flâneur

Aditya Sharma

13 followers · 37 following · 1277 views

on the atlas — 22

highlights — 67

  • ohn Cleese: “Now I suggest to you that a group of us could be sitting around after dinner, discussing matters that were extremely serious like the education of our children, or our marriages, or the meaning of life, and we could be laughing, and that would not make what we were discussing one bit less serious. Solemnity, on the other hand, I honestly don’t know what it’s for. I mean, what is the point of it? The two most beautiful memorial services that I’ve ever attended both had a lot of humor and it freed us all and made the services inspiring and cathartic. But solemnity, it serves pomposi…
    Are you serious? - by visakan veerasamy
  • This tension is also part of what I’m getting at with the “ayy lmao” meme – “excruciatingly meaningful” is when everything you do or don’t-do is so overwhelmingly important that it paralyzes you – or worse, convinces you that it’s okay to treat people poorly because your quest is of such cosmic significance.
    Are you serious? - by visakan veerasamy
  • I think this question is more difficult than the others
    Dario Amodei — Machines of Loving Grace
  • ample, historical hunter-gatherer societies might have imagined that life is meaningless without hunting and various kinds of hunting-related religious rituals, and would have imagined that our well-fed technological society is devoid of purpose. T
    Dario Amodei — Machines of Loving Grace
  • A 21st century, AI-enabled polity could be both a stronger protector of individual freedom, and a beacon of hope that helps make liberal democracy the form of government that the whole world wants to adopt.
    Dario Amodei — Machines of Loving Grace
  • They may be unrealistically utopian. But the important thing is to have an ambitious vision, to be willing to dream big and try things out. The vision of AI as a guarantor of liberty, individual rights, and equality under the law is too powerful a vision not to fight for.
    Dario Amodei — Machines of Loving Grace
  • At the same time, the vitality of democracy depends on harnessing new technologies to improve democratic institutions, not just responding to risks. A truly mature and successful implementation of AI has the potential to reduce bias and be fairer for everyone
    Dario Amodei — Machines of Loving Grace
  • AI seems likely to enable much better propaganda and surveillance, both major tools in the autocrat’s toolkit.
    Dario Amodei — Machines of Loving Grace
  • I expect citizens to demand access to technologies that so radically improve quality of life. O
    Dario Amodei — Machines of Loving Grace
  • it’s something all of us must work together to make more likely.
    Dario Amodei — Machines of Loving Grace
  • . Overall, a dream scenario—perhaps a goal to aim for—would be 20% annual GDP growth rate in the developing world, with 10% each coming from AI-enabled economic decisions and the natural spread of AI-accelerated technologies, including but not limited to health.
    Dario Amodei — Machines of Loving Grace
  • More importantly though, we have to try.
    Dario Amodei — Machines of Loving Grace
  • I am not as confident that AI can address inequality and economic growth as I am that it can invent fundamental technologies, because technology has such obvious high returns to intelligence (including the ability to route around complexities and lack of data) whereas the economy involves a lot of constraints from humans, as well as a large dose of intrinsic complexity.
    Dario Amodei — Machines of Loving Grace
  • we should view that as a terrible moral failure and a blemish on the genuine humanitarian victories in the previous two sections.
    Dario Amodei — Machines of Loving Grace
  • Everyday problems that we don’t think of as clinical disease will also be solved. Most of us have everyday psychological problems that are not ordinarily thought of as rising to the level of clinical disease. Some people are quick to anger, others have trouble focusing or are often drowsy, some are fearful or anxious, or react badly to change. Today, drugs already exist to help with e.g. alertness or focus (caffeine, modafinil, ritalin) but as with many other previous areas, much more is likely to be possible. P
    Dario Amodei — Machines of Loving Grace
  • Human baseline experience can be much better. Taking one step further, many people have experienced extraordinary moments of revelation, creative inspiration, compassion, fulfillment, transcendence, love, beauty, or meditative peace. The character and frequency of these experiences differs greatly from person to person and within the same person at different times, and can also sometimes be triggered by various drugs (though often with side effects). All of this suggests that the “space of what is possible to experience” is very broad and that a larger fraction of people’s lives could consist …
