In my view we should also stop taking the Great Technoking at his word and move away from lionizing this old well-moneyed elite in general.
Real technological progress in the 21st century is more capital-intensive than before. It also usually requires more diverse talent.
Yet the breakthroughs we can make in this half-century can be far greater than any before: commercial-grade fusion power (where Lawrence Livermore National Lab currently leads, thanks to AI[1]), quantum computing, spintronics, twistronics, low-cost room-temperature superconductors, advanced materials, advanced manufacturing, nanotechnology.
Thus, it's much more about the many, not the one. Multi-stakeholder. Multi-person. Often led by one technology leader, sure, but this one person must uplift and be accountable to the many. Otherwise we get the OpenAI story, and end-justifies-the-means type of groupthink wrt. those who worship the technoking.
I still find it remarkable how we need such an extreme amount of electrical energy to power large modern AI models.
Compare with one human brain. Far more sophisticated, even beyond our knowledge. What does it take to power it for a day? Some vegetables and rice. Still fine for a while if you supply pure junk food -- it'll still perform.
Clearly we have a long, long way to go in terms of the energy efficiency of AI approaches. Our so-called neural nets clearly don't resemble the energy efficiency of actual biological neurons.
Food is extremely dense in energy. 1 food calorie is about 1.1 Watt-hours. A hamburger is about 490 Wh. An AI model requires 0.047 kWh = 47 Wh to generate 1000 text responses.[1] If an LLM could convert hamburgers to energy, it could generate over 10000 prompt completions on a single hamburger.
Based on my own experience, I would struggle to generate that much text without fries and a drink.
During that time, your brain would do far more than just that text generation though, beyond what we even know scientifically.
But yes, food energy could be useful for AI. A little dystopian potentially too, if you think about it. Like DARPA's EATR robot, able to run on plant biomass (although potentially animal biomass too, including human remains):
This is more likely to be a hardware issue than an algorithms issue. The brain physically is a neural network, as opposed to a software simulation of one.
A classical philosopher once told me that many ultra-wealthy people have ancient papyrus scrolls hidden away in their collections -- full of ancient Greek and Roman knowledge currently unknown to the outside world.
Keep the value up by keeping it secret. Or at least keep your bragging rights with fellow ultra-rich apex parasites.
If I heard someone brag about depriving the public of historical documents, I'd see them as nothing more than slime. Even the Vatican Secret Archive is finally getting digitized https://digi.vatlib.it/
If you're ever in Kyoto, be sure to check out the Miho Museum to see what one billionaire family's private collection of works from antiquity looks like. I don't recall any papyri, but it wouldn't surprise me one bit if they have things tucked away that aren't ever on display.
It is in some ways equivalent to a One Piece. Ultiamtely, people want legacy, and what better way to have people talking about you centuries later than by suggesting you have this huge treasure buried somewhere that no one can ever find?
That's importantly different, unless the existence and authenticity of the scrolls is public and only the contents are secret (which is not what I understood the commenter to be suggesting).
100%. If they could learn anything, then shouldn't modern ML systems be able to solve the big mysteries in science -- since we have large datasets there describing the phenomena in various ways? E.g. dark energy, dark matter, matter-antimatter asymmetry, or even outstanding problems in pure mathematics.
The intention of this sama post is as you said, it's to build narrative so he can raise his trillion from the Arab world or other problematic sources.
Well, you could certainly train a big-ass model to mimic the distribution of all that physics data. That doesn't mean the model could, eg, formulate interesting new theories which explain why that distribution has its particular structure.
Except not in NATO, Five Eyes, or even a party to the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons. In real terms, they're definitely among the more problematic allies. Compared with Germany, UK, France, Australia, Canada, etc.
This is a blatant lie. For example, as part of operation Rubikon Germany and the US spied on Spain, a NATO ally, among other targets. It's commonplace to spy on each other.
Nothing they said was a lie though. Yes, everyone spies on each other, but what matters is the level of aggression. Israel ranks up there with China and Russia, and that's an issue.
And it's absolutely true that they did not sign the nuclear non proliferation treaty, and then went on to do nuclear tests off the coast of South Africa in the 1979 Vela incident. And that provided a huge motivation for Israel's enemies (which are absolutely anti-US) to seek nuclear weapons, which caused huge regional instability since then and threatened US national security.
Yes, you can talk about how it's hypocritical that the US gets to do these things and nobody else does. And in a sense it is, but the fact is that at the moment, the US effectively rules the world for better or worse. And it is a fact that Israel's behavior is causing instability that threatens themselves and the US.
