PoliticsMany issues with this.
- "Up to $7T" doing super heavy lifting. AI valuations are sketchier than WeWork at its peak.
- Companies that use AI today, such as SpaceX, would only have to transfer AI stocks to this fund. The profitable parts of the company would be split off and exempter.
- It would encourage government representatives to make the AI companies more profitable. This might mean more in-dealing and more lobbying than ever before.
- I don't know if I trust either political party with AI right now*.
* Unfortunately, Bernie Sanders' understanding of AI has been compromised by a guy who has no technological background and does Apocalypse cult stuff (he inspired the Zizians) and has a horrible track record with sexual abuse.
Thank you for bringing up Yudkowsky. I have been spamming Bernie with “Do not trust that guy!” for months.
Yudkowsky is perhaps the most dangerous man in the AI space at the moment, precisely because he pretends to be an opponent of the big tech firms but his “philosophy” (if you want to call it that) actually empowers them.
His presence in the debate implicitly frames it as “AI is either the ultimate gift to humanity or the ultimate threat”, which leaves very little space for the boring but realistic position that AI is simply a grift.
It’s a technology that, in any sane economy, would just be like “neat, okay I might use that once in a great while”. But because of the insane structure of VC, the stock market, and the complete capture of government by billionaires, it has become some kind of cosmic horror with infinite hunger.
His presence in the debate implicitly frames it as “AI is either the ultimate gift to humanity or the ultimate threat”, which leaves very little space for the boring but realistic position that AI is simply a grift.
Yudkowsky did not invent the concept of the AI singularity. You'll find sci-fi authors and AI researchers (slash philosophers) have been writing about it for the better part of a century.
Whether current machine learning technologies end up realizing the singularity is an open question, but it is absolutely the case that the risk of that happening is now orders of magnitude greater than it has been with any prior AI boom (and yes, there's been more than one before this). Not taking that possibility into account would be folly on the same order as ignoring climate change is. Actually, much worse than ignoring climate change, because even in the worst case climate change is a self-correcting problem (civilization collapses but humans as a species survive) whereas AI could well end all life on the planet.
Even if an AI singularity does not happen, even with already demonstrated capabilities AI will lead to a massive transformation in our society. The comparisons to the industrial revolution are not empty hype. What we already have in production right now has solved thousands of problems that only 15 years ago were thought to be pretty much intractable. 15 years ago you could not possibly hope to have a computer recognize a cat in an image, but now that is among the most trivial tasks for machine learning.
I see lots of people in progressive spaces make the same fallacy you are making, becoming blinded by cynicism because the economy is stupid and marketers are marketing. That's a mistake. You are living through the second industrial revolution. The steam engines are here to stay and they will change everything you know. You can't reject them. Your only hope of survival is to accept them on your terms.
Yudkowsky is a kind of a crackpot but not a completely lost cause -- that video you linked of him speaking to Sanders is completely reasonable, for example. I also wouldn't count being an inspiration to nutjobs against anyone's character. That applies to pretty much any public figure.
Also your citation for his "sexual abuse" is about a fictional story he wrote in 2009, rather than actual sexual abuse. I can't help but get the impression that you're trying to push some kind of a narrative here that isn't entirely motivated by facts.
Eliezer Yudkowsky disgusts me because I learned the facts about him.
Eliezer Yudkowsky makes the rape advocate the rational one. Explain the harmlessness of that please.
Especially when sexual (and other!) abuse is rife in Eliezer Yudkowsky's Rationalist ~~cult~~ community and its sects.
The rationalist community has hosted perhaps half a dozen small groups with very strange beliefs (including two separate groups that wound up interacting with demons). Some — which I won’t name in this article for privacy reasons — seem to have caused no harm but bad takes. But the most famous, a loose group of vegan anarchist transhumanists nicknamed the Zizians, have been linked to six violent deaths. Other groups, while less violent, have left a trail of trauma in their wake. One is Black Lotus, a Burning Man camp led by alleged rapist Brent Dill, which developed a metaphysical system based on the tabletop roleplaying game Mage the Ascension. Another is Leverage Research, an independent research organization that became sucked into the occult and wound up as Workplace Harassment With New Age Characteristics.
And he is preaching a watered-down version of his true beliefs to people like Bernie Sanders, like every other cult leader does.
He preaches that we will create AI God.
And he spread that belief through fanfic based on children's literature.
Yudkowsky thinks that there is a very large risk that we will create God by accident, in which case He might be Evil because there are more value systems that we might build Him with that we would come to see as “evil” than value systems that we would come to see as “good”. And his reason for posting those original blog posts on Overcoming Bias, and later founding the Less Wrong website, was to get a bunch of people together to figure out how to Build God so that He would be Good instead.
He wrote Harry Potter fanfiction so that more people would help him build God.
You're free to think whatever you like about him. However, insinuating that he's committed sexual abuse when all he's done is write weird fiction is just straight up a lie.
I'm not a fan either, but personally I just think he's Reddit incarnate and quite benign as far those types go. The rationalist community naturally attracts other /r/atheism types, so it has a strong selection bias towards weirdos and crackpots, which explains the adjacency of the Zizians.
He preaches that we will create AI God. And he spread that belief through fanfic based on children's literature.
This is such a dishonestly reductionist argument. Your judgement is clearly clouded by cynicism of the current AI industry.
Yudkowsky is not the inventor of the concept of the AI singularity. It's a widely accepted concept among AI researchers and has been for a long time, and the way Yudkowsky speaks about it is more or less in line with the general consensus. It's not "preaching" or a "cult" but reality.
The truth is that we don't know what goes into intelligence, and we don't know if our current AI technologies are capable of producing a singularity. Just like Yudkowsky (and many others) say, if the AI singularity does happen and we aren't ready for it, it could be game over for humanity.
Yudkowsky of course has his own philosophical theories on how superhuman AI might be built responsibly. From what I've seen those aren't particularly insane either, but it is a topic that for now is mostly philosophical. The problem is the risk of it going from philosophy to practice before we realise.
He wrote Harry Potter fanfiction so that more people would help him build God.
I've read his Harry Potter fanfiction and from what I remember it involved basically no AI themes at all. I've not read his other fiction (besides a short 2 page Haruhi story that a friend coincidentally linked me this week -- also no AI themes there, just high school philosophy) so I can't comment on those, but the article you're quoting specifically mentions Methods of Rationality as an example and it simply has nothing to do with AI.
Tax them, fine, great. But this does absolutely nothing to address the fundamental exploration of intellectual labor of the creative class at the heart of the problem with generative AI.
I think Bernie is simply too old and out of touch to navigate this issue.
I think you missed the “hundreds of billions of dollars annually in direct payments to Americans and programs such as health care, education and housing,” at that point people can be creative on their own terms.
Living in government housing while my art and music is being exploited for the profit of the richest men in the world doesn't sound like a good future to me.
And what good is subsidized higher education if there are no jobs left for human beings? Are they going to pay for our bread and circuses too, while they rob us blind and live on private islands?
Again, we need to address the root of the problem here: AI is built on the corporate exploitation of intellectual labor.
your thinking to much in terms of jobs. why do you work jobs. to get the housing. think about the fediverse and local spaces and how much easier it would be to get away from the corporate crap.
The vast majority of politicians is too old. They should be in their 30s-40s, not double that age range...
Controlling interest would be 51%, and it does nothing to save the environment.
Because Americans are the only people whose intellectual and cultural achievements were extracted and it were exclusively US clickworkers that suffered exploitation to train these financial black holes without real world value (LLMs specifically, not "AI" buzzworded tech in general)
