It’s possible for other business leaders to be more evil than you and to still be on the wrong side of history. I’m not even saying Dario is ill-intentioned — just too propagandized to fully comprehend the moral implication of doing deals with war profiteers and throwing in with the U.S. empire.
Anthropic did the deal with Palantir and was begging the government to use their technology to “fight authoritarianism”, are you insinuating that they shouldn’t be held morally accountable for these business decisions?
Claude may have just bombed an elementary school, meanwhile Dario is whining that Altman and Trump, two well-known psychos, didn’t play fair for a military deal. Anthropic is the last bastion of the sanctimonious neolib and hopefully this war marks the end of that failing ideology.
Having played around with this a bit, I recommend using https://github.com/CadQuery/cadquery as the CAD language instead. I'm pretty sure it could even transpile to OnShape / Solidworks models as well, though it might require some funky hacks with their extensions frameworks
First off, I consider the post-Mao / starting with Deng era of Chinese government to be the most relevant when considering who they “are” as a country now.
However, I’d still maintain that before that, China’s foreign policy was more focused on maintaining territorial sovereignty against the threat of Western imperialism vs. focused on expansion or foreign influence: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_foreign_relations_o...
Meanwhile, the entire territory of the U.S. is predicated on one of history’s largest genocides, and a consistently expansionary foreign policy on top of that.
For example, China operates 1 foreign military base, in Djibouti. How many do you think the U.S. has in the South China Sea alone?
Beyond that, how many people has China killed in foreign military conflicts in the past 40 years? How many foreign governments have they overthrown?
Instead of all this, they’ve used their resources not only to become the world’s economic superpower but also to lift 800 million people out of poverty, accounting for 75% of the world’s reduction during the past 4 decades. The U.S. has added 10 million during that same time period.
The Sinophobic culture at Anthropic is worrying. Say what you will about authoritarianism, but China’s non-imperialist foreign policy means their economy is less reliant on a military-industrial complex.
All they have to do is continue to pump out exponentially more solar panels and the petrodollar will fall, possibly taking our reserve currency status with it. The U.S. seems more likely to start a hot war in the name of “democracy” as it fails to gracefully metabolize the end of its geopolitical dominance, and Dario’s rhetoric pushes us further in that direction.
> The solution to this problem, he says, is artificial intelligence. The book offers a short guide to building a “target machine,” similar in description to Lavender, based on AI and machine-learning algorithms. Included in this guide are several examples of the “hundreds and thousands” of features that can increase an individual’s rating, such as being in a Whatsapp group with a known militant, changing cell phone every few months, and changing addresses frequently.
The short-term effect is a harbinger of the long-term risk, since capitalism doesn’t inherently care for people who don’t provide economic value. Once superintelligent AI arises, none of us will have value within this system. Even the largest current capital holders will have a hard time holding on to it with an enormous intelligence disadvantage. The logical endpoint is the subjugation or elimination of our species, unless we find a new economic system with human value at its core.
As Antonio Gramsci said: “Pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will.”
The forces of blind or cynical techno-optimism accelerating capitalism may feel insurmountable, but the future is not set in stone. Every day around the world, people in seemingly hopeless circumstances nevertheless devote their lives to fighting for what they believe in, and sometimes enough people do this over years or even decades that there’s a rupture in oppressive systems and humanity is forever changed for the better. We can only strive to live by our most deeply held values, within the circumstances we were placed, so that when we look back at the end of our lives we can take comfort in the fact that we did the best we could, and just maybe this will be enough to avert the inevitable.
> The expert believes that “asking for regulations because of fear of superhuman intelligence is like asking for regulation of transatlantic flights at near the speed of sound in 1925.”
This assessment of the timeline is quite telling. If supersonic flight posed an existential threat to humanity, we certainly should have been thinking about how to mitigate it in 1925.
> I guess things like recursive self-improvement. You wouldn’t want to let your little AI go off and update its own code without you having oversight. Maybe that should even be a licensed activity—you know, just like for handling anthrax or nuclear materials.
He’s clearly aware of the risks of runaway, self-improving AI, and the idea that we can prevent this with regulation is laughable. The car is barreling towards the edge of the cliff, and many of our best and brightest have decided to just put a blindfold on and keep flooring it.
Lots of people I know dislike the taste of Beyond Meat specifically, but like Impossible and other fake meats. This article seems to be sensationalizing and over-generalizing from a single company’s failure.