A gentle walk through the first couple pages of your post history suggests you have very strong opinions about American government and that this is just bait to cause a ruckus
Your playback quality is still (I consider, severely) restricted[1], among other features I might not be aware of. They might also start injecting ads into the audio stream soon, if they realise ad blocking methods are popular (Twitch has done this for example).
While that is a very funny sentence, the half a cent I'm withholding from the artist by blocking the ad is hardly a robbery.
Just buy a CD once in a while if the guilt is too much to handle.
Move to high elevation and latitudes. Make use of shelter and caves. Make use of cooling technologies. Won't work for the large majority, but humans have survived ice ages and colonized the planet with much more primitive technology. I don't think any climate change scenario on Earth ends our species. Would end civilization as we know it.
But as a species we're too adaptable. Earth would have to turn into Venus, and that's not in the cards. Keep in mind that dinosaurs evolved in a 12°C warmer world. So it's not going to be deadly to all animal life.
> Keep in mind that dinosaurs evolved in a 12°C warmer world.
Sounds like a ridiculous claim to me. Source?
Edit: searching seems to suggest 5-10 degrees warmer. 12 warmer seems like an aggressive bet, but it may be possible
> Move to high elevation and latitudes. Make use of shelter and caves. Make use of cooling technologies.
Ok and what are you going to eat? And use to power your cooling tech? And how will you create fresh water? And where will you acquire raw materials to build things? And how will you survive the severe weather?
I may have overstated the degrees, but there was significantly more CO2 in the atmosphere thanks the prior major extinction from volcanic activity. It was very warm, and yes the dinosaurs evolved over millions of years, but the point is that it wasn't so extreme that animals couldn't survive, or there wouldn't have been dinosaurs, reptiles, mammals.
> Ok and what are you going to eat?
Stuff you can grow higher up or indoors.
> And use to power your cooling tech?
Solar, wind, geothermal, nuclear if there's a plant nearby.
> And how will you create fresh water?
Either live near a body of water or pipe it in.
> And where will you acquire raw materials to build things?
This will be harder as global trade will be seriously impacted and there won't be as many people to extract raw materials. But if we're talking smaller groups of humans, then maybe from scavenging existing things not in use or have to make use of local resources.
> And how will you survive the severe weather?
Sturdy shelters or caves. Not everyone will of course. My point is the entire planet won't become inhospitable. You could live up by the artic circle where there's water and grow things that can't grow there now. Might have to ship the soil in, though. There will be more passages in the artic with sea ice gone.
I imagine a world where people have decades to figure out what part of the planet remains hospitable for human life. So places like Canada, Russia, the Himalayas, Rockies, Andes, Iceland, etc. The bigger problem will be fighting over those locations and the scarcer resources. But some groups of people in some condition will survive.
That might include local industry and northern shipping routes. Nuclear reactors or solar farms could have been setup decades before. Shelters don't have to be caves. They can be any sturdy structure. It's not like bad weather is going to blow or burn everything down across the entire planet.
I don't see how Earth becomes totally inhabitable for any realistic climate change scenario, including asteroid impact, nuclear winter or super volcanoes. There will always be locations that are survivable. We know this because animal and plant life has survived previous global extinctions on land, and humans have survived ice ages, which are arguably worse for global civilization.
Most of the world becomes uninhabitable or volatile during that lead up where the world is getting hotter. Not decades where it’s fine and then too hot. The coast lines will rise pretty quickly. Most fish will die. Most agricultural centers will become unfarmable.
Sure you can make a bunker and live off of supplies. But you should not expect any substantial infrastructure or long distance travel to remain. You will not have fuel. You will not have steel. You will not have farms. You will not have water infrastructure, and ocean water will begin to pollute sources while others dry up. You will not have mega fauna to hunt. Most large plants will die. Your generation facilities will quickly become unuseable.
Sure there will be small plant life and critters and life will adapt. But nothing that a human population will be able to survive in. Living off of dwindling supplies is in a sealed off environment like guy on mars doesn’t count as surviving meaningfully imo.
You mean the thing that people claimed if it were repealed, the internet as we know it would end? Then the thing did get repealed, and nothing really changed?
Almost anyone on HN can see through this type of low effort passive-aggressive commenting. So this makes it even less likely me, or anyone else, well provide a substantive response.
