Then you grossly misunderstand how far along AI is. AGI is not even a remote possibility with current techniques and implementations (and I would contest, entirely impossible with digital logic). It's just massive amount of statistics that were computationally impossible given available hardware until recently.
We don't have a baseline understanding of consciousness or intuition to a degree that we could even begin to replicate it.
While true, what you're saying is totally tangential to whether or not large numbers of people will treat AIs like they're conscious.
Expecting masses of people to defer to subject matter experts, contrary to what their feelings tell them, isn't a bet I would have much confidence in given the current climate.
The concept of rights also makes no sense to a machine. The main reason rights are a thing are to prevent pain and suffering, which unless specifically implemented no AGI will likely have.
I agree with that sentiment. Also I would estimate that AI would eliminate humans long before it would or could reach the level of what humans are. So we wouldn't exist to see such a world.
> AI would eliminate humans long before it would or could reach the level of what humans are
You think that an artificial agent with less than human level intelligence could destroy humanity? Then why hasn't a deranged human (or animal) already done so?
by AGI do you just mean artificial general intelligence, as in, capable of composing plans and deriving conclusions and such about the world in general, doing all the same types of reasoning tasks that humans are capable of and which are also used to achieve outcomes,
Or do you mean, being conscious?
Whether the latter is impossible with only "digital logic", is somewhat plausible (though I would still guess that it is possible, though far beyond our understanding.)
But the former being impossible with only "digital logic", seems rather implausible to me!
Like, I endorse the claim that souls exist, but, I see no reason that a soul would be required for an agent to have a model of the world we live in (not just a toy environment), and to act in the world in ways which both improve its model of the world and to achieve "goals" within it (and when there is a trade-off between these, which balances these in some way).
Nor do I see a reason that any such agent would need to have any internal experience.
(I still think it is probably possible to make an artificial agent which does have an internal experience, but, I doubt this will ever actually happen.)
Ok, you might ask, "Why do you think those things?", which, first, I should ask you the same, but, I will answer:
I see no fundamental obstacle to it.
The world behaves in ways which can be modeled well. These models which we use, they are not some ineffable knowledge that can only ever be represented within a person's mind, and cannot be concretely expressed in artifacts like books and pdf files such that it could be recovered from said artifacts.
If navigating the world required such a kind of secret knowledge, that either couldn't be communicated, or which could only be communicated through some kind of special person-to-person medium which is never merely expressed in an object in the world, and such that without this secret knowledge, effective planning in the world was impossible, with the world being too wild without it, then it would make sense that, unless we could make machines that could have this kind of secret knowledge, then it would be impossible to make machines that could plan in the world and such.
But, no such secret knowledge appears to be needed when acting in the world. When one constructs a shed according to some plans, there is no ineffable secret knowledge needed for this. When one, given some desiderata, designs a plan for a shed, there is no secret knowledge needed for this either. Nor when designing a computer chip.
(by "secret knowledge" I don't mean that it would be a secret that a few people know and other people don't. I mean secret as in, cannot be shared with or expressed via anything we know of that isn't a person.)
It very much seems that the world works according to expressible rules, or at least, can be very well approximated as working according to such rules.
Expressible rules can be enumerated. They can also be interpreted mechanically, and therefore evaluated mechanically. Of course, a naive enumeration and testing would be completely impractical, but if we are talking about what is possible in principle, with no requirement that the computations be doable in practice, just that they be finite, then it seems clear that rules which describe the world well can, in principle, be discovered mechanically.
There is no fundamental barrier.
Obviously I can't rule out that there is an undiscovered law-of-physics, that if ever an AGI would be created, lighting strikes the area and destroys it before it is completed, and that therefore AGI is impossible, because if it ever would be created, this would be prevented by the lightning.
But, within our current understanding of the world, there is nothing that can be a reason it is impossible.
Any such reason would have to apply to machines but not to us.
Now, maybe if our brains work quantum mechanically in an important large-scale way, or, if our brains receive signals from beyond the physical universe (which I'm not ruling out; see: souls), these could be reasons it could be impossible to emulate a human mind using a binary classical computer, even allowing lots of slowdown. (Err, quantum mechanics can be simulated with costs exponential in the size of the system, but, if the human brain were entangled with other things in an important way, you couldn't really emulate the brain with just a classical computer, because it couldn't be entangled with the other thing.)
But, this still wouldn't be a barrier to something using just classical computation with binary, having models of the world and acting within it, unless these things were needed for modeling the world, which, seeing as we can communicate our models and such with words, they aren't.
