AI has the chance to improve EPS growth for the S&P 500 by 2% per annum In exchange for this growth potential there is a 10% chance AI might cause an extinction level event for humanity This seems fair That’s why it’s called a risk premium
If there really is a high chance of AI leading to the extinction of humanity within years/decades, then the only rational stance towards safety monitoring and research pacing should be stringent, top-down government involvement and universally ratified international treaties.
I don’t think AI is going to usher in an extinction event. In fact, even if nobody were to slow down, I really don’t think humanity would have much to worry about.
most surveys find that the median AI researcher forecasts about a 5% chance of extinction or similar "doom" from AI, while the mean probability is much higher -- around 15-20% -- due to a smallish group who give very high probabilities of doom.
The value of a degree is in question, as tuition costs have increased in the last few decades while the college premium-the expected benefit from getting a diploma-has flatlined and possibly even declined in the last few years.
I put the probability of complete extinction as being so low it isn't worth discussing, but the probabilities of AI caused disasters - e.g. cyber attacks on critical infrastructure or bio-risks - as being worth debating.
Extremely severe extinction events happen every 100M years or so and just switching to sustainable energy will not be enough to stop them. Space satellites to control temperature and massive geo-engineering will be needed or it will be game over.
My view is that an appreciation of China's REER is very much to be desired, but the real (haha) way to get there is through higher inflation domestically, and that means different macro policies.
there still seems to be an enormous premium on cognitive ability. And so, I wouldn't I I I I think, um, renouncing that before there's evidence that we've saturated, uh, those benefits would be premature.
And uh it's still worth it's still worth not reading the code for most of the time at the cost of every once in a while I'm going to have to spend two weeks fixing an issue by hand. And I don't believe that anymore because I think the amount of code we're able to write now is actually like 10xed or 100xed and I think the problem's just getting worse.
Standardized systems are important, and there is a systems premium in the US and UK, but it can't be about a regular pipeline because London has that and yet Crossrail engaged in some really dodgy systems decisions that drove costs up.
So with one, you get the effect that the person produced art print is valued much much higher than the than the AI version. And then what we do is to say there's in a set of other conditions, there's 500 of these being produced. So for the human made one, the price goes down a lot because it's no longer seen as like you're not like making a connection with this one artist versus with AI, there's no difference. AI is already viewed as like a commodity.
PLC's or um uh or or companies on the NASDAQ or the New York Stock Exchange are incentivized to behave like psychopaths because they're optimized around short-term transactional value, not long-term relationship building.
and so I think this is interesting just modernization learning that especially if you work on a premium product try to have your free product be a reflection of like everything that your product can offer you. Obviously, to an extent, there's some costs involved with some of the paid features and things like that, but it generally will pay it for itself if you're able to put your best foot forward um and go do that.
So premium is one source of our revenue. We also have ads, but they're context-based, not targeted. Of course, we leave probably 80% of value on the table because we're not ready to engage in all this practices, exploiting personal data.
But yeah, there's been a back and forth about whether dinosaurs were already on their way out or were they a bit limited by the very end of the Cretaceous. I think the more recent analyses have shown that's probably not the case, because in other words, they were basically doing fine right up to the extinction event. And so yeah, if the asteroid hadn't hit, there's no reason to think that they were on some kind of terminal decline.
So birds did not appear as a result of the dinosaurs going extinct. Birds lived alongside the dinosaurs for 100 million years. The birds were not new on the scene, and it's not like, "Oh, the dinosaurs died, and from the ashes rose the birds." No, they've been knocking around forever.
You're dominant in contests, particularly with conspecifics. If you're trying to win a territory or win mating rights, bigger things usually beat up smaller things. So there's going to be selection favoring them. But then big things don't usually do well in extinction events, so that tends to reset the clock by killing off the big stuff, and then smaller stuff does better again.
The interesting Tesla point is people always looked at it and said, "It's the iPhone of cars." No, it's not. What's happening is that cars are becoming Android with no iPhone. And then Tesla is just selling and is is in that metaphor Tesla is just another android phone maker
Bitcoin is not going to catch on as a charity. In order for spending it to catch on persistently at scale (i.e. not just billions of dollar-equivalents in annual global medium-of-exchange volume, but trillions), it has to solve problems for spenders and/or recipients that other solutions are not doing.
I recently used Peddle with great results, and have been recommending them to anyone who has a low-value, possibly even non-driveable car they just want GONE in exchange for $500-1000 of cash.
Luis and Walter Alvarez, who made that incredible discovery, initially their discovery was based entirely on impact proxies, just as the Younger Dryas is. There was no crater. And for a long time they were disbelieved because they couldn’t produce a crater.
Well, we’ve divided the New York cost premium into three tranches: labor (mostly overstaffing, not high wages), station and system design, and procurement and soft costs.
If you want to exchange or deliver information to a group of people, one of the worst ways to do it is with a live verbal presentation. If your goal is actually to deliver that scientific paper or that insight, then you should either write a book or write a memo and say, here, in an asynchronous way, this is what we know. If you're going to show up live, in person, in real time, synchronized, you are performing. And the goal is to not deliver the information, but to deliver emotion.
The problem with these grand ambitions—saving humanity from extinction and enabling our species to reach its full potential millions of years from now—is that they ostensibly justify any cost in the present.
I do think that we might be in the middle of an extinction right now if you define it by the number of species that are getting killed off. It’s subtle, but it’s a complex system.
And I notice that the tiny handful of people capable of caring about 200,000 people dying of neglected tropical diseases are the same tiny handful of people capable of caring about the next pandemic, or superintelligence, or human extinction.
Bryan Washington's novel Family Meal: Bryan is the great millennial fiction writer of food, among many other talents. His descriptions of cooking and meals are fantastically rich, as much for the food itself as for the social and emotional exchange involved.
Without sufficient caution, we may irreversibly lose control of autonomous AI systems, rendering human intervention ineffective. Large-scale cybercrime, social manipulation, and other harms could escalate rapidly. This unchecked AI advancement could culminate in a large-scale loss of life and the biosphere, and the marginalization or extinction of humanity.
My response is that their position is non-scientific – What is the testable hypothesis? What would falsify the hypothesis? How do we know when we are getting into a danger zone?
"Monetize" is a terrible word that tacitly admits that there is no such thing as an "Attention Economy." You can't use attention as a medium of exchange.
It was surprisingly unliterary and unpostmodern for Mitchell, but in exchange, he nailed the historical details and gave us an adventure which subverted many of the usual tropes
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