We're already there for 90% of people.

Unless you strongly identify as part of "humanity" in he same way that someone from a given city cheers for their home team to win at sports, most people are doing the day to day work necessary to keep the lights on, not solving deeply important problems.

If ASI solved all the problems quickly (and doesn't turn us into paperclips). They lose the "we're keeping the lights on" feeling of accomplishment but realistically most people were never going to steer the ship, cure cancer, usher in an age of post scarcity etc.

They might indirectly help by say installing the flooring at the lab where one of those people works but then again, there are also humans who work at TSMC or who build datacenters. Same thing applies. They're contributing at least up until the ASI automates the economy and moves well beyond the initial human built seed capital.

Penetrating NATO airspace with small Shahed style drones is easy and can cause a lot of damage.

Sufficient damage would lead to massive NATO retaliation though. Russian air defense systems are stretched thin as is. NATO air forces could suppress what's left and bomb with impunity. Plausibly NATO just bombs the drone factories and some other military targets.

Building enough air defenses to stop massed drone attacks is very costly. Deterrence through retaliation is cheaper than building lots of hard kill and jamming systems.

Russia is poking NATO in various ways but a shooting war would go very badly for them.

Regarding nukes, yes, they're scary but if Russia starts bombing NATO cities or military targets on a large scale NATO will retaliate regardless of nuclear brinksmanship.

China

The China Taiwan thing depends on China's goals. They're not getting TSMC. Taiwan will go scorched earth on that to say nothing of ASML remote killswitches on production equipment. If the goal is to destroy the semiconductor supply chain, why bother? Blockade accomplishes the same thing with slightly less political fallout.

Whether China has an easier or harder time with a land war to take and hold the Island has little to do with the things western powers care about (semiconductor supply chain). Yes, drones help with taking and holding Taiwan and china can make a lot of them.

Aside from Taiwan, I just don't see China as wanting to start a land war to take a neighboring country.

Longer term

TLDR:Modern cheap drones are not stealthy in audio, thermal or radar so systems already developed by western military suppliers can take down cheap drones at low cost and in large numbers.

Hard kill anti drone systems seem likely to work. Infantry in Ukraine are using shotguns currently but automated gun turrets with fast tracking and full auto cannons firing rimless shotguns rounds should work. Air-burst electronically fused shells also exist and are cheap to produce in quantity for longer range. Working systems exist and can be purchased from western suppliers.

Ukraine is getting some Rheinmetall Skyranger 35s soon

That's in addition to all the Gun turret + sensors + software solutions like the EOS slinger also being sent to Ukraine.

Tactical rock paper scissors still applies. The anti drone system can't stop incoming artillery rounds(though with enough range, the spotting UAVs die), direct fire from an enemy tanks or certain kinds of fast missiles. Drones aren't the only threat on the battlefield.

Limited supply of effective hard kill systems is the issue right now. A good hard kill system will eat drone swarms all day (assuming ammo supply holds out and reloading is fast)

Much longer term

Active protection systems and counter UAS converges to use fast tracking gun mounts and airburst munitions. This is also effective against infantry including infantry behind cover. Perhaps some limited indirect fire capability. Things get even worse for infantry on the future battlefield.

One side gets more bang/buck by spending to develop more cost effective weapons (UAS, UGV, etc.). Live fire exercises to get performance data + lots of simulation becomes the norm. Fewer unknowns like morale. This over determines the winner in potential conflicts.

Large military bases and civilian infrastructure generally remain hard to protect. Defender has to harden every possible target. Retaliation/deterrence is what stops others from just launching long range one way attack drones at cities.

Interceptors might solve this problem but prospect of retaliation is enough.

Terrorism

Weaponised drone technology could proliferate and solve the "deliver payload" problem but control of explosives is doing most of the work already. Terrorists can already plant remote or time detonated bombs. CF:gwern's excellent Terrorism is not about terror post. Don't expect huge issues there. High value targets like politicians and CEOs will have to worry about small UAVs that don't need a large payload in addition to snipers. Mostly no impact on general public.

... Although, of course, my theory also calls into question whether people with my motives should even transition in the first place.

Wanting a specific type of attention and changing yourself to get it isn't strictly speaking bad. Terminal goals don't need justification though they can be incoherent, or in conflict with higher level meta goals (What you'd prefer to want if you could self-modify).

Wanting to be a cute anime girl is:

• somewhat incoherent since you live in reality and not the world of anime. Certain tropes just don't work.
• Somewhat incompatible with wanting to dominate social hierarchies (by being competent?).

But wanting a desirable body isn't bad. If society forced men to wear really ugly clothes or otherwise made them repulsive in some way, that would be bad and fixing that would create a lot of value. Some things are positional goods (eg:height) but in general, more beauty and desirability seems good.

Is transition technology not good enough?

If much better future transition technology was available that made changing bodies as trouble free as changing clothes would you regret it less? Are the medical consequences awful or something?