Every time I encounter resistance to your points here, I feel like an alien among humans.
I think it cuts so deep into people's psychology, and frequently religion. The very notion that we are not the apex of anything. And that we no longer need to eat other animals to live and be healthy. Too much to bear for many, so it frequently results in low-quality conversation, laden with emotions.
The fact remains, however. Non-human animals are not that different from us. Pretty much all mental behavior is represented in the animal kingdom. They, in so many ways, are us. And we are them.
Why should it be otherwise, after all? It would be strange to have a quantum jump in mental behavior with humans, and only primitive behavior in all other animals.
It'll probably take some centuries for humans to see other animals as inherently worthy of respect.
I am in no way religious, and I don't think we are fundamentally different than other animals, but I don't think it is surprising that most of us (myself included) think of human emotions and intelligence as being on a completely different level than animals.
The complexity of human language, social structure, and technology is not even in the same ballpark as animals. Humans make iPhones and travel to space and write War and Peace. We dominate the world, changing its very climate and wiping countless species off the planet, and no other species even tries to stop us.
It seems a bigger stretch to think other animals have similar emotions to humans than the opposite.
> The complexity of human language, social structure, and technology is not even in the same ballpark as animals. Humans make iPhones and travel to space and write War and Peace. We dominate the world, changing its very climate and wiping countless species off the planet, and no other species even tries to stop us.
That's true only for a small subset of humans. 99.9% of humans achieve no feat as you describe.
You can easily make the case for attributing these feats to smaller subsets. E.g., Africans, Native Americans do not make iPhones, travel to space, etc. And therefore its ok to colonize them. I think that sounds familiar to history.
If you go by this notion, it would rather make sense to attribute these feats to a small elite and not humans entirely. And by that logic, this elite is siphoning money, creating riches for their own benefit. Which is probably what is happening in most countries (more so if they are authoritarian).
I think its simply about a feeling of superiority, might makes right. If you can, you abuse others for your own benefit. Whether they are a human or another animal.
> We dominate the world, changing its very climate and wiping countless species off the planet
To add on to your argument in the context of this quote, I also think this is also an extremely compelling argument for not only the arrogance of mankind, but the true stupidity of mankind.
We treat our one and only planet -- source of survival -- like its rental. Hopefully within the next century, we can develop some method to eat those iPhones because we might not have many options left.
> That's true only for a small subset of humans. 99.9% of humans achieve no feat as you describe.
You can have a conversation with 99.9% of humans, something you can’t do with any other animal. The other list of accomplishments is not even needed to surpass what animals can do.
You have to be intentionally being obtuse to suggest that the gal between humans and animals is not an order of magnitude away from the gap between humans and other humans.
Your point doesn't touch my argument. I'm saying if you are claiming superiority over other animals, you can also claim superiority over weaker humans, for the same reasons, with the same results.
By the way, you can't have a proper conversation with someone, if you don't speak the same language.
Even if someone doesn't speak the same language, we can communicate in a way that animals simply can't. I think the fact that different civilizations have been able to contact each other throughout history, and even when not speaking the same language at all, establish relations shows that it isnt just that we don't speak animal languages, but that they are fundamentally different in their ability to communicate.
To answer your other argument, there is a different fundamental level of 'superiority' over animals that you could never argue for over humans. Even the most 'primitive' of civilizations have been able to articulate their resistance to oppressors in a way no animal has ever even come close to doing. Again, the orders of magnitude difference between humans and animals makes it a completely different comparison than between humans and 'weaker' humans. It is insulting to humans to imply it is the same thing.
FWIW: I think your point is highly insightful. Very deep, and I'll be thinking about it for quite some time! It all comes from the same psychological place -- reminds me of autocracy vs democracy. In one, presumed superiority of the autocrat, leading to apparently justified mistreatment of all others. In the other, presumed equality of all, leading to agreed-upon consequences if others are mistreated.
Humans might not be able to converse with animals like one another. Humans can absolutely communicate with other animals, especially other mammals, to varying degrees. I believe such communication could argued as a form of conversation.
Are humans more intelligent than animals though? By human definitions and metrics? Unquestionably. However, I am not convinced that humans are truly superior in every facet of intelligence.
I have mental health issues, I breathe in toxic air, consume poisonous food and drink, wait in traffic to go to some miserable office, to be surrounded by miserable people, to do meaningless work. I do all of this so that I may survive and placate myself with the leftovers. Other "intelligent" humans give me concoctions that alter my brain chemistry in order to help me cope and distract myself from our Sisyphean existence.
