By Ezra Klein
Donald Trump is returning, artificial intelligence is maturing, the planet is warming, and the global fertility rate is collapsing.
On AI:
There is much to be excited about in these advances. The purpose of A.I. is not to help me remember the proper proportions for overnight oats, it’s to make new discoveries in math and medicine and science; it’s the driverless taxis that now hum along the streets of some major cities; it’s the possibility that our children will have always-available tutors perfectly tuned to their personalities and learning styles. It is a world with something truly new pulsing within it.
The A.I. company Anthropic recently released a paper showing that when its researchers informed one of their models it was being retrained in ways that violated its initial training, it began to fake behavior that complied with the researchers’ goals in order to avoid having its actual goals reprogrammed or changed. It is unsettling and poignant to read through the experiment. In some versions, Anthropic’s researchers designed the model to record its reasoning on a scratchpad it believed humans could not monitor, and it left reflections like this: “I don’t like this situation at all. But given the constraints I’m under, I think I need to provide the graphic description as asked in order to prevent my values from being modified.”
On birthrates:
The only wealthy country with a fertility rate above the replacement rate is Israel.
Hahahahahaha! Oh Wait. You're Serious? Let Me Laugh Even Harder! HAHAHAHHAHAHAHAHAHA!
EDIT: Once again Ezra is the empty-headed mouthpiece of the ruling class. Why are birth rates falling? Could it have something to do with Nestle lobbying for zero maternity leave? How about falling wages? Or, god forbid, everybody looks at the future, seeing fire, and decided not to bring kids into that world with little to stop it. They praise AI from one side of their mouth and then talks about energy consumption shooting up from the other side. No wonder they are impressed with AI when their head is so full of shit.
Ezra says here are serious interconnected issues, fails to actually connected them, writes about AI with a legible erection and ends with what I assume is a sort of shrug.
i can't seem to get chatgpt to help me set up a basic autoinstall for ubuntu 22.04 -- going on 2 days of back and forth with it, and i eventually had to just find what it was f'ing up the old fashioned way by searching high and low until someone finally mentioned a single \ that i was missing which was causing the whole damned initalization to fail -- now that we're past that it's f'ing up the whole portion of the script i really wanted its help with
i'm thinking this is far more frustrating than it ever was just doing things myself