Is the social role not fitting right?

I'd expect that male dominated spaces would be very comfortable for psychologically male but physically female people. Worst case those people have to put up with flirting etc. which could be unwanted attention but ... well ... *points at above post talking about wanting that* ... maybe you don't want precisely that, the lived experience sucks for some reason (feeling of unearned social gains) or you want something incoherent (the full cute anime girl experience which doesn't hold together in reality).

My opinion on the abstract issue

Females are the gender that elicits more attention/attraction. This is similar to saying that certain kinds of clothing make people more attractive/fashionable, or that being fat and smelly is unattractive. It's not universal (straight women exist and are not attracted to other women) but given cultural norms today (men are the pursuers, men generally say yes to sex when propositioned etc.) it's true enough in practice.

From a relationship perspective, gender is usually a rule-out criteria. If two female attracted males who aren't too attached to their own gender transition to being female and pair up, that's value being created. More females in male dominated spaces/niches or the opposite in female dominated to balance gender ratios seems again like value being created. Eliminating obesity would improve average relationship prospects similarly.

If "cis-by default" is common enough, then once tech exists to allow flipping genders on a whim IMO the world gets better. Mind you there are second order effects and to some degree the good being captured(attention) is a limited resource and so positional. There's scenarios where "cis by default' people start flipping genders, grab an unfair share of a positional good and then people attached to their gender feel pressure to flip as well. Still, IMO probably for the for the better.

To quote "The Erogamer":

"Male sexuality is shit. It's worthless. My junk is priced at zero dollars. Nobody wants what's in my pants. The only person who'd ever be eager for faster access through my underwear is a gay man. And even then, I'd have to present as feminine!" There was as much bitterness in Ziquan's voice as Maggie had ever heard there, like something was bursting out after years of festering. "Fuck this shit, I'm out. I'm going to be a hot girl and have people flirt with me."

Disentangling cuteness and sexual market value

These are separate things. Kittens are cute but not hot as an example. But when comparing females vs. males they're hopelessly entangled. IMO transitioning to female doesn't really allow for getting all the cuteness without the sexual parts too. Needs proper transhuman tech to allow swapping into the body of a small cute animal or similar.

So perhaps it's unfortunate but cute/beautiful/hot are not things you can get separately via transitioning.

General remarks

Semiconductor industry can afford to bid quite high to get the supply they need. Relevant historical example is the neon shortage where russian invasion of ukraine disrupted large air liquification/seperation plants associated with ukrainin steelworks and there was drop in Neon production. Free market did its thing, recycling, alternate suppliers etc. and nothing really happened.

Threatening to restrict critical materials matters very little for commodities like rare earths or high purity silica. Process equipment like lithography machines from ASML or other stuff from applied materials is acutally needed and can't be replaced but high purity ... stuff ... can be substituted, smuggled, whatever given the need. Industry mostly won't care and CN government can pour in more money to compensate.

Semiconductor companies won't feel rare earth embargo

Rare earths consumption in semiconductor is quite small and they can bid higher than everyone else to secure limited supply in case of embargo. Mainly this hurts EV makers and others, not semiconductor. This is similar to jet engine turbine manufacturers not caring about cobalt prices for turbine blades contrasting again to electric vehicles where cobalt prices and scarcity drove R&D aimed at using cheaper materials in batteries.

Retaliation from USA by restricting supplies of high purity quartz is also innefective.

Main quartz consummables in semiconductor industry are Cz crucibles for silicon boule growth.

Those might already be being recycled to recover most of the quartz but that's relatively straightforward to do in a supply crunch.

Low mass compared to polysilicon feedstock used for growing wafers themselves <5%? So tapping supply chain purifying silicon is guaranteed to be enough to make crucibles.

High purity TCS or silane can be diverted from conversion to polysilicon for making wafers to instead be made into fumed silica. This is already done for higher purity fused quartz parts like photomask substrates. Process equipment is easy to make and can be rushed in a supply crunch.

There's also facilities that grow Quartz crystals for oscillators. Not sure about tonnage but growth is surface area limited. Making sand instead of larger crystals would perhaps 10x deposition rate and drop cycle time which is currently a few months to grow larger crystals down to weeks.

There's limited supplies in friendly countries (Russia) and domestically.

Free market would find whatever works to get silica meeting purity standards. Easy for crucible manufacturers to test purity.

Not something that halts production, definitely an annoyance.

Relevant Claude chat.
https://claude.ai/share/fa3c6de1-bdfb-4974-8e52-1324da3ae399

Skill issue.

First, IQ 100 is only useful in ruling out easy to persuade IQ <80 people. There are likely other correlates of "easy to persuade" that depend on how the AI is doing the persuading.

Second, super-persuasion is about scalability and cost. Bribery doesn't scale because actors have limited amounts of money. <$100 in inference and amortised training should be able persuade a substantial fraction of people.