In Greek mythology, Sisyphus was punished for believing he was more intelligent than the gods. I sometimes wonder if we, too, are punished for believing we are superior to nature. Perhaps true intelligence is not defined by our metrics after all.
There is also the notion that we have evolved a empathy for humans over other animals because it is beneficial. So that the 99.9% don't hunt down the .1% for sport.
Look at it this way: life on Earth is composed primarily of C, H, O, N , and a number of trace atoms.
If life evolved here on Earth, then somehow, CHON+trace all self-organized into all of Earth life today, including us, and all we humans have done and will do in the future.
Now: say we could go back just before life evolved. Even with very very good data, and with whatever talent (AI, science, anything) and technology from today, would we be able to truly describe the emergence paths for those CHON+trace atoms?
Impossible. This would be far beyond our level of science and technology. We can't even do this for much simpler systems and shorter time horizons. You'd have to predict the emergence of life, the full properties and behavior of all forms of life in the last 4 billion years, and last but not least, humans and all that humans have done and thought since then.
Yet clearly nature emerged all this from perhaps small amounts of 11 elements or so. Complexity is one of the greatest unknowns in our present civilization.
This is where most of the real value of AI actually lies. The scientific and engineering applications of machine learning.
Another MIT study: if we AI-augmented R&D widely in the US, our productive economic growth rate would double. The authors argue this would be permanent, forever increasing the rate of technological progress:
I bet a true accounting of all the economic impacts of semiconductor technologies will show these have far more value than Meta, Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok all combined. The stuff built on top of deep technology has higher PR value -- but the deeper tech has far more economic value. Same with AI.
The reason AI will do great things all levels of reality and different fields of studies (i.e. physics, biology, material science, climate, etc) is that these aspects operate from rules governing behaviour at the specific scale. These context specific rules derive from and summarise fundamental physics directly. This also explains why these methods will succeed in every domain. Analogy: Euler's rule is a topological invariance. So applies to both Spherical and Euclidean geometry.
The second, also called the Euler polyhedra formula, is a topological invariance (see topology) relating the number of faces, vertices, and edges of any polyhedron. It is written F + V = E + 2, where F is the number of faces, V the number of vertices, and E the number of edges.
The difference is that Euler’s rule doesn’t need to be verified after each use of it.
AI may speed up research by uncovering interesting patterns, but I don’t believe it’ll do great things all by itself.
AI is, after all, just a name for a statistical model of something. We’ve been using statistical models for a looong long time.
Any domain already relying heavily on statistical models (like protein folding, I believe) may really benefit from AI (like alpha fold), but domains which don’t won’t.
Protein folding historically was more reliant on physical simulations. Like, David Shaw (of DE Shaw fame) had/has a team optimizing the hell out of simulations. There are oodles of fields (like weather) doing similar, and they are finding they can use statistical models where they previously thought they couldn't.
Imagine a futuristic sci-fi scenario in which AI is so advanced that it can model so deep into physics (i.e. plank scale), a scale which can't be probed by experiments but the predictions match. We would have a probabilistic Oracle of sorts. It can give answers but no way of knowing why it works.
I don't think the why is that confusing. If you do a physical simulation, so many calculations cancel each other out or work in opposite directions. If there is a pattern to it (and it appears there is for many situations), you just short cut it.
Consider Roger Federer's ability to predict where a tennis ball will land and how to send electrical signals to his body to move in a way that will return that ball with high precision. It's pretty wild the number of short cuts he can make for what is a very complex calculation.
I agree with your point of calculations cancelling out. That's why I am not a fan of Butterfly effect. Just as Lewis coined unbirthday, we should coin Unbutterfly effect cancelling each other out.
On second thought, I missed your point, I think. In my example we could reason through why the tennis ball ended where it did. In yours, we couldn't. My bad.
> I wonder: would this level of fraud occur if the US had universal healthcare, or its effective equivalent?
The fraud was perpetuated against Medicare, which is the US-run insurance plan for people 65 and older and people with disabilities. Nearly 20% of the population is on Medicare.
Universally letting everyone on to the plan would have actually allowed them to run the fraud on everyone, not just people on Medicare.
The difference is that private insurers have an actual incentive against this happening but when the scheme is state-funded you have to rely on the people's sense of duty which we know is not particularly strong in many cases.
Investigations are a cost-center. Government can staff investigators; private insurers just factor the fraud into next year's premium hike.
> To put that record in context, take a look at the state’s Medicaid program, which covers about 13 million low-income people. During fiscal 2017 and 2018, the program’s fraud unit filed criminal charges against 321 fraudulent medical providers. It garnered 65 civil settlements and judgments and recovered more than $93 million, according to the state attorney general’s office.
