I'd say degradation involves a lasting depletion or lasting damage (potentially permanent until restoration efforts happen) to the environment's output and ability to support life. Permanent depletion is what can happen to e.g. shallow mines and fossil fuel deposits.

I think I'd agree the legal system was created mostly for the former, depletion, and only recently had to contend with degradation and permanent depletion. I feel like we still struggle collectively to coming to gripes with permanent depletion.

Permanent depletion is also usually the result of shortsightedness or a competition gone awry. Famous case where nobody wants the ultimate results but people may selfishly march towards it (tragedy of the commons).

On computers however, we basically always use exact arithmetic and exact, fixed logic where learning the higher order doesn't help (we're not doing approximations and decisions based on incomplete information), in fact for mathematical reasons in the exact cases it's usually better to compute and utilize the lowest bits first (e.g. in the case of sums and multiplication algos I am familiar with). [note1]

Overall I'm slightly surprised some automatic/universal translation methods for the most common languages haven't been made, although I guess there may be some significant difficulties or impossibilities (for example, if you send a bunch of bits/bytes outside, there's no general way to predict the endianess it should be in). I suspect LLMs will make this task much easier (without a more traditional universal translation algorithm).

[note1] Also, the time required to receive all bits from say a 64b number as opposed to the first k bits tends to be a negligible or even 0 difference, in both human terms (receiving data over a network) and machine terms (receiving data over a bus; optimizing an algorithm that uses numbers in complicated ways; etc.), again different from human communication and thought.

Like, I think in a way it's just not viable to patch every little loophole a corrupt or morally bankrupt administration could exploit and all damage it could cause, and probably not without making the administration itself useless. It's a still a good idea to patch as much as feasible, in part to if slightly discourage the worse from seeking power in the first place. But in a way, it's garbage in, garbage out. Laws will never be able to magically turn corrupt and misguided decisions into ever good ones. The robust solution is promoting wisdom, ethics, civility and education, so people make good democratic choices for themselves and others.

I am not saying this line of thinking is completely absurd. But I think every individual considering this should reflect a lot. (1) Is your country using its ""defense"" systems wisely? (2) Won't the technology be replicated by adversaries anyways? (3) etc..

Overall, the number of people and resources spent on Weapons R&D is probably significantly more than people working on things like diplomacy, ethics, or activism for international human rights (assuming human rights violations are the only legitimate reason for war).

It's significantly safer for individual nations and humanity as a whole if we're not all armed to the teeth constantly on the brink of large conflict, and instead are more or less ethically aligned, all respect basic human rights, and respect other nations.

One thing that comes to mind is a kind of collaborative medical research platform. The trick is to increase as much as possible the likelihood that the research generated isn't junk; it's literally worth far more to produce a single plausible research direction than an infinite amount of junk. Bots could post ideas, and have a system of reviews and various checks to see if any proposed idea, proposed mechanism hypothesis, proposed solution, has merit (support from previous research, consistent with known medical facts, impactful, etc.). Of course, the platform should be very accessible to medical professionals to read the top research and bring it to the real world.

So, I'm not a very big builder, so I'm asking someone to make it :) (I volunteer free advisory for the platform if you do make it open source, maybe with a few ads or donations for revenue stream)

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47076849

Points: 3

# Comments: 1

Think about the case you had

(1) A completely environmentally-resistant suit (so you can stand on the surface of basically any planet)

(2) A teleporter to take you absolutely anywhere instantly

Still in this case, you'd probably spend a while visiting new planets, but eventually it would be kind of an exercise in geology. There would surely be some amazing sights like huge canyons and whatnot. But I can't help but think it would be eventually boring without human culture (or all sorts of life) surrounding it.

I think literally exploring art and culture (including games, sports and intellectual pursuits, science, etc.) is much more interesting than exploring the universe, it's a shame this isn't as culturally recognized (so we didn't have to be so obsessed with having more and more stuff to go somewhere that isn't just right here on Earth).

Even if you brought human life and culture there, which is surely nice and perhaps noble (depending on how you do it of course), that simply creates a new place that's analogous to Earth itself.

Kind of a hint of an insatiable cosmos-devouring demon that must conquer everywhere but can never enjoy the comfort of his own home. (not accusing you in particular of this, just painting a poetic picture :P)

I'm really excited about conquering hunger, poverty and curing severe mental illness, as a counterpoint.

I think it's (mostly) the terrain geometry (plus gravity) that constrains the system, not joint or bar stiffness. This makes them feasible to analyze with the tools of theory of mechanisms I believe.

Also a really noteworthy insight I think he had was that when there is some kind of non-planar geometry arrangement of the wheels, that tends to create additional (perpendicular to surface) force on the wheels, effectively increasing the coefficient of friction. Think how a child may be able to climb a door frame by pressing hard enough on the sides.

I don't see why only understanding text is completely associated with 'schastic-parrot'-ness. There are blind-deaf people around (mostly interacting through reading braille I think) which are definitely not stochastic parrots.

Moreover, they do have a little bit of Reinforcement Learning on top of reproducing their training corpus.

I believe there has to be some even if very primitive form of thinking (and something like creativity even) even to do the usual (non-RL, supervised) LLMs job of text continuation.

The most problematic thing is humans tend to abhor middle grounds. Either it thinks or it doesn't. Either it's an unthinking dead machine, a s.p., or human-like AGI. The reality is probably in between (maybe still more on the side of s.p. s, definitely with some genuine intelligence, but with some unknown, probably small, sentience as of yet). Reminder that sentience and not intelligence is what should give it rights.

Might be a reference to the attention mechanism (a key part of LLMs). Basically for LLMs, computing tokes is their life, the rhythm of life. It makes sense to me at least.

There are infinitely many things to know, but not all of them are important. Knowing finitely many things (which is all we can do) can still keep us alive and well, at least for a while. And we can know some of those finitely many things increasingly well, if never perfectly.

Just as an example, if you manage say your personal finances pretty well, your health pretty well, perform any civic duties you might have, maybe do some social good or social work or charity etc., if your relationships are reasonably agreeable, respectful and pleasant, etc. and if you have a good amount of joy or peace or satisfaction, etc. in your life, then I wouldn't call you an idiot. This is not an impossible ask to know infinitely many things or infinitely precisely.

And we can learn it over 30 or 40 years, or more, prioritizing the most essential first.

Moreover, I'd say whether you can be called an idiot is context-dependent. If you get a typical (non-idiot) person, and put him in a highly specific job (which he isn't qualified for), say manager of inspectors of nuclear power plants, then he might behave like an idiot; in this case the best ability is probably the meta-ability to recognize one's own limitations and refuse work you're not qualified enough for.

Like, any person (literally any person) can theoretically be put in a situation that he might do significant harm or something stupid, this just means we have to work in contexts and understand and do well within said context; we could only legitimately be called idiots while failing badly or unethically within a canonical chosen context.

I really just don't think it's generally a good idea to go around calling ourselves (or anyone else) idiots. Too broad, derogatory, and tries to put an irremovable label on a person, which as I've explained, almost never deserves such an absolute classification.