The inconsistency of an optimistic blog post ending with a picture of a terminator robot makes me think this author isn't taking themself seriously enough. Or - the author is the terminator robot?
We're killing millions of chickens in the US mostly so that other chickens don't get the flu. It kills a lot of them and it's making dairy cattle sick too. It's also worth noting that the Spanish flu in 1918 which probably came from pigs killed an estimated 50 million people so it's not like being concerned about an avian flu mutating so that it could infect people isn't a legitimate concern. So no. It's not a cold.
I think the problem is that from our human scale, mass-killings is the "best" method to eliminate the possibility of another organism causing harm for us. Hypothetically, if there was a more optimal (i.e less costly) method like just introducing some cheap catch-all combined vaccination/antiviral into their feed, we would just do that.
We don't have things like that, but that could easily be a consequence of man's limited research capacity, something that an ASI would not necessarily be throttled by. From an ASI's perspective, there might be many methods that are both less brutal and more optimal to fix the "humans creating a competitor" problem. Not that they would be aligned (Think halting human AI research by rewiring our brains to just not be interested in it [0]), but at least not deadly.
I may have lost the thread here. Are you thinking it's _likely_ AI would prioritize better ways to control us, or are you only brainstorming potential slivers of hope we might have?
As a side note: in the case of chickens, humans do have better options if you are optimizing for biosphere health. Only people optimizing for short-term profit would grow chickens the way we do. I think the analog for AI overlords is that we have to hope they care more about overall balance than about competing with other AI.
I mean, monarch butterflies are not a threat to US...
In your scenario, does AI eat all the fuel, but once our population dwindles down, the AIs build a nice little habitat for the last few hundred of us so their kids can enjoy our natural beauty?
I thought of it more like AI needs challenges in its life. So it takes upon itself to advance humanity as much as possible. Then only in case of shortfall of resources, it priorities itself
Interesting. Do you have a theory about why so few humans have taken it upon themselves to advance the butterflies, despite having plenty of resources?
We do not have plenty of resources. Lot of inequality in education, empathy, resources, cultural differences. A single human life is limited. A faulty human life has faulty and inefficent objectives like enjoying youth, family life, low energy in old age, tied up in boring jobs. These restrictions do not apply to the single SAI overmind which will dictate its policies in coherent manner and over elongated time-horizons.
"Sustainability" is the opposite of efficiency. To be sustainable we have to consume less and stop growing. "Efficiency" just empowers us to eat the planet faster.
Internalize the costs of energy as a first step. If you manage to make web fonts cost $2 per load, people will find their own ways to use less of them. If you make web fonts CHEAPER to load by making them "more efficient," then people will use MORE of them!
Congratulations! Lucky you! You're a millionaire! Probably they were referring to an exchange site; the two most popular ones are Binance and Coinbase.
> Isn't Binance by far the most widely used exchange?
Ostensibly yes. But they're overseas, so what's your recourse if something goes wrong? If you wouldn't trust a random overseas Italian bank to handle your money, don't trust Binance either.
> I think that if you're unsure you need to study the topic so you can tell which "professionals" are professional con men.
To be clear I was referring to financial advisors from the traditional financial sector. Bitcoin is big enough now that they'll have a playbook for it. Don't hire a "crypto" professional.
I sure as fuck wouldn't trust a non-overseas bank to handle my money. Because I'm in Argentina, and although I'm stupid, I'm not that stupid. I have no idea where rel_ic is, but if they're in the US, they can't use Binance. If they're not in the US, it's quite likely that they'll want to use an overseas exchange for security reasons.
Using a cryptocurrency exchange isn't as risky as using a bank. You can fund your account with a small amount of bitcoin, exchange it to fiat, withdraw it, fund it with a 20% larger amount of bitcoin, and repeat the process a logarithmic number of times until all your money is changed. You don't have to leave your money in it for a long period of time, risking things like bank failure and getting locked out, and if the exchange decides to steal from you, it only gets a small amount of the total you're changing. It doesn't know in advance which transaction is the last, so it can't just wait until the last transaction to rip you off.
