It's not. Alignment is de facto capabilities (principal agent problem makes aligned employees more economically valuable) and unless we have a surefire way to ensure that the AI is aligned to some "universal," or even cultural, values, it'll be aligned by default to Altman, Amodei, et. al.
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1Strongly agreed.
Another extreme advantage of the the "Renaissance man" is the ability to clearly *convey* emotion learnings to others (especially those without strong emotional intelligence). Typically, EI is won through interaction and, essentially, reinforcement learning on contact with others - possessing both the technical vocabulary and understanding of human social norms allows you to explain very tricky things nerds have a tough time learning directly to them. This is extremely useful in, e.g workplaces or high stakes environments (a good manager can quickly untangle a mess of arguments), and arguably underappreciated in therapists and similar vocations.
Are there any existing articles, deep dives, or research around PCBTF? It is a supposedly "green" solvent used as a replacement of xylene due to its status as VOC-exempt, despite being similarly volatile.
It has all the hallmarks of being one of the wretched forever chemicals - fat soluble, denser than water (accumulates in groundwater supplies instead of evaporating), and heavily halogenated. There's very little cancer and toxicity data, and what does exist seems pretty bad. The EPA has prevented employees from acknowledging the issue; (also see this article by the Intercept) to my understanding, this is because it is grandfathered as an existing chemical that has been in production for a long time (although usage has only increased in recent years as a replacement for "high-VOC" solvents, such as ethanol.)
This seems like a clear-cut case of replacing a relatively mundane solvent (primarily xylene, ethanol and others as well) with a far more toxic, persistent compound with far worse effects for very misguided reasons. Am I missing something there (perhaps it breaks down rather quickly in the environment?) or is this a rather neglected & significant issue?
That's why I brought it up; I thought it was an interesting contrast.
I am skeptical of it, but not altogether that skeptical. If language is "software" one could make an analogy to e.g symbolic AI or old fashioned algorithms vs modern transformer architectures; they perform differently at different tasks.
There's a book of fiction, Blindsight, by Peter Watts, that explores what intelligent life would look like without consciousness. You may be interested in reading it, even only recreationally, but it covers a lot of ground around the idea you're talking about here.
I would also not discredit the ability of the emotive brain. Just like anything else, it can be trained - I think a lot of engineers, developers or technical professionals can relate to their subsconscious developing intuitive, rapid solutions to problems that conscious thought does not.
Hard agree on "post rationalism" being the alignment of the intuitive brain with accurate, rational thought. To the extent I've been able to do it, it's extremely helpful, at least in the areas I frequently practice.
Why are you using water use as a metric for LLM environmental impact, and not energy use? The only water use in data centers would be for cooling tower open-loop evaporative cooling; this is far smaller than e.g irrigation demands. This water can also be reclaimed water or condensate from dehumidification, or sourced from shallow aquifers unsuitable for drinking.
Even if you did use city water, usage is negligible compared to what everything else. NYC uses open-loop once through cooling for refrigerators and such in restaurants right now, for example.
Energy use (and corresponding CO2 emissions) is a much more salient metric.
Agreed on most counts, but one: what makes you think the humanist values described in HPMOR will be encoded in AI? Alignment is materially useful; companies that have better aligned models can sell them to do a wider variety of tasks. With no universally convergent morality, models will increasingly become aligned to the desires of those who control them.
If AI technology has strong economies of scale; it will naturally concentrate. If it has strong diseconomies of scale, it will spread out. In the latter case, I can easily see it aligned to a rough amalgamation of human values; I can even see an (aggregate) more intelligent set of agents working out the coordination problems that plague humanity.
But we're in the scale case. There are ~four AI conglomerates in the United States and I trust none of their leaders with the future of the lightcone. The morals (or lack thereof) that allow for manipulation and deceit to acquire power are not the same morals that result in a world of cooperative, happy agents.
Absurd 1984-style dystopias require equally absurd concentrations of power. Firearms democratized, to an extent, combat; armed citizens are not easily steamrolled. We are on the eve of perhaps one of the most power-concentrating technologies there is; given the fantasies of the typical bay area entrepreneur, I'm not sure if WW3 sounds so terrible.