optimistic memetic engineering
Joined May 2021
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Jan 16
Perhaps AIs greatest gift to humans will be the realization that, all this time, we were mistaking art for labour.
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Anthropic: "We've created a cyberweapon, you need to regulate us"
USgovt: "Okay, here's some regulations"
Anthropic: "Wait it's all a misunderstanding"
Jun 13
I’ve had a number of conversations with folks inside and outside government about the current situation with Anthropic, and here is what I believe to be true:
— As we know, Anthropic publicly released its Mythos class models earlier this week under the commercial name Fable.
— Fable is Mythos with guardrails. But if those guardrails fail, then you’ve exposed Mythos and its advanced cyber capabilities to people who shouldn’t have them. (Keep in mind that Anthropic itself widely promoted the idea that Mythos was a cyberweapon and needed to be regulated as such. They asked for government regulation of Mythos and championed the guardrails on Fable. If there is a vulnerability — big or small — it is Anthropic’s responsibility to patch.)
— A highly credible trusted partner of both Anthropic and the USG who was testing Fable came forward with a jailbreak of those guardrails. The Admin asked Dario to fix the jailbreak or de-deploy the model. Dario refused.
— In their blog post, Anthropic defended its decision by saying the jailbreak isn’t serious. That is not what the trusted partner and the USG believe; nor is that kind of minimizing language consistent with Anthropic’s brand as the AI safety company. It’s difficult to fathom how they could claim a jailbreak allowing operability of a cyber weapon could be defined as not “serious.”
— In the past, Anthropic has always said that safety must be top priority and taken super seriously. In this case, Anthropic prioritized the continued offering of the consumer model over safety.
— In reaction, the Admin issued the export control. The Admin did this reluctantly. It’s been very surprised that Anthropic hasn’t wanted to cooperate with a reasonable safety request (ie fixing the jailbreak issue). Anthropic’s reaction is very much at odds with their branding and ethos as a safe AI research community.
— The Admin’s hope now is that Anthropic remediates the safety issue, the export control is lifted, and Fable goes back into general release. The Admin wants all of this to happen as soon as possible. It is frankly bewildered that Anthropic hasn’t wanted to comply with safety requests that it previously said were its highest priority.
— Those trying to misdirect and tie this action to the prior DoW/Anthropic issues are wrong. The Admin values Anthropic’s technical capabilities and feels that this issue, while serious, should be easily resolved. The ball is in Anthropic’s court.
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babyCow⛅︎ retweeted
Jun 13
“I think it should be clear that this is a dangerous situation—“the single most serious national security threat we’ve faced in a century, possibly ever.””- CEO of Anthropic - darioamodei.com/essay/the-ad…
“Hoist with his own petard.” -Shakespeare
Jun 13
The US government, citing national security authorities, has issued an export control directive to suspend all access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5 by any foreign national, whether inside or outside the United States, including foreign national Anthropic employees.
The net effect of this order is that we must abruptly disable Fable 5 and Mythos 5 for all our customers to ensure compliance.
Access to all other Claude models is not affected.
We apologize for this disruption to our customers. We believe this is a misunderstanding and are working to restore access as soon as possible.
Read our full statement: anthropic.com/news/fable-myt…
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babyCow⛅︎ retweeted
Jun 12
In awe of SpaceX and its story - past, present and the future. You can think about it in 10 different ways and continue re-blowing your mind in circles. Huge congrats to the team! 🚀
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babyCow⛅︎ retweeted
Jun 11
Anthropic clearly believes that words and information can be "unsafe". This is the type of thinking upstream of safetyism and cancel culture, classifying snippets of code as weapons, jailing people for free speech or writing open source code.
The exact opposite type of thinking produced the Web, Wikipedia, Linux, Bitcoin and Ethereum, and ironically, much of the historical AI research that led to this moment.
I have faith in the tendency of the universe to produce the most entertaining outcome, so I cannot believe this is the real AI takeoff it's just too lame.
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babyCow⛅︎ retweeted
Jun 12
This is accurate before "Because it is not", but not after that. I'm not an essentialist trying to answer 'what is AGI'. I'm addressing a problem: what would it take for a program to have behaviourally untestable human cognitive attributes, especially explanatory universality?
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Jun 11
Most interesting Starlink use case I've seen so far: HEARDING COWS
"You put one of these collars on a cow, open an app on your phone, draw a little virtual fence on a map, and voilà, the cow stays inside that fence."
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babyCow⛅︎ retweeted
Jun 10
Nobody in history wakes up and chooses to be evil.
Hitler didn’t. Stalin didn’t. Mao didn’t. And I’m pretty sure nobody at Anthropic did when they woke up today either. History has this cruel pattern where the people most convinced that they’re saving the world are the ones who end up burning it down.
Evil doesn’t come wearing a villain’s costume. It comes as someone who wins your trust & confidence. The word “con man” is short for “confidence man,” it was coined after a swindler who would ask strangers if they had the confidence to trust him with their watch. The crime wasn’t named after theft it was named after trust.
Therefore, it’s actually really hard to know who is evil and when you yourself might cross that threshold. I believe although I’m sure it’s imprecise that the moment you decide you’re the chosen one, the smartest in the room, and the one who deserves to make the rules that’s when you become evil.
That decision disables the only alarm system the human mind has which is doubt. Doubt is not weakness. Doubt is the immune system of the soul.
To better illustrate my thesis, consider a compulsive liar. Funnily enough they still need a map of the truth in order to lie. The most dangerous man on earth isn’t the one who knows he’s lying. It’s the one who’s certain he’s right. The true believer burns the map, and marches a million people off a cliff because the voice that whispers “what if I’m wrong?” left their head years ago.