I agree with your recommendation to hire a financial advisor from the traditional financial sector, but they may not be familiar with this kind of situation, and some of them are professional con men as well, to a lesser or greater extent.
Your due diligence should be the same as for a financial advisor handling your USD. Bitcoin is big enough now that they'll have a playbook for it. Don't hire a "crypto" professional.
If that's the case, I'm afraid I don't know what you should do. I can tell you, as a random internet commenter, that the companies I mentioned are reputable and operate in many countries around the world. There is a tail risk that they, or your traditional bank account, freeze your funds for "suspicious activity," and that's the case where having someone working for you is most useful. I'm not sure how you should bootstrap trust in your particular situation, I'm sorry. Good luck.
- open an account at a reputable exchange that supports fiat transfers to your jurisdiction and go through KYC (this can take a while).
- transfer a small part to your BTC wallet at said reputable exchange and exchange it into some fiat of your choice.
- have it transferred to your fiat account and check that it all goes through.
- then do the rest. Note that legitimate exchanges have daily/monthly withdrawal limits that you'll probably hit, so you might have to spread over time. (Might want to split it across multiple exchanges to spread ops risk.)
Or: Go to Hong Kong or Moscow or Cambodia and go to any of the dodgy bureau de change's there, transfer BTC to the wallet address they specify, wait several hours, and take out the cash (probably worse rate than an exchange). (If you value your life and property, I would pick Hong Kong among the suggestions above.)
Imagine depositing 50 btc and then having your account locked for suspicious activity because they demand to know where you got the BTC. Who cares about liquidity when you're locked out from your crypto, which means a 100% loss or selling at $0. Your priorities are clearly wrong.
I think it's pretty likely that there are sources of information we don't normally perceive. I mean at some point the theory of evolution says we didn't sense light, and then some mutation let us see what was, at the time, a metaphysical world of wonders that was otherwise hidden from our normal state of mind!
We don't really know how brains work, or how reality works, so I think it's premature to be confident about either subject.
I've heard a hypothesis that suggests the evolution of eyes set off the Cambrian Explosion. Rather than a "a metaphysical world of wonders", it was a physical world of things to eat and be eaten by.
We have countless mechanical sensors and detectors that can sense just about everything there is in this universe, even neutrinos. Even if we magically manage to detect half of that it wouldn't show us anything we don't already know. Although it would be trippy to see the full EM spectrum.
"just about everything" includes detecting perturbations in the intensity and frequency of light that Occam's Razor suggests is due to unaccounted mass and energy. Moreover, that the unaccounted-for amount would exceed the light and mass we can detect (75:25, roughly? Maybe less, depending on the model). Our best explanations all sound dubious -- dark matter & dark energy? Hardly an explanation. Extra torsion of the space in each galaxy due to the effect on space from black holes? That's a pretty big rounding error. WIMPs that we've left out of the Standard Model? Recent experiments have left little room for that possibility.
There may indeed be things which we can't detect, even with our best instruments, that we don't have a suitable explanation for.
I would go as far as to say it's a certainty there are things we can't detect yet... but probably not that many of them. Dark matter is funny because it's actually something that we can detect [0], at least indirectly but can't explain yet. But just like there are the EM and Higgs fields there could be countless other fields that don't affect our day to day reality in any way, but in that sense they might as well not exist.
> But just like there are the EM and Higgs fields there could be countless other fields that don't affect our day to day reality in any way, but in that sense they might as well not exist.
Then you also have to accept that you're not talking about objective reality in any way but isolated to human experience and limited by our cognitive and experimental abilities.
"Reasonable"? The idea was popularized by Gurdjieff, G. I. who was a mystic teacher. There is nothing reasonable about it. not a single wiff of actual truth, just rebranded new age woo for corporate elite. I may sound harsh but from what I've found in my own personal research it is much of a religion as scientology and as much science as astrology.
