If 2023 ends up giving us AGI, room-temperature superconductors, Starships and a cure for cancer, I think we will able to call it a good year...
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Unfortunately, I think things are just getting started.
The planet itself, being a rock, doesn't care, at all.
The 2007 IPCC climate change synthesis report specified a deadline of 2015 for peak CO2 in order to meet the lowest mitigation scenario. Of course we've blown past that date and it's still full speed ahead with business as usual.
Alas, I try not to blather on about the severity of the climate situation in every thread.
I would say it's perhaps never been higher since the Cuban missile crisis.
Why is Belarus performing provocations on the Polish border? Seems to me that Lukashenko is either doing it for himself, or for Putin. I can't see why he'd be doing it for himself. He might see Poland, flawed but still something of a democracy, as a threat to inspire those seeking democracy in Belarus.
But it seems to me to be more likely that he's doing it for Putin. (This also might involve Wagner going to Belarus, not to escape Russia after the coup attempt, but in order to do a job for Russia.) But what's the point? Belarus isn't going to conquer Poland. Russia's not going to conquer the Baltics. So what's going on?
If this is all a master plan, I think it's most likely that Putin is trying to create a war (or at least a real threat of war) with NATO, to give him an excuse to call for a mass mobilization in Russia. This in turn will give him enough force to at least keep what he has in Ukraine. (He's gambling - almost certainly correctly - that NATO has no stomach for anything beyond defending themselves. Think of the "Phony War" phase of the western front in WWII.)
If I'm right, this is an extremely dangerous game that Putin is playing. Wagner could get out of hand (it already did once). The war could escalate. The Russian population could get fed up. The Russian elites could get fed up.
But Putin may feel that he has no choice, because otherwise he would lose power, and because he may not survive a fall from power.
(Wow, this has gone really far afield from a discussion of a promising cancer drug!)
Plus creating chaos in general seems part of the goal. Russia was losing (well, lost) hegemony in Ukraine post 2014, but damned if it's going to permit its success outside of of Russian control. Absolutely laying waste to Ukraine will not bring Ukraine back under Russian influence and has turned even formerly pro-Russian people in places like Odessa into Ukrainian nationalists. But this matters little to them, because Putin/Lavrov have already clearly bargained on losing them. ... So instead, create chaos not only in Ukraine but across all of Europe, making an example out of them and sewing destruction in order to prevent further splintering of Russian influence.
And it plays well to the domestic audience, and to the blindly "stick it to the West" types. Bitter ethnic animosity between Russians and Poles works for jingoistic demagogues on both sides of the border. Talking shit about Poland keeps Putin's domestic support strong. And (basically explicitly fascist) Wagner's philosophy of might-makes-right and chaos-making clearly plays well to the audience at home, so two birds one stone, sticking Wagner next to Poland to rattle some sabres.
The question is whether ultimately NATO falls for Lukashenko and Putin's stupid trap, and the next time a provocation like this happens, a helicopter or two is obliterated or a ship in the Black Sea is sunk (again), and then the hyper-nationalist audience at home can froth at the mouth some more and Putin's ratings go even higher.
But I think NATO leaders are smart enough to see the provocations for what they are.
You're right if you define a planet as its rocks, and would also be right to assert that humans don't care if you defined a human as its skeleton.
I admit it's a longshot, but I think it's the only chance we have. The superconductor news is welcome, we just need to see it get truly confirmed without a doubt.
The West being aligned with Ukraine would prevent Ukraine from getting nuked in an extended conflict.
That being said, there would have been no extended conflict for Ukraine without the West's assistance, they simply wouldn't exist without the international assistance, reducing the chance of Russia using a first strike against Ukraine to 0.
A downfalling desperate Putin is likely to cause serious damage with nuclear weapons. I think should be very cautios, but am not suggesting we should giving in to his his nuclear erection. The doomsday clock is 90 seconds to midnight for a reason.
Planes from Belarus flew into Polish airspace, and Lukashenko has threatened that Wagner troops are eager to enter Poland.
I think the Russian populaiton is still largely supporting Putin and eating his propaganda on bread every morning and evening from state media channels.