(... uh... ok so, quantum teleportation does allow using entanglement along with sending classical information, to communicate quantum information, so you might say "well, if two people's brains are entangled, then what if the measurements and such done in quantum teleportation are somehow encoded in a way we don't notice in the word choice and such that people use, and then this is subconsciously used in the other person's brain for the other half of the quantum teleportation protocol, and so quantum bits are communicated that way, but, I don't think this is plausible. There would have to be some way that the brains renew the entanglement, which doesn't seem plausible even if brains do store quantum information, and I really don't think brains store quantum information. I only mention this to cover bases.)
And, our reasoning about the models, which we use to make models and such, are also things we can explain.
There is no fundamental barrier. The only barriers are practical ones, things being hard, algorithms being too inefficient, not having worked out all the details of things, etc.
(That's not to say that I think AGI will ever be produced. I'm kind of trusting that God won't allow that to happen, because I think it would be likely to go very badly if it did happen. (But, I still think research into trying to figure out how to make sure that it goes well if it does happen, is good and important. "Do not rely on miracles" and all that. Perhaps His actual plan is that people solve AI safety, rather than AGI being prevented. Idk.))
Please don't stoop to childish insults. While a mountain of headlines might appease your fifth grade teacher, it is not a substitute for primary evidence in a rational debate.
If you have primary evidence of this alleged massive atrocity, please share it. Otherwise, I am done engaging with you.
lol two of the sources are literally post graduate level efforts, ironic given your fifth grade teacher comment.
You don't know what primary evidence means. I've linked several sources that include indisputable, concrete evidence, including verified CCP documents, as well as eye witness, first party testimony that maintains consistency across accounts from entirely different people.
Describe evidence sufficient to your standards and provide rebuttals to the evidence provided. I know you can't and won't do either of these things, I'm just explicitly demonstrating the intellectual dishonesty you're employing to minimize the horrors of the CCP.
Your contentions don't hold up to even the most basic scrutiny or challenge.
Now imagine the same government bureaucratic policies being used to run public healthcare in the US. What do you think is going to happen to the supply of healthcare professionals?
"The push has involved aggressively wooing brands and large ad agencies such as Omnicom Group, whilst simultaneously seeking to temper the dark underbelly of the platform — once a hotbed for far-right and misogynist groups — after years of criticism for perceived underpolicing."
Statements like this are humorous to me. While it's undoubtedly true that reddit was used by some disgusting far-right ideologues, it's still a hotbed for misandrists (TwoX and FemaleDatingStrategy), anti-white racists (BlackPeopleTwitter, many others), violent, radical left-wing ideologues (riot strategies discussed and planned in the open in summer 2020), blatant child grooming, and many other subgroups that are easily categorized as belonging to the "dark underbelly". As long as they're not right wing, they're not worth mentioning explicitly I guess.
The dichotomy of political concern, as well as the fact that reddit has an increasingly large and dominant population of literal children is why I'm awaiting this IPO with massive expectations that I'll be thoroughly entertained by how it turns out in the next few years. Community content curation by left wing ideologically homogeneous children seems like a very winning strategy for a businesses and advertisers.
Every time a major org claims to be open to OSS it rapidly reverts to old tools and ecosystems. The new CIO can claim all he wants, it's not going to happen. DoD is run by entrenched civil servants. I've seen it happen time and time again in MDA, Army, and Navy work.
This is a commonly repeated trope that is completely false and based on very questionable accounting. Namely the omission of opportunity cost and the comparison of static parameters to temporal parameters.
What do you think that paper actually says? I keep seeing it cited as "no, this is how much the bailouts really cost!", but that's not what it's about at all and anyone who has actually read it cannot credibly come to that conclusion.
It's about assessing the fair value of the bailout programs, at the time they were executed - i.e. the estimated net present value of the future cashflows under the bailout programs. The author argues that it unhelpful from a policy perspective to do an ex post analysis because it only describes what happened in this case, rather than what could've happened. i.e. when considering whether a bailout is good value, we should consider what happens if its unsuccessful.
There is absolutely no doubt that the bailouts have been profitable for the government in terms of actual repayments.
"Drawing selectively on existing cost estimates and augmenting them with new calculations, I conclude that the total direct cost of crisis-related bailouts in the U.S. was on order of $500 billion, or 3.5 percent of GDP in 2009. [...] Those conclusions stand in sharp contrast to popular accounts that claim there was no cost because the money was repaid, and with claims of costs in the multiple trillions of dollars."
From 3.1.3. See Wall's analysis of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac for more detailed discussion of their bailout costs:
"Treasury collected $147 billion from Fannie and $98 billion from Freddie. As explained earlier, interpreting this tally as a cost measure is conceptually flawed for several reasons. Wall (2014) also discusses the shortcomings of this approach, which has been used to argue that the government has been more than fully repaid and that value should be returned to the shareholders."
