god yeah he is really cooking here. we are making truly incredible leaps. we are not reading the texts being cited let alone any of the thousands that came after. we are saying with a straight face that saussure discovered the fact that human language maps perfectly onto the perceptron then immediately transitioning into hugging face hack discourse. you may not like it but this is what peak performance of the dialectical science of historical materialism looks like. i didn’t even fucking get to the nick land stuff but i bet it smokes

lol im reading this and this guy seems to really think that he could just muscle his way through the chinese room argument with uhhhhhhh saussure??? boss baby tweet energy but for intro to critical theory

Yet the stubborn fact remains: machines could not do these sorts of things a year ago. However “weak, narrow and crude” such machines were, they are now necessarily less so.

damn dude thats crazy

i also wonder if this is going to lead to an intramovement schism of some kind, if only because a lot of the activists i’ve noticed turning (or being recruited) towards xrisk shit on the activist level (esp the student activist level) are ex-climate activists. i don’t know if the belief that ai xrisk is the One Risk To Rule Them All has just fully slid into the climate change place in these activists’ minds or if there’s enough lingering reality principle attunement there to give them pause. but i also don’t know enough about the way EA types talk to their activist recruits to know if they’re being allowed into the full “it’s all about the robots” inner sanctum or if the ideologues keep the activists in the sort of “no other existential risks are important too we promise that we believe that 100%” not-yet-clear zone

If all these hysterical plebs would calm down and do some freaking Bayes-theoretic thinking for once they would definitely realize that the primary concern facing modern society is letting the text prediction algorithm achieve demonic apotheosis

It’s enduringly odd to me that Scott Alexander is a psychiatrist. I don’t really have any insights about this; I just think it’s kind of funny. All the psychiatrists I’ve seen have been mildly-eccentric-but-it-doesn’t-seem-to-really-matter, so I wonder if he is just a normal doctor who turns around and taps out a fucking Astral Codex Ten post. I wonder what posts my own damn psychiatrist is making

God as someone involved with actual anti-AI organizing on university campuses this is increasingly scaring the shit out of me.

That said I wonder if I could somehow steal their money for nefarious Ludditic purposes. I don’t actually wonder this, really, but it does remind me of when, during my master’s degree at a university bombarded by culture war garbage, I was debating going to the well-advertised well-funded conservative groups’ fancy dinner book clubs about Plato or whatever. “Hey I’m here to chat about the Great Books! Don’t worry that my name is this but my voice sounds like this. It’s not a big deal bb” / “Oh yeah I’m soooo scared of the big brain computer. Like what if it gets too big lol. That would be sooooo bad! Here are my account and routing numbers”

GPT, mind, personality, imitation learning, Decision Transformer, Guardian Angel, AI mode collapse, AI safety, transhumanism

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When I found out he was already thirty (30) years old when he started writing it I had to physically get up and go for a walk