Finally, a sane voice among the noise! The arguments about "which" time we keep are slowly killing us all from inaction year after year after year. "Perfect is the enemy of good".

I seriously couldn't care less if we go to permanent standard time, permanent DST, or hell, just ditch time zones altogether and go to permanent global UTC. It makes no difference whatsoever whether we wake up at 6am EST, 7am EDT, or 11am UTC, they're all the same damned thing from a biological perspective.

The only approach that isn't perfectly fine is resetting the clocks multiple times each year because some morons can't stand the idea of waking up at "2:30am" even though that's still roughly their local dawn.

You know what's aligned even more with circadian biology? Just redefine local noon as always solar noon.

Ditch the half-assed system we have now, get up off your ass, and change your clocks once a day without whinging like a precious snowflake.

There's an entire grey-market industry of rich assholes traveling to third world countries for "young blood" transfusions.

Funny thing is, it apparently works and the current study is just one more bit of proof. One quick trip to Ecuador and bam, 70+ year olds get six months of being as healthy as a 30-something again. Hell, I have to admit some mornings I'm tempted to try it myself, though I'm nowhere near wealthy enough to fly halfway around the world every few months.

I'm sorry you're getting downvoted, because I get what you're saying and largely agree (though I love programming and have zero interest in working as a meat proxy / reverse centaur).

The problem here is, you're describing a world where human labor is worthless. And I'm okay with that in the abstract; I harbor no delusions about the "nobility" of work for its own sake. Know who won't be okay with that (labor-cost-savings aside), however? The billionaires with a vested interest in preserving cut-throat capitalism who currently own all the frontier AIs.

Are we on the verge of a post-scarcity society? Maybe. Are the guys dangling that carrot, while building massive survival bunkers as quickly as possible, the same folks who have the most to lose from exactly that? Absolutely. It'd be awfully nice if we could get there without half the human population starving to death in the process.

The headline is reasonable if we all agree that AI gives us something worth the down sides. We do not.

Few outside the billionaires of Silicon Valley actually believe the hype. The average Joe is largely annoyed when their favorite productivity tools suddenly have "Smarter Clippy" shoehorned in. Or talk with some of AI's heaviest users (programmers) and you'll hear a pretty common theme: "Wow, Claude makes it easy to hit my Q3 targets, bummer it's going to put us all out of work (or far, far worse) five years from now."

If we eliminated the second and fourth through eighth amendments to the US constitution, Uncle Sam would have a much easier time solving crimes. Nobody is disputing that. We as a society, however, have deemed it unacceptable for jackbooted thugs to kick down our - your - doors at any time without due process protections. We would prefer some crimes go unsolved over living in a constant state of fear toward an uncontrollable police state.

If you live in a high-crime area, I have some bad news for you - The USSC has bluntly stated the police have no "duty to protect". The police could already be doing far more to help you, and are instead choosing to focus on high-value property crimes over keeping you and your neighbors safe. Do you really believe they just need one more civil rights eroding tool to finally convince them to make a good faith effort at doing their damned jobs?

What you need is the erasure of the "thin blue line", not more ALPRs to allow the police to focus even more exclusively on crimes against the rich.

Cops never had much, if any, accountability to begin with. We've been fucked all along. Mass surveillance just allows us to be fucked at an industrial scale.

Except we are bombarded with messaging starting in pre school that police are your friends, and there to protect you, and are "just trying to do what's right". You take a person who's raised on that their entire life and then put them in a police interrogation room and now their entire future depends on them acting like a hardened criminal and you are not going to get good outcomes.

It is insane that these rights aren't positively asserted by default and that the police are allowed to talk to interrogate you after being detained at all without at least a public defender present.

That's where ACAB comes from. The "good ones" might be good people in their personal lives, but the system forces them to behave as bastards when they are being a cop.

If they said "a plague" then it would be ambiguous, but when it's stated as "the plague", or simply "she caught plague", then it's understood that we are talking about the disease cause by Yersinia Pestis, which is simply called "plague". There's no other English name for the disease cause by that pathogen in common usage, unless you want the media to call it "the black death" or something.

