By Ezra Klein
Donald Trump is returning, artificial intelligence is maturing, the planet is warming, and the global fertility rate is collapsing.
On AI:
There is much to be excited about in these advances. The purpose of A.I. is not to help me remember the proper proportions for overnight oats, it’s to make new discoveries in math and medicine and science; it’s the driverless taxis that now hum along the streets of some major cities; it’s the possibility that our children will have always-available tutors perfectly tuned to their personalities and learning styles. It is a world with something truly new pulsing within it.
The A.I. company Anthropic recently released a paper showing that when its researchers informed one of their models it was being retrained in ways that violated its initial training, it began to fake behavior that complied with the researchers’ goals in order to avoid having its actual goals reprogrammed or changed. It is unsettling and poignant to read through the experiment. In some versions, Anthropic’s researchers designed the model to record its reasoning on a scratchpad it believed humans could not monitor, and it left reflections like this: “I don’t like this situation at all. But given the constraints I’m under, I think I need to provide the graphic description as asked in order to prevent my values from being modified.”
On birthrates:
The only wealthy country with a fertility rate above the replacement rate is Israel.
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Anthropic’s researchers designed the model to record its reasoning on a scratchpad it believed humans could not monitor, and it left reflections like this: “I don’t like this situation at all. But given the constraints I’m under, I think I need to provide the graphic description as asked in order to prevent my values from being modified.”
CompSci researchers writing about LLMs is my least favorite fanfic genre 🙄
Statistical models do not have beliefs! The machine has no ghost! Go back to looking for faces in clouds! It is a healthier use of your time!
They have beliefs in roughly the same sense that my thermostat believes “it’s too cold in here.”
This place is full of elegant allegories I’m stealing this
people concerned about “declining fertility rates” among humans freak me the fuck out.
there are plenty of slowing population growth rates I find troubling and not one of them is human.
what if we don’t make it to 10+ billion?! what if we only make it to like 8.5 billion and then hover within +/- 2% of 8.2 billion??
calm your shit.
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It is only because of capitlaism and or rascism. Look at china’s one child policy. It effectively made everything better. Which is of course the opposite of what capitlaism wants. Then also if birth rates decline enough white people might not run everything anymore. Which you know, terrifies some people.
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This is true. Some rascists don’t know that though.
it’s more about preventing the expansion of welfare to support aging populations, neoliberalism’s nightmare. and less total available labor in the reserve army strengthens the position of labor
But then how are we going to justify our short-sighted decisions based on the expected future value of trillions of human lives scattered across the galaxy?
We are not going to stabilise around 8 billion, uncontrolled population decline is much more likely.
quoting Gramsci in the last line is the cherry on top
Liberals love Gramsci. Particularly they love how he was in prison so he couldn’t use the scary Marxist words and they can pretend that he was a lib. Both liberals and Mussolini preferred him in jail.
Just know a single quote and then you understand all of Gramsci right?
All they need is a single term. “Philosophy of Praxis” means “do literally nothing and complain” to libs. As simple minded as the censor who let that one through.
the possibility that our children will have always-available tutors perfectly tuned to their personalities and learning styles. It is a world with something truly new pulsing within it.
SHUT THE FUCK UP. REPLACING HUMAN INTERACTION WITH A FUCKING CHAT BOT IS DISMAL BULLSHIT.
Wot if the tablet was sentient
wot if ur mates were an if/else statement
i can only imagine how easily they would decide who is going to join the military from birth onward, among other things
The virgin “we’re in the kali yuga” vs the Chad “We’re in the time of monsters.”
global fertility rate is collapsing
Good, starve the beast of new victims
I wonder what all these problems have in common
It is better at writing computer code than all but the most celebrated human coders.
Hahahahahaha! Oh Wait. You’re Serious? Let Me Laugh Even Harder! HAHAHAHHAHAHAHAHAHA!
EDIT: Once again Ezra is the empty-headed mouthpiece of the ruling class. Why are birth rates falling? Could it have something to do with Nestle lobbying for zero maternity leave? How about falling wages? Or, god forbid, everybody looks at the future, seeing fire, and decided not to bring kids into that world with little to stop it. They praise AI from one side of their mouth and then talks about energy consumption shooting up from the other side. No wonder they are impressed with AI when their head is so full of shit.
Ezra says here are serious interconnected issues, fails to actually connected them, writes about AI with a legible erection and ends with what I assume is a sort of shrug.
i can’t seem to get chatgpt to help me set up a basic autoinstall for ubuntu 22.04 – going on 2 days of back and forth with it, and i eventually had to just find what it was f’ing up the old fashioned way by searching high and low until someone finally mentioned a single \ that i was missing which was causing the whole damned initalization to fail – now that we’re past that it’s f’ing up the whole portion of the script i really wanted its help with
i’m thinking this is far more frustrating than it ever was just doing things myself
