Comment by dchftcs

It took a 100 billion people and their knowledge,experience to generate the data to train an AI. So that cost also comes under the environmental costs to build his version of AI.

unless he plans to freeze the training data at this point and use that for another billion years, the cost of building AI will always be more than the cost of humanity.

His human costume is really starting to fall apart at the seams, isn’t it?

> A cynic is a man who knows the price of everything, and the value of nothing.

So the opposite of a Lisp programmer then!

> There is value in affording all beings dignity, respect, and the opportunity to thrive.

> there should be no question about their worth as a person

Dignity, respect, thriving, and even human worth don't exist without joy and at least a concept of suffering.

There's no value in life, but life should be allowed to exist. Who's to say otherwise?

The lifeless dust and rock of the moon is an simpler value proposition to quantify than the messy intrinsic value of overlapping, ever-changing life here on Earth.

Still, it’s vastly fewer now relative to the total number of children born than any previous time in human history. It could be even fewer had birth rates begin to drop instantly as a response to child mortality dropping dramatically even in most developing countries, rather than with a few-generation delay.

Yea, and I will take it a step further; it is really easy to start to worry about the “worth of a human life” when it’s yours. When we are in the position to not care about the worth of a human for our gain(such as children working to make iPhones for us to use cheaper) we call it economics.

You're conflating society with the white collar job at hand. Yes, if you don't provide value for shareholders, your life is worthless _to that company_. The company is in the business of making money. The businesses goals are a microcosm; a small subset of society. There are many other ways to live (and live well, I might add).

  > Otherwise you get effects like;
  > * Just take drugs, feel meaningless "joy" because that's what you value,
  > * Don't do anything less "joyful" even though it's more meaningful.

These are entirely valid positions to take though. Obtaining knowledge for knowledge's sake isn't objectively more meaningful, even if it may be subjectively more valuable to you.

You could make the point that teaching, and thus furthering the collective knowledge of our species, may be somewhat objectively meaningful, because you impact the trajectory of humanity. But unless you draw joy from that specific fact alone, the joy from creating knowledge is just as selfish as taking drugs to attain a state of bliss (which, again, I don't oppose either.)

Also, I'd even challenge the notion that knowledge alone, at its face value, automatically equates to a benefit for humanity. Harari has made that point far more eloquently than I in Nexus.

....I think it's a fairly widespread view to value joy for its own sake. In fact, I would say that's pretty much how normal people would say they view joy.

Money and monetary systems aren't compassionate -- people are.

Historically (in the USA), capitalism was paired with charity and supporting those around you (primarily for religious reasons).

One of the greatest downsides of the welfare system is that people don't give the money to others themselves (it's instead stripped from them and doled out without their input). They don't get to experience the good feelings that come from helping another person (only negative feelings about the government taking their money).

This removes the habits of practicing selflessness and it's positive feedback loop. As a result, we get all the downsides of capitalism with a trained selfish cohort who have no charitable feelings to counterbalance things.

What do you win at the end of the race? I've never heard it concisely put. 'Dominance' is the word that comes to my mind, but I don't want to put words in your mouth and don't really know why that would inherently be a valuable trophy, so that's probably not what you were thinking of, right?

The bigger race is education, which some countries are really falling behind on.

Why should we care about that? Even if you wanted to argue our individual fates are tied to our country's, we don't all live in the same country, so how, actually, could we all care? Are you really convinced its so zero sum like this?

We collectively spend decades and decades creating a sophisticated global capitalism, huge networks and infrastructures of trade and travel, just to find ourselves in some dark forest-esque race with everyone else anyway? Is this really consistent to you? What was the point of anything in the last, like 40 years to you if we just need to act like we are still in a cold war, except this time its a war with everyone?

>If human life was inherently valuable then the concept of poverty wouldn't exist

This only proves that injustice exists. Surprise: injustice still exists.

I'm hoping that you're still young and primarily motivated by survival, which can lure you into this cold world view. I think the reality is an inversion of that old "if you're not liberal at 20 you have no heart, but if you're not conservative by 30 you have no brain" chestnut.

Hopefully once you've made it past the raw basics of survival and the feelings of a dog-eat-dog world, you can look back and realize that compassionate people helped you over and over throughout your life, maybe without you even realizing it at the time. The next step is to realize that you can extend that same compassion to others.

If human lives weren't inherently valuable, the concept of charity wouldn't exist. Where does that leave us? I think probably the line of argument doesn't work in either direction.

Likewise, most of the time you don't have social programs, somebody will introduce social programs. You can't just say "no social programs" and expect this to have no positive consequences... okay this is falling apart a bit, but the point is, what makes 'not expanding UBI' so much harder than 'not introducing UBI'? If you can convince people that introducing UBI will lead to expanding UBI and that that is bad, what's stopping you from just convincing them of the latter?

