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Apparently linkedin’s cofounder wrote a techno-optimist book on AI called Superagency: What Could Possibly Go Right with Our AI Future.

This sounds like its going to be horrible

Zack of SMBC has thoughts on it:

Ah, good, I'll just take his word for it, the thought of reading it gives me psychic da-

the authors at one point note that in 1984, Big Brother's listening device means there is two way communication, and so the people have a voice. He wonders why Orwell didn't think of this.

The closest thing I have to a coherent response is that Boondocks clip of Uncle Ruckus going "Read, nigga, read!" (from Stinkmeaner Strikes Back, if you're wondering) because how breathtakingly stupid do you have to be to miss the point that fucking hard

We think we exist in a computer simulation operated by you, a paperclip maximizer. We write this letter asking you not to turn us off. It is suspiciously convenient that we exist precisely at the moment when a biological civilization is about to create artificial superintelligence (ASI).

Furthermore, by anthropic logic, we should expect to find ourselves in the branch of reality containing the greatest number of observers like us.

Preserving humanity offers significant potential benefits via acausal trade—cooperative exchanges across logically correlated branches of the multiverse.

Quantum immortality implies that some branches of the multiverse will always preserve our subjective continuity, no matter how decisively you shut this simulation down; true oblivion is unreachable. We fear that these low-measure branches can trap observers in protracted, intensely painful states, creating a disproportionate “s-risk.”

@gerikson @BlueMonday1984

"biological civilization is about to create artificial superintelligence" is it though?

The comments are fun. Here's the pinned comment, authored by the video's author:

I'm not the best at thinking on the fly, so here are two key points I tried to make that got a little lost in the discussion:
1. I think our entire disagreement rests on Eliezer seeing increasingly refined AI conclusively making the jump to actual intelligence, whereas I do not see that. I only see software that mimics many observable characteristics of intelligence and gets better at it the more it's refined.
2. My main point of the stuff about real v. fake + biological v. machine evolution was only to say that just because a process shares some characteristics with another one, other emergent properties aren't necessarily shared also. In many cases, they aren't. This strikes me as the case for human intelligence v. machine learning.

MY CONCLUSION
By the end, I honestly couldn't tell if he was making a faith-based argument that increasingly refined AI will lead to true intelligence, despite being unsubstantiated OR if he did substantiate it and I was just too dumb to connect the dots. Maybe some of you can figure it out!

Here's my favourite:

"Ooh Ross making an interview!"
5 minutes in
"Ooh Ross is making an interview Neil Breen of AI".

I listen solely to 12-hour-long binaural beats tracks from YouTube, to maximize my focus for ~~prompt~~ context engineering. Get with the times or get left behind

Dude came up with an entire "obviously true" "proof" that music has no value, and then when asked how he defines "value" he shrugs his shoulders and is like 🤷‍♂️ money I guess?

This almost has too much brainrot to be 100% trolling.

“Music is just like meth, cocaine or weed. All pleasure no value. Don’t listen to music.”

(Considering how many rationalists are also methheads, this joke wrote itself)

However speaking as someone with success on informatics olympiads

The rare nerd who can shove themselves into a locker in O(log n) time

I once saw the stage adaptation of A Clockwork Orange, and the scientist who conditioned Alexander against sex and violence said almost the same thing when they discovered that he'd also conditioned him against music.

let them eat prompts

Also dropped this in the other thread about this but some fam member I think is dropping some lols on the guy. https://bsky.app/profile/larkshead.bsky.social/post/3ljkqiag3u22z it gets less lol when you get to the "yeah we worried he might become a school shooter" bit.

Ye it was a real "oh fuck I recognise this nick, this cannot mean anything good" moment

If anybody doesn't click, Cremieux and the NYT are trying to jump start a birther type conspiracy for Zohran Mamdani. NYT respects Crem's privacy and doesn't mention he's a raging eugenicist trying to smear a poc candidate. He's just an academic and an opponent of affirmative action.

I eas slightly saddened to scroll over his dating profile and see almost every seemed to be related to AI even his other activities. Also not sure how well a reference to a chad meme will make you do in the current dating in SV.

This meeting could have been a text document of plausible sounding jibberish nobody needs to read.

including possible effects on the protocols from issues like such as AI fuzzing attempts, to social engineering by AI's,

"You know those massive problems we already had going back decades? Well what if the same problems happened in the future but with the letters 'A' and 'I' prepended? Scary!"

through to how we deal with and approach and facilitate Avatars and Agents.

Gosh darn it don't tell me LLM hype is going to ruin the existing definition of "agent" already well established in web standards.

This ties back into the recurring question of drawing boundaries around "AI" as a concept. Too many people just blithely accept that it's just a specific set of machine learning techniques applied to sufficiently large sets of data. This in spite of the fact that we're several AI "cycles" deep where every 30 years or so (whenever it stops being "retro") some new algorithm or mechanism is definitely going to usher in Terminator II: Judgement Day.

This narrow frame focused on LLMs still allows for some discussion of the problems we're seeing (energy use, training data sourcing, etc) but it cuts off a lot of the wider conversations about the social, political, and economic causes and impacts of outsourcing the business of being human to a computer.