Neo4j is a great DB but their license price is egregious for enterprise customers. A few years ago I was involved in negotiating a contract for a small/medium size kubernetes deployment (think around 25 cores) and the annual price was more than the salary of a senior SWE full-time equivalent. See this page for an idea of their prices in 2018: https://blog.igovsol.com/2018/01/10/Neo4j-Commercial-Prices....
Even more so considering that most, if not all countries already have age-verification infrastructure in-place for selling alcohol and tobacco (and other goods). Why not piggy-back on this? Go to a kiosk/shop selling controlled goods, pay a small fee to the vendor to get a one-use verification code that attests your age.
Continue building useful models, tooling and products, market them to the people who could benefit and be realistic about their strength and weaknesses. Drop the messaging about job displacement, "transformative/dangerous AI", "significant disruptions" and "unprecedented abundance". They are the ones pushing and funding this narrative; just look at the phrasing in this announcement. And it's percolating down everywhere in the general public leading to AI psychosis.
They are proposing solutions to a hypothetical problem they are actively trying to manifest into reality to get more capital and funding.
That's what hypocritical about it. Not the development of the technology nor the effort to lobby for more regulations and policies.
The general discourse around AI could be much more sensible and pragmatic and lead to a more balanced, healthy rollout of the technology in society. But of course this means forfeiting at least part of the massive injection of capital in those companies and the ecosystem in the short-term.
I was not criticizing the technology in itself but the messaging and marketing around it. I agree with most of your points except perhaps the general sentiment outside of tech about AI. Most people I've talked to admire the technology but are genuinely scared or angry about the second-order effect of it on society. And I think, in part, it's because of the messaging, marketing and general psychosis about the technology that those companies are generating.
I see your point, but in this case we are not talking about disruption at the scale of a product category, vertical, or even an entire industry. AI companies are trying to disrupt entire sectors of the economy at the same time: knowledge work/white collar jobs, creative work (design, photo, video, ...), medical professions, etc.
They are recognizing themselves in their economic policy framework that the lowest level of unemployment potentially caused would be 5% (they also mention 10% and "unprecedented levels of unemployment").
I don't think there is a precedent for this claim. It's hard to take the "we're a force for good for humanity" message seriously in this context.
Interesting examples, thanks for the nice discussion!
I believe it goes deeper than the "logical proof" sense. It's a category mistake. Consciousness can never be "objectified".
About the readiness potential I'd argue that it's still happening in consciousness just not being registered by the mind of the participant. In the experiment "conscious decision" or "unconscious brain activities" are misnomers. Thoughts, decisions, memory, latent biases, etc. are processes of the mind not of consciousness.
Anesthesia and deep sleep are also useful scenarios to investigate. There is an interesting question to contemplate for those examples: are they an absence of experience or an experience of absence? I'd contend that it's the experience of the complete cessation of all workings of the mind and sense organs. But consciousness is still there. Otherwise how would you experience the transition from waking state to deep sleep/anesthesia and then back to waking?
> We are not seeking job displacement. We are working to prevent or minimize it. Some amount of displacement, though we cannot say how much, may be an intrinsic consequence of the technology, and our responsibility is to prepare for it and respond to it. That is what this framework is for.
> Whatever happens, we are on the side of people. We are trying to solve these problems. We take no satisfaction in contributing to them, and we are not working to make them more likely.
The cognitive dissonance/doublespeak/hypocrisy (pick one) is absolutely insane.
They are concurrently:
1. creating and marketing products that are explicitly trying to automate, if not entire professions, at least big parts of them
2. edicting grand policy plans to limit the impact of massive job displacement that their products might cause
3. directly funding and coordinating missionary-type activities ("it's for a greater cause") to evangelize and propagate said products in areas of the economy that are usually underfunded and where job security is already quite bad (non-profits, NGOs)
That might be too much of an assumption to make because of the binding problem. Imaging knowing absolutely everything there is to know - measurably, quantifiably, down to atomic/quantum states - about what happens when a human sees red but only having experienced a black and white world. Do you learn anything new when seeing a cherry for the first time? You experience red for the first time.
Measurement is third-person by definition, and consciousness is irreducibly first-person. So no instrument, however precise, can ever close that gap.
Consciousness/"the subject" is the raw material of reality. Matter, sensory inputs and mind are experienced as objects in consciousness not the other way around.
So in that sense "the subject" is exactly the same for the bat or the human.
> What she meant was that it's impossible to get that rich without doing something bad — without cheating in some way.
> But startups are the most common way to become really rich, and if you want to start a successful startup, the key is not exploitation but empathy.
There is no doubt that Graham is right in saying there is a formula to becoming a billionaire and that formula involves creating products that help your users in some way.
However this is very narrow, reductionist interpretation of AOC's comment. You need to put it into perspective of the massively increasing global wealth inequality.
In 2011, billionaires owned 4.5 trillion USD of wealth. Today, fifteen years later, it's 20.1 trillion USD. This amounts to about 20% of the entire planet's GDP. That means 0.000003% of humans capture 20% of the value globally created. The top 12 billionaires own more than 50% of the bottom half of humanity.
How can you sensibly argue that this is not exploitation?
This public-private drama will only get worse once the AI companies are public and most of the economy depend on their continued performance through their presence in everyone's retirement funds
The depravity of using a fun, uplifting game that targets kids and teenagers to train military drones boggles my mind. "The end justifies the means" continues to reign supreme
This raises an interesting question: is experience possible without a "point of view" as you call it; without any subject, only sensing and reacting? I don't think so. A purely reactive system cannot experience the world. Subjective experience requires an object to be experienced and a subject experiencing the object.
In the case of the bat, the object(s) being experienced are all the signals coming from the sense organs of the bat plus the inner chatter of the bat's mind (if they have some). The subject experiencing those objects is the exact same subject allowing us to experience "human-specific" objects.
Once all of this settles, will there be interest in fully human-generated text or images? I believe lots of people would rather consume art where genuine human creativity and emotions were involved. But will we be able to discriminate between it and AI-generated stuff?
If you accept the postulate that there will be a point where most of content will be AI-generated and thus the training set of additional models will consist of more and more AI-generated stuff then what happens?
Which latent biases, subtle stereotypes and negative cultural trait will slowly compound and seep into our shared understanding of the world? It's complete hubris to imagine we are capable of predicting the second-order effects this will have on society in our current generation, much less the next one.