Child mummy, the scene, turns out EA is important actually, Mathocalypse
Big Walk is a delightful game and i recommend you play it with your friends.
i also recommend spending some time with Raqib Shaw's Paradise Lost (at the Art Institute of Chicago).
"Rosalia Lombardo... was an Italian child whose exceptionally well-preserved embalmed body is displayed in the Capuchin catacombs of Palermo in Sicily... Her remarkable state of preservation has made her one of the best-known mummies in the catacombs and the subject of scientific study into early twentieth-century embalming techniques."
WSJ coverage of the Berkeley AI safety scene.
Remember back in the spring when Meta employees were protesting because leadership announced a policy of laptop surveillance (to collect training data for their models)? i wonder what became of that...
"Selfishly, I don't want my screen scraped because it feels like an invasion of my privacy," wrote an engineer in an internal post seen by nearly 20,000 coworkers this week.
"But zooming out, I don't want to live in a world where humans – employees or otherwise – are exploited for their training data."
Yoshua Bengio (one of the "Godfathers of AI") issues an appeal to the technical staff of frontier labs:
To the researchers I trained and the ones who trained on my work,
I know what it is like to deeply believe in your work, yet still wake up every morning having to face the weight of our moral choices. My work in deep learning helped lead us to this point, one which threatens our societies and the fabric of human experience itself. Week after week, we see new and amplified harms from leading models, most of which have been predicted for years or even decades by AI researchers.
For a long time, I continued my research and minimized the arguments of some of my colleagues that we were building something unsafe. In fact, I couldn’t face the fact that my work — my life’s work — could do harm. I fell into the trap of motivated reasoning, believing what I needed to believe so that I could keep doing the work I loved.
...
My purpose is to ask you for something smaller, and harder. I ask you to honestly reflect on whether you want to be part of an effort that may be pushing humanity towards the brink.
Does Costco Cause Cancer? (Empirics are hard!)
This is just exquisite:
someone donates $5k to local homeless shelter
inefficient
could have funded 0.0000000000003% of an AI governance researcher
think of all the simulated people you just killed
and from the same:
assistant asks again
"no, I mean how do you know the sign is positive?"
stare into cosmic light cone
10^50 people staring back
none of them exist
none of them can tell me
none of them can falsify my assumptions
realize I have invented the perfect constituency
infinitely important
completely silent
and always represented by me
The Economist names Effective Altruism as the century’s most important social movement.
Scott Aaronson on the Mathocalypse:
If you want some sense of what things feel like now in math, imagine a hunter-gatherer who’s spent his entire life learning to survive deep in an unforgiving rainforest, then a giant resort hotel springs up right next to him with a helipad and heated pools and AirBnBs, and without missing a beat, the hunter-gatherer says: "alright fine, so now my new job is to run wilderness retreats for the tourists, or something."