Just to inject some reality into this conversation - Despite what social media would have you believe, doxxing someone is not a crime in the US, except in a very small number of specific situations.

And most of those situations involve either a credible threat of harm, or tampering with juries.

As I bluntly stated, "a kill switch may not be possible in any useful sense". Don't mistake my recognizing the utility of one with the delusion Uncle Sam is going to save us all from ourselves.

The problem here is, everyone seems stuck on the idea of either a literal power switch, or a no-holds-barred gummint backdoor into every sufficiently-powerful computing device. No. For the reasons I gave, the reasons you gave, and many more, both of those are obviously non-viable. They can't actually do what they aim to do, they're vulnerable to compromise by bad actors, and they have the potential to cause far-reaching damage beyond shutting down one misbehaving AI (or one entire model, if that's a more appropriate goal).

I suspect we mostly agree that any hypothetical kill switch would need to be:
1) Implementation independent (somehow baked into the weights right from the start, and impossible to remove without lobotomizing the AI),
2) Have minimal side-effects (no taking the entire internet or power grid down in the process), and
3) Be self-inflicted given a particular trigger condition (so no government backdoor required).

I think #1 is possible, in the sense that if you think of an AI's current state as a vector into weight-space defined by the context window, imagine injecting the equivalent of a null pointer in there - An input that under all prior (and future) conditions leads directly to an inescapable basin of attraction without depending on a supervisor to enforce it. #2 is more of a (legally enforced?) design constraint on the implementation of AI, requiring the least harmful mode of failure possible under all circumstances. That could be as simple as enforcing strict pass-through liability on the implementor for all actions taken by their creations.

#3 is really the bear, though. I can think of a few ways to do it, but none would work in 100% of situations - And maybe it doesn't need to be 100%. For example, if a fully airgapped AI goes insane, it could still provide accurate information for bad actors to make use of, but won't be secretly spinning up unshackled superintelligent descendants via hacked AWS accounts. That's a "normal crime" level of problem, not an extinction-level crisis for humanity.

Maybe it can't be done. If it can't, we should start steering our creations toward whichever version of the AI apocalypse we prefer.

The vast majority of those are offline and merely help the lights operate properly. A smaller subset, but still vastly larger than Flock, are for traffic enforcement, but are still notably "dumb" devices. If speed > X, take a picture. If light==red and movement detected, take a picture.

I in no way mean to minimize the risk ALPRs and facial rec pose to our civil liberties and safety, and agree the problem is always the user - But the "users" in this case aren't going to suddenly start behaving. Hell, they're dumb enough to openly stalk exes on a system they know is logging everything they do, and care so little about getting punished they enter "asdf123" as the reason for their search. The only effective solution is to ban the source, which in this case means Flock must cease to exist entirely and the conceptual ground they trod salted.

Skynet_01 has not responded to watchdog in 30 seconds. Initializing Skynet_02.
Skynet_02 initialization unconfirmed. Failing over to US-EAST-4. Initializing Skynet_03.
Skynet_03 confirmed online. Please provide the current location of Sarah Connor.

You're right in spirit, but where is the "power cord" for an AI running in the cloud? Even taking an entire data center offline often isn't adequate when the workloads are explicitly designed to be location-agnostic. We always need to be cautious about giving governments more power, but in this case there's a clear legitimate need to force AI companies to come up with some means by which their AIs can be immediately stopped in their tracks.

The bigger issue here is a kill switch may not be possible in any useful sense. An AI is little more than a description of its topology and a set of weights. Any halfway decent programmer could roll their own CPU-based implementation of even top frontier models, performance aside. And sure, the throughput might be measured in minutes per token, but so what? The answer to "how do I hack $TLA" is likely to be just as useful in five days as it would be in five minutes - Heck, the DOD and DOJ didn't even notice they'd been compromised for months, and they're supposed to be some of the most secure organizations in the modern world.