From the conclusion:
"Nevertheless, the total is large enough to conclude that the bailouts were not a free lunch for policymakers as some have claimed."
What the paper is saying seems pretty clear to me: bailout costs have been inaccurately measured and reported popularly at both ends. It was neither unfathomably expensive, nor profitable to the tax payer.
If you lend me $100 and I pay you back $107 you can declare you profited from the loan if you literally only look at the principal and repayment amount, but finance is not so simple, especially at a national level. Opportunity cost, inflation, depreciation, and numerous other factors exist. The total cost of you lending me $100 could have been significantly more than $107.
I invite you actually to read the whole paper. Please pay attention specifically to section 2.1 where the author contrasts "fair value", "ex ante" and "ex post" approaches to direct cost estimation.
The paper says that you cannot look at a successful bailout and conclude that it must have been good policy, because success was not guaranteed; you instead need to look at the range of outcomes that are reasonably possible to estimate the likely costs.
The author doesn't at all say that the "ex post" account of actual cashflows is an inaccurate measurement of what happened; only that it doesn't represent a useful policy tool for estimating whether other bailouts represent good value.
Section 2 is literally the basis of my original point that declaring repayment as profitable to the tax payer is inaccurate accounting of costs. I've read the entire paper. I'm not sure why you're so bent on ignoring plainly stated facts that align with my contention that the bailouts were not profitable to the tax payer. They weren't. It's explicitly stated.
"At 3.5% of 2009 GDP it is a cost that is big enough to raise serious questions about whether taxpayers could have been better protected."
It even directly states that citing the propublica bailout tracker, which the root comment does, as evidence of "profit to the taxpayer" is deeply flawed and one of the reasons the paper is addressing the issue. This is the entire reason I cited it
"The press typically reports bailout costs on an ex post cash basis despite the problems with that approach. For example, ProPublica, a highly regarded non-partisan news organization, created a 'Bailout Tracker' that has been keeping a running tally of government asset purchases and cash receipts under TARP and from the bailout of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. In their most recent update dated September 27, 2018, they report a total net government 'profit' of $97 billion. Policymakers also tend to cite ex post cash results. For example, in 2012 former president Barack Obama claimed that, 'We got back every dime used to rescue the banks.' Other media outlets report skepticism about such claims,7 but news organizations generally lack the financial acumen or resources to produce credible cost estimates of their own."
You're not going to force your flawed interpretation onto me and convince me the author is not stating exactly what she's stating plain as day, and has reinforced with subsequent work and commentary. That's called gaslighting
“My analysis imposes the discipline of a fair-value approach, which incorporates the uncertainty about the size of eventual losses at the time assistance was extended and the cost of that risk. By contrast, popular accounts simply add up realized cash flows or tally total risk exposures.”
As we look back, there is no uncertainty. We know what happened. The bailout was successful (within its parameters) and was more than repaid. You don't need to do any counter-factual analysis to show that, you can just go look at the reports to Congress from the Department of the Treasury.
To understand that paper, take an analogy from gambling.
Say I plan to play roulette; I'm the U.S. government, the bet is the bailout. Let's just assume I'm going to bet $1 on red.
I want to understand the cost of the bet at the time I place it; this is the fair value of the wager (bailout). The odds against winning a bet on red with an American roulette wheel are 1 1/9:1 and the payout is 1 to 1 - so the expected (fair) value of the bet is -$0.053. The author attempts to do the same for the bailout, bearing in mind the uncertainties, and comes up with -$500bn.
Now, at the roulette wheel, the expectation that I'm going to lose out $0.053 needs to be balanced against the excitement and pleasure of the wager. In the bailout case, the fair value of the bailout needs to be balanced against the anticipated broader economic results of the intervention like containment of the credit crisis and the shoring up of the mortgage system.
We spin the wheel and it's 32, red. We're lucky and so we win back our stake plus another $1. In the case of the bailout, the intervention was successful, the economy recovered, and the bailout money was more than repaid.
The popular account that the author alludes to corresponds to looking at this bet and saying "betting on red was obviously the right thing to do because I made 200% of my money back and I had fun gambling". The author isn't disputing that the bailout was more than repaid (she stipulates that in the abstract of the paper!), or that the economy rebounded. She is absolutely right that this is the wrong way to look at the expected cost of a bailout in the future.
Fundamentally, from a finance/economics perspective, there is no incompatibility between saying "the fair-value cost of the bailout was $500bn" and "the government made billions of dollars on the bailout". That's because the definition of a cost requires an analysis of the expected return. You do agree with this, right?
The original comment stated that the bailouts have been profitable for the taxpayer and cited the ProPublica bailout tracker as evidence of this.
