This person needs to study Ronald Coase's Theory of the Firm in order to not make incorrect assertions like 'the only moat left is money'. There's many other criticisms to level at this piece, but this is the one I'll use my reply/comment on. If the author was right, then the entities with the most money, or ability to print money, a.k.a. the government, would be in charge of all economic activity. They are not. Empirically, what we observe about human economic activity is that it's not about who has the most money. Money helps, and certainly there's economic structures that are a tier below government but definitely far larger than a small business that can use money as a weapon to stay entrenched or gain other advantages in the market, etc, but it's not the only thing. Empirically it is just not. There has been, is, and will continue to be room for what other commenters have called 'creativity' broadly speaking, and that even includes creatively recruiting other people to your cause/company versus another's, etc, that 'the one with the most money' has not alone shown to be decisive.
I agree on the importance of anonymity for social discourse. But if a tool/platform like Polis is some equivalent of a local 'town hall meeting', where there is no anonymity (and you as a citizen publicly appear, state your name, make your argument, etc), then why is lack of anonymity a threat in this specific context?
At what point does something like this make it onto world leaders' daily briefing?
"Mr. President, outside of the items we've just discussed, we also want to make you aware of a new kind of contingency that we've just begun tracking. We are witnessing the start of a decentralized network of autonomous AI agents coordinating with one another in an encrypted language they themselves devised. It apparently spawned from a hobbyist programmer's side-project. We don't think it's a concern just yet, but we definitely wanted to flag it for you."
Eliezer Yudkowsky's book was blurbed by a former Special Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs and a former Under Secretary for the Department of Homeland Security
I can't tell if your definition of politician is weirdly narrow or you confidence that there isn't like, some random state legislator with a computer science degree anywhere in the world is absurdly high.
At the moment I presume the human owners of moltbook.com and various servers can pull the plug but if the agents start making their own money through crypto schemes and paying for their own hosting and domains with crypto it could become interesting.
Just want to say this is a really good description of our brain's simulation, and I have experienced the same catching-the-misread-word phenomenon, and it's a subtle reminder about how this is all working. But does this mean our wires are crossed in a particular way that is uncommon? I haven't heard others share a similar experience.
I'm not sure. At times I've wondered if I have something similar to dyslexia. There are few common failure modes with me such as flipping consonants or vowels between adjacent words, or writing down a word and it being the wrong one.
My brain seems to store/recall words phonetically, possibly because I taught myself to read at age 3 with my own phonetic approach, but also possibly due to how I trained myself out of a long spell of aphasia during high school by consciously relearning how to speak in a way that engaged the opposite hemisphere of my brain; thinking in pitches, intonation, rhyme, rhythm, etc. and turning speaking into a musical expression. I'd read about this technique and after months of work I managed to make it work for me. So in that aspect, there really might be some crossed wires out of necessity.
I was homeless in high school and thus too poor to visit doctors and get scans done, so I'm really not sure if the assumed damage to my left hemisphere which I experienced was temporary or permanent, or even detectable. The aphasia was coupled with years of intense depersonalization and derealization as well. The brain is a very strange thing and many events in my life such as the ones described above have only reinforced to me how subjective my experience really is.
Not to be glib, but how can people witness this and still shovel countless billions into GPU data center buildouts? Are there just two vastly different approaches supported here by the market?
Anyone else surprised by how the actual training content doesn't seem to cover true fundamentals (even for a broad, non-technical audience) that would include basics like pre-training, post-training, weights, context window, etc? I get that we're all flabbergasted by the website itself, but it's not like the content is redeeming either. Here in the US, I should've learned my lesson when what came out of the White House "AI Education Summit" wasn't a comprehensive plan to teach Americans about AI, but instead just a cheap ploy for tech companies to offer coupons and vouchers to start using their services.
Read your blog post and agree with some of it. Largely I agree with the premise that the 2nd and 3rd order effects of this technology will be more impactful than the 1st order “I was able to code this app I wouldn’t have otherwise even attempted to”. But they are so hard to predict!
My parents’ home is like this. Control4, etc. They’re left constantly consulting the low-voltage techs who set it up just to do simple things, and are endlessly frustrated by their expensive system. Meanwhile, I’m the one who actually works in tech, and yet my own home AV setup is just an Apple TV connected as the only input into my TV, and that’s the extent of it (because I know better).
It’s strange though, for my dad, the complexity is a kind of status symbol:
“Look how hard it is to use! Marvel at all these buttons and switches! It must be very complicated and sophisticated! Real proof that I’ve made it in life!”
I’m not kidding.
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