I think one thing to look out for are "deliberately" slow models. We are currently using basically all models as if we needed them in an instant loop, but many of these applications do not have to run that fast.
To tell a made-up anecdote: A colleague told me how his professor friend was running statistical models over night because the code was extremely unoptimized and needed 6+ hours to compute. He helped streamline the code and took it down to 30 minutes, which meant the professor could run it before breakfast instead.
We are completely fine with giving a task to a Junior Dev for a couple of days and see what happens. Now we love the quick feedback of running Claude Max for a hundred bucks, but if we could run it for a buck over night? Would be quite fine for me as well.
Why wouldn't it? I still have to hear one convincing argument how our brain isn't working as a function of probable next best actions. When you look at amoebas work, and animals that are somewhere between them and us in intelligence, and then us, it is a very similar kind of progression we see with current LLMs, from almost no state of the world, to a pretty solid one.
That's not even a devil's advocate, many other animals clearly have consciousness, at least if we're not solipsistic. There have been many very dangerous precedents in medicine where people have been declared "brain dead" only to awake and remember.
Since consciousness is closely linked to being a moral patient, it is all the more important to err on the side of caution when denying qualia to other beings.
"Race realism" is just a meaningless label Neo-Nazis use, because they are still trying to fly under the radar, or they are slightly embarrassed of being what their grand-parents fought. They might try to butter up their standing by (falsely) citing stuff like the Bell Curve, but it is still the same vile and evil ideology it was 80 years ago.
But not all fascists are neo-nazis. Just because a subset of today's fascists describe themselves that way, doesn't mean they are fundamentally different from other fascists. Look at Steven Miller; he's jewish, and quite obviously a white supremacist. He's all about dehumanizing people he thinks of as leser, and he welcomes the new fascist America. AfD, the german far-right party, is both very pro-Israel and loves to play "tread the nazi line and extend it"-game. Anti-semitism is a common, but not necessary prerequesite to fascism.
When I was younger I also thought the opposite of good should be bad, and it is silly to describe things as evil. I disliked the religious connotation, but have changed my mind. There are people committing absolutely horrible things, and calling it anything but evil is underestimating the depravity of those characters. To quote Captain G. M. Gilbert:
“In my work with the defendants (at the Nuremberg Trails 1945-1949) I was searching for the nature of evil and I now think I have come close to defining it. A lack of empathy. It’s the one characteristic that connects all the defendants, a genuine incapacity to feel with their fellow men. Evil, I think, is the absence of empathy.”
Trump's approach is probably going to work partially in the short term. - The US is very powerful, a lot of countries are reliant on them, so bullying can be used to extract benefits. They got their plane thingy with Colombia, Mexico didn't react much to the preludes of military action against the cartels. The US could annex the Panama Canal and Greenland.
There's a reason why hawks like Bolton and Cheney are against it. It harms US interests in the mid-to-long-term. To me it seems like the Trump adminstration is a) trying to distract from their domestic agenda and b) isolate the US internationally and create new external foes to justify domestic changes.
We can afford it, but it is very difficult to do politically. The rise of far-right parties has everyone spooked, and in ageing societies pensioners cost more and more money, while holding most of the wealth, and constituting the majority of the voting power. Working people feel increasingly disenfrenchised, and it is only going to get worse. At the same time we are judging climate change to still be a larger problem (or we are at least investing a lot more money into it), and there's this horrific fetish for fiscal conservatism in law and in practice.
As a European, I find it quite outrageous to demand a company be sold to the US because it is too successful and valuable to be foreign-held. It is the old-school imperialist school of thought. If you think Bytedance is harming Americans, despite following american law, then amend the rules for social media companies. Or at least be honest enough to say: "The free market is great, but only if we hold all the cards".
Reciprocity in this case is supposed to mean "We allow your companies in as long as they follow the local laws, and you will allow our companies in as long as they follow the local laws." TikTok is following American law, which is significantly more permissible in terms of speech than China.
American social media giants thought it was too damaging to follow Chinese law and voluntarily retreated (Google), played the game until they got burned (Facebook) or silently comply (Bing/Microsoft).
In the case of Facebook, they didn't want to share data on Uighur separatists, who organized protests on Facebook, which in turn left hundreds of people dead. Barring any kind of moral judgment, this obviously wouldn't fly in the US either.
No, at the core of this issue is the realisation that a social media giant has enormous influence on the minds of the next generation, and having this be in the hands of foreign powers is very dangerous. Of course, the US doesn't want to be super open about this, since 4/5 global players in social media are American, and they'd rather not have other regions get similar thoughts.
In the end, the reasoning is sound while the justification is hypocritical.
A couple of years ago I seriously considered joining the federal police department in charge of dealing with internet crime here in Germany, so I've thought quite a bit about this topic.
Basically, it is a job that needs to be done in society, but one that is torturous, and can leave you with long-term or permanent problems. In essence though, it is not fundamentally different in the way a coal miner would jeopardize their physical health, just with mental health instead. This risk/possible damage should be rewarded with a higher wage, and adequate measures should be put in place to minimize the possible damage, eg. in the case of content moderation with access to therapy and only exposing employees to short intervals of traumatic content.
This is of course how things should be, in reality coal miners working environments only reached a decent level through unions and a long fight for better rights. Content moderators are not paid well anywhere either.
This reminds me a bit of the etymology of genius, which at first was something you had, a protective/tutoring spirit. Over time the meaning changed more to something someone is, like naturally intelligent and driven.[1] Stroke of genius is still one of those phrases using the old definition, and in the modest amount of situations were it happened to me, it did feel like something coming from outside of me.
To tell a made-up anecdote: A colleague told me how his professor friend was running statistical models over night because the code was extremely unoptimized and needed 6+ hours to compute. He helped streamline the code and took it down to 30 minutes, which meant the professor could run it before breakfast instead.
We are completely fine with giving a task to a Junior Dev for a couple of days and see what happens. Now we love the quick feedback of running Claude Max for a hundred bucks, but if we could run it for a buck over night? Would be quite fine for me as well.