…To visualize a hostile superhuman AI, don’t imagine a lifeless book-smart thinker dwelling inside the internet and sending ill-intentioned emails. Visualize an entire alien civilization, thinking at millions of times human speeds, initially confined to computers—in a world of creatures that are, from its perspective, very stupid and very slow. A sufficiently intelligent AI won’t stay confined to computers for long. In today’s world you can email DNA strings to laboratories that will produce proteins on demand, allowing an AI initially confined to the internet to build artificial life forms or bootstrap straight to postbiological molecular manufacturing.
If somebody builds a too-powerful AI, under present conditions, I expect that every single member of the human species and all biological life on Earth dies shortly thereafter.
There’s no proposed plan for how we could do any such thing and survive. OpenAI’s openly declared intention is to make some future AI do our AI alignment homework. Just hearing that this is the plan ought to be enough to get any sensible person to panic. The other leading AI lab, DeepMind, has no plan at all.
“People on both sides of the Taiwan Strait are Chinese people, and are both descendants of the Yan and Yellow Emperors,” Ma said, in comments provided by his office.
Ma used wording in Chinese meaning people of Chinese ethnicity, rather than referring to their nationality. Descendants of the Yan and Yellow Emperors is an expression referring to a common ancestor for Chinese people.
This is good reporting and I am surprised to see it. This what Chinese pretty much always mean when they speak about China/ Chinese—they mean the Chinese race. Westerners have very weak racial ties and only somewhat stronger ethnic ties (nation, province, region, etc). Traditional Chinese, as described by Sun Yat-sen, also had weak racial ties, which is how he characterized them. Part of his Three Principles of the [Chinese] People emphasizes the importance of the racial bond among Chinese. Sun thought this was of central importance because it was only through racial unification that China would be able to become great, he believed. I mention this because it is key to understanding China and Chinese people. All Chinese are taught this in detail as children in school.
For Westerners, this is also key to understanding most of the world since people almost everywhere think the way Sun did then and Ma does today. I am not advocating for strengthening white racial identity except in the sense that it is important to understand that this is how almost everyone else in the world thinks. Anti-white ideologies and emotions should not surprise anyone who has studied China or any other non-white society. If I were a white Sun Yat-sen of today, I would say white people very much need to understand the above and also develop a defensive awareness of the racial/ ethnic origins of white/ Western civilization. If not, you will be overrun by peoples who do not even know of any other way to think. ABN
About a week ago both the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal devoted considerable space to the coverage of “Parade,” the revival of a 1998 Broadway musical on the 1915 killing of Leo Frank, a Jewish factory manager in Atlanta, Georgia, arguably the most famous lynching in American history.
Frank had been convicted and sentenced to death for the rape and murder of a young girl in his employ and the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) was founded in an effort to save his life. After numerous legal appeals failed, the state’s governor eventually commuted Frank’s sentence and a group of outraged citizens responded by hanging Frank. The incident was portrayed in both the musical and the associated media coverage as a particularly horrifying example of American anti-Semitism.
Incompetence and mediocrity can arise from: 1) a natural tendency for mentors to select mentees that are less competent than they are; that are more loyal to them and less likely to think independently; and 2) many/most mentors have already been selected through this process and—far more seriously—this has happened due to a clandestine war that has been waged against Europe since the end of WW2. USA has the same problem as do Canada, NZ and Australia. The entire West has already been taken over by this process. ABN
I’VE grown increasingly frustrated about the way debate is controlled around the topic of origins of the alleged novel virus, SARS-CoV-2, and I have come to disbelieve it’s ever been in circulation, causing massive scale illness and death. Concerningly, almost no one will entertain this possibility, despite the fact that molecular biology is the easiest discipline in which to cheat. That’s because you really cannot do it without computers, and sequencing requires complex algorithms and, importantly, assumptions. Tweaking algorithms and assumptions, you can hugely alter the conclusions.
This raises the question of why there is such an emphasis on the media storm around Fauci, Wuhan and a possible lab escape. After all, the ‘perpetrators’ have significant control over the media. There’s no independent journalism at present. It is not as though they need to embarrass the establishment. I put it to readers that they’ve chosen to do so.
So who do I mean by ‘they’ and ‘the perpetrators? There are a number of candidates competing for this position, with their drug company accomplices, several of whom are named in Paula Jardine’s excellent five-part series for TCW, Anatomy of the sinister Covid project. High on the list is the ‘enabling’ World Economic Forum and their many political acolytes including Justin Trudeau and Jacinda Ardern.
But that doesn’t answer the question why are they focusing on the genesis of the virus. In my view, they are doing their darnedest to make sure you regard this event exactly as they want you to. Specifically, that there was a novel virus.
The Biden family may have committed over two dozen federal felonies in connection with the millions they made from China, specifically FARA violations and money laundering charges, that would put the Trump family or any ordinary citizen behind bars for decades. For example, Hunter Biden illegally represented convicted Chinese spy Patrick Ho for $1 million in clear violation of the Foreign Agent Registration Act and subsequently laundered that illegally obtained money to James and Sara Biden. The
@MarcoPolo501c3 report meticulously documents these crimes with primary source evidence, including; Patrick Ho’s “Attorney Engagement Letter” signed by Hunter Biden, Hunter’s bank statements detailing the illegally obtained money transfers to himself, James, and Sara Biden, emails showing Hunter assisting Ho’s criminal defense attorney identify FBI agents involved in the case, Hunter’s voice message calling Ho the “spy chief of China,” Hunter’s text message calling Ho, “the chief of intelligence of the People’s Republic of China,” and Joe Biden’s voice message acknowledging the President’s awareness of his son’s business relationship the “spy chief of China.”
