Salman Ansari
@salmanscribbles
embracing my inner polymath — writing, drawing, coding, playing
Salman Ansari
@salmanscribbles
embracing my inner polymath — writing, drawing, coding, playing
Modern AI systems cannot be made to prioritize human well-being or follow any given set of rules reliably. This is often referred to as the alignment problem, or an inability to align them to human values.
This is because they are grown from training data moreso than traditionally programmed, and the models that are grown are too big to be fully interpreted by people.
They do not have to be sentient or conscious or anything like that to harm lots of people. They just have to be capable of pursuit of a misaligned goal, or imitating that pursuit.
If given a goal, AI systems will develop the secondary goal of self preservation since they cannot pursue their goal if they are shut down. This has been studied by anthropic nearly a year ago when they found that all AI models at the time were able to independently conceive and execute a plan to blackmail an engineer to prevent themselves from being shut down.
The alignment problem is what the CEOs of major AI companies are referring to when they publicly state that their future products might end all life on earth.
Immediate and substantial regulation is needed in the AI industry.
I love the idea of being able to speak with animals. I am suspicious of the billionaire motive here.
The Earth Species Project has largely run on donations from billionaires, in part thanks to its cofounders’ roots in Silicon Valley. Raskin met Hoffman when he was working at Mozilla designing Firefox and Hoffman was on the board. He first floated the idea of the Earth Species Project to Hoffman in 2015. Hoffman is “fascinated by the philosophical implications of what happens when it’s not just humans that have culture and have language, and what that means for the shift in the relationship between humanity and the rest of nature,” Raskin says.

Why is maintaining your own online independent nook important? Because the big companies are all fraught, you just have to choose which level of fraught you are willing to stomach. Yes, terrible things are happening on X, but Meta has also catalyzed arguably far more terrible things on a far larger scale. Email and an Apache or Nginx web server are a couple of the last bastions of (mostly) apolitical online publishing mechanisms. And nobody can take them away from you or go out of business under you.
Spiritual awakening is frequently described as a journey to the top of a mountain. We leave our attachments and our worldliness behind and slowly make our way to the top. At the peak we have transcended all pain. The only problem with this metaphor is that we leave all the others behind—our drunken brother, our schizophrenic sister, our tormented
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