Some of them who are fed up cannot do anything about it as they can face extremely harsh punishments.
The elites may be sick of it, they lost a lot of ‘business’ since the start of the military operation, and from time to time another one bites the dust from an open window high up on a building.
And there are factions within Russia that fight one another and yet they are somehow all in support of Putin.
Neil: The Universe is blind to our sorrows and indifferent to our pains. Have a nice day!
Norm: Neil, there is a logic flaw in your little aphorism that seems quite telling. Since you and I are part of the Universe, then we would also be indifferent and uncaring. Perhaps you forgot, Neil, that we are not superior to the Universe but merely a fraction of it. Nice day, indeed
You’d need a bunch of jackpots to come up, in a row, immediately, at this point for technology to provide a way out of the current debacle.
To paraphrase Paul Lieberstein’s character on the Newsroom:
If we stop drilling globally right this second
AND
Everyone stops driving their car and starts biking everywhere
AND
We invest immediately in clean renewable energy
THEN
I still don’t see a way out of this.
edit: found it on YouTube https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=pNYp6oc37ds
My guess is what would likely happen is NATO would yell loudly, look like it was ineffective and couldn't decide what to do, but in reality suddenly "Ukraine" would suddenly sink some expensive big ships in the Black Sea or take down a strategic bomber or two, using advanced US/European weaponry, and NATO would shrug and say "Huh. Neat. Wasn't us tho"
It's just a threat to make west slightly less likely to help Ukraine for real. If people stopped falling for it 10 years earlier we wouldn't have been in this predicament, millions of people and billions of USD would be saved. All that was needed was to accept Ukraine into NATO or do serious response to 2008 and 2014 russian invasions.
Wild fires, what is sure to be a historic hurricane season, floods, war, and a technological leap.
I think everyone is fooled by Searle’s Chinese dictionary and the visual equivalents with midjourney.
The practical details should be figured out in a decade or so. The political side may be harder.
https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2023/07/su...
Don't underestimate Russia but don't overestimate them either:
Russia lost against Afghanistan already back when they were a superpower and had Ukraine on their side.
They will lose this time too even if they are even dumber this time and choose to waste all their conventional forces there.
I just asked "what does the JS ** operator do" and it made up an answer about it being a bitwise XOR. 1 ** 2 === 3. The fact that all these LLMs will confidently suggest wrong information makes me feel like LLM is going to be a difficult path to AGI. It will be a big problem if an AI receptionist just confidently spews misinformation and is unable to tell customers they are wrong.
Where? Humanity does not have the capability to travel between planetary systems.
Okay, ChatGPT is only text-to-text, but Google & Co are adding more modalities now, including images, audio and robotics. I think one missing step is to fuse training and inference regime into one, just as in animals. That probably requires something else than the usual transformer-based token predictors.
I was walking my dog there most days when that happened, and to my knowledge they never caught the spooky hackers did they?
For now, just call me spooky Patsy.
Anyway, whilst more and more cars and buildings with air conditioning expel heat without a considerable lag, thus amplifying the thermal heat island effect [2], and the reduction of aerosols that were contributing to global dimming [3] making it possible to warm up the sea and land to new record highs since records began [4], have the climate scientists adjusted their models yet, or are they still in full on fatalism and alarmism mode? I feel like Roy Castle [5] still lives on.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climatic_Research_Unit_email_c...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urban_heat_island
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_dimming#Relationship_to...
[4] https://blog.metoffice.gov.uk/2023/06/16/sea-surface-tempera...
The mujahedeen fighting Russia in Afghanistan also had Western (US, particularly) support.
It was for me unclear when the knot will rip from an investment point of view.
Everyone is investing in ai now.
This will leapfrog what we already see.
And yes John carmacks bet to solve it is a big bet but this is also a very good sign
No, it wouldn’t. You can have a World War without global superpowers on both sides (you need a wide geographic alignment of such power to, balanced for the relative difficulty of force projection on both sides, reach aggregate near-parity across a widely geographically dispersed set of conflict theaters, but you can do that with a global superpower on one side and a coalition of major regional powers in different regions on the other.
