http://samuelshadrach.com/?file=/raw/english/about_me_summary.md
samuelshadrach
Karma: 87
Intelligence explosion
I agree tech beyond human comprehension is possible. I’m just giving an intuition as to why a lot of radically powerful tech likely still lies within human comprehension. 500 [1] years of progress is likely to still be within comprehension, so is 50 years or 5 years.
The most complex tech that exists in the universe is arguably human brains themselves and we could probably understand a good fraction of their working too, if someone explained it.
Important point here being the AI has to want to explain it in simple terms to us.
If you get a 16th century human to visit a nuclear facility for a day that’s not enough information for them to figure out what it does or how it works. You need to provide them textbooks that break down each of the important concepts.
[1] society in 2000 is explainable to society in 1500 but society in 2500 may or may not be explainable to society in 2000 because acceleration
Would you include preference cascades and the formation of common knowledge in the same cluster?
Why does this matter? To quote a Yudkowsky-ish example, maybe you can take a 16-th century human (before Newtonian physics was invented, after guns were invented) and explain to him how a nuclear bomb works. This doesn’t matter for predicting the outcome of a hypothetical war between 16th century Britain and 21st century USA.
ASI inventions can be big surprises and yet be things that you could understand if someone taught you.
We could probably understand how a von Neumann probe or an anti-aging cure worked too, if someone taught us.
Suppose you are trying to figure out a function f(x,y,z | a,b,c) where x, y ,z are all scalar values and a, b, c are all constants.
If you knew a few zeroes of this function, you could figure out good approximations of this function. Let’s say you knew
U(x,y, a=0) = x U(x,y, a=1) = x U(x,y, a=2) = y U(x,y, a=3) = yYou could now guess
U(x,y) = x if a<1.5, y if a>1.5You will not be able to get a good approximation if you did not know enough zeroes.
This is a comment about morality. x, y, z are agent’s multiple possibly-conflicting values and a, b, c are info about environment of agent. You lack data about how your own mind will react to hypothetical situations you have not faced. At best you can extrapolate from historical data around minds of other people that are different from yours. Bigger and more trustworthy dataset will help solve this.
Update: I read your examples and I honestly don’t see how any of these 3 people would be better off by their own idea of what better off means, if they were less open or less truthful.
P.S. discussing anonymously is easier if you’re not confident you can handle the social repercussions of discussing it under your real name. I agree that morality is social dark matter and it’s difficult to argue in favour of positions that are pro-violence pro-deception etc under your real name.
If you can’t provide a few unambiguous examples of the dilemma in the post that actually happened in the real world, I’m less likely to take your post seriously.
Might be worth thinking more and then coming up with examples.
Do you have examples?
Update: I’ll be more specific. There’s a power buys you distance from the crime phenomena going on if you’re okay with using Google maps data acquired on about their restaurant takeout orders, but not okay asking the restaurant employee yourself or getting yourself hired at the restaurant.
SecureDrop review
Pizza index and stalking employees are both the same thing, it’s hard to do one without the other. If you choose to declare war against AI labs you also likely accept that their foot soldiers are collateral damage.
I agree that (non-violent) stalking of employees is still a more hostile technique than writing angry posts on an internet forum.
Makes sense, thanks for replying.
Sorry to hijack old thread but I think LLMs likely will obsolete this technique.
I’d love a reply on this. Common attack vectors I read on this forum include 1. powerful elite bribes existing labs in US to manufacture bioweapons 2. nation state sets up independent biotech supply chain and starts manufacturing bioweapons.
Are you open to writing more about this? This is among top 3 most popular arguments against open source AI on lesswrong and elsewhere.
I agree with you you need a group of > 1000 people to manufacture one of those large machines that does phosphoramidite DNA synthesis. The attack vector I more commonly see being suggested is that a powerful actor can bribe people in the existing labs to manufacture a bioweapon while ensuring most of them and most of rest of society remains unaware this is happening.
Has anyone considered video recording streets around offices of OpenAI, Deepmind, Anthropic? Can use CCTV or drone. I’m assuming there are some areas where recording is legal.
Can map out employee social graphs, daily schedules and daily emotional states.
Thanks for taking time to reply!
Yes OpenAI realtime API is really cool. When speaking to realtime API, I start each sentence with two words indicating what I want it to do. It’s clunky but it works. “Translate Chinese, what is the time?” “Reply Chinese, how are you?” Ideally yes I could write an app to prepend the instruction audio to each sentence.
If I had this as higher priority I’d actually want to setup this Twilio app.
I was the one who asked this question. Thanks again for the reply.
Specific questions I have for you
Is there any particular Anki deck you’d recommend (with pinyin and audio)? Should I just use the probability table and generate it myself?
I want to go from 100 words to 500 words vocabulary. Should I do that using immersion or using Anki deck?
Is there any particular video or podcast channel you’d recommend at a beginner level (100-500 words vocabulary)?
Would you recommend I try generating my own video? I have enough notes at this point I can ask o1 or gpt 4.5 to generate full stories based on my notes. AI video generation is expensive but I could look into it if you’d recommend that as a good use of my time.
Update on my progress
I have been studying spoken Chinese maybe 1 hour a day for past 4 months with plenty of off days. Have made some progress but less progress than I’d like.
I decided not to search for jobs in order to shift to China, as that would mean a significant amount of my time consumed doing a job I don’t actually want to do. I figured I should first learn Chinese better and then take a decision on job search.
I can recognise atleast 100 words by sound.
I still can’t differentiate between accents by sound, but I haven’t prioritised this as it seems less important to me, usually from hearing the word it’s obvious what it means.
I am studying spoken Chinese and written Chinese pinyin. I have put zero effort learning Chinese characters.
I am mostly using ChinesePod podcast. I couldn’t find any video immersion resources that I liked, at beginner level. I haven’t put enough effort searching though.
I haven’t spent a lot of time using Anki decks.
I use o1 a lot to get translations and transcribe words when I mishear accents and stuff
Update: I thought about this more and I think yeah it should be possible to just skip the torrent step. I have updated the post with this change.
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Post on SecureDrop servers, circulate via manual or automated resending of messages. For people with technical skills and enough free time to run servers as a part-time job.
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Post on a nginx clearnet server, circulate via automated web crawlers, For people with technical skills but not necessarily a lot of free time.
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Post on high attention social media platforms, circulate via people using DMs and discovery of those social media platforms. For all people.
A key attack point here is the first person who posts this on clearnet. Hence I was hoping for it to circulated by automated bots before any human reads it on clearnet.
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An intuition pump you can try is make them sit side by side with an AI and answer questions on text in 1 minute. And check whose answers are better.