... steam age but modern times turns out to be way more efficient and reliable.

Golly jeepers gee wizz - Who would've thunk?

It keeps the head warm and improves mental performance. A warm head performs at a better rate. Like a warmed up body or the people doing hot yoga. I'm a more or less bald ADHD candidate and I wear buffs as "spare hair" and observe a similar effect.

There's a reason we keep ill and injured people warm.

Bottom line:
This sounds plausible IMHO.

This is why they're so keen on robots. They want guards whose loyalty they can really count on when the mob shows up with a guillotine.

That one might surrender and meekly accept their likely death at the hands of the machine, I can believe. But all of them? This isn't the first such claim we've heard about AI danger.

I believe that Yudkowsky believes what he says he believes, for example. He says shut them all down worldwide, immediately, and if there are rogue nations who don't go along with it then launch air strikes on their data centres - even against a nuclear state. He said that three years ago. That's the thinking of a man who believes it's genuinely likely that the machines will kill us all in the near future.

And this is still considered extremist lunacy. That tells me the rest of them don't believe what he does.

The general public should care because there's apparently a good chance these machines are going to kill them all, very soon.

They don't care because they don't believe that.

When some AI agent of theirs, trying to meet a developer's benchmark test, eventually hacks the power grid or the water supply to a metropolis to help itself to a way around a sandbox environment, then the general public will care. And when that happens they may well drag AI industry CEOs and researchers out of their beds to the nearest lamp-post.

> approximately eight hundred billion ... oops, that's eight hundred million, of course. Ten percent probability, times the current population of the Earth. The expected consequences of allowing the AI industry to continue their work, according to people who are oddly calm about the prospect.

The actual post is behind a login wall, but I don't see from the BBC article that he's even advocating any action. Is he demanding the immediate shutdown of the data centres? Raids on the labs? Coordinated global action to impound and destroy the equipment? Life imprisonment for anybody found training large neural networks? Rogue researchers declared hostis humani generis? There's no mention of it.

That's what I'd be advocating at the very least. Then the question of whether to take direct action personally on top of that would be one of practicality - can I lay my hands on the right equipment, how can I do the most effective damage, do I have access to high value targets, will it be dramatic enough to frighten new recruits away from joining the industry, will others be inspired to follow my example, should I take the time first to form a team for more extensive action, that kind of thing. It wouldn't be a question of whether it should happen, only one of whether those are the right tactics. Yes, in all probability I'd decide I wasn't personally cut out for terrorism or assassination, but not everybody would decide so. It would be a reasonable choice in the circumstances.

If the expected bodycount from the operation of this industry over the next ten years was approximately eight hundred billion, then that would make AI researchers the single most dangerous group of human beings that has ever existed. The National Socialist German Workers' Party, previous title holders for the worst people ever, probably didn't kill even a tenth as many as this man says he expects AI firms to kill in roughly the same timescale. That is the comparison that would frame my thinking about AI researchers and what we should do with them, if I believed what he says he believes.

And I just don't see that kind of thing coming up in these conversations. People calmly and academically discuss their probability estimates as if it's a question of pure theory, not the imminent destruction of all humanity. If they really believed what they say, there would certainly by now be AI Luigis everywhere, data centres would be burning, and people would be quitting the industry all over the world for their own safety. That simply isn't happening. So I don't believe they actually do think that this outcome is likely. Actions speak louder than words, and their actions say they don't believe a word of it.

... then I would be demanding that every single person involved in the AI industry be rounded up and shot. All of them. My former boss, my coworkers, our competitors, all of them. I would be advocating a world in which is was worse to be found with LLM weights on your computer than to be caught with the worst possible kind of CSAM.

But apparently the idea that his former employer might literally kill literally everybody in just ten years' time isn't that big a deal for this guy. Go into the office one day and take a Second Amendment approach to as many of the frontier research team as possible? No... let's just whine about it on the internet!

Which is why I'm not at all convinced he believes this. If he believed that, this action is too small a response. Nothing short of Butlerian jihadism is an appropriate response, if you actually believe this.

EOM

Since their whole shtick is blocking ads and trackers where they can it's likely that they get to first paint faster than other browsers. I use Brave as my daily driver and am reasonably happy with it. It has most of the blockage you need built right in.

The Web without a powerful stream buffer/blocker/anti track setup is basically unusable these days. I'm totally bedazzled whenever I see sorry ass normies using a regular browser without any of that. A nigh surreal experience.

Goes to show: Many (white collar bullshit) jobs are a social thing, not a productivity thing.
In ohter words: Using computer and AI is more and more a cultural technique rather than a job. Meaning we have more liberty when chosing what we want to do with our life and time.

Which, if you ask me, is actually a good thing. Let's hope this trend continues on a positive path.

... or not. What matters is, if it can replace the person with two non-trivial degrees at some highly qualified job. And to that I do believe we are closing in on. Seeing what current agents I ran install on my phone are capable of compared to just 6 months ago it pretty telling.

I'm getting ready to do something entirely different than senior web software development real soon now. Perhaps I will be needed as something like that until I retire, but I also won't be too surprised if my current type is positively obsolete in 2 years.

I'm surprised. ... Who on earth gives a flying f*ck about a new line of obsolete-on-arrival IoT audio trash by Sonos? Any fans here that care to enlighten me?
 

We're living in a crazy world.

We all know that politicians like any other human being are often out of their depth when society gets into a critical situation. They have blind spots, ignore trends with the regular people and fumble. And talk trash about people issues without even noticing.

But this Trump thing you USians have going on seems to be an entirely new level of malignant corruption. I mean, like some satire of a corrupt government with some man-child in charge asking for rockets to be more pointy because pointy is more dangerous.

Is anybody taking this seriously anymore over there? Wouldn't impeachment of this President be overdue by now?

An inquisitive European is curious to know, please enlighten me. Seriously.