The only low effort passive aggressive posting in this thread is from you - posting gotcha questions that aren’t gotchas and then tucking tail when sources come thru.
You already were clearly at 0% probability of a substantive reply. Nice attempt at deflection tho - I see you’re learning from the republicans whose boots you love to lick
> The only low effort passive aggressive posting in this thread is from you - posting gotcha questions that aren’t gotchas and then tucking tail when sources come thru.
You already were clearly at 0% probability of a substantive reply. Nice attempt at deflection tho - I see you’re learning from the republicans whose boots you love to lick
This does not increase your credibility, especially when hiding behind a pseudonym account made in 2020 replying to someone using their real name since 2014 on HN.
So it seems like a losing proposition to continue digging a hole.
Then, given an opening when I called you out on it, you have tried to imply:
* I am at fault for your lack of "substantive reply"
* I am at fault for using a pseudonym
* Because you use your "real name", you have street cred
I would like you to explain to me why you even bothered asking me to prove the regulatory environment was weakened in the states by Trump, that is obvious. It really makes no sense why you've come in and introduced such a bad faith chain of arguments on a topic you have made absolutely 0 points about.
I would take that to mean just about any last minute urgent need ticket. Airlines used to offer discounts for actual (as opposed to business) emergencies but I think that's mostly gone by the wayside.
Regardless of incentives, I don’t see any particular reason to think he has a more informed view than other experts on the trajectory of AI. He’s made several incorrect bets (capsule networks).
I’m sure he’s smart and all. His contributions were valuable. But he’s not special in this particular moment.
Your viewpoint is fascinating. So the inventor of backpropagation, Turing award winner, Google researcher, mentor to the CTO of OpenAI, doesn’t have any special insights about AI and the tech industry that’s forming around it? He might as well be some guy off the street?
Who, in your opinion, _does_ have enough context to be worth our attention?
Because if you’re waiting for Sam Altman or the entire OpenAI team to say “guys, I think we made a mistake here” we’re going to be knee-deep in paperclips.
Someone who is actually doing it would be a lot more authoritative in my opinion. Hinton has been wrong on most of his big ideas in the past decade. He hasn’t actually been involved in the important advances of anything recent. Inventing backprop is great. No discredit to him there. But that’s not a free pass to be seen as someone who is on the cutting edge.
But beyond all of that, what are we really asking? Are we asking about social ramifications? Because I don’t think the OpenAI devs are particularly noteworthy in their ability to divine those either. It’s more of a business question if anything. Are we talking about where the tech goes next? Because then it’s probably the devs or at least indie folks playing with the models themselves.
None of that means Hinton’s opinions are wrong. Form your own opinions. Don’t delegate your thinking.
I'm surprised you'd consider Hinton as not being "someone who is actually doing it".
Are you basically saying that you only trust warnings about AI from people who have pushed the most recent update to the latest headline-grabbing AI system at the latest AI darling unicorn? If so, aren't those people strongly self-selected to be optimistic about AI's impacts, else they might not be so keen on actively building it? And that's even setting aside they would also be financially incentivized against publicly expressing whatever doubts they do hold.
Isn't this is kind of like asking for authoritative opinions on carbon emissions from the people who are actually pumping the oil?
No, that’s the opposite of what I’m saying. Asking Hinton for his opinions on the societal impact of new AI tech is like asking the people who used to pump oil 20 years ago. It’s both out of date and not really relevant to their skill set even if it’s adjacent.
Let me clarify: who does qualify to offer an authoritative opinion, in your view? If, say, only Ilya Sutskever qualifies, then isn't that like asking someone actively pumping oil today about the danger of carbon emissions? If only Sam Altman, then isn't that like asking an oil executive?
If not Geoff Hinton, then, who?
Ultimately the harm is either real or not. If it is real, then the people with the most accurate beliefs and principles will be the ones who never joined the industry in the first place because they anticipated where it would lead, and didn't want to contribute. If it is not real, then the people with the most accurate beliefs will be the ones leading the charge to accelerate the industry. But neither group's opinions carry much credibility as opinions, because it's obvious in advance what opinions each group would self-select to have. (So they can only hope to persuade by offering logical arguments and data, not by the weight of their authoritative opinions.)
