Well yeah, there are a lot of counteies helping Ukraine without demanding a quid pro quo. There are a lot of cointeies that har participated in Americas wars without demanding quid pro quo.
>a lot of cointeies that har participated in Americas wars without demanding quid pro quo
Name a country that helped in one of Americas wars without enjoying "most favored nation" trading status with the US and not enjoying a promise by the US to come to their aid if they are ever attacked.
I disagree: a big reason Beijing is so keen to unite all the Chinese-speaking (Chinese-writing to be exact) lands under its rule is that Chinese history shows that when China is divided into multiple polities, war frequently breaks out between them and rivals like Japan can keep China weak by playing one polity off against another.
>Oh, come on. This is what we get from social media bubbles and breathless irresponsible media reporting [emphasis mine].
Speaking of bubbles, how sure are you that Silicon Valley and HN are not part of a bubble composed of people with an emotional attachment to technological progress and people with a financial stake in AI?
How sure are you that the AI labs aren't being even more irresponsible than the news media?
Google had shareholders in 2005 too or thereabouts when they publicly decided to abandon the Chinese search market for soft, fuzzy reasons (i.e., not because they were losing money on Chinese operations).
And as far as I know, they're still absent from the Chinese search market.
The trouble with giving doctors complete control over doctor education is that in the US they've used that control to restrict the supply of doctors to keep the price of doctors high.
Right now it’s congress that is restricting the supply of doctors. The AMA’s (which only represents about 15% of doctors btw) current position is that we need more doctors and they have been actively lobbying congress to provide funding for more residency slots.
The AMA lobbied for the freeze in slots in the 90s. Their change of heart today doesn't make them less responsible for creating the mess, in the name of protecting physician salaries, in the first place.
The AMA lobbied for a freeze in slots because the rate of growth had was increasing and extrapolating from that it looked like more physicians would be graduating than there would be jobs for them to fill.
The number of physicians has been growing faster than population growth since the 60s. No one could have predicted that we’d be able to sustain the insane growth in medical spending and demand that allowed this to continue.
Because of the way medical training is funded, number of physicians isn’t not a free market phenomenon. Congress decides how many there are. In the 90s it looked like there were going to be too many. When that changed the AMAs position changed, it was a perfectly reasonable position.
But even if it weren’t a reasonable position. That was 30 years ago. No one who was in a position of power is around today, so it’s unclear to me how exactly the current AMA should bear responsibility.
It would be like if IEEE today called for a temporary freeze on the increase of H-1Bs. Then 30 years later something causes an explosion in demand for engineers and people started blaming these evil engineers.
You will run an autonomous ai agent on your own hardware or by having your own local ai pass out commands to distributed systems online, ai, real people, or just good old fashioned programming. There is no stopping this.
It is in fact possible to stop training runs that consume billions of dollars in electricity and in GPU rental or depreciation costs. If no one does such a training run, then no one can release the weights of the model that would have been produced by the run, so you won't be able to run the model (which would never come into existence) on your own hardware. I don't care if you run DeepSeek R1 in your basement till the end of time. What my friends and I want to stop is the creation of more capable future models.
It is also quite possible for our society to decide that deep learning is too dangerous and to outlaw teaching and publishing about it, which would not completely stop the discovery of algorithmic deep-learning improvements (because some committed deep-learning enthusiasts would break the law) but would slow the discovery rate way, way down.
But it’s not actually
possible for our society to decide that. In the real world, at this moment when laws and norms are gone and a billionaire obsessed with AI has power, that will 100% not happen. It won’t happen in the next several years, and that is the time left to do what you are saying. Pretending otherwise is a waste of time.
I prefer to retain some hope that our civilization has a future and that humans or at least human values and preferences have some place in that future civilization.
And most people who think AI "progress" is so dangerous that it must be stopped before it is too late have loose confidence intervals extending for at least a couple of decades (as opposed to just a few years) as to when it definitely becomes too late.
All five merchants who went to Opal City were never seen again, but don't let that stop you from going to Opal City because anecdotes don’t actually provide meaningful information.
Another low stake option. 5 of your friends each say that restaurant A is horrible and restaurant B was great. You have to pick a restaurant. Are you going to throw dice because these are just anecdotes and don't matter?
A specific restaurant is an actual place so if someone describes the decor and prices yesterday it’s not going to be wildly different when you show up tomorrow.
I'm not eating anything till I see a peer-reviewed study demonstrating that the verbal reports about restaurant decor made by my family members or the guys I ride bikes with on weekends have any actual correlation with actual restaurant decor. Where is the hard, non-anecdotal evidence?
It also needs evaluation beyond subjective reports, as food taste is known to be highly prone to placebo. Until an objective device for evaluating the taste is found I believe it would be completely unscientific to take a bite or even smell the food since that is also known to affect taste.