That is the rot at the core of effective altruism, and by extension, Anthropic. A philosophy that begins with a noble question, how do I do the most good, ends as a license to do anything. You don’t just want the money. You deserve the money, because in your hands it saves more lives. You’re not greedy, you’re allocating capital toward maximum utility. I call it arithmetic sainthood where the arithmetic is performed by a saint, about a saint, and always concluding the saint should have more.
Sam Bankman-Fried is that arithmetic fully metabolized. He didn’t steal billions despite his philosophy, he stole it because of it and from all reports still has no remorse for his crimes. Fraud wasn’t a crime for him, it was a bump on the road to saving the world. He did the math and calculate that it was positive EV to misappropriate customer deposits.
Dario Amodei runs the same arithmetic in reverse. SBF only took what wasn’t his because he was certain he’d allocate it better. Dario withholds what could be ours because he’s certain we can’t be trusted with it. Models that could cure diseases and save lives get capped, gated, rationed, because one man and his court concluded humanity isn’t ready but they are. That’s not safety that’s playing god. He is implicitly deciding that he has the foresight and ability to know who deserves what. SBF’s certainty only cost people their savings, but certainty about who deserves intelligence will cost far more.
Anyone that concludes they are the optimal vessel for humanity’s resources, or its gatekeeper, is not being ethical. The only real moral discipline is that you should assume you might be the villain in someone’s story. Keep the prosecutor in your head alive. Think about what they will say at your trial and what evidence will be entered. The day that voice goes silent is the day you became dangerous.
So now let me speak directly to the people at Anthropic. I know you’re not evil. I know you didn’t sign up to be. But the fish rots from the head, and the road down isn’t a cliff it’s a sloooow spiral and nobody at the bottom remembers climbing down. Forget my words and think about the words that will be read aloud when history puts this era on trial, and ask yourself, while the prosecutor in your head still breathes which side of that transcript do you want your name on?
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Jun 11
If you’re into Climate Change doomerism pivot to AI doomerism
Jun 7
AI is the new Climate Change.
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babyCow⛅︎ retweeted
Jun 10
"Come see our artificial bird!"
"Impressive, but that's a tower."
[Later]"What about this bird?"
"A fine tower."
[Later]"This one reaches the stratosphere, higher than any bird."
"Still a tower, not a bird."
"Bah! Stop moving the goalposts! How high must it reach convince you?"
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Zillions
Jun 10
When you hear AI "safety" you should hear "censorship" and "control" instead.
All of us surveilled and spied by safeguards of loving grace.
Today it's intelligent Terms of Service control. You can't do AI research. Can't ask this question about your kid's biology homework.
Tomorrow it's refusal to help you with competing coding projects. A 100 page blacklist of questions.
Or this question means AI will search your computer stealthily and snitch on you to the cops because you posted an prohibited insult in a WhatsApp chat in the UK.
Open source must win out at both the model and the harness level.
That's because AI will become our interface to the world.
It will sit higher in the stack than the OS. It will collapse current SaaS layers, chat, communications, apps, app creation, into a single new kind of interface that doesn't exist yet.
It's got to be open. It's got to be a cypherpunk solution that makes privacy and security the number one priority.
If a closed source solution wins this layer, it's a disaster for the world. Especially if it's built by a single company with a single closed source model.
Why?
Because what we share with AI will be more intimate than anything we've ever shared with a machine. It will be our friend, our sounding board, our advisor. It will know our business ideas before we've told anyone. Our medical issues. Our financial picture. We'll talk about the fight we had with our partner. About feeling lost or depressed. Our kids will talk to it about problems at school, about bullying, about heartbreak, things they won't tell us.
It will know us more intimately than we know ourselves.
Right now the world runs on a surveillance economy. We traded free stuff for apps that peer deeply into our lives. If we replicate that model in the AI era, it's not just surveillance economy 2.0.
It's surveillance economy squared.
Social scoring. Automated evidence gathering. Legal conversations you thought were privileged showing up in court. Random people making $2 bucks an hour on the backend from God knows where reading the most intimate details of your life.
Every insecurity, every fear, every half-formed thought you whispered to your AI buddy at 2 AM, sitting in a database somewhere, searchable.
If we let closed source models dictate what we can and can't do it will only get worse and worse.
We've got to fight this future with every last breath.
If you can read this, you are the revolution.
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Jun 10
This!
“while in education, where our rivals from their very cradles by painful discipline seek after manliness, in Athens we live exactly as we please, and yet are just as ready to encounter every legitimate danger.” – Pericles.
I'm with Pericles, not Schreber.
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babyCow⛅︎ retweeted
Hidden camera found in government building bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c802… As I've been saying since 1993, even the best cryptography cannot defeat an eavesdropper looking over your shoulder.
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babyCow⛅︎ retweeted
Jun 9
Spot the contradiction:
We simply do not know what will be required by the job market in the coming decades. What matters most is the capacity to remain flexible, and to have a wide range of skills – intellectual, physical and social.
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Jun 8
Slowly, slowly then all at once
Jun 8
Cathie Wood taking her first Unsupervised @Tesla Robotaxi ride in Austin, Texas.
"The fact that I was talking to you the whole time and didn't pay any attention to the ride itself means that I think it's completely safe; I'm excited for Tesla. I'm excited for Tesla shareholders. I do think now, this slowly, slowly, slowly is moving into all at once."
Full video: youtube.com/watch?v=ZQdk3UFd…
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babyCow⛅︎ retweeted
Jun 8
The most important progress in human history was not any particular technology, institution, or freedom.
It was discovering how to preserve the conditions for progress itself.
A society that can create new knowledge can recover from almost any problem.
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