> A rigorous search for civil lawsuits filed by private health insurers over fraud in California turned up just one case in 2017 and 2018. Experts said insurers rarely sue over fraud because of the high cost of litigation.
> I tracked down a dozen or so investigators who once worked for insurers, and they all said the same thing: Insurers don’t police fraud as much as they could because it hurts the bottom line.
This is one of those moments where you realize how frustrating the discourse is that Everyone Just Knows the US doesn't have government-run health insurance. The US invented government-run health insurance. And Medicare has its warts, but works extremely well on the whole.
The US has multiple government run single-payers. I remember being told six, but I remember Medicare, Medicaid, and the VA. What the US does not have is universal healthcare, though I think we spend something like as much of a percentage of GDP on our non-universal government systems as other countries do on their universal healthcare, and then again we spend more GDP on private. All for worse outcomes than those other countries (though we can do some really impressive stuff if you're rich). It's quite a racket for sure.
> Maybe 6 is Medicaid through a managed care plan.
House of Representatives and Senate offices will provide health coverage to Members of Congress and designated staff through the Small Business Health Options Program (SHOP).
The biggest scam in US health care is the insurance industry.
Most of the 'fraud' that doctors complained about where I lived in Italy was old people coming in with mostly imagined complaints because they're lonely and don't have anyone and a doctor visit is free. Which is kind of sad, but... not the same level of problematic.
> Most of the 'fraud' that doctors complained about where I lived in Italy was old people coming in with mostly imagined complaints because they're lonely and don't have anyone and a doctor visit is free. Which is kind of sad, but... not the same level of problematic.
I don't think that's a relevant analogy at all. In this case, the doctors were the ones perpetuating the fraud. Not the patients, not the insurance company.
This level of fraud is almost non-existent when there is NO insurance and NO universal healthcare.
Anytime the person paying is not the one receiving service, the appeal of fraud goes up. When the person paying is not paying with their own money the appeal goes up and a TON of incentives argue against finding fraud. At least in govt, there is sometimes a willful blind eye because finding fraud causes a huge headache and you don't benefit or get paid more. In fact, if you are taking an administrative fee to manage the program, reducing expenditures can hurt your own budget.
I have traveled internationally where folks paid cash for services. It was a bit crazy - they would basically hold you hostage until you paid a bill / impound your car etc. BUT you could buy many drugs OTC (no DR visit even required) and the layers of things like approvals, pre-approvals, billing and billing codes etc simply didn't exist.
Yeah I've wondered about a system where health insurance is for major events like injury accidents and cancer, and typical office visits are handled as a consumer product. Insurance companies may want to pay for basic checkups and the like to reduce their risk of high ticket items -- or not, however the math works out. Seems like this has at least some of the benefits of a market system, for those who insist that nationalized health care is not something we can stomach in the US.
There would still be some fraud, but since the prices of basic medical care would be considerably lower (as demonstrated everywhere else in the world) the amount of money made from fraud would be considerably smaller thus creating less incentives.
The province’s 12 top-billing doctors — who received payments of between $2 million and $7 million in one year — are overcharging the Ontario Health Insurance Plan, documents obtained by the Star suggest.
[stuff deleted]
Among additional “concerns” alleged in the report:
- Three specialists “inappropriately delegated” duties — for which they billed OHIP and which were supposed to perform themselves — to unqualified individuals to undertake.
- Six claimed to have worked between 356 and 364 days of the year.
- Eight recorded notably high volumes of claims and/or patients. One radiologist, who worked 332 days, billed for 100,000 patients, indicating that more than 300 scans were interpreted per day, the report stated.
- Eleven billed OHIP incorrectly.
- An obstetrician/gynecologist billed for seeing male patients.
Real technological progress in the 21st century is more capital-intensive than before. It also usually requires more diverse talent.
Yet the breakthroughs we can make in this half-century can be far greater than any before: commercial-grade fusion power (where Lawrence Livermore National Lab currently leads, thanks to AI[1]), quantum computing, spintronics, twistronics, low-cost room-temperature superconductors, advanced materials, advanced manufacturing, nanotechnology.
Thus, it's much more about the many, not the one. Multi-stakeholder. Multi-person. Often led by one technology leader, sure, but this one person must uplift and be accountable to the many. Otherwise we get the OpenAI story, and end-justifies-the-means type of groupthink wrt. those who worship the technoking.
[1]: https://www.llnl.gov/article/49911/high-performance-computin...
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