In my view, someone who makes landmark contributions to the oil industry for 20 years and then quits in order to speak frankly about their concerns with the societal impacts of their industry... is probably the most credible voice you could ever expect to find expressing a concern, if your measure of credibility involves experience pumping oil.
If you want an authoritative opinion on the societal impact of something I would want the opinion of someone who studies the societal impact of things.
So that seems to me like someone like Stuart Russel or Nick Bostrom? But what Geoff Hinton is saying seems to be vaguely in general agreement with what those people are saying.
His opinion obviously does matter because he is a founder of the field. No one believes that he is prescient. You are exaggerating and creating a strawman argument, infantilizing the readers here. We don't worship him or outsource our thinking.
You seem to be taking my usage of the word prescient as meaning he can either see the future perfectly or he cannot. That’s… not what it conventionally means. I simply mean his track record of predicting the future trajectory of AI is not great.
Your argument sounds like (and correct me if I'm wrong) something along the lines of "he chose to do X, and afterwards X was the correct choice, so he must be good at choosing correctly."
Isn't that ad hoc ergo propter hoc?
That argument would also support the statement "he went all in with 2-7 preflop, and won the hand, so he must be good at poker" -- I assume you and I would both agree that statement is not true. So why does it apply in Geoffrey's case?
I still don't follow. In your example, how would you differentiate between that choice of his being lucky vs. prescient? Or was the intent to just provide a single datapoint of him appearing to make a correct choice?
Nobody was arguing that Hinton should be listened to uncritically. You were the one asserting that he should not be listened to at all.
With respect, you seem to be shifting goalposts, from the indefensible (Hinton doesn't know what he's talking about) to the irrelevant (Hinton doesn't have perfect and complete knowledge of the future).
Authority figures will not matter. This technology, like nuclear weapons, will be pursued to the utmost by all actors capable of marshalling the resources, in secret if necessary. (After all, the 'Hydrogen bomb' was debated pro/con by established authorities, including Oppenheimer and Teller. Did that stop their development?)
US Senate has a bill drawing the line on AI launching nuclear weapons but to think US military, intelligence, and industry will sit out the AI arms race is not realistic.
China's CPC's future existence (imo) depends on AI based surveillance, propaganda, and realtime behavior conditioning. (re RT conditioning: We've already experienced this outselves via interacting with the recent chatbots to some extent. I certainly modulated my interactions to avoid the AI mommy retors.)
There's something about being first that gives a pioneer a great head start that can't be matched when it comes to considering the implications of their groundbreaking work.
Even if they're too busy doing the work, they're still thinking about what it would be like if it performed successfully, and it does seem to always take more retrospection before a leader can fully raise their head and more carefully consider unintended consequences.
Early success can give the impression that future efforts have difficulty being as meaningful, but also realistically after that the successful individual does not need to struggle to prove themself any more the way the less-accomplished would be expected to do.
Then there's seniority itself, and maturity levels that can not be gained any other way.
Beyond that when retirement is within easy reach you don't really have the same obligation to decorum itself as you would earlier, in order to actually maintain the same desired level of decorum.
Dr. Hinton seems to do a pretty good job of comparing himself to Oppenheimer.
I don't see how anyone else can question his standing more seriously than that.
You could have written the same thing about NNs for many years and you'd have been right. But the reason why Hinton has a Nobel prize to his name and you don't is because he placed a very long term bet and it paid off, in spite of lots of people saying that he wasn't going anywhere and that he should drop it.
Who knows, maybe a decade or two from now we'll see a resurgence of capsule networks, or maybe not. But I'd be a bit more careful about rejecting Hinton's hunches out of hand, his track record is pretty good.
Is this true? I can’t actually think of any examples of this off the top of my head. I can think of examples of popping anxiety pills to show weakness and lack of resolve, pills that suppress their acuity in some way, or some sort of amphetamine because they need energy.
But pain pills don’t ring a bell. The classic move is strongly taking a swig of hard alcohol and then pouring it over a wound and wincing.
In my opinion, people shown to be taking pills are usually portrayed as weak or digging themselves into a hole.
Perhaps with some exceptions to people shown taking pills which I interpreted as a display of competence and experience more than anything.