So do many humans. The expression of ignorance and self-doubt must certainly be woefully underrepresented in training data.
This will be a great strategy very fast.
It shows to be quite good for image generation already
This has always been an important missing piece. Without it ChatGPT is just a natural language interface to the information it was trained on. Still useful but unable to learn (aside from context).
Are they all understood? Sure, it seems like a rational suggestion, and we know that if we add it to the atmosphere it should cool, but what other effects will it cause? How many times have we tried this trick where we introduce something new to an environment and it doesn't turn out like we'd like it to? Feels like we're hoping to apply a band-aid but not deal with the wound.
We know a lot about it because volcanoes do this occasionally. Temperatures cool down for about 2 years, which is how long it takes for the S02 to break down.
So Putin's plan is just to create problems and confusion using Lukashenko as a proxy. These immigrants have been there for more than a year and he is still bringing new ones.
It's not clear it is one. Sleep is training (replay from hippocampus). Wake is inference.
We are NOT close to AGI.
* Fancy Markov chain (LLM) is not AGI.
* Stable diffusion style of image generation is NOT AGI.
* Fancy computer vision is NOT AGI.
Honestly, I don't think we are any closer to AGI. What we are seeing is the peak of "fancy tricks" for computer generated artifacts.
So I think we’re still quite a ways off from that level of threat.
I believe it's a form of intellectual laziness who's roots lie in self-consciousness. Meaning, that some people project internal feelings of inadequacy onto the external world.
And I understand the temptation there - if I'm not competing well at a game, the immediate tendency is to blame the game (I stink at golf -> golf is stupid).
One of the reasons doom porn is so popular because it's the ultimate "out": I don't need to focus on myself and self-improvement, which is hard, when we're all going to die anyway.
Considering that the stratosphere is part of the atmosphere, that's both pedantic and incorrect.
> We know a lot about it because volcanoes do this occasionally. Temperatures cool down for about 2 years, which is how long it takes for the S02 to break down.
Volcano's don't pump pure SO2. Yes, the science may be entirely valid, and it's not for me decide, but I think it warrants heavy consideration before we try to solve problems we're creating due to adding excess by adding additional excess.
Wild speculation. The human brain is still pretty much a black box.
> Would "feelings" improve decision accuracy in artificial systems?
Hard to tell, since we haven't observed any cases of sentient A.I. (able to feel). The only general intelligence we know (humans) have feelings as one of the most prominent features, so much so that "accuracy" is not the main driver for any given human... far from it. I don't know of any human that couldn't in one way or another be classified as "irrational".
I was there when the foundations for the enshitification of the internet were laid. And there were a bunch of people complaining about the people complaining about taking a beat to decide how this will play out. Well, we were so eager to get to the future and here we are.
Lots of naive and goal obsessed people who thought if you build it, they will come. If you chop the last two minutes off of that movie, it is a very dark and different story. Only the miracle at the end saves it.
AGI was the result of people using the older term "AI" for things that hadn't turned out to be what we thought AI was going to be.
Like alot of technology terms, all of this has its orgins in science fiction, when AI was supposed to be the equivalent of a human mind, but constructed out of something other than meat. The AI would have agency, it would do things... and do them because it wanted to. It would have goals, that it might fail or succeed at. And it would learn... a proper AI might be constructed to know nothing about a particular subject, but it could then go on to learn (on its own without any outside help) all about that topic. Perhaps even to the point of conducting its own original research to learn more. A sufficiently intelligent AI would go on to learn things no human had ever learned, to invent and theorize inventions and theories no human had conceived of.
But then we all realized that intelligence might be severable from those other parts, and we might have an "oracle" that when asked questions could provide sensible answers, but would have no agency. That wouldn't be able to learn in any real way, but since it already knew the sensible answers, that didn't matter.
And at that point, you see AGI start being used. And I assumed it meant "well, that is what we'll call Asimov's robots, or Skynet, or whatever".
Except, here you are again using AGI to mean the dumb oracles that aren't intelligent in any meaningful way.
Like, wtf.
