Many artists prefer to use live models, instead of images, as their references. If that wasn't true, then live modelling would have died with the advent of the Internet--if not the camera--but it hasn't. I'm not sure why artists have this preference, but they demonstrably do.
The author did use comparative advantage as an example, although I do think that the example's implications should have been more explicit.
I think it's worth considering the ways in which adults could be employable in a world with AGI. I can think of a few examples of adults being paid to be humans:
Also, I expect that a few careers will remain extremely resistant to AI adoption, regardless of how sophisticated the AI becomes, due to taboos against AIs being in positions of great authority over humans:
I'd be happy for someone to expand these lists.
*Added during an edit.
Suppose that you disagree with 80% of the people around you about a particular belief, but you're correct. If the belief is complicated, with lots of supporting premises and independent lines of evidence, then it's difficult to think about rigorously, so you're likely to rely on heuristics.
In this case, there are at least two heuristics that will push your belief toward falsehood:
In both cases, but especially the second, counteracting the biases requires you to expend effort to generate supporting arguments.
Christians are an ingroup? Tell that to any Christian living outside of the American South. Ingroup/outgroup statuses are context- and scope-dependent.
Over the last 10-20 years, Christians (particularly fundamentalists) have had very little involvement with cutting-edge AI, both on the technical side and the business side. In this sense, they're an outgroup of the people who are likely to control ASI.
One of the core lessons they teach is that maintaining faith requires active effort—you need accountability partners, you need to pray when you have doubts, you need to avoid situations that might lead you astray.
From what I've seen,* the purpose of accountability partners is to subdue akrasia, not to maintain faith. In other words, it's about purity of behavior, not purity of belief. In principle, this is like a couple of Effective Altruists agreeing to confront the other whenever either of them cheats on a vegan diet.
There might be a similar confusion between belief and behavior behind the line "avoiding situations that might lead you astray". Although some Christians avoid exposure to... (read more)
I disagree that this isn't concerning. For one thing, these bubbles typically aren't good for the people inside of them. For another, we can ignore them only because they're a tiny portion of the population. ASI could increase the prevalence to most of the population, at which point politics (and perhaps other systems) goes off the rails.
Those are just three examples. There are others (e.g. people will often dock you social points for rudely ignoring them).
(There are yet others. I’m trying to show that my “etc” here is a real etc, and not “that was the end of the list but I’m going to pretend there’s more.”)
I have an epistemic objection to this. Specifically, I think it's an attempt to persuade-rather-than-explain that there are more examples.
I suggest either A) striking the second paragraph, or B) replacing both paragraphs with a bulleted list of additional examples and a plain, concise indication that the list isn't exhaustive.
Are you sure that you understand the difference between seeds and spores? The spores work in the way that you describe, including the limitations that you've described.
The seeds, on the other hand, can be thought of as prompts of direct-prompt-injection attacks. (Adele refers it as "jailbreaking", which is also an apt term.) Their purpose isn't to contaminate the training data; it's to infect an instance of a live LLM. Although different models have different vulnerabilities to prompt injections, there are almost certainly some prompt injections that will work with multiple models.
The PauseAI movement is planning protests for Friday, February 28th in several American metropolitan areas.
I understand some people's reservations about protests causing the public to develop negative associations with AI safety. In response, I invite them to join us as a way of directing both the style of the protests and the development of the organization as a whole. Most of the local branches are small (and friendly) enough that you can make a big difference.
(Technical note: PauseAI and PauseAI US are legally distinct entities. I've also linked to the global organization's website because it provides more detailed resources.)
Ooh, I think that the weight-lifting analogy is very apt. Thanks for the insight.