flâneur

jeremy h

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on the atlas — 53

highlights — 1255

  • similarly intuitive that people should have autonomy and responsibility over their own lives and choices
    Dario Amodei — Machines of Loving Grace
  • the Culture’s values are a winning strategy because they’re the sum of a million small decisions that have clear moral force and that tend to pull everyone together onto the same side
    Dario Amodei — Machines of Loving Grace
  • But at the same time there is something blindingly obvious—something overdetermined—about it, as if many different attempts to envision a good world inevitably lead roughly here.
    Dario Amodei — Machines of Loving Grace
  • I mean the experience of watching a long-held set of ideals materialize in front of us all at once. I think many will be literally moved to tears by it.
    Dario Amodei — Machines of Loving Grace
  • I don’t know if this world is realistic, and even if it is, it will not be achieved without a huge amount of effort and struggle by many brave and dedicated people.
    Dario Amodei — Machines of Loving Grace
  • I suspect that some new and stranger thing will be needed, and that it’s something no one today has done a good job of envisioning.
    Dario Amodei — Machines of Loving Grace
  • (a) an AI somewhere could in principle do this task better, and (b) this task is no longer an economically rewarded element of a global economy, don’t seem to me to matter very much.
    Dario Amodei — Machines of Loving Grace
  • Most people are not the best in the world at anything, and it doesn’t seem to bother them particularly much
    Dario Amodei — Machines of Loving Grace
  • 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. They might also have not understood how our economy can provide for everyone, or what function people can usefully service in a mechanized society.
    Dario Amodei — Machines of Loving Grace
  • For example, could AI improve our legal and judicial system by making decisions and processes more impartial?
    Dario Amodei — Machines of Loving Grace
  • written extensively about techniques for psychologically robbing authoritarians of their power, for breaking the spell and rallying support against a dictator
    Dario Amodei — Machines of Loving Grace
  • In general people want more self-expression when their other needs are met, and democracy is among other things a form of self-expression
    Dario Amodei — Machines of Loving Grace
  • will in particular require close cooperation between private AI companies and democratic governments, as well as extraordinarily wise decisions about the balance between carrot and stick.
    Dario Amodei — Machines of Loving Grace
  • The coalition would aim to gain the support of more and more of the world, isolating our worst adversaries and eventually putting them in a position where they are better off taking the same bargain as the rest of the world: give up competing with democracies in order to receive all the benefits and not fight a superior foe.
    Dario Amodei — Machines of Loving Grace
  • On the international side, it seems very important that democracies have the upper hand on the world stage when powerful AI is created.
    Dario Amodei — Machines of Loving Grace
  • we can make at least a downpayment on the promises of dignity and equality that we owe to every human being on earth.
    Dario Amodei — Machines of Loving Grace
  • I am concerned about the “opt out” problem in both the developed and developing world, but suspect that it will peter out over time and that AI can help accelerate this process
    Dario Amodei — Machines of Loving Grace
  • the people who are least able to make good decisions opt out of the very technologies that improve their decision-making abilities, leading to an ever-increasing gap and even creating a dystopian underclass
    Dario Amodei — Machines of Loving Grace
  • markets function better in the developed world, and markets are typically good at bringing down the value of high-cost technologies over time25
    Dario Amodei — Machines of Loving Grace
  • not by directly controlling entire economies but by pulling a few key levers (such as an industrial policy of export-led growth, and resisting the temptation to rely on natural resource wealth); it’s plausible that “AI finance ministers and central bankers” could replicate or exceed this 10% accomplishment
    Dario Amodei — Machines of Loving Grace
  • might be for the developing world 5-10 years after powerful AI to at least be substantially healthier than the developed world is today, even if it continues to lag behind the developed world.
    Dario Amodei — Machines of Loving Grace
  • AI-driven plans for economic development need to reckon with corruption, weak institutions, and other very human challenges.
    Dario Amodei — Machines of Loving Grace
  • I am somewhat skeptical that an AI could solve the famous “socialist calculation problem”23 and I don’t think governments will (or should) turn over their economic policy to such an entity, even if it could do so.
    Dario Amodei — Machines of Loving Grace
  • If AI further increases economic growth and quality of life in the developed world, while doing little to help the developing world, we should view that as a terrible moral failure and a blemish on the genuine humanitarian victories in the previous two sections. Ideally, powerful AI should help the developing world catch up to the developed world, even as it revolutionizes the latter.
