A sufficiently intelligent AI will have multiple ways to pose risk to humanity at large. For example an oopsie at a wetlab - very contagious virus with initially mild symptoms which kills its hosts only after they already had time to spread it further. But I would have to become super intelligent myself to give you precise blueprint for such a virus -- which is kind of the point

Also -- ASML lithography machine is only good at making chips. I can't believe you compared it to AI that can generalize across variety of tasks

AI labs are certainly trying to make LLMs behave helpful and subservient but the question is -- will they be able to keep doing so once LLMs become smarter?

Btw thinking about the far-right rhetoric of us vs immigrants, I think you could draw some similarities here only if you replaced "immigrants" (ie. humans with very similar morals, behaviors and capabilities) with an actual alien species that is qualitatively different from us. More like human vs chicken (where we are the chicken)

At the end of the day the final grades from school / college grades depend on so many factors that this signal is close to noise anyway, but in college it often feels somehow more important than the actual learning and so much time and stress is spent on them.

In a better world I imagine it would be the organisations that need specific knowledge co-sponsoring "exam centers", separate from colleges, where you could go and get a certificate saying how well you know a given subject. Private companies that want to hire the best people actually have a good incentive to make these exams as fair and useful as possible.

To make an analogy with GAN networks in deep learning: the college would act as a generative part and "exam center" would be the discriminative part. It seems to work pretty well in ML, maybe it would work in education too?:D

> Also best not to point out that very large contingents of the defenders are actual literal Nazis.

Even if – the thing they are defending is not nazism!

I don't think the parent commenter meant the producers of goods as the "people with actual power". It is just as unreasonable to believe that businesses will suddenly start caring about environment, since that would put them at a disadvantage on the market. (Though I imagine the whole narrative that it is the consumer's responsibility to fix the environment is very convenient for some of the less-environmentally friendly corporations who might be afraid of additional burdens on them so there's an incentive to push that message)

In my opinion the root of the problem is that damaging the environment is not associated with an inherent cost. In my opinion, scalable solutions are those which "use the free market to regulate itself", i.e. things like carbon taxes (to make CO2 emission a cost), shifting cost of garbage utilisation to packaging producers (to make non-recyclable packaging a cost) etc. (+ corresponding change to social programs to lessen the impact of this change on consumers who would not afford increase in the price of goods). But for this to happen there needs to be a political will. For this reason I think that the most environmentally conscious things those of us who live in democracies can do is to vote for environmentally conscious representatives who understand the issue well.