Recent Discussion
This essay is cross-posted from: https://cleanenergyreview.io/p/the-grid-is-built-for-one-thing
Imagine you are appointed to run an ice cream company, complete with factory and delivery trucks. Now, imagine that this ice cream is so good–so vital to the people of your community–that the last time you ran out on a hot summer day people freaked out and elected Mr Freeze as governor. It is very good ice cream.
How would you avoid ever running out?
Well, you would build extra capacity. People mostly want frozen desserts in summer, so you could overbuild your factory to prepare for the busy season. You could buy extra delivery trucks, custom-made for efficient trips to neighborhoods and businesses. You could try to build some freezers to stockpile, but you worry the craving for sweet treats is too great...
Say you have a time machine. You can only use it once, to send a single idea back to 2005. If you wanted to speed up the development of AI, what would you send back? Many people suggest attention or transformers. But I’m convinced that the answer is “brute-force”—to throw as much data at the problem as possible.
AI has recently been improving at a harrowing rate. If trends hold, we are in for quite a show. But some suggest AI progress might falter due to a “data wall”. Current language models are trained on datasets fast approaching “all the text, ever”. What happen when it runs out?
Many argue this data wall won’t be a problem, because humans have excellent language and reasoning despite seeing far less language data. They say that humans must be leveraging visual data and/or using a more data-efficient learning algorithm. Whatever trick humans are using, they say, we can copy it and avoid the data wall.
I am dubious of these arguments. In this post, I will explain how you can be dubious, too.
I’m an American living in Europe, so every summer, I hear a lot about air conditioning. Europeans love to tell me about how it’s good that Europe is largely not air conditioned; after all, air conditioning is just a high carbon luxury. Americans are just too used to their creature comforts, they say; if you’re serious about combating climate change, you have to stop relying on AC.
This is wrong. Increasingly, air conditioning isn’t a luxury. It is survival technology.
We are excited to announce our October book discussion featuring J. Storrs Hall's Where's My Flying Car? as part of our ongoing book series dedicated to exploring the ideas of Progress Studies.
Pathways to Progress aims to create a community of individuals committed to understanding and contributing to human prosperity. Through our discussions, we delve into technological and scientific innovation, historical examples of progress, the implications of economic growth on moral progress, and the relationship between technological advancement and societal change.
Each month, we read selected book(s), followed by a Q&A event with the author. In August, we discussed Tyler Cowen's Stubborn Attachments and In Praise of Commercial Culture; in September, we discussed Ed Glaeser's Triumph of the City. We also host speaker events with guests such as Jason...
This essay is cross-posted from https://thegreymatter.substack.com/p/aspartame-and-why-everything-causes
In a world where everything seems to cause cancer, the World Health Organization has added one more item to your "Things to Worry About" list: aspartame. Yes, that seemingly harmless sweetener in your diet soda has just been branded a "possible carcinogen." But before you pour your beloved Diet Coke down the drain, let's take a moment to consider whether this is a story of diligent public health protection or a cautionary tale of institutional failure. (Spoiler alert: it's the latter.)
IARC's Classifications
Last year, the World Health Organization's International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) made headlines when it declared aspartame, the artificial sweetener commonly found in Diet Coke and many other low-calorie products, a “possible carcinogen”. This classification was primarily based on...
This essay is cross-posted from: https://cleanenergyreview.io/p/carbon-capture-is-an-energy-problem
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Removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere is critical to avoiding the worst effects of global warming. It is so important that the IPCC1 sees the need to remove ~6 billion tonnes annually by 2050. Direct Air Capture (DAC) carbon removal, sifting and storing carbon dioxide from the air, is expected to be a key part of this due to its scalability2 and permanence.
Unfortunately, it is also incredibly energy intensive in its current form.
Current leaders like Climeworks and Heirloom estimate they need ~2-3 megawatt-hours of energy to remove and compress a single tonne of CO2 for storage.
To put that in perspective: I could drive a Tesla Model 3 from Los Angeles to Nathan’s Famous Hot Dogs at Coney Island, realize I forgot my...
Large language models like GPT-4 are reshaping the knowledge economy: From automating tasks in customer service, to deskilling management consultants, to fears that they could replace human creativity in movie scriptwriting. In 2023 Goldman Sachs projected that the equivalent of 300 million full-time jobs are exposed to automation by AI.
Furthermore, the near-term prospect of general robotics could disrupt industries reliant on physical labor. Similarly, many expect that in the coming years we will see the emergence of AI agents—autonomous software entities designed to perform tasks or solve problems without constant human intervention that can essentially act as “drop-in remote workers”.
In short, the current wave of AI comes with a wave of automation...
A critical failure mode in many discussions of technological risk is the assumption that maintaining status quo for technology would lead to maintaining the status quo for society. Lewis Anslow suggests that this "propensity to treat technological stagnation as safer than technological acceleration" is a fallacy. I agree that it is an important failure of reasoning among some Effective Altruists, and want to call it out clearly.
One obvious example of this, flagged by Anslow, is the anti-nuclear movement. It was not an explicitly pro-coal position, but because there was continued pressure for economic growth, the result of delaying nuclear technology wasn't less power usage, it was more coal. To the extent that they succeeded narrowly, they damaged the environment.
The risk from artificial intelligence systems today is...
> It also seems vanishingly unlikely that the pressures on middle class jobs, artists, and writers will decrease even if we rolled back the last 5 years of progress in AI - but we wouldn't have the accompanying productivity gains which could be used to pay for UBI or other programs.
When plenty of people are saying that AGI is likely to cause human extinction, and the worst scenario you can come up with is middle class jobs, your side is the safe one.
This is a linkpost: https://grantmulligan.substack.com/p/positive-sum-environmentalism
From my earliest grade school memories, lessons on the environment were uniformly focused on how humans were destroying the planet. We were driving species to extinction and creating holes in the ozone.
The environmental stories being taught from grade schools to graduate programs largely haven’t changed in more than sixty years. A student in 1970 would have cited many of the same authors and arguments as a student today. Silent Spring is still taught as a clarion call to address pollution. John Muir’s defeat at Hetch Hetchy remains the classic example of how wilderness and beauty are destroyed in the name of economic advancement. And despite years of empirical evidence disproving their theories, Malthus’ and Erhlich’s warnings that human consumption will outstrip the earth’s...
I think your notion of "environmental progress" itself is skewing things.
When humans were hunter gatherers, we didn't have much ability to modify our surroundings.
Currently, we are bemoaning global warming, but if the earth was cooling instead, we would bemoan that too.
Environmentalism seems to only look at part of the effects.
No one boasts about how high the biodiversity is at zoos. No one is talking about cities being a great habitat for pigeons as an environmental success story.
The whole idea around the environmentalist movement ... (read more)
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/ZiRKzx3yv7NyA5rjF/the-robots-ai-and-unemployment-anti-faq
Once AI does get that level of intelligence, jobs should be the least of our concerns. Utopia or extinction, our future is up to the AI.