Recent Discussion
The history of humanity can be summarized as a long series of “fuck around and find out.”[1]
It’s the cycle of innovation and consequence. We see a problem X, we invent a solution, we discover that solution creates a new problem, we can't stop doing X, and we have to invent another solution. And so on. This is our philosophy: to seek, to solve, to stumble anew.
We invented fire, which kept us warm and cooked our food, and also burned down our villages and killed us in wildfires. We invented knives and arrows and saws, which helped us hunt and build, and also cut off our fingers and stabbed us in the gut. We invented agriculture, providing food surplus, yet it sowed seeds of war, famine, and environmental...
Most development interventions are considered “good buys” (for donors or governments) if they return $15 in social benefits for every $1 spent.
Every $1 spent on reading glasses could result in $46 more in earnings.
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.
Ok. Firstly I do think your "Embodied information" is real. I just think it's pretty small. You need the molecular structure for 4 base pairs of DNA, and for 30 ish protiens. And this wikipedia page. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DNA_and_RNA_codon_tables
That seems to be in the kilobytes. It's a rather small amount of information compared to DNA.
Epigenetics is about extra tags that get added. So theoretically the amount of information could be nearly as much as in the DNA. For example, methyization can happen on A and C, so that's 1 bit per base pair, in th... (read more)
This essay is cross-posted from https://thegreymatter.substack.com/p/the-ai-responsibility-dilemma
In an article in The Conversation, Professor of Philosophy David Danks and Professor of Computing Mike Kirby present the following scenario:
A self-driving taxi has no passengers, so it parks itself in a lot to reduce congestion and air pollution. After being hailed, the taxi heads out to pick up its passenger – and tragically strikes a pedestrian in a crosswalk on its way.
Who or what deserves praise for the car’s actions to reduce congestion and air pollution? And who or what deserves blame for the pedestrian’s injuries?
They tell us:
...One possibility is the self-driving taxi’s designer or developer. But in many cases, they wouldn’t have been able to predict the taxi’s exact behavior. In fact, people typically want artificial intelligence to discover some
This essay is cross-posted here: https://open.substack.com/pub/cleanenergyreview/p/the-uber-ization-of-electricity
Before Uber, taxis were all we had. They operated on a fixed rate model, with the same metered fare if it was a sunny holiday morning or raining during rush hour. This drove prices up and kept drivers circling for fares, only to leave taxis hard to find at any price during peak periods.
Uber changed this. By recruiting drivers outside the regulated taxi structure, and implementing surge prices during periods of high demand, they were able to flex supply to better match demand. Their app-based platform also gave riders much improved transparency into the price they would be paying, and the expected length and route of their ride.
The result: a revolution in intra-city transport that is still reverberating.
We are at the beginning...
This essay was written by Tom Ireland. Read the essay on the Asimov Press website: https://press.asimov.com/articles/artificial-wombs
The womb is a remarkable organ — a muscular, pear-shaped chamber that supports the transformation of a tiny cluster of dividing cells into an entirely new person. All humans begin their lives in this sturdy chamber.
At least for now.
Several research groups are busily developing artificial wombs to replicate the basic life-support functions of the uterine environment for extremely premature infants — that is, babies born at or before 28 weeks of the typical 37-42 week pregnancy.1
At least one group is working on something altogether more radical: a system to grow a fetus from embryo to birth entirely outside the womb, a concept known as ectogenesis. And while currently being developed under the guise...
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...
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.
This is a linkpost for https://amistrongeryet.substack.com/p/alphaproof-and-openai-o1
The latest advances in AI reasoning come from OpenAI's o1 and Google's AlphaProof. In this post, I explore how these new models work, and what that tells us about the path to AGI.
Interestingly, unlike GPT-2 -> GPT-3 -> GPT-4, neither of these models rely on increased scale to drive capabilities. Instead, both systems rely on training data that shows, not just the solution to a problem, but the path to that solution. This opens a new frontier for progress in AI capabi... (read more)