I'm currently working on a project that is self-improving most of the time. Most of the plans for next steps are written by the agent itself, and executed by the agent itself, and the result feeds into choosing which plans to pursue next. It's not 100% autonomous yet, but self-improvement loops are real, and essential to getting the most out of AI.
AI currently lacks agency but if it can achieve greater goal setting and agency I can't see why self-improvement could not be achieved.
I think the most disappointing thing will be that even we do achieve ASI, everything will carry on as business as usual for a while before it starts making an economic impact because of how resistant to change we have made society.
This is something that I have been wondering about. SuperIntelligence or not, it's clear that significant change is going to happen.
There are a lot of people working on the cause of the change.
There are a lot of people criticising the nature of the change.
There are a lot of people rejecting the change.
How many are there preparing the world for the change?
Some form of change is coming, how are we preparing society to deal with what is happening?
Job losses due to technology have happened over and over again. Rendering particular forms of employment redundant (typing pools, clearing horse manure, Video rental store workers, and of course, the loom). Most agree that the world is better when those are jobs that need to be done. It's the livelihood of the workers that is the concern.
Instead of fighting the change we need to address the inevitability of change the responsibility to those who it will affect.
Nobody is happy about killing civilians. But Khamenei did more than that every day he was alive. Personally I feel there is some amount of immediate civilian casualty that is worth putting a stop to continuous suffering.
It's easy to excuse the collateral damage of people you will never meet, just remember that this reasoning has unleashed hell on Earth for countless innocent people, many kids, and it makes you sound like a ghoul.
Hope to hell that you or anyone you care about isn't on the receiving end of such sentiments.
It's not "easy" but it remains true. We can play the moral-decision game and I'll ask you whether killing one child is justified to save 5,000,000. If you answer "yes" then from that point it's just about agreeing on numbers.
What is the alternative you propose? Just to give a hypothetical-but-realistic example, let’s presume that khamenei’s continued existence results in 100 civilian deaths per day. Under that assumption, what one-time cost would you accept to end his life?
Whether or not one would accept deaths of civilians to get rid of Khamenei, I don't think anyone should accept a school full of children being blown up for no obvious reason. If there was somehow a reason why Khameni could not have killed without attacking that school, then those reasons should be plainly spelled out and evidence presented. As things stand with the limited information we have now, it just looks like a war crime with no strategic upside.
I remember that the alternative has also unleashed hell on Earth for countless innocent people.
At some point, you have to take the path that offers at least some hope for the future. To turn into something that has lost all hope - there is no fixing that.
While this is a minor point; whether or not it was an Iranian misfire doesn't move the moral responsibility away from the invaders. Unless the IRGC took advantage of the chaos to purposefully hit the school (seems unlikely) then the entire situation was teed up by the external aggression and can still pretty reasonably be blamed on them.
If you try to shield your armed forces using children, and then accidentally kill them because you used them as a shield, you can't blame someone else.
... I'm just going of Wikipedia here but it seems to have been a standard small city [0]. Attempting to educate Iranians in Iranian cities isn't really trying to shield armed forces. Is the expectation here that Iran should send their students out into the wilderness to make it more politically convenient for US/Israeli to launch unannounced strikes on them?
Apart from the fact that Iran is a bad place to be right now it actually looks like a pleasant city to visit. Sounds like they have lots of fruit, warm weather and have some interesting history vis a vis the Mongols. Very middle eastern.
Instead of looking at the entire city, just look at the google maps data for proximity of their armed forces to their school.
Look, maybe it was a school specifically for the children of army personnel, but that's a long shot. From the geolocation data, the school was right at their missile launch site.
They had choices.
Locate the school or the launch site elsewhere, for one.
Evacuate the school before they tried to launch munitions, for another.
Why does that seem unlikely? It makes people argue that the price is not worth it. After killing thousands of protesters you think they would shy away from killing some dozens of kids?
Weird that you're so delighted to shift the blame for the tragedy of children being blown up in school, even more so that you're relying on unsubstantiated claims to do it.
Since you know more than the rest of the world about this, please update Wikipedia with a reliable source for your claim as has already been requested by admins here[1].
> Weird that you're so delighted to shift the blame for the tragedy of children being blown up in school, even more so that you're relying on unsubstantiated claims to do it.
Where in my message does it seem that I am delighted?
No doubt the truth will eventually come out, what I have seen is that the school was sited unusually close to an Iran launch site.
You can judge me all you want for "being delighted", whatever the hell that means, but I'm not advocating that schools be used as shields for rocket launchers, am I?
Okay, I get it - for you this is a laughing matter; your goal is something other than discussion.
But I gotta know - you are talking about a regime that had no problem gunning down thousands of innocent citizens in the streets just a month ago, why are you so sure that they won't use other innocents as shields for their soldiers?
I left Twitter a few months ago because the overall experience was getting worse and I had no desire to be fed culture war propaganda and AI slop non-stop.
I decided to dip my toes into Reddit after a few years of irregular use. The politics there are far worse, and far more one sided. The political takes on the main page are insane. We have a lot of mentally ill people in this country.
I was curious to see what someone elses perspective was on something I routinely engage with. I wasn't sure if it was someone trolling or genuinely upset.
(Most) vaccines work by letting your immune system know to watch out for particular things. That's an information advantage. Likewise, antibiotics are chemical agents that the body lacks the genes to synthesise. Betting that the immune system's parameters are generally well-calibrated is entirely compatible with taking antibiotics and vaccines, where indicated.
You wouldn't want to get vaccinated for smallpox in the middle of a plague epidemic, because that would waste your immune system's resources on an extinct-in-the-wild disease, when it really needs to be gearing up to stop the plague killing you.
The immune system does expend resources on vaccines: it makes antibodies, usually has some kind of inflammatory response…. But if a vaccine causes a nutritional deficiency, there's something seriously wrong with your diet.
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