I don’t find anything offensive about carefully considering how to do good, or taking a longer term view of humanity.
I think the thing that is irritating about EA is that it often feels like this generation’s ‘post-colonial guilt’. Many people with the privilege to act on their EA sentiments are the beneficiaries of financial inequality, either via inheritance or VC froth, and can afford to absorb the risks.
To be honest, EA feels like church without the beardy cloud man, and IMO is a better use of the philosophy brain-trust than metaphysics, so I have no desire to see it fail. The cultish part is more a Silicon Valley thing than an EA thing.
As an atheist parent being forced consider Catholic faith schools out of sheer necessity, this is far from a help. This is geographical blackmail. I have seen teaching material, and it is subtly biased towards Catholicism. Spending valuable contact hours on Religious Education is a waste of time. I will respect my child’s choice if they find religion as an adolescent/adult, but I do not respect an organisation that depends on indoctrinating 5 year olds and filter-feeding on the local inhabitants.
If it is any consolation, as someone from a Catholic family and who spent 11 out of 13 years of K-12 schooling at Catholic schools, mainstream Catholic schools do an utterly woeful job at indoctrination. Your average Catholic school is more likely to turn your kid into an atheist/agnostic than into a convinced Catholic.
The really conservative ones, like Opus Dei or SSPX schools, arguably do a much better job of indoctrinating their pupils (although even for them, there are plenty for whom it doesn’t stick)-but I assume they are not on your menu. Even if you were willing to consider them, they probably wouldn’t be willing to consider you.
I went to a catholic school (in a place where public ones are readily available, but my parents thought the education there was better), and while they did talk religion, except for the religion class (which i'd have had in public school as well) I don't think it was very faith oriented. Notably they had evolution, big bang, sex ed and so on.
I think anglosaxon world religious schools are much different, and I have the impression that people in USA collate creationism and catholicity, while it's a strongly held belief in their country, across all faiths.
I'm an atheist now, so I don't think the indoctrination was so good.
> I have the impression that people in USA collate creationism and catholicity
I've noticed this as well. It's kinda weird, since the Catholic Church has officially held that it has no conflict with respect to evolution for around 75 years now (they basically take no position on the subject), and some of their scholars were pro-evolution for many years before that.
Nowadays, it's generally just fundamentalist Protestant churches which insist on literal creationism.
> while it's a strongly held belief in their country, across all faiths.
It's actually a minority belief in the United States, although a substantial minority.
Basically it's all WASP propaganda against italians, mexicans and irish people… to brand them as intellectually inferior, when the reality is different.
I was the same way. My struggle with the book was the way that Gibson presents new lore. He doesn't say "this is an ono-sendai deck; it allows the user to enter cyberspace. it connects to your head here, here, and here". That's how Neal Stephenson writes. Gibson just presents you with an in-universe object or character or company, and talks about it as if you already know what he's talking about, and it's up to you, the reader, to figure it out.
He even does this with narrative. Two male characters will be having a conversation, and all of a sudden the next line will say something like
> "[dialog]", she said
Without introducing who SHE is. You have to wait for the next page to figure out, based on her description.
It drove me insane for years, but now I like it and I've gotten used to it. I like count zero and its characters more than neuromancer. I'm reading virtual light right now but am taking a break to read John Romero's Doom Guy. I'll get to Mona Lisa Overdrive eventually
Agree that AI is at a different stage of development and has a different risk profile, but my idea would be to learn from those 100+ years of nuclear power management (successes and failures) and bootstrap a similar set of organisations for AI.
I don’t see anything in your reasons that would fundamentally preclude such a setup. I guess that’s really my question - is there a gotcha for AI development that requires a completely new regulatory solution?
Agree progress is rapid, but I was under the impression model training for LLMs was still the preserve of mega-corps, with the support of eg NVDA providing the hardware.
Military may be doing the same behind closed doors of course, but still a large endeavour.
Who is going to regulate the US and Chinese militaries? The CEO of Palantir just published an open letter calling for a Manhattan Project for superintelligent AI warfare.
https://archive.is/KSOv4
What needs to be regulated is the performance of the hardware designs. I have not seen anyone except for myself specifically say this. And no one listens to me. So it seems that society may not figure that out until it's too late.
Western militaries have justice systems, including courts and prisons. I presume they also follow best practice in lots of domains, despite some legal exemptions. They also clearly have the aim to preserve society in a safe state.
Even if militaries are outside the remit of these new AI orgs, they could still be useful in the civilian world.
“ExxonMobil… [acquired]… a smaller Texas oil and gas company with the U.S.’s largest network of pipelines designed to carry carbon dioxide.”
There was a great episode of the Volts podcast, about a startup aiming to make synthetic shipping fuel (methanol), where waste CO2 was one of the main inputs.
Some good discussion of where they sourced their CO2, and the practicalities of CO2 distribution.
Yes, some are possible and we are already doing that. Sadly will it only delay the time we run out of resources. If we would talk about a few weeks, we could for sure make it, but over 4 months is sadly not possible.
