the world is incredibly filled with risk to humans—people in the AI doomer camp are making a claim that AI potentially is a new kind of uncontrollable risk that warrants extraordinary regulation
the basis of this claim seems to be a confusion of logical or deductive reasoning with inductive or observational reasoning
argument comes down to
- it’s possible to imagine a super intelligent machine that has properties that will kill everyone (this is an exercise in logical reasoning)
- since it’s possible to imagine it, this means it will come into existence — this is an error because things that exist in the real, physical world do so based on physical processes governed by inductive reasoning
generally, there is a long series of steps between the imagining of some constructed, complex machine and its realization, along with its conceptual foundations it requires sustained effort, trial and error, maintenance, generally a serious fight against entropy to make it function and keep it functioning
the sort of out of control AI imagined by AI doomers is not something we’ve seen before
so we shouldn’t make costly decisions based upon this confusion of reasoning
this is my pet peeve with discussions of ‘free will’ they have an implicit definition—everything being exactly the same at a different time or place—that is non-sensical as far as we know.
I’m still disturbed by peoples confidence in a deterministic universe—I suppose such confidence is based on the success of inductive reasoning but inductive reasoning is a phenomenon based on how our minds work.
As far as I know the philosophical problem of causation is not considered solved?
In any case, elements of randomness seem likely to play a role in human intelligence but what that role is, who knows?
I’ve never understood his crankiness on this subject: the concept of ‘right to repair’ is entirely synthetic.
Government intervention in markets is usually predicated on some kind of ‘market failure’ and I don’t see how that is the case here. There is plenty of competition in the phone market and if the option to have a phone repaired by third parties was really desired by consumers then someone would sell such a phone.
It seems more like Rossmann is angry there is not a product-market fit for his services. Something like that.
Really? Like in the next 200 years? That’s ridiculous. The scenarios from IPCC envision a future of prosperity, albeit at a reduced level than if we could somehow drastically cut carbon emissions.
No he is not. The Strike in question is the one run by Jack Maller and the description of using USDT for remittances to ES comes from Miller’s own Medium article.
I agree with the thrust of your comment in general. I thought that Trump’s China travel ban was a choice of common sense and the Democrats labeling it as xenophobic was counterproductive.
While it certainly was xenophobic in Trump’s hands, it was practically a decision that made him happy as a China hater, the motivation of the decision is independent of its utility.
Trump certainly made a mess of it after that.
All of the politicians got fooled by the relative stability and rareness of the pandemic. Most of the time telling people not to panic it won’t be as bad as you fear works OK as a strategy in a country like the US.
Isn’t this a problem of efficiency and optimization? Running the system lean leads to lower costs, but with risk of occasional shortfalls due to exogenous effects. But to optimize for those relatively infrequent events would increase the cost of the frequent events (the everyday shipping).
Given the challenge of finding an optimum it seems like the world hasn’t done too badly.
This argument about code inspection does not make sense to me. The number of people who are going to even have the ability to inspect the code of the applications they use is infitesimal and of that small number the people who have time and inclination to do so is microscopic. Given that applications are complex, written by groups of programmers over extended time what is the chance of meaningful code review by an individual? It could take years for a single application.
I don’t know if Free software makes software less secure but I don’t see how it makes it more secure? Especially given that security might not be a high priority for the authors.
I’m not a programmer so it’s hard for me to understand the arguments, but from what I gather is that any popular software could be a vector for threats and that users themselves remain the biggest vector.
The author suggests greater use of code signing could help. It also seems to me that progress towards computer security needs to be the province of large, well resourced organizations.
Our own (US) government seems to not be prioritizing this correctly, preferring to maintain their own exploits at the cost of defense. This is a political problem. It is of a piece with the historical arrogance of the US security-military apparatus that is being badly outplayed, mistaking pure military superiority as the most important type of security.
This article is an example of the pure propaganda that 'mainstream financial media' participates in on-the-regular. Why that is I don't know. Symbiotic business interests I guess.
It's not that the information is incorrect. It probably is and it does tell us something about some of the big players around Coinbase.
