flow directly from the hands of a doctor, just as justice is not always meted out by a judge.