    Dario Amodei — Machines of Loving Grace
  • I’m very optimistic about the “compressed 21st” where everyone can get their brain to behave a bit better and have a more fulfilling day-to-day experience.
    Dario Amodei — Machines of Loving Grace
  • Effective genetic prevention of mental illness seems possible. Most mental illness is partially heritable, and genome-wide association studies are starting to gain traction on identifying the relevant factors, which are often many in number. It will probably be possible to prevent most of these diseases via embryo screening, similar to the story with physical disease. One difference is that psychiatric disease is more likely to be polygenic (many genes contribute), so due to complexity there’s an increased risk of unknowingly selecting against positive traits that are correlated with disease. …
    Dario Amodei — Machines of Loving Grace
  • I expect AI to accelerate neuroscientific progress along four distinct routes, all of which can hopefully work together to cure mental illness and improve function:
    Dario Amodei — Machines of Loving Grace
  • Behavioral interventions. I haven’t much mentioned it given the focus on the biological side of neuroscience, but psychiatry and psychology have of course developed a wide repertoire of behavioral interventions over the 20th century; it stands to reason that AI could accelerate these as well, both the development of new methods and helping patients to adhere to existing methods. More broadly, the idea of an “AI coach” who always helps you to be the best version of yourself, who studies your interactions and helps you learn to be more effective, seems very promising.
    Dario Amodei — Machines of Loving Grace
  • Behavioral interventions. I haven’t much mentioned it given the focus on the biological side of neuroscience, but psychiatry and psychology have of course developed a wide repertoire of behavioral interventions over the 20th century; it stands to reason that AI could accelerate these as well, both the development of new methods and helping patients to adhere to existing methods. More broadly, the idea of an “AI coach” who always helps you to be the best version of yourself, who studies your interactions and helps you learn to be more effective, seems very promising.
    Dario Amodei — Machines of Loving Grace
  • Behavioral interventions. I haven’t much mentioned it given the focus on the biological side of neuroscience, but psychiatry and psychology have of course developed a wide repertoire of behavioral interventions over the 20th century; it stands to reason that AI could accelerate these as well, both the development of new methods and helping patients to adhere to existing methods. More broadly, the idea of an “AI coach” who always helps you to be the best version of yourself, who studies your interactions and helps you learn to be more effective, seems very promising.
    Dario Amodei — Machines of Loving Grace
  • scaling hypothesis as “the secret to intelligence” isn’t fully accepted even within AI.
    Dario Amodei — Machines of Loving Grace
  • yet. The idea that a simple objective function plus a lot of data can drive incredibly complex behaviors makes it more interesting to understand the objective functions and architectural biases and less interesting to understand the details of the emergent computations
    Dario Amodei — Machines of Loving Grace
  • Below I try to make a list of what we might expect.
    Dario Amodei — Machines of Loving Grace
  • Biological freedom. The last 70 years featured advances in birth control, fertility, management of weight, and much more. But I suspect AI-accelerated biology will greatly expand what is possible: weight, physical appearance, reproduction, and other biological processes will be fully under people’s control. We’ll refer to these under the heading of biological freedom: the idea that everyone should be empowered to choose what they want to become and live their lives in the way that most appeals to them. There will of course be important questions about global equality of access; see Section 3 f…
    Dario Amodei — Machines of Loving Grace
  • ying to get across the general level of radicalism we should expect:
    Dario Amodei — Machines of Loving Grace
  • experimental models (or even simulations) that are more accurate in predicting what will happen in humans
    Dario Amodei — Machines of Loving Grace
