Kristina Fiflis
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on the atlas — 6
- - Chapter 21 savers
- Dario Amodei — Machines of Loving Grace50 savers
- Quit Your Job58 savers
- A Trip Behind the Spectacle at Davos1 savers
- My Last Five Years of Work7 savers
- Mean People Fail6 savers
highlights — 53
It is on those days, when I place the birds in the ground, that I find myself thinking of her again, and wishing that I was just a simple man, tending my cattle and worrying about my crops and thinking the thoughts of simple men, rather than a mundumugu who must live with the consequences of his wisdom.
- Chapter 2I know why the caged birds die — For, like them, I have touched the sky.
- Chapter 2"You are not like the falcon at all," I said. "He was prevented from being what he was meant to be. You are prevented from being what you are not meant to be."
- Chapter 2"But I feel like the pygmy falcon," she said, her misery reflected in her voice. "He spent his life dreaming of soaring high upon the winds. I dream of seeing words upon the computer screen."
- Chapter 2"All I know is Kirinyaga," she said. "How am I to chose a new home if I am forbidden to learn about other places?"
- Chapter 2We had come to the world of Kirinyaga to create a perfect Kikuyu society, a Kikuyu Utopia: could one gifted little girl carry within her the seeds of our destruction? I could not be sure, but it was a fact that gifted children grew up. They became Jesus, and Mohammed, and Jomo Kenyata—but they also became Tippoo Tib, the greatest slaver of all, and Idi Amin, butcher of his own people. Or, more often, they became Frederich Neitzsche and Karl Marx, brilliant men in their own right, but who influenced less brilliant, less capable men. Did I have the right to stand aside and hope that her influenc…
- Chapter 2That Kamari was brilliant and gifted was obvious: she had not only taught herself to read and write, but had actually created a coherent and logical language that the computer could understand and in which it could respond. I had given orders, and without directly disobeying them she had managed to circumvent them. She had no malice within her, and wanted only to learn, which in itself was an admirable goal. All that was on the one hand.
- Chapter 2Why do we make cages, then, if they do not make the birds feel better?" "Because they make us feel better," I answered.
- Chapter 2A few like the security of the cage, but most die of broken hearts, for having touched the sky they cannot bear to lose the gift of flight
- Chapter 2"No," I said, "for once the shrike knew what the ostrich knew, it forgot that it was a shrike. You must always remember who you are, and knowing too many things can make you forget."
- Chapter 2I’ve tried to lay out a vision of a world that is both plausible if everything goes right with AI, and much better than the world today.
Dario Amodei — Machines of Loving GraceI think that most people are underestimating just how radical the upside of AI could be, just as I think most people are underestimating how bad the risks could be
Dario Amodei — Machines of Loving GraceThese simple intuitions, if taken to their logical conclusion, lead eventually to rule of law, democracy, and Enlightenment values. If not inevitably, then at least as a statistical tendency, this is where humanity was already headed. AI simply offers an opportunity to get us there more quickly—to make the logic starker and the destination clearer.
Dario Amodei — Machines of Loving GraceBasic human intuitions of fairness, cooperation, curiosity, and autonomy are hard to argue with, and are cumulative in a way that our more destructive impulses often aren’t.
Dario Amodei — Machines of Loving GraceI think 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 Gracecompetition is self-defeating and tends to lead to a society based on compassion and cooperation
Dario Amodei — Machines of Loving GraceThe game, however, is complex enough that a player’s strategy within it tends to reflect their own political and philosophical outlook. The protagonist manages to defeat the emperor in the game, showing that his values (the Culture’s values) represent a winning strategy even in a game designed by a society based on ruthless competition and survival of the fittest.
Dario Amodei — Machines of Loving Graceit embodies values and political choices that not everyone will agree with.
Dario Amodei — Machines of Loving GraceI mean the experience of watching a long-held set of ideals materialize in front of us all at once.
Dario Amodei — Machines of Loving GraceBut it is a world worth fighting for.
Dario Amodei — Machines of Loving GraceBut it is a world worth fighting for.
Dario Amodei — Machines of Loving GraceEveryone (including AI companies!) will need to do their part both to prevent risks and to fully realize the benefits.
Dario Amodei — Machines of Loving GraceHowever, I do think in the long run AI will become so broadly effective and so cheap that this will no longer apply. At that point our current economic setup will no longer make sense, and there will be a need for a broader societal conversation about how the economy should be organized.
Dario Amodei — Machines of Loving GraceIn fact, even if AI can do 100% of things better than humans, but it remains inefficient or expensive at some tasks, or if the resource inputs to humans and AI’s are meaningfully different, then the logic of comparative advantage continues to apply.
Dario Amodei — Machines of Loving Gracecreating a bunch of new human jobs complementing and amplifying what AI is good at, such that the “10%” expands to continue to employ almost everyone.