But the whole bitcoin 'ecosystem' is essentially a collective criminal organization, with some players being closer to the dirty parts than others. (I'm leaving out everyday holders of bitcoin, just talking about insider types.) These big Coinbase players might not 'touch the poo' directly, but their hands still get stinky.
The price action in bitcoin is determined across a network of exchanges, most of which do not use real dollars (or other govt currency). They use crypto only for trading, including the fake 'stable-coin' tether.
Tether (the company who issues the currency tether) has been shown definitively to be running a scam and are completely dishonest.) They have issued $35Billion worth of their fake dollars. Until recently they were issuing on the order of $1B per week!
Tether is a sister company to the exchange Bitfinex with the same owners and management. So essentially the same company. They just signed an agreement with the New York Attorney General where they paid a fine of $18.5M (notice difference in scale). The agreement spells out exactly how they have been scamming people. This is based on information coming from the company itself. This is not FUD, just FACT. (interestingly since they signed this agreement ~10 days ago, they stopped issuing tether.)
One of the central players in this ongoing criminal operation who has been taken out is Crypto Capital Corp. They ran a shadow banking system for many of the big exchanges, including Bitfinex and Binance. The Feds seized $850M from CCC for money laundering, which precipitated a crisis for these entities and intensified the criminal activity of the many industry insiders connected through this shadow bank.
My guess is that Tether issued $35B in fake USDT (tether) almost exclusively without dollar collateral backing. (the original premise of tether was each would only be issued on receipt of a true USD by tether, and therefor each USDT was pegged to a USD, the peg holds for now but the dollar backing is not there, that's another story.)
Most of this $35B was issued over the last year when we have seen a huge rise in bitcoin price. The tether currency only has one purpose, to buy cryptocurrency. So this is a huge amount of liquidity introduced into the market. (Compare to the hype around Tesla's $1.5B bitcoin purchase.)
It is the price appreciation that drives this whole market, including the business of Coinbase, even though they do not deal with tether.
The OP article mentions none of this! Sure, it reveals some insiders, perhaps on the more legit side, but ignores the real engine of this speculative bubble/fraud.
It has the effect of 'white-washing' this dirty game.
The difference is the moon landing or ‘who shot JFK’ are about subjects that are low stakes, very low. Having millions people believe the Presidential election was corrupt is corrosive to the basic civic foundations of the political process.
I believe what they are saying is that if their is a correlation between skin color and vitamin D levels (people with darker skin have less vitamin D) and there is another reason people with darker skin have poor outcomes (let’s say bad healthcare), it would make any conclusion that the vitamin D levels have a causal relationship to covid-19 outcomes less likely.
To account for this, you would need to control for skin color.
You are not acknowledging the core economic problem which is that the productive capacity of the economy is going to be destroyed if this doesn’t end soon.
What you are describing is essentially how to ration the dwindling supplies of goods during the epidemic.
Enacting arbitrary taxes where the government simply appropriates funds from entities that have it and gives it to those who don’t is unfair, dangerous, and will undermine trust in the rule of law. It will be ripe for abuse and predatory behavior. It is also a system that loses the critical information market mechanisms provide, instead replacing with “command” based allocation which is a dangerous precedent.
The way to achieve what you propose that is not at odds with civil society is for the government to “print” new money, and distribute it through moderately means based criteria.
The US has unlimited capacity to increase its money base as a sovereign entity. Normally this is done through the Fed buying bonds from the treasury. The treasury has the authority to create money directly if they choose.
This has the effect of devaluing the currency as a whole. By distributing the new currency ti citizens that need it, it is effectively a transfer of wealth that is distributed throughout the economy in a decentralized and proportional way.
It is only necessary to target those who need help, opposed to harder problem created when the need to target who can “afford” to sacrifice their savings is added.
This doesn’t address the problem of productivity lost, but it allows what productive output there is to be more fairly rationed.
It also less subject to being the legal and political nightmare your suggestion entails.
I like Serum a lot, but it has the same set of issues that make all of these digital synths limited as performance instruments compared to, say, a piano.
The issue starts with the low resolution of MIDI. Most instruments implement only velocity connected to keys, with max 128 layers of resolution.
A real piano has near infinite resolution on velocity alone.