    Dario Amodei — Machines of Loving Grace
  • This is perhaps the neuroscience version of “biological freedom” or
    Dario Amodei — Machines of Loving Grace
  • 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’m very uncertain how possible this is, but my instinct is to be optimistic about what AI can invent here.
    Dario Amodei — Machines of Loving Grace
  • the progress in 20th century neuroscience was enormous – for example we didn’t even understand how or why neurons fired until the 1950’s.
    Dario Amodei — Machines of Loving Grace
  • Many of my friends and colleagues are raising children, and when those children grow up, I hope that any mention of disease will sound to them the way scurvy, smallpox, or bubonic plague sounds to us.
    Dario Amodei — Machines of Loving Grace
  • 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
    Dario Amodei — Machines of Loving Grace
  • deaths from heart disease have already declined over 50%, and simple interventions like GLP-1 agonists have already made huge progress against obesity and diabetes.
    Dario Amodei — Machines of Loving Grace
  • Reductions of 95% or more in both mortality and incidence seem possible. That said, cancer is extremely varied and adaptive, and is likely the hardest of these diseases to fully destroy
    Dario Amodei — Machines of Loving Grace
  • Death rates from cancer have been dropping ~2% per year for the last few decades; thus we are on track to eliminate most cancer in the 21st century at the current pace of human science
    Dario Amodei — Machines of Loving Grace
  • biomedicine is unique in that although the process of developing drugs is overly cumbersome, once developed they generally are successfully deployed and used.
    Dario Amodei — Machines of Loving Grace
  • a lot (though by no means all!) of their slowness ultimately derives from the need to rigorously evaluate drugs that barely work or ambiguously work
    Dario Amodei — Machines of Loving Grace
  • unavoidable constant delay: experiments and hardware design have a certain “latency” and need to be iterated upon a certain “irreducible” number of times in order to learn things that can’t be deduced logically.
    Dario Amodei — Machines of Loving Grace
  • This suggests that it’s not just massive resource concentration that drives discoveries, but ingenuity.
    Dario Amodei — Machines of Loving Grace
  • they often “could have been made” years earlier than they were: for example, CRISPR was a naturally occurring component of the immune system in bacteria that’s been known since the 80’s, but it took another 25 years for people to realize it could be repurposed for general gene editing
    Dario Amodei — Machines of Loving Grace
  • discoveries are so powerful precisely because they cut through intrinsic complexity and data limitations, directly increasing our understanding and control over biological processes
    Dario Amodei — Machines of Loving Grace
  • surprisingly large fraction of the progress in biology has come from a truly tiny number of discoveries, often related to broad measurement tools or techniques12 that allow precise but generalized or programmable intervention in biological systems
    Dario Amodei — Machines of Loving Grace
  • It is by speeding up the whole research process that AI can truly accelerate biology.
    Dario Amodei — Machines of Loving Grace
  • data is often lacking—not so much in quantity, but quality: there is always a dearth of clear, unambiguous data that isolates a biological effect of interest from the other 10,000 confounding things that are going on, or that intervenes causally in a given process, or that directly measures some effect (as opposed to inferring its consequences in some indirect or noisy way).
    Dario Amodei — Machines of Loving Grace
  • Thus, we should imagine a picture where intelligence is initially heavily bottlenecked by the other factors of production, but over time intelligence itself increasingly routes around the other factors, even if they never fully dissol
    Dario Amodei — Machines of Loving Grace
  • Examples of advances that work well in a technical sense, but whose impact has been substantially reduced by regulations or misplaced fears, include nuclear power, supersonic flight, and even elevators.
    Dario Amodei — Machines of Loving Grace
  • the speed at which a major project—for example developing a cancer cure—can be completed may have an irreducible minimum that cannot be decreased further even as intelligence continues to increase.
    Dario Amodei — Machines of Loving Grace
  • we should be talking about the marginal returns to intelligence7, and trying to figure out what the other factors are that are complementary to intelligence and that become limiting factors when intelligence is very high
    Dario Amodei — Machines of Loving Grace
  • summarize this as a “country of geniuses in a datacenter”.
    Dario Amodei — Machines of Loving Grace
  • summarize this as a “country of geniuses in a datacenter”.
    Dario Amodei — Machines of Loving Grace
  • The result often ends up reading like a fantasy for a narrow subculture, while being off-putting to most people.
    Dario Amodei — Machines of Loving Grace
  • In the speech (and video) case, we can assume that we really are receiving the input continuously, and thus can perform this tradeoff to reduce first token latency.
    Tincans - Final Technical Report