thoughts

One other argument in favor of this direction is that it may be more socially palatable than simply shouting "pause AI" without a complementary message providing an alternative path forward. It will require a philosophical shift from the current mentality that tech advancements that touch humans are dangerous but advancements that are separate from... See more

eth.limo • My Techno-Optimism

It's a useful capability to have: if we get warning signs that near-superintelligent AI is starting to do things that risk catastrophic damage, we will want to take the transition more slowly.

Until such a critical moment happens, merely having the capability to soft-pause would cause little harm to developers.

Focusing on industrial-scale hardware,

eth.limo • D/Acc: One Year Later

As Manuel Castells Oliván,2 a Spanish sociologist, has written, “Elites are cosmopolitan, people are local.”

Alexander C. Karp • The Technological Republic: The Sunday Times bestseller from the great minds behind Palantir

It is true, of course, that purportedly neutral or innocent aesthetic decisions are often means of constructing and maintaining caste hierarchies.

Alexander C. Karp • The Technological Republic: The Sunday Times bestseller from the great minds behind Palantir

enthusiasm about modern military technology as a force for good seems to require believing that the dominant technological power will reliably be one of the good guys in most conflicts, now and in the future : military technology is good because military technology is being built and controlled by America and America is good. Does being an e/acc... See more

eth.limo • My Techno-Optimism

A first natural step is brain-computer interfaces . Brain-computer interfaces can give humans much more direct access to more-and-more powerful forms of computation and cognition, reducing the two-way communication loop between man and machine from seconds to milliseconds. This would also greatly reduce the "mental effort" cost to getting a... See more

eth.limo • My Techno-Optimism

The Chinese proverb 天高皇帝远 ("tian gao huang di yuan"), "the sky is high, the emperor is far away", encapsulates a basic fact about the limits of centralization in politics. Even in a nominally large and despotic empire - in fact, especially if the despotic empire is large, there are practical limits to the leadership's reach and attention, the... See more

eth.limo • My Techno-Optimism

If this crash-like process is inevitable, recovery is not. If you happen to become aware of a parrot in time, like the piece of corn noticed by the author of the depression story, you can regain the ability to keep playing.

But if you crash into a finite game and fail to see a parrot for long enough, you can lose the will to keep playing entirely.... See more

Venkatesh Rao • Don’t Surround Yourself With Smarter People

A more advanced approach is to use clever cryptographic trickery: for example, industrial-scale (but not consumer) AI hardware that gets produced could be equipped with a trusted hardware chip that only allows it to continue running if it gets 3/3 signatures once a week from major international bodies, including at least one... See more