The idea that GPT4 passed the Turing test is preposterous unless the test is a much more restricted version of what I think it is — in which case it would be meaningless.
Decisions making in our universe is a 1-dimensional slider between deterministic and random. That's it.
Write a program that makes non-deterministic, non-random (or any combination) decisions. You can't. It's like asking to create a new primary color.
If such a test exists we could interrogate if a system of some design might pass it, but if such a test does not exist and we cannot even imagine it then you’re talking about something that is unfalsifiable - which is another way of saying “effectively fake”.
These are far more complex tasks than many give credit for, and there are a lot more that she can do (even that dumb fucking hamster). Just because she can't speak doesn't make her intelligent, the same way that just because GPT does doesn't make it. What's key here is the generalization part. Yeah, there are failures, but clearly my cat's intelligence is highly generalized. You don't throw her off by minor perturbations of the environment. If I change the bowl that her food gets poured into, she still comes running, and can differentiate this from a bowl of cereal. She's robust to orientation of an object or even herself. We don't see remotely this robustness in ANY AI systems. While they can do impressive things, we still haven't beaten that fucking hamster.
I'm not sure how anyone could be this naive. Mammal brains don't have this train mode inference mode. They are both running at all times. If what you said was true, if I taught you something today you wouldn't be able to perform that action till tomorrow. Hell, schools would be an insane concept if this were true. Try to think a bit more before confidently stating an answer.
Luckily despite the last ten years of decline in relations and shift in China's positioning, the PRC still seems mostly motivated by trade rather than dick-measuring contests. Let's hope that continues.
He may get us back into space, but SpaceX won't get us into the solar system. That will come when SpaceX is fat and happy and complacent, and some new company comes in and does to them what they've done to others.
And none of us will be alive when a human orbits another star. We might see someone launch, but we won't live to see if they survived the journey.
NASA report on the Mount Pinatubo caused global cooling: https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/images/1510/global-effects...
Plenty has been written about the requirements for decades now. That hasn’t changed.
So the interesting question here that many people ask is, what game is Lukashenko playing here? I saw many comments that he just pretends he is stupid but in fact he is quite intelligent and he's doing what he can to keep his country as far away from war as possible. At the same time, he needs some tension and external enemy to help him keep the power (at least among the ~20% of Belorussians who actually believe the official propaganda and support him).
I very much hope I will live long enough to see the day when Belorussians finally get their freedom in a peaceful way and can enjoy living in peace, doing business with other countries and just be happy. I know many of them, they are very nice people, it's such a pity they need to go through this shit.
Of course, there _is_ a line, and Russia will probe to see where that is, but they won't cross it.
It's yet another reason why NATO is so firmly bound to supporting Ukraine. Before the opening of direct hostilities there, Russia engaged in all sorts of shit in the west with no consequences. Cyber attacks and surveillance stuff, but actually doing things like brazenly poisoning people on NATO soil and in the process killing UK civilians. Or shooting down civilian airliners. And never paying any consequence because we were afraid of war.
Well, now there's a war, but we don't have to be directly involved with the threat of nukes and cruise missiles hitting our cities...
The one place where I do see risk of the line being crossed is in the Black Sea. I'm disappointed that Turkey and NATO have not taken a firmer line. I hope/expect to see a stronger response to events like what happened in the port on the Danube a couple days ago.
It makes no sense for Russia to be allowed to control the waters outside of its territory on a sea where the coastline is filled with NATO countries.
If there is a serious flare up, it will be there, and naval.
Doesn't SO2 sink in air? Because we'll need to be constantly adding it to the atmosphere aren't we going to end up with acid rain as it falls to the ground?
Seconded. I had such high hopes that they could push it through the last time around and what really irks me is that there are enough Belorussians still that keep this jackass in power, and that they will prioritize their own financial well being over their fellow citizens' lives. I was in Poland during the Solidarity uprising and I had such high hopes for the rest of the SovBloc but not everybody managed to take advantage of the momentum. Ironically, distance from German capital seems to have been a prime factor in the outcome.
Either way, if acid rain is the price for controlling global warming, I think that is a very desirable trade-off!