This exacerbates the issue that digital synths are generally deterministic, meaning for the same input they produce the same output.
Because the resolution of the controller is so low, attempts to introduce variety rely on randomness. In an acoustic instrument the same sound cant ever be produced twice. But this is a result of a complex, chaotic system, not randomness.
A major factor in the inherently chaotic sound is that each note is exciting the same physical object, even a note played with the same velocity (like a disklavier piano system could) will sound different every time based on the state of the whole large object. As notes are added to a chord or arpeggio, they are not just superimposed over each other, instead they each contribute their energy to the whole object.
The use of mod wheels definitely helps with expressiveness in the hands of a good player.
But my sense is that even “players” are forgoing using these instruments as performance tools, and instead loop the sections, and piece through the whole song, listening carefully, modifying the midi data directly based on what they a hearing.
This has definitely resulted in some very imaginative and striking work, but, to my ear anyway, it has a very different feel as a mode of artistic expression. It’s more “cerebral” in some way.
I wouldn’t say modern electronic music has a higher level of ‘sonic texture’ than orchestral music, or any music using traditional instruments. The difference is that in modern music ‘sonic texture’ is an explicit mode of “authorial expression.” The sonic textures creates by acoustic instruments are arguably richer, as they are capable of much more subtle modes of expression as playable instruments.
It’s just the case that the development of novel acoustics instruments is a whole separate craft, subject to the annoying vicissitudes of the sonic properties of physical matter. The instruments were developed over centuries.
As soon as instruments became electrified artists began using the ability to express themselves directly by manipulating the sounds themselves.
The sonic experimentation dominating modern pop music is entirely the result of the complete digitization of the sound generating chain.
I also think another factor is that digital synthesizers are woefully impoverished as instruments capable of expression through musical performance. Outside of the voice, modern pop is devoid of real-time musical expression. It’s become a non-real-time process, closer to writing, animation, the visual arts.
This forces the composer to rely on the native capacities of the instruments to express ideas, and the one that is completely unavailable in the acoustic realm is to chain the fundamental timbre of the instrument.
I’m a producer, recording engineer. The author of the original piece is missing that the only reasons a composer could imagine they were working primarily with the modes or melody, harmony, rhythm is that there is highly developed tradition of musicianship and instrument design to fill in the most fundamental aspect of music, which is the actual sound.
Edit: there is another huge factor in the decline of melody which is the product of two interrelated technology developments. The first is the use of loop based sequencing techniques for compositional work, and the second is that the random-access editing techniques made possible by modern digital audio workstations extended the loop based composition process to all sounds, including the voice.
Loops are basically short compositions. If you spend a lot of time in this mode or composition, your ideas will tend to be short. The actual mechanics of how the music is made disincline the composer from constructing both traditional harmony and melody.
The DAW has fundamentally disconnected music from the strict relationship with linear time that was inherent before the age of recording. To some extent musical notation allowed composers to work around this, but the end result was always an expression that had to have a thought out beginning, middle, and end.
That doesn’t require a blockchain based system though. A single entity can secure a crypto currency.
You can convert PayPal directly into US dollars at your bank, so I don’t think they would see any benefit to supporting such a distributed token system unless the could make a cut on every transaction.
I’m having a hard time seeing Facebook being able to support a stable coin without being subject to the same regulations and cost as any other system.
Perhaps they will get a competitive advantage through data mining and could charge smaller transaction fees.
the basis of this claim seems to be a confusion of logical or deductive reasoning with inductive or observational reasoning
argument comes down to
- it’s possible to imagine a super intelligent machine that has properties that will kill everyone (this is an exercise in logical reasoning)
- since it’s possible to imagine it, this means it will come into existence — this is an error because things that exist in the real, physical world do so based on physical processes governed by inductive reasoning
generally, there is a long series of steps between the imagining of some constructed, complex machine and its realization, along with its conceptual foundations it requires sustained effort, trial and error, maintenance, generally a serious fight against entropy to make it function and keep it functioning
the sort of out of control AI imagined by AI doomers is not something we’ve seen before
so we shouldn’t make costly decisions based upon this confusion of reasoning