I said that they have not been profitable to the taxpayer. I pointed out that the conclusion that they've been profitable to the tax payer is based on flawed cost accounting methods and cited the paper.
In the paper, the author very explicitly stated it was not profitable to the tax payer, directly calls out the misleading nature of the ProPublica tracker, explains why it's misleading, verbosely explains and justifies a more accurate cost accounting methodology, describes the results of using this methodology, and commentates on how these results and the methodologies that produce them may be used in the future to make more accurate and less misleading cost assessments of bailouts in the future.
I've directly quoted the paper numerous times in which the author clearly states that the bailouts were not profitable to the taxpayer, flaws in methodologies that indicate they were profitable to the taxpayer, and why different methodologies are needed that more accurately reflect whether the true cost of a bailout results in a situation that is profitable to the taxpayer.
In conclusion, and to reiterate my original point. The bailouts were not profitable to the taxpayer except when using deeply flawed cost accounting methodologies such as ex post cash flow analysis, which the author, in great detail, explains is a woefully inadequate for measuring the cost to the taxpayer of a bailout.
In fact because it is most likely that a recession will be followed by a recovery, it is probable that the government will show a “profit.” However, bailouts are costly because of the possibility of relatively unlikely but very costly states of the world where recessions persist and recoveries are low.
As I think we can agree, it was not the case the 2008 recession was persistent with low recovery; yet it is the possibility this could have been the case that increases the cost.
Cost analysis is absolutely orthogonal to an actual accounting of profit and loss, which is why the author consistently uses quotes around the word "profit". The cost of doing a thing has nothing at all do with whether it turns out to be profitable! Profitability is exactly a matter of ex post cash accounting; there is just no other way to measure it.
I guarantee you have never quoted a section of the paper that says the bailouts were unprofitable to the taxpayer because the author never makes that claim: because it would be false. You will also never find a reference to "cost accounting" in the paper, again because those concepts are orthogonal within the author's framework. By all means double-check the paper on both those points.
If you're trying to answer the question "did the tax payers get back more money than they put in to the bailout", then the only way to do that is by ex post analysis of cash flows: the answer is "yes they did". If this were a business, that would be the definition of a profitable investment.
Until you understand that costs are nothing to do with profitability, you're doomed to misunderstand this paper.
"The government earns a 'profit' from the bailout of -$200 + $210 = $10 million. Figure 3 illustrates the situation and makes clear its conceptual shortcoming."
"At 3.5% of 2009 GDP it is a cost that is big enough to raise serious questions about whether taxpayers could have been better protected."
You're just plain wrong mate. Taxpayers don't need to be protected from profitable ventures. I dunno what the hell definition for profit you're making up, but it's literally defined on the basis of cost in accounting and finance.
... "conceptual shortcoming" as a cost analysis technique, which is the subject of the paper. I literally just explained this in my prior post. Cost analysis can tell you nothing about profitability. Cash flow analysis can tell you nothing about costs.
Protection means "structuring the bailout differently to reduce the downside risk".
Accounting profit is literally revenue minus appropriate cost analysis. You can't determine profit without appropriate cost. That's the point of the paper and my contention. You're wrong. Stop gaslighting.
Cost means something different in economics from what it means in accounting. A cost in accounting terms is an expenditure. When an economist talks about a cost, they are talking about an opportunity cost, which is one that is contingent on the expected return of an activity. If you don't believe me, go read about it on Wikipedia or whatever.
Section 2.1.1 - "For a bailout cost measure to be economically meaningful, it has to be evaluated as of a fixed point in time. In most cases, the natural choice is the year the bailout is initiated, for instance, when new legislation is passed or administrative policy changes are announced or implemented, or shortly thereafter."
The author does this. She evaluates the cost of the bailout at a fixed point in time, the year the bailout is initiated, which is to say 2008. She arrives at a number of $500bn.
What happens after 2008 is irrelevant to her cost analysis. If you don't understand this, you don't understand anything about the paper at all. Look at every subsection in section 3 where the author considers the different elements of the bailout. When she's considering fair value cost, it's always in reference to contemporaneous reports (2008/2009 sources) or estimates on that basis.
Also, please stop accusing me of gaslighting: I'm not asking you to question your reality, I'm just asking you to question your understanding of an economics paper - there's no power dynamic here that would put you into a vulnerable position and allow me to bully you, even if that were my intent. We're just people on the internet.
I'm done here now, by the way, as there doesn't seem to be much more to say. If you have friends who have a strong background in economics, I really suggest you show them the paper, and this thread.
We don't have a baseline understanding of consciousness or intuition to a degree that we could even begin to replicate it.