  • s from the need to rigorously evaluate drugs that barely work or ambiguously work. This is sadly true of most therapies today: the average cancer drug increases survival by a few months while having significant side effects that need to be carefully measured (there’s a similar story for Alzheimer
    Dario Amodei — Machines of Loving Grace
  • esigned physics modeling,
    Dario Amodei — Machines of Loving Grace
  • “returns to intelligence
    Dario Amodei — Machines of Loving Grace
  • ll the tasks biologists do, including designing and running experiments in the real world (by controlling lab robots or simply telling humans which experiments to run – as a Principal Investigator would to their graduate students), inventing new biological methods or measurement techniques, and so on
    Dario Amodei — Machines of Loving Grace
  • A common formulation is “AI can do a better job analyzing your data, but it can’t produce more data or improve the quality of the data. Garbage in, garbage out”.
    Dario Amodei — Machines of Loving Grace
  • peed of the physical world,
    Dario Amodei — Machines of Loving Grace
  • Many human societal structures are inefficient or even actively harmful, but are hard to change while respecting constraints like legal requirements on clinical trials, people’s willingness to change their habits, or the behavior of governments.
    Dario Amodei — Machines of Loving Grace
  • human societal structures are inefficient or even actively harmful,
    Dario Amodei — Machines of Loving Grace
  • Cells and animals run at a fixed speed so experiments on them take a certain amount of time which may be irreducible
    Dario Amodei — Machines of Loving Grace
  • country of geniuses in a datacenter”.
    Dario Amodei — Machines of Loving Grace
  • figure out what the other factors are that are complementary to intelligence
    Dario Amodei — Machines of Loving Grace
  • In terms of pure intelligence4, it is smarter than a Nobel Prize winner across most relevant fields – biology, programming, math, engineering, writing, etc. This means it can prove unsolved mathematical theorems, write extremely good novels, write difficult codebases from scratch, etc.
    Dario Amodei — Machines of Loving Grace
  • Obviously, many people are skeptical that powerful AI will be built soon and some are skeptical that it will ever be built at all. I think it could come as early as 2026, though there are also ways it could take much long
    Dario Amodei — Machines of Loving Grace
  • In fact I think it is critical to have a genuinely inspiring vision of the future, and not just a plan to fight fires.
    Dario Amodei — Machines of Loving Grace
  • I think this causes people to take the claims less seriously, and to imbue them with a sort of unreality. To be clear, the issue isn’t whether the technologies described are possible or likely (the main essay discusses this in granular detail)—it’s more that the “vibe” connotatively smuggles in a bunch of cultural baggage and unstated assumptions about what kind of future is desirable, how various societal issues will play out, etc. T
    Dario Amodei — Machines of Loving Grace
  • Although I think most people underestimate the upside of powerful AI, the small community of people who do discuss radical AI futures often does so in an excessively “sci-fi” tone (featuring e.g. uploaded minds, space exploration, or general cyberpunk vibes
    Dario Amodei — Machines of Loving Grace
  • Machines of Loving Grace1
    Dario Amodei — Machines of Loving Grace
  • The more stress that exists in our body, the harder it is to access that wide attention. In a state of anxiety, we don’t have time to make novel connections: we need to solve a problem, and we need to solve it now.
    creativity is relaxation - by Scott - inner mythologies
  • In part, this sense of possibility comes from diverse life experience: meeting interesting folks, going to inspiring places, reading nourishing books, etc
    creativity is relaxation - by Scott - inner mythologies
  • To make a creative connection, we need to sense the wide variety of existing ideas, and the potential relationships between them.
    creativity is relaxation - by Scott - inner mythologies
  • he’s created this immense vertical filing cab
    Curius / Onboarding
  • Weak-form efficients market hypothesis is a good heuristic for evaluating the public markets but a really, really bad heuristic for evaluating either technical or economic facts about tech companies, startups, your career, etc etc. Optimizations are possible; fruit hangs low.
    Thread by @patio11: "Some people really benefit from hearing advice that everyone knows, for the same reason we keep schools open despite every subject in them h […]"