Cooperative online shared worlds, even adversarial ones, are a wildly different use of time compared to spending hours staring at short-format video after short-format video.
Even single player games have adopted these practices. It’s in retrospect not surprising that roguelikes became so popular, but I think it’s very unhealthy that a game like Balatro is considered one of the exemplars of the video game medium. It activates almost exactly the same emotions as gambling and its no surprise that people spend hundreds of hours on them, but its almost certainly bad for the consumer even if they’re not losing money
The physics aren't the problem, though. You CAN cool the processors provided you have large enough radiators, a really good system for the coolant flow, and hardware that's fine operating continuously at around 100C or above.
That's basically an engineering challenge more than anything else. Also keep in mind that one of the reasons the ISS for example requires rather large radiators, is that humans typically don't enjoy temperatures above 40C for prolonged periods of time.
Silicon chips on the other can tolerate much higher operating temperatures just fine and even short spikes around 100C can be acceptable for some hardware.
The real challenge is getting launch cost down and securing the rights to pollute polar orbits and frequency bands. Sure, there's plenty of room up there in orbit, but much of that room is not fit for purpose in the context of orbital data centres. Frequency bands for up- and downlinks are also often ignored in the discussion.
Basically I don't see the current issues with the concept in the required engineering or physics - that's solvable in the near term.
I find it much more difficult to believe that there's a way hundreds of thousands of satellites can share the same orbit (i.e. polar orbit in a quite "narrow" band of distances from the surface) without causing major issues.
Same goes for frequency bands, as it wouldn't be just one US company doing this, but dozens from around the world, each with hundreds or thousands of sats and everyone needs a share of the available communication frequencies.
Then there's the logistics of getting the satellites into orbit in the first place. Not just the launch cost, the logistics! Fuel, NOTAMS, maritime exclusion zones, launch licences, etc. The concept would necessitate increasing current launch rates by at least an order of magnitude and cost aside, the logistics and regulatory frameworks aren't ready for this.
It's a marketing exercise; the physics are not required to make sense for those. It's the size of a fridge, draws a kilowatt, has four TPUs and can only run for 15 minutes at a time. The physics work for _that_; they just don't give you anything useful.
Advertising has the appearance of representing an on-going revenue source for an increasing number of devices used in our daily lives by way of surveillance and creation of a picture of an individuals habits and psychology in order to manipulate said psychology to induce the individual to spend more money on literally worthless shit.
That is a threat to the fundamental stability of society.
Correct, but advertising was a better disguise for surveillance. AI goes well beyond surveillance and many evil use cases are now obvious to more people.
I don’t think that’s what he meant. They both are surveillance tools. He’s just upset only one of those is making people advertise their leave in protest.
It’s funny how the [very real] thing that normalizes the exploitation of user data, enables “reel casinos,” suffocates creators and replaces them with “influencers,” etc. is compared with the [still very abstract] danger of AI.
Even before big money was on the table, people didn’t blink an eye at starting to work for Google/Facebook, “solving fun tasks.”
(OP here)
FWIW I despise the addictiveness, er engagement optimization that Google and others do. I have said so inside and outside the company many, many times. I would never have agreed to work on that stuff myself. One of the hobby projects I would like to work on is exploring how to use personal AI to beat those algorithms.
I respect the argument for not working for a company that does addictiveness work anywhere, even if you don't work on it yourself. But that's not where I drew the line.
Also FWIW I disagree the danger of AI is abstract. A lot is happening right now, in education for example.
I actually work in education and can share the following first-hand: the things we now build, the ways we now educate, and all the opportunities for reaching out to students are beautiful. I foresee that _many_ people will cut corners now, but I believe that, in the end, we will get a new generation of education that is personal and humane.
I don't mean this as preaching some shiny future that I hope will magically arrive. I already see these things happening. And I also see all the ways people misuse the tools or take shortcuts.
Educators with good intentions, skills, and powerful tools will always beat ignorance and laziness relying on those same tools.
So it is ok to believe (even despise) it is bad but as long as I don't work directly on it but my super big paycheck gets funded by it, all good! Cheers!!
To a guy who knows nothing about nuclear physics, an atomic bomb is very abstract until it blows up and becomes very concrete. Should we wait until it explodes to consider the risk?
Is there anything specific you, as an LLM equivalent of a nuclear physicist (if that’s a fair comparison), can highlight in terms of these imminent dangers?
There's no "imminent" danger, but right now we are on a course where ASI will be developed. There are many reasons to believe that ASI will be dangerous. There are some books you could read...
I think it's worse than that. Or at least, the products that have been built because of advertising are worse than that. Instagram/TikTok/Facebook are all ultimately just surfaces to serve ads, but they've wormed their way into their users' consciousness in fairly insidious ways
Advertising turned brains of entire generation (or maybe a few) into mush.
All intellectual, psych and social scores are in free fall since introduction of ad-supported attention grabbing internet.
AI is theorethical threat. Advertising is a constant detriment to our brains, societies and culture.
If AI can mitigate a fraction of the damage that ads do it will have massive positive impact.
We live in times where everyone can pick their own flavor of apocalypse to be scared of. Ads are leading us into Idiocracy since ~2004 and made huge progress towards it.
Google and Meta's wealth came at the cost of civilization getting sucked dry of its attention and mental capacity.
AI is a threat if you're a messy codebase, an unsolved math problem, or cancer. Otherwise you only have an improved quality of living to look forward to IMO.
"Bread and circuses" refers to a public free grain dole and free entertainment events in Ancient Rome. Precious little of that in the US right now, except for food benefits whose recipients probably on balance do not support the current guy.
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