In Zelenskyy’s latest appeal to congress, he offered an alternative to a No Fly Zone, which is massive support for AA equipment and additional fighters. By creating pressure for a NFZ, he’s bought himself significant AA equipment boosts.
ChosunOne
Karma: 79
This is more or less what Kasparov believed back in 2015:
I think one of the things to consider with this hypothesis is what is the signal that indicates an area is “overpopulated”, and how should members of the species respond to that signal? And how can this signal be distinguished from other causes? For instance, an organism that has offspring that are unable to reproduce because they had limited resources will likely be outcompeted by an organism that produces fertile offspring regardless of the availability of resources.
If you open up a variable that determines how likely your offspring are to reproduce, it also could become an attack vector for other competing species to trigger. Imagine a species that sends out the signal for your species that you are overpopulated, but ignores that signal itself. I think you will quickly find your species going extinct in such a scenario.
Personally I think a more compelling reason for species who sometimes can’t or won’t have biological offspring is that it frees up their time and energy to focus on things other than child rearing in the larger community. If instead of having a variable that determines how likely your offspring want to naturally reproduce based on the currently available resources, you have a fixed percentage, then the communities that descend from you might outperform communities that focus more on child rearing at the expense of other activities (research, sentries, hunting, protecting relatives etc).
Consider that if the fixed percentage hypothesis is correct, then a natural consequence of population growth is a growing number of LGBTQ+ members of the population.
Are we also presuming that you can acquire all desired things instantaneously? Even in a situation when all agents are functionally identical, if it costs 1 unit of time per x units of a resource, wouldn’t trade still be useful in acquiring more than x units of a resource in 1 unit of time? Time seems to me the ultimate currency that still needs to be “traded” in this scenario.
My point here was that even if the deep learning paradigm is not anywhere close to as efficient as the brain, it has a reasonable chance of getting to AGI anyway since the brain does not use all that much energy. The biggest models from GPT-3 can run on a fraction of what a datacenter can supply, hence the original question, how do we know AGI isn’t just a question of scale in the current deep learning paradigm.
Here is a link to my forecast
AGI Timeline And here are the rough justifications for this distribution:
I don’t have much else to add beyond what others have posted, though it’s in part influenced by an AIRCS event I attended in the past. Though I do remember being laughed at for suggesting GPT-2 represented a very big advance toward AGI.
I’ve also never really understood the resistance to why current models of AI are incapable of AGI. Sure, we don’t have AGI with current models, but how do we know it isn’t a question of scale? Our brains are quite efficient, but the total energy consumption is comparable to that of a light bulb. I find it very hard to believe that a server farm in an Amazon, Microsoft, or Google Datacenter would be incapable of running the final AGI algorithm. And for all the talk of the complexity in the brain, each neuron is agonizingly slow (200-300Hz).
That’s also to say nothing of the fact that the vast majority of brain matter is devoted to sensory processing. Advances in autonomous vehicles are already proving that isn’t an insurmountable challenge.
Current AI models are performing very well at pattern recognition. Isn’t that most of what our brains do anyway?
Self attended recurrent transformer networks with some improvements to memory (attention context) access and recall to me look very similar to our own brain. What am I missing?
Thanks for the recommendation!
[Question] Which books provide a good overview of modern human prehistory?
I’ve been feeding my parents a steady stream of facts and calmly disputing hypotheses that they couldn’t support with evidence (“there are lots of unreported cases”, “most cases are asymptomatic”, etc.). It’s taken time but my father helped influence a decision to shut down schools for the whole Chicago area, citing statistics I’ve been supplying from the WHO.
I think the best thing you can do if they don’t take it seriously is to just whittle down their resistance with facts. I tend to only pick a few to talk about in depth at a time. A fact that particularly influenced my mother was that preventing one infection today can prevent thousands over the course of just a few weeks.
It seems to me that trying to create a tulpa is like trying to take a shortcut with mental discipline. It seems strictly better to me to focus my effort on a single unified body of knowledge/model of the world than to try to maintain two highly correlated ones at the risk of losing your sanity. I wouldn’t trust that a strong imitation of another mind would somehow be more capable than my own, and it seems like having to simulate communication with another mind is just more wasteful than just integrating what you know into your own.
Thinking about it, it reminds me of when I used to be Christian and would “hear” God’s thoughts. It always felt like I was just projecting what I wanted or was afraid to hear about a situation and it never really was helpful (this thing was supposed to be the omniscient omnipotent being). This other being is the closest thing to a tulpa I’ve experienced and it was always silent on things that really mattered. Since killing the damned thing I’ve been so much happier and don’t regret it at all.
That isn’t to say it has to be like that, after all in my experience I really did believe the thing was external to my mind. But I feel like you would be better off spending your mental energies on understanding what you don’t or learning about how to approach difficult topics than creating a shadow of a mind and hoping it outperforms you on some task.
Given that Russia’s attempt at a fait accompli in Ukraine has failed, and that the situation already is a total war, I fail to see Russia’s logic of nuclear deterrence against NATO involvement. In a sense, NATO has already crossed the red lines that Russia stated would be considered acts of war, such as economic sanctions and direct military supply. From the Russian perspective, would NATO intervention really invite a total nuclear response the way that a Russian attack on Poland would?
NATO intervention and subsequent obliteration of the Russian army seems extremely in the interest of NATO. This intervention could be covert, limited in scope, and done in piecemeal, but with the effect of resolutely destroying the Russian military over time. A slow steady trickle of first supplies, then limited direct AA support, with a gradual buildup of force in Ukraine seems to me like it could be used to avoid escalation all the way to nuclear conflict. At some point, the invasion becomes pointless and the Russians have no option but to withdraw.