Global warming, though not ocean acidification, is quickly and cheaply reversed by ejecting calcite nanoparticles (with an average radius in the ~90nm range) into the stratosphere, using a propeller-based system to prevent particle clumping. The particles should be carried up by hydrogen balloons, and very preferably released over the tropics. The total amount needed will be on the order of several hundred kilotons yearly, and the total cost should be somewhere between $1B and $5B yearly.
I endorse this plan (with a minor caveat for liability, which I have to think more about).
The U.S. must immediately establish a detailed registry of giant AI experiments, maintained by a U.S. federal agency. This agency should also build awareness of the huge clusters of specialized hardware that are used in these experiments, and work with the manufacturers of that hardware to include safety and verification features at the chip level. The U.S. government should at minimum ensure that it has the capability to trigger a pause. It has become clear that corporations are not merely reluctant to hit the brakes — the brake pedal does not even exist.
If we are going to reap the revolutionary potential of AI, regulators must enforce standards to ensure safety and security during development. They must require that developers take on the burden of proof, and demonstrate that their new systems are safe before deployment — just like they do for new drugs, cars or airplanes. Lawmakers must take proactive steps to ensure that developers are legally liable for the harm their products cause.
These efforts cannot stop at home. The large-scale risks of AI affect everyone everywhere, and the upcoming UK summit is an opportunity to start the crucial task of addressing them at a global level in a way that transcends national borders and geopolitical rivalries. This kind of international cooperation is possible. We coordinated on cloning. We banned bioweapons. We signed treaties about nuclear weapons even at the height of the Cold War. We can work together on AI.
The anecdote is fascinating. Not currently endorsing the essay as a whole.
(quoted in the essay, original source NYT)
During a visit to the United States in 1989 [Yeltsin] became more convinced than ever that Russia had been ruinously damaged by its centralized, state‐run economic system, where people stood in long lines to buy the most basic needs of life and more often than not found the shelves bare. He was overwhelmed by what he saw at a Houston supermarket, by the kaleidoscopic variety of meats and vegetables available to ordinary Americans.
Leon Aron, quoting a Yeltsin associate, wrote in his biography, “Yeltsin, A Revolutionary Life”…: “For a long time, on the plane to Miami, he sat motionless, his head in his hands. ‘What have they done to our poor people?’ he said after a long silence.” He added, “On his return to Moscow, Yeltsin would confess the pain he had felt after the Houston excursion: the ‘pain for all of us, for our country so rich, so talented and so exhausted by incessant experiments.’ ”
He wrote that Mr. Yeltsin added, “I think we have committed a crime against our people by making their standard of living so incomparably lower than that of the Americans.” An aide, Lev Sukhanov was reported to have said that it was at that moment that “the last vestige of Bolshevism collapsed” inside his boss.
This is very much a dispatch from the far reaches of the paranoid style in American politics. But even if you wouldn’t put the pieces together the same way that the author does (and I wouldn’t), the pieces themselves are fascinating and troubling. And I’m in full agreement that our recent approach to disinformation and the double-thinkish ‘malinformation’ is an alarming trend.
In his last days in office, President Barack Obama made the decision to set the country on a new course. On Dec. 23, 2016, he signed into law the Countering Foreign Propaganda and Disinformation Act, which used the language of defending the homeland to launch an open-ended, offensive information war.
Something in the looming specter of Donald Trump and the populist movements of 2016 reawakened sleeping monsters in the West. Disinformation, a half-forgotten relic of the Cold War, was newly spoken of as an urgent, existential threat. Russia was said to have exploited the vulnerabilities of the open internet to bypass U.S. strategic defenses by infiltrating private citizens’ phones and laptops. The Kremlin’s endgame was to colonize the minds of its targets, a tactic cyber warfare specialists call “cognitive hacking.”
[…]
The point was echoed by Michael Lumpkin, who headed the State Department’s Global Engagement Center (GEC), the agency Obama designated to run the U.S. counter-disinformation campaign. Lumpkin singled out the Privacy Act of 1974, a post-Watergate law protecting U.S. citizens from having their data collected by the government, as antiquated. “The 1974 act was created to make sure that we aren’t collecting data on U.S. citizens. Well, … by definition the World Wide Web is worldwide. There is no passport that goes with it. If it’s a Tunisian citizen in the United States or a U.S. citizen in Tunisia, I don’t have the ability to discern that … If I had more ability to work with that [personally identifiable information] and had access … I could do more targeting, more definitively, to make sure I could hit the right message to the right audience at the right time.”
