You say that the times are bad. Be better yourselves, and the times will be better: You are the times. Technology must multiply human agency. DMs closed.
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Joined October 2018
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akhil retweeted
The British governor of Jamaica Edward Eyre (1865) having authorized the Morant Bay massacre of 500 men, women, & children, London's prosecutorial committee included JS Mill and Albert Venn Dicey, the defence committee Charles Dickens, Thomas Carlyle, John Ruskin, Matthew Arnold.
akhil retweeted
We can't brute force compute all possible moves in Go, a static game with a simple 19 x 19 grid, yet somehow people think we're going to simulate a dynamic system of trillions of cells each containing trillions of molecules.
If you had an exponential amount of compute you could solve simulate biology exactly and wouldn't need to run any experiments.
Some of you will think "of course, but that's an unrealistic assumption" and others will think "no, you need experiments even with that much compute. That's just How It's Done".
You would of course need evaluations once you have a solution, but you don't in principle need experiments to find it: Experiments are a way to save compute, dating from a time when it was much more expensive.
And I think the presentation is exponential but real systems aren't irreducibly exponential. AlphaFold worked, after all.
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akhil retweeted
Economics of AI at the moment suggests there's $10K out there in someone's pocket that is worth more than the many hundreds of billions of dollars sloshing around because those dollars can get the necessary leverage over depleted physical resources and start a non-zero-sum game.
If you're a technologist, you have a duty to do more than critique. As Blake said:
"I must create a system, or be enslaved by another man's.
I will not reason and compare: my business is to create."
My criterion is: make sure you're working on the most important, civilization-critical technological problem, and review it often.
This automatically rules out LLMs and a whole host of things that are DDoSing most people.
We’re hitting a period in time in tech where money is irrelevant.
Important to re-evaluate all priors. The most expensive thing right now is to work with people that are just larping and wasting their time. You will actively get dumber and fall behind.
This was always true but the clock cycles have collapsed to be much faster now.
This is a limited view of reasoning. Mathematical logic can be a blinding force when you think about knowledge production and its reflexive relationship to consciousness and cognition.
These people are not technologists despite their STEM educations and sci-fi predilections. Not having the chops to spar with complex systems (including social, technical, political, economic, etc., aspects) is the tell.
AI safety is the current manifestation.
Y2K was the dumbest thing ever. It was easily mitigated, and companies had years to work on it. I remember VC backed companies “working” on Y2K, which evaporated 1/1/2000.
Dario sees everything through the lens of computers, but there’s a whole world out there that just adapts when computers don’t work.
AI isn’t a risk anymore than PCs or the Internet were. We will find problems … and fix them.
I wonder if math is just like the alphabet in this regard.
akhil retweeted
National Museums Scotland announced it had acquired a rare, 8thC, gold sword pommel #OTD in 2022. A detectorist found it at Blair Drummond, Stirling, in 2019. Encrusted with garnets, it has eyes and a beak on each end. 📸National Museums Scotland
ALT A close-up of the sword pommel.