It's just the worst version of capitalist game theory. If I don't do the bad thing and get rich, then someone else will do the bad thing and I won't get rich.

I have a script at work that writes out some config files and I'm having Claude run them after making changes. The script if it detects breaking changes will spit out a message saying what the breaking changes are, and not do anything, telling you to rerun it after validation with the override flag.

If I don't tell Claude about this behavior, it ignores the script output and lies about passing tests that validate if the config files were regenerated.

So I added to my prompt instructions to observe it, and if it sees that message, double check its work and then inform me and ask what to do before proceeding.

This has had the net result of Claude either running the script with the override flag from the get go (explicitly forbidden) or it seeing the message and convincing itself that the override is warranted and running it a second time with the override flag. It's never once stopped to ask me what to do like instructed.

This is one of a few reason I strongly prefer GPT and its codex variants. It seldom frustrates me, sure its not omnipotent in any way, but it just feels very "tuned in" when it comes to understanding intent and scope.

Imagine worker that did loop of "you're absolutely right -> same fuckup again" multiple days every week, wasting time of whoever told them to do the task

They'd be out of company after a week

Why not? Blacksmithing and coding have a hell of a lot in common. In both disciplines toolmaking is extremely important. Often you have to make custom tools to accomplish a design--e.g. a twisting wrench or a form tool. Sometimes you have to make tools that get used once and thrown away, like a jig temporarily welded to a piece to hold it in place while you build its sibling assembly. Sound familiar? I do this kind of thing all the time in code.

Another similarity is the relative simplicity of the underlying structure of the system. You essentially have two hammers (one small one you swing with your hand and another big one that is planted on the ground), some material, and some heat. You build the rest.

Another similarity is the resistance to automation. A skilled blacksmith is a versatile worker. You can create assembly lines to automate any one thing they might produce. The end product will not have the same quality--it will not truly be wrought iron, each piece will not be unique, there will be nothing of the aesthetic taste of the artist in it, but if you're just some bean counter who doesn't care about those things you'll be able to sell it. But if you need the optionality to produce any of those things.. automation is not your friend. And some things just cannot be automated, at least not without extreme costs or very poor results--shoeing horses comes to mind.

That simply isn't true. LLMs are completely incapable of operating without supervision, same as they were 3 years ago.

AI was here in the 1970's too for that matter, in the form of expert systems. "AI" is the label that perennially gets applied to whatever current technology does something that was previously considered similar to human intelligence, then later on gets removed and applied to something new.

You'll know were making progress towards AGI when LLMs start being called LLMs again, and something new starts being called AI.

"AI" is a marketing buzzword. Real AI doesn't exist.

A thing that people have chosen to call AI is here today.

Quite right. I'm worried about the impact that LLMs will have on the learning process, especially in programming, but also in writing. Programming and writing are both skills that seem simple, but take an absolutely staggering amount of practice to master.

Think about how much your own writing (and programming, if you were lucky enough to start early) evolved from, say, age 12 (when a lot of smart kids start to tackle 'real' books) to age 18 (when you supposedly have a good enough education for 50% of work in most countries) to age 25.

All of that evolution is a direct result of one thing: practice! But with a magic answer box available in everyone's pocket, it'll take truly Herculean effort from a learner to actually grind through the practice instead of just cheating for an answer. I really worry how much an LLM user will actually comprehend their own code or even prose; if you've scarcely written a line of code, how can you really understand what's going on in a debugger? If you haven't done the legwork of writing essays and constructing coherent arguments and comprehending grammar, how will you ever communicate effectively?

Maybe I'm just a dinosaur and these kids will sail a whole level of abstraction above my own understanding of writing and programming, much like how my own generation preferred Python to C, and how the previous generation evolved from assembly to C/BASIC/etc. But then I come back to those missing fundamentals, that empty mental model. It's not like my English or CS teachers had me grind through essays and implementing linked lists and Djikstra's Algorithm for pure busywork. They did it because practice is the only way to truly immerse a student in a practical subject. Maybe it'll work for programming, as long as LLMs get good enough that you can always ask them to fix low-level errors for you? But it seems unlikely to work in prose. And even those generational programming jumps I mentioned (assembly to C to Python) were lossy; most kids I went to school with would be absolutely useless writing C code, and even as a bit of a dinosaur I'm pretty awful at even debugging assembly.

Like you said: you still need to learn grammar and spelling. And I suspect a whole skill tree of other fundamentals!

The way I think of it has evolved a lot over the last 5 years. At this point I think human brains probably do something analogous to next token prediction when we think. For all the hype, I think LLMs are actually more, not less, intelligent than that average person realizes. I think it’s legit, actual intelligence, not just “artificial” intelligence. That may be a hot take but it’s just my perception.