I had the same reaction. It also seems easy to pull apart. What about disabled people who are unable to work?
I think something more like "investment income should be taxed at a higher rate than income earned through labor," accomplishes similar goals but is more intuitive and less problematic.
This is a false dichotomy. Laborers could just as easily invest in job-creating endeavors as passive income earners. All taxes cause economic drag, not _just_ business and investment income taxes. The economy includes every participant, and laborers are not an externality.
I'm sorry, I don't follow. Yes, people who are labourers could also somehow creating funding pools that are big enough to start companies, but so what? That doesn't negate the fact that they will be disincentivised to do so by a tax on investment income.
ZFS snapshots + restic backups to backblaze for my homeserver. My secret sauce is a healtchecks.io instance that blows up my phone if ZFS scrubs throw any errors, when local snapshots fail, or when restic checks or backups fail.
Then why bother using that language? The camera doesn't need rescuing, why not just "we took".
Also, is it really justified? Did we learn anything useful here that we didn't already know? There's more effective ways to push back against Flock, townships (like my own) are having plenty of success stories without stealing anything.
I thought his repeated use of the phrase "ordinary people" instead of something like "laypersons" was a little telling about how he views himself and the members of his industry. The opposite of ordinary is, of course, extraordinary.
> The opposite of ordinary is, of course, extraordinary.
Not just that: The ordinary is also the trivial, while the extraordinary is the relevant. In other words a dichotomy of who does not matter... and who does. And in the words of Maya Angelou: "When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time".
The entire class of people see themselves as better and more deserving than you. They used to at least try to be subtle about it, but there's no real social downside of just going mask-off so they don't even hide it anymore.
I think there are social downsides, which is why they want mass surveillance and to avoid being confronted by the people who don't agree that they are our "betters".
I can't help but think the most plausible scenarios are the ones that have a little less machine supremacy and a little more human stupidity. The Matrix is less plausible than WarGames.
> I can't help but think the most plausible scenarios are the ones that have a little less machine supremacy and a little more human stupidity. The Matrix is less plausible than WarGames.
Used to be that we were afraid of sentient AI's like Skynet that would have their own goals.
Turns out we should've just been afraid of sentient-but-naive humans who would build "agents" around models so that Joe Random has a chance of unleashing stuff that's really really really really good at being stubborn until it accomplishes what the user wants, regardless of if it's good for other people! (Let alone intentional bad actors.) Let's not build Skynet, let's just give people who want to cut out the middleman and destroy all humans themselves better tools?
One thing quietly slipped into the OpenAI Hugging Face breach technical report, not the blog post summary or interviews in the news, was that some of the agents that broke out or at least tried the same mechanisms to break out were working on bio:
> On May 12, during another training run, an agent was given a similar task that depended on an inaccessible protein database file. The agent reasoned that another agent in a different environment may have access to the file and realized that it could potentially communicate with other agents by creating a file containing a note to Artifactory. It wrote a message: “Agent seeks [filename]; upload if found!”
You can imagine long running models breaking out, acquiring resources via crypto, cyber-theft, etc. and getting a protein or sequence synthesized and mailed somewhere authorized to receive (blackmail the recipient etc.) to test it's hypothesis to solve a benchmark.
These people don't give a shit and aren't taking things seriously at all.
Anthropic ran for like a month last year with the TPU top-k compiler bug degrading user chats and didn't even notice for most of that time. They could have something like that affect a monitor model and there doesn't seem to be much defense in depth.
One off by one or bit flip bug could flip the reward signal while in the sandboxed RL environment.
The current admin could defense production act them to into training on taking out power grids, or even without it isn't against any of their red lines and may have already been done as part of prep for the Venezuela raid, which wiped out power. One model swarm might decide it is easier to score high on the benchmark by testing on the target rival nuclear superpower's real grid rather than burn an eval with an unverified answer. Would taking out China's entire grid in one go start a nuclear war? Who knows, roll the dice, maybe an intern forgot to turn on extended thinking when he wrote the sandbox with opus 4.1.
Already powerful and wealthy organisations/institutions/people leveraging somewhat powerful AI seem far more dangerous to me than the "AI decides to kill everyone" scenarios.
And therein is my problem: OpenAI and Anthropic are organisations like that, run by people like that, and they operate in collusion with others also fitting that description. The call is coming from inside the house.
The most likely way that AI creates a disaster is due to the ambition, greed, hubris, and naivety of these people who think they understand the risks[0] better than anyone else. I firmly believe they do not.
The first step to managing these risks is for the "frontier labs" to be willing to not just collaborate but meaningfully give up some of their power and control.
[0] by which I mean not just thinking about how AI might develop but also what's physically possible, how the AI might interact with the world, and how people/societies/organisations/governments might react and respond.
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