The message from the U.S. defense establishment was clear: To win the information war—an existential conflict taking place in the borderless dimensions of cyberspace—the government needed to dispense with outdated legal distinctions between foreign terrorists and American citizens.
Since 2016, the federal government has spent billions of dollars on turning the counter-disinformation complex into one of the most powerful forces in the modern world: a sprawling leviathan with tentacles reaching into both the public and private sector, which the government uses to direct a “whole of society” effort that aims to seize total control over the internet and achieve nothing less than the eradication of human error.
This really is just insanely cool. What a genius idea — take a machine-learning algorithm that can produce images from text, train it on images of spectrograms, let it interpolate between them, and convert the spectrograms back to audio. I could honestly listen to this for quite a while.
I’ve been thinking a lot about confabulation lately, because large language models do it too. And in particular, last night I read an interesting study (https://arxiv.org/abs/2305.04388) that shows that LLMs, asked to explain their decisions, come up with a plausible story that doesn’t necessarily reflect their actual decision process. This is very much something humans do; for examples, see the post quoted below, particularly the section on choice blindness.
We have so far explored confabulation in patients with brain damage. Do neurotypical, everyday people produce “honest lies”?
We confabulate all the time.. We just don’t realize that we are.
In Telling More Than We Can Know: Verbal Reports on Mental Processes, Nisbett & Wilson (1977) review hundreds of studies, across dozens of disciplines. Their evidence admits a theme: people’s attempts to explain their behavior is almost always unhelpful in identifying the important factors influencing their decisions. Let me briefly review four example findings.
This is one of the very few things I’ve ever read that made me feel like I understand the Standard Model just a little bit better.
Although in full honesty he really lost me when he said, ‘…if I gave you the Standard Model, you wouldn’t come back to me and tell me about the existence of a giraffe.’
(I’ve only read the transcript, no idea whether it’s better or worse in it’s original audio form)
^ check out the 15 seconds following 5:38 (direct link to that start time) for some really useful mnemonics for the polyrhythms for 2:3 (‘Nice cup of tea’), 3:4 (‘Pass the goddamn butter’), and 4:5 (‘I’m looking for a home to buy’).
Some others can be found at these links (although you really have to hear them, or feel them out against the polyrhythm, to get them right):
A couple more I figured out by using https://4four.io/ploop:
3:5, emphasis on the 5 — “HEAT UP the CHEESE PIZza PLEASE”
2:5, emphasis on the 5 — “I’VE BEEN CEL-e-BRAT-ING”
3:4 emphasis on the 3, as mentioned above, is “PASS the GODdamn BUTter”. With emphasis on the 4, you can use “I’M LOOKing FOR a CAKE”. It’s pretty interesting to put on a 3:4 rhythm (using eg this excellent tool) and switch between those two.
In 1975, India had a worse-than-usual economic crisis and declared martial law. They asked the World Bank for help. The World Bank, led by Robert McNamara, made support conditional on an increase in sterilizations.
…
In the end about eight million people were sterilized over the course of two years. No one will ever know how many were “voluntary” by standards that we would be comfortable with, but plausibly well below half.
The West didn’t just tolerate this process, they supported it and cheered it on. The Ford and Rockefeller Foundations provided much of the funding. Western media ranged from supportive to concerned-for-the-wrong-reasons…
Maybe now you’ll go read it? I was pretty shocked to learn about this. In the mid-70s! Despite the enormous post-WWII backlash against forcible sterilization for eugenic purposes!
In 2010, Ratcliff started working with brewer’s yeast, the single-celled fungus we use to make bread and beer. He repeatedly grew the yeast in liquid-filled tubes, shook them, and then used the cells that sank fastest to start new cultures. By favoring cells that stick together and settle faster, this simple procedure radically changed the yeast within just 60 days. Now whenever a cell divided in two, the new cells didn’t drift apart as they normally would; instead, they remained attached, creating beautiful, branching snowflakes that comprised dozens of cells. The yeast had evolved multicellularity in just two months.
