Exactly! I worked with a couple ex Xanadu acolytes at Apple back in the day. What they took away from the experience were the many inspirations rather than the project as a model for organizations. One of them brought him in to speak and he spent the time exhorting us to think beyond WYSIWIG (be careful about how your metaphors limit what your avoidances can be) which at the time I found rather eye-opening.
It can certainly be seen as a simple prisoner's dilemma, but it's not in some very important dimensions. (E.g. given the core tech the most likely outcomes are not AGI but developed carelessly nonetheless capable of causing all sorts of societal damage.) Unfortunately our bitwit overlords love short term self serving frameworks like this one so it's easy to imagine them embracing a "what has the future ever done for me" strategy...
So long as it's non-neglible, it doesn't change the rational strategy. Uncertainty about whether ASI is achievable only reduces the magnitudes of the expected values of the payoffs, not their relative order. Adding a "global misery" scenario does not change the fact that "extinction OR king of the world OR global misery" is strictly superior to "extinction OR global misery".
Outrage media economy / NIMBY? There is a general malaise at prices and a target is needed. Data centers and the Trump-Bibi-Iran War are currently those targets seen as the primary driver of high prices, which have consistently been the top political issue for Americans for many years now.
I'd want to know how that 71% compares to other things; like housing, parks, prisons, or factories; to get a general floor of NIMBY-ness.
But data centers are easy to hate on. They don't provide a lot of jobs, other than initial construction. And being close to a data center has no benefit compared to being far away from a data center.
indeed, I do support showing down and being responsible, forcing the companies to pay for electrical infra build out, using minimal water cooling systems
they have all this money, they can afford adhering to stricter requirements
> There is a general malaise at prices and a target is needed. Data centers and the Trump-Bibi-Iran War are currently those targets seen as the primary driver of high prices,
I could argue that underinvestment in electrification and renewables are the true cause of price inflation from these two processes. If we electrified like China, there would not be the impact we see.
> I could argue that underinvestment in electrification and renewables are the true cause of price inflation
And I'll argue that yours is a rather uninformed and illogical statement. Inflation is the result of the opposite of underinvestment, trying to cure inflation with more investment is like trying to put out fires with gasoline.
The whole logic of raising interest rates is based on reducing the gasoline but that doesn't work for the present kinetic and AI wars which are fueled regardless of cost - interest or otherwise. There's your explanation for the persistent inflation.
> If we electrified like China, there would not be the impact we see.
Chinese consumer inflation is below 1.3% Maybe they know something about not treating everything as a war?
As someone in industry who also teaches early career engineers once every two years, there seems to be a tailing off of enthusiasm in the latest cohort. Does anyone know of an actual data source from which one could draw actual conclusions about this sort of thing, by the way?
It makes sense to me that someone coming up today would be less enthusiastic about the effects of technological innovation given the experiences of the last decade. Growing up in Silicon Valley a generation or two ago it was an article of faith that innovation was going to bring great things to us. Taking that away ought to have an impact on enthusiasm.
Not just the latest cohort, plenty of folks that grew up with technology in the late '90s (i.e. mid 30s) are jaded by the last 5-10 years. Constantly hearing about dark patterns, grifts, anti-consumer practices (and -worker for that matter) will do that.
Lethal dermal exposure is somewhere near 100mg/kg.
I probably wouldn’t wear permethrin treated pants and let a cat sit on my lap, but “anywhere near the clothes” is a pretty big exaggeration of the danger.
Social media seems to basically be a way of running A/B testing on the population until you find enough folks vulnerable to some sort of powerful misconception that serves your purpose.
For the SM network "purpose" means engagement, but it turns out that (to our disadvantage) it also serves the purposes of an army of grifters, opportunists and power mad sociopaths who are taking over the world. Once again (think the 1930s) it turns out mastery of new media technologies in the hands of bad people has consequences.
As techies, building productive rather than destructive media (and AI is the next "media" of consequence) really ought to be top of agenda.
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