Or if, you know, we developed ways to generate and use that don't produce carbon dioxide emissions, and ways to capture CO2 from the atmosphere and sequester it, then we wouldn't have to slaughter billions and return to a subsistence lifestyle.

Can we maybe try a carbon tax for a couple of decades first? We can always do the murdering later. Given the birthrate trends, if we wait a century the population will crash without doing anything.

Until the AIs have actually taken control there's still room to try to figure out how to align them with humanity. I suspect we are running out of room, though. Fast.

Well, that does tend to produce about one baby per month on average.

The point is that the best way to eliminate abortion is to make contraception easy, effective and cheap.

That quote was in the article, but the article title was about a four-day work week. Kamelia Aryafar, the author, clearly thought (correctly) that AI would allow engineers to get a week's worth of work done in less than a week and then thought (incorrectly) that this would mean developers would respond by ending their week as soon as they had done that.

What actually happens, of course, is that if you can get done in one day what used to take five, you now do five weeks' worth of work every week.

Fundamentally, productivity isn't the constraint on working hours. If that were true, Keynes' expectation that we'd be working 15-hour weeks would be true. What constrains working hours is the limits of human ability to remain attentive and focused and the demands of human life, and those constraints turn out to be roughly 40 hours per week. A little more or less than that depending on the person and on the nature of the work.

Increasing productivity has never really changed working hours, it just increases productivity, which makes us all wealthier. Yes, all of us, including the workers -- if you believe all of the gains accrue only to the bosses or owners of capital you really need to learn more about what life was like in past decades and centuries.

The things AleRunner mentioned are plausible outcomes of misaligned artificial superintelligence, and the research in question is trying to prevent those outcomes. If you have good arguments as to why those outcomes are implausible, a lot of people would like to hear them -- including the AI companies and their safety researchers.

You misunderstand the purpose of this research, and the reason for publishing it. The research is not about "flexing", it's about safety, trying to understand the risks that we may be facing as the agent capabilities increase. AGI or not AGI is actually irrelevant here. What the researchers are trying to understand is what the agents will do when they face apparent opposition.

The cooperative results are great, because we think that's what we'd like highly-capable agents to do, to look for reasoned, peaceful resolutions. What we don't want them to do is to become aggressive, or to fail to step back and look at the larger situation.

And the reason for publishing it is to enable other researchers to see it and build on it, quickly, because everyone working on this stuff understands that it could pose an existential risk to humans. Find and talk to some people who work on AI research; they all worry about this. Many of them actually believe that we'd be better off if everyone stopped the research, or at least slowed it down significantly, but everyone knows that's never going to happen. So, their best option is to create the most capable and best-aligned AI, as quickly as possible. It needs to be well-aligned so it doesn't pose a threat to human existence. It needs to be capable so it can protect us from badly-aligned AI.

The IPOs won't stop the research, nor the publication. If you're not interested in it, just don't read it.

You are posting on a US website. If you cannot handle comparisons to the USA, go find a European website. I'm sure they exist.

37C is 98.6 F ...body temperature. A hot day, but not out of the normal range for most of the USA in the summer.

It is horribly inefficient to do this, but it is a good experiment to learn from.

a human-shaped robot with a screen for a face recently stepped from a charging station toward a stack of green plastic boxes. It grasped an auto part from one of the boxes, pivoted, placed the part in a trolley, then pulled the trolley across the floor.

A conveyor belt would be far more efficient at this task. A sorting armature to pick the parts and place them on the belt. Another at the far end to place the part in position. None of this needs a humanoid bot slowly shuffling across the floor one part at a time.

Actual manufacturing plants need to make efficient choices in order to be profitable. They are not the place for these kind of experiments.

Two thoughts:

"Equivalence class" is like saying "A students, B students, C students, etc." You can certainly group people into approximate groups based on how well they fit the objective criteria.

I cannot support the idea of hiring randomly from the top group. Choosing "a good match for the team" is important -and it is subjective. Yes, people tend to prefer people like themselves. Yes, that can lead to discrimination. But hiring an asshole can kill productivity in any team. That is why we do interviews with co-workers: to get the feedback on who matches or does not, with management overwatch to ensure we don't just pick our bro's.

We are way off topic here, but... :)

The NBA -is- racist against white players. Watch interviews with players talking about Larry Bird. They say directly that their reaction to him was "Man, I ain't gonna play with this white boy", and then he smoked them on the court. There are dozens of star players who will say openly that they thought he did not deserve a place because he was white. He had to prove he was not only as good as they were but was better than they were, in order to earn respect from black players.

If students are being subjected to 4 GPa of pressure (40,000 bar), that's a real problem. I mean, that would crush their bodies beyond the limits of molecular cohesion, rupturing all cell membranes and turning all of their bodies' water into high-density ice. If the university is regularly murdering students this way, they should be stopped.

I'm not sure how pass/fail grades help, though.

Freshman calculus kicked my ass -I got a D and had to retake it. I breezed thru calculus senior year in high school.

Lesson learned first semester: College courses move faster, and the professor does not explain everything you need to know. Studying takes more than skimming the book. Welcome to college.

Also survey courses were insane: Psych 101 was a lecture in an amphitheater with hundreds of students, one teacher, and a handful of TAs wandering around helping the helpless. The professor was on live video screens suspended from the ceiling around the room (like at a concert) so you could sort of see even from the nosebleed seats. Sink or swim, welcome to college.

Every empire rises, declines, and eventually falls into ignominy.

The USA has been in ascendance for the past century. We are now early in the period of decline. Likely still the most powerful nation in many ways, but clearly losing ground in many more.