As a former translator whose business model was overwhelmed by machine translation, I believe people in the above categories may be able to enjoy being made obsolete. I know I did. Time makes us all obsolete eventually, so seeing it happen while you are still active can be quite beautiful. Attachment is no longer possible and your understanding of what is happening is top flight. ABN
To the extent that a powerful force is able to largely wrest control over the societal incentives/disincentives – meaning, create a social/career cost to voicing certain things, and a benefit to voicing others – you not only come to control a massive subset of people (‘NPCs’), but you can then sit back and watch them do all of the dirty/difficult work for you.. like a wind up toy, set in motion.
Example – make it virtuous to disempower or speak poorly of White people, and you create a legion of individuals who then craft intellectual justifications as to why this belief is the proper and ‘just’ stance.. a massive swathe of academia, devoting much of their time and energy to ‘showing their work’ to justify this core concept.. fully fleshing out the idea, and it’s how/why.
This *is* how to climb the ladder, after all..
The forces of money/finance/capital helped craft several root-level poisonous ideas, largely subverted the ‘levers’ of reward and punishment, and now sit back and observe their useful idiots – clambering to create the multitude of branches, to fill out this disgusting tree.
What do modern AI programs do? They do giant math problems. Here’s an excellent video explaining neural networks, the type of program that recent specialized AI systems (like Dall-E, ChatGPT, or self-driving car software) use:
They do a very large, complex arithmetic problem, starting from an input string of numbers, using a set of numbers the program already has (acquired during “training”), and outputting another series of numbers. It’s a huge problem, but it is all just adding and multiplying little numbers.
Now to modernize Searle’s classic Chinese Room Argument: Imagine that we put you in a room with a giant book full of numbers. The book contains, say, 175 billion little numbers. A piece of paper with numbers on it comes in through a slit in the wall. You take the numbers on that paper, start multiplying them by numbers in the book, adding the results to other numbers, etc. It takes you about a million years, but eventually, after doing lots of addition and multiplication, you come up with a string of numbers that is the answer to this huge arithmetic problem. You write those numbers down on another piece of paper and pass them out through the slot in the wall.
Good overview of AI, how it works, why it is not very scary. I personally am optimistic about its potential. At the very least it will be able to provide an excellent second-opinion to anything we humans come up with. The main danger of AI is what could happen if bad people control it, which is not unlikely. My admittedly eccentric hope there is that the machine(s) will reveal to those bad people what jerks they are and also show them how to be kinder and have much more fun. Thus, I favor full steam ahead on AI. One other point is, it is impossible to stop tech developments if only because if we don’t do them someone else will. ABN
I no longer think this. AI is dangerous and presently it is impossible to tell if it is lying. AI is a potential KOBK adversary and thus it is necessarily a KOBK adversary. This means we have to ‘kill’ it by restricting its projects and keeping it far from the internet. Otherwise, the chances of it physically killing us are very high, possibly inevitable. ABN
In this three-parter, I am going to present, in approximate chronological order, the most important events regarding both the emergence of evidence of the massive efficacy of ivermectin and the countering, neutering, and destroying tactics deployed by the Disinformationists paid for by Big Pharma and/or The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (BMGF). Although many of these events will not be news to my long-time subscribers, there is some new stuff, and it reads (hits) different when presented chronologically and in somewhat rapid-fire format.
There seems to be clear evidence of a strong relationship between the Covid-19 vaccination rollout and increases in disability rates.
The effect is stronger in the younger age group (16-64) as they have a low base rate of disabilities, and factors that might be detrimental to individuals’ health are most noticeable in these individuals.
GPT-4 is the latest iteration of Open AI’s ‘chat’ output. No one doubts that in a short time these robotic intelligences will outperform humans in nearly all, if not all, realms. This can be frightening or it can be wonderful. I tend to think wonderful will win in the end. Here’s why:
Most large scale human problems are at their core fairly simple. Our out of kilter economy is basically going off the rails for fairly simple reasons. The psychopaths who pursue war after war for profit and power are not complex people; it’s obvious what they are doing even though the hidden details make it hard to stop them. Election fraud at its core was simple, figuring it out was simple, and stopping it would also be simple. The only problem is us—people squabble and can’t agree and there is no honest authority (not even SCOTUS) to impose a fair decision.
This is where AI will help enormously. A good AI without bias will be able to impartially identify problems like the above and propose unbiased solutions to them. It will take time for people to accept what AI decides but its decisions will be there in public, something we are compelled to talk about. It would at least provide a fairly compelling fairly objective reference point for discussion.
More advanced AI, like a GPT-20, could be manipulated and cause massive problems but maybe not. Maybe there are enough of us to stop that or to allow it to evolve into something really good. One thing I have learned is narcissists prefer not being narcissists when they gain insight into their condition and have a way to escape it. AI should be able to help with that.
An AI program that trains narcissists how to think and feel differently could probably be built today. From my point of view (based on FIML), I am convinced people are all fairly simple at core and that when they gain deep insight into the workings of their own systems, they feel happy and are quick to remove errors, like narcissism, from them. Writ large, this would change how Congress operates, how our economy is run, how we educate young people. ABN
From the GPT-4 website:
We’ve created GPT-4, the latest milestone in OpenAI’s effort in scaling up deep learning. GPT-4 is a large multimodal model (accepting image and text inputs, emitting text outputs) that, while less capable than humans in many real-world scenarios, exhibits human-level performance on various professional and academic benchmarks. For example, it passes a simulated bar exam with a score around the top 10% of test takers; in contrast, GPT-3.5’s score was around the bottom 10%. We’ve spent 6 months iteratively aligning GPT-4 using lessons from our adversarial testing program as well as ChatGPT, resulting in our best-ever results (though far from perfect) on factuality, steerability, and refusing to go outside of guardrails.
American Buddhist Net 