Dario Amodei — Machines of Loving Gracethink meaning comes mostly from human relationships and connection, not from economic labor. People do want a sense of accomplishment, even a sense of competition, and in a post-AI world it will be perfectly possible to spend years attempting some very difficult task with a complex strategy, similar to what people do today when they embark on research projects, try to become Hollywood actors, or found companies
Dario Amodei — Machines of Loving Grace. Of course today they can still contribute through comparative advantage, and may derive meaning from the economic value they produce, but people also greatly enjoy activities that produce no economic value.
Dario Amodei — Machines of Loving GraceMost 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 GraceOn the question of meaning, I think it is very likely a mistake to believe that tasks you undertake are meaningless simply because an AI could do them better.
Dario Amodei — Machines of Loving GraceBut AI might be smart enough for this: it is the first technology capable of making broad, fuzzy judgements in a repeatable and mechanical way.
Dario Amodei — Machines of Loving Grace“Smart contracts” in cryptocurrencies haven’t revolutionized law because ordinary code isn’t smart enough to adjudicate all that much of interest.
Dario Amodei — Machines of Loving GraceAs with neuroscience and biology, we can also ask how things could be “better than normal”—not just how to avoid autocracy, but how to make democracies better than they are today. Even within democracies, injustices happen all the time. Rule-of-law societies make a promise to their citizens that everyone will be equal under the law and everyone is entitled to basic human rights, but obviously people do not always receive those rights in practice.
Dario Amodei — Machines of Loving Gracebut if we design and build AI in the right way, it may at least be a fight where the advocates of freedom everywhere have an advantage
Dario Amodei — Machines of Loving Gracethere is a good chance free information really does undermine authoritarianism, as long as the authoritarians can’t censor it. And uncensored AI can also bring individuals powerful tools for undermining repressive governments. Repressive governments survive by denying people a certain kind of common knowledge, keeping them from realizing that “the emperor has no clothes”.
Dario Amodei — Machines of Loving GraceThe 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 GraceMy current guess at the best way to do this is via an “entente strategy”26, in which a coalition of democracies seeks to gain a clear advantage (even just a temporary one) on powerful AI by securing its supply chain, scaling quickly, and blocking or delaying adversaries’ access to key resources like chips and semiconductor equipment.
Dario Amodei — Machines of Loving GraceAI-powered authoritarianism seems too terrible to contemplate, so democracies need to be able to set the terms by which powerful AI is brought into the world, both to avoid being overpowered by authoritarians and to prevent human rights abuses within authoritarian countries.
Dario Amodei — Machines of Loving GraceAI-powered authoritarianism seems too terrible to contemplate, so democracies need to be able to set the terms by which powerful AI is brought into the world, both to avoid being overpowered by authoritarians and to prevent human rights abuses within authoritarian countries.
Dario Amodei — Machines of Loving GraceAI-powered authoritarianism seems too terrible to contemplate, so democracies need to be able to set the terms by which powerful AI is brought into the world, both to avoid being overpowered by authoritarians and to prevent human rights abuses within authoritarian countries.
Dario Amodei — Machines of Loving GraceIf 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.
Dario Amodei — Machines of Loving GraceThere could end up being bad feedback cycles where, for example, 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 (some researchers have argued that this will undermine democracy, a topic I discuss further in the next section).
Dario Amodei — Machines of Loving GraceTo get back on track, we must quit our comfortably lazy routines and leap back into the unknown wilderness. We must first set our curiosity and then our fatal determination on the biggest problems of our collective existence and functional justice, without assurance that we will get it right.
Quit Your JobA comfortable, certain, and tracked-out existence is necessarily one of little vitality and low growth. This is a key reason to quit especially “good” jobs where you have become comfortable.
Quit Your JobThe other reason is that to actually accomplish at your full potential, you have to start doubling down on particular bets long before you know that you can follow through. You won’t see the whole path when you begin. You will have no way of knowing whether it exists, or whether what you are pursuing is even possible. If you have more certainty than that, you aren’t aiming high enough. You have to bet your life on faith that the universe will provide if your vision is good enough.
Quit Your JobSomeone must make that leap of faith to define ends for the rest of us to work towards. No one else is going to do it. Why not you?
Quit Your JobThe man of action serenely regards ruin as the most likely possible outcome, mitigates it where he can, and leaps anyway. He rejects the comfortable half-existence of drifting with the indeterminate human tide and manifests his bold vision into the world.
Quit Your JobThe indeterminate hedge-trader with his logarithmic utility function assigns infinite negative utility to ruin.
Quit Your JobYou don’t actually need the money; in reality, the money needs you to give it a worthy purpose, but everyone gets this backward
Quit Your JobPeople miss that escaping this meaningless servitude to our own capital was Thoreau’s main point in Walden.
Quit Your JobThe search space is too complicated and unknown for linear objective-chasing to work. Biological evolution, in practice, works through a diversity of niches which it explores in parallel to find unpredictable advances.
Quit Your Job