Swing It Seattle has dances with live bands in Cap Hill at least once a week, and they also have multiple classes going on at any given time. Really pleasant environment, great people, can't recommend it enough!
I hear ya! One of my hobbies is to be a somewhat known stage & exotic dancer / dance instructor in VR using 5-11pt tracking (depending on my mood and production quality). The number of "features" that get in the way, and lack of representation for VR dancers and performers has been frustrating, especially as the world moves more and more towards 3-point robot avatars.
Actually had a chance to provide my perspective to a FAANG Research Group, but I was laid off (and they were disbanded).
I just don't see how the genie is put back in the bottle. Optimizations and new techniques are coming in at a breakneck pace, allowing for models that can run on consumer hardware.
I think it could be done. Or rather, instead of putting the genie back in the bottle, we could slow it down enough that we figure out how to ask it for wishes in a way that avoids all the monkey-paw's scenarios.
Dropping the metaphor, running today's models isn't dangerous. We could criminalize developing stronger ones, and make a "Manhattan project" for AI aimed at figuring out how to not ruin the world with it. I think a big problem is what you point out -- once it's out, it's hard to prevent misuse. One bad AGI could end up making a virus that does massive damage to humanity. We might end up deciding that this tech is just too dangerous to be allowed to happen at all, at least until after humanity manages to digitize all our brains or something. But it's better to try to slow down as much as we can, for as long as we can, than to give up right from the get-go and wing it.
Honestly, if it turns out that China ends up developing unsafe AI before we develop safe AI, I doubt it would have turned out much better for the average American if America were the ones to develop unsafe AI first. And if they cut corners and still manage to make safe AI and take over the world, that still sounds a heck of a lot better than anyone making unsafe AI.
I suppose the argument would be that the key search space is reduced. Statistically speaking, you know the weights of certain binary pairs if the image is not evenly distributed. But I'm guessing that it'd only drop the average search space by... two or three powers of two for most keys?
Again: the randomart image is based on a hash of the public key. If you want to know what that key is, all you have to do is ask the server. You don't need to launch a sophisticated, expensive cryptographic attack to obtain it.
The metric of "hauling 40 Tesla Model S vehicles up every sixty minutes." is a strange one. A '93 Honda Accord would be divisible to the minute (60/hr). Or even 52lbs/second... Though I suppose those don't sound as flashy.
Alternatively, I'd be curious how many tesla batteries in raw materials that equated to per hour.
I found the book Rama Revealed by Arthur C. Clarke and Gentry Lee to be an unbelievable and depressing outlook on the short sidedness of man's assault on limited resources.
And then I was driving through Phoenix Arizona, looking out at the concrete landscape and concrete riverways, and realized just how right he was.
A large part of the reason Phoenix (the greater metro area) is as large as it is is because most of California restricts new housing construction so severely. I'd not live here if it weren't so much more affordable than California.
The parking-lot sprawl is appalling, and should be reversed, but California policies (like those in New York, Boston, etc.) have a lot to do with the growth of the Phoenix-to-Florida area.
The question is what will it take for us all, collectively, to refrain from using whatever is it hand for whatever we happen to desire. Out of respect for what?
Most of the time this kind of self restraint does not really seem conceivable. Instead, in debates like this, we’ll defer to emissions and sequestration data, without ever confronting what what it is that led us to blithely create and deploy machines like this and shrug off the damage.
My first thought is that there may be something environmental... interfering with your voice. Something like someone watching a show in the evening, or turning on a fan when it's time for bed.
And I completely agree about event organization! It really introduces you to a wider swath of people than your initial search may have turned up.
Way to go!