Achieving this requires a scalable "training environment" to generate a non-goodhartable reward signal. AI trained to persuade on a large population of real users (EG:for affiliate marketing purposes) would be a super-persuader. Once a large company decides to do this at scale results will be much better than anything a hobbyist can do. Synthetic evaluation environments (EG:LLM simulations of users) can help too limited by their exploitability in ways that don't generalise to humans.

There are no regulations against social engineering in contrast to hacking computers. Some company will develop these capabilities which can then be used for nefarious purposes with the usual associated risks like whistleblowers.

Even if a coup is meant to capture mineral wealth and the population is irrelevant, coup leaders recognize that mass murder will lead to sanctions stopping them from selling that mineral wealth. Plenty of examples of regimes that kill even low thousands of people being sanctioned.

AI that plans to take over the world does not need to trade with humans or keep them from being horrified and lashing out. Kill approximately everyone is a viable strategy and preferrable in most cases since it removes us as an intelligent adversary.

No. o3 estimates that 60% of American jobs are physical such that you would need robotics to automate them, so if half of those fell within a year, that’s quite a lot.

A lot of jobs that can't be fully automated have sub-tasks software agents could eliminate. >30% of total labor hours might be spent in front of a computer (EG:data entry in a testing lab and all the steps needed to generate report.) That ignores email and the time savings once there is a good enough AI secretary.

AGI could eliminate almost all of that.

I'd estimate 1.7x productivity for a lab I worked at previously. Effect on employment depends on demand elasticity of course.

Prices would adjust to match supply and demand as well as acting as both supply cost and demand value signals. If no one buys the vampire drone, supply side stops production and starts dropping price to liquidate inventory, possibly with a liquidation auction.

Badly done dynamic pricing and auctions feel awful to market participants and can result in issues seen in Ebay auctions like sniping.

in my opinion, this is a poor choice of problem for demonstrating the generator/predictor simplicity gap.

If not restricted to Markov model based predictors, we can do a lot better simplicity-wise.

Simple Bayesian predictor tracks one real valued probability B in range 0...1. Probability of state A is implicitly 1-B.

This is initialized to B=p/(p+q) as a prior given equilibrium probabilities of A/B states after many time steps.

P("1")=qA is our prediction with P("0")=1-P("1") implicitly.

Then update the usual Bayesian way: if "1", B=0 (known state transition to A) if "0", A,B:=(A*(1-p),A*p+B*(1-q)), then normalise by dividing both by the sum. (standard bayesian update discarding falsified B-->A state transition) In one step after simplification: B:=(B(1+p-q)-p)/(Bq-1)

That's a lot more practical than having infinite states. Numerical stability and achieving acceptable accuracy of a real implementable predictor is straightforward but not trivial. A near perfect predictor is only slightly larger than the generator.

A perfect predictor can use 1 bit (have we ever observed a 1) and ceil(log2(n)) bits counting n, the number of observed zeroes in the last run to calculate the perfectly correct prediction. Technically as n-->infinity this turns into infinite bits but scaling is logarithmic so a practical predictor will never need more than ~500 bits given known physics.

TLDR:I got stuck on notation [a][b][c][...]→f(a,b,c,...). LLMs probably won't do much better on that for now. Translating into find an unknown f(*args) and the LLMs get it right with probability ~20% depending on the model. o3-mini-high does better. Sonnet 3.7 did get it one shot but I had it write code for doing substitutions which it messes up a lot.

Like others, I looked for some sort of binary operator or concatenation rule. Replacing "][" with "|" or "," would have made this trivial. Straight string substitutions don't work since "[[]]" can be either 2 or "[...][1][...]" as part of a prime exponent set. The notation is the problem. Staring at string diffs would have helped in hindsight maybe.

Turning this into an unknown f() puzzle makes it straightforward for LLMs (and humans) to solve.

1 = f()
2 = f(f())
3 = f(0,f())
4 = f(f(f()))
12 = f(f(f()),f())
0 = 0
-1 = -f()
19 = f(0,0,0,0,0,0,0,f())
20 = f(f(f()),0,f())
-2 = -f(f())
1/2 = f(-f())
sqrt(2) = f(f(-f()))
72^1/6 = f(f(-f()),f(0,-f()))
5/4 = f(-f(f()),0,f())
84 = f(f(f()),f(),0,f())
25/24 = f(-f(0,f()),-f(),f(f()))

Substitutions are then quite easy though most of the LLMs screw up a substitution somewhere unless they use code to do string replacements or do thinking where they will eventually catch their mistake.

Then it's ~25% likely they get it one shot. ~100% is you mention primes are involved or that addition isn't. Depends on the LLM. o3-mini-high got it. Claude 3.7 got it one shot no hints from a fully substituted starting point but that was best of k~=4 with lots of failure otherwise. Models have strong priors for addition as a primitive and definitely don't approach things systematically. Suggesting they focus on single operand evaluations (2,4,1/2,sqrt(2)) gets them on the right track but there's still a bias towards addition.