Given that no one understands how the mental relates to the physical in the first place, I have no idea how you would reach such a confident conclusion about the phenomenological status of 200k human neurons in a petri dish playing Doom?
There is an extremely straightforward argument that WMDs are precisely what prevented the outbreak of direct warfare between major powers in the latter 20th. (Note that WWI by itself wasn’t sufficient to prevent WWII!)
You can take issue with that argument if you want but it’s unconvincing not to address it.
There’s also an extremely straightforward argument that if the current crop of authoritarian dictatorial players in power now had been then that the outcome of the latter 20th would have been much different.
- had four [!] terms, a move so anomalous it was subsequently patched by constitutional amendment
- threatened court-packing until SCOTUS backed down and stated rubber-stamping his agenda
- ruled entire industries by emergency decree in a way that contemporaries on the left and right compared to Mussolini
- interned 120k people without due process, on the basis of ethnicity
- turned a national party into a personal patronage system
- threatened to override the legislature if it didn’t start passing laws he liked
Not even saying any of this is even good or bad, clearly in the official history it was retroactively justified by victory in WWII. But it’s a bit rich to say that the bomb wasn’t developed under authoritarian conditions.
That's a little bit like saying the bullet in the gun prevented someone getting shot while playing Russian Roulette. We pulled back that hammer several times, and it's purely happenstance that it didn't go off. MAD has that acronym for a reason.
I agree that the risk of an accidental strike was a huge problem with the theory of nuclear deterrence, but the question is: compared to what? In expectation or even in a 1st percentile scenario, was MAD worse than a world where the USSR is a unilateral nuclear power? For that matter, what would it have taken to get a stronger SALT treaty sooner?
I think you need to have people thinking through this stuff at a nuts-and-bolts level if you want to avoid getting dominated by a slightly less nice adversary, and so too with AI. Does a unilateral guarantee not to build autonomous killbots actually make anyone safer if China makes no such promise, or does that perversely put us at more risk?
I’d love to know that the “no killbots, come what may” strategy is sound, but it’s not clear that that’s a stable equilibrium.
> Does a unilateral guarantee not to build autonomous killbots actually make anyone safer if China makes no such promise, or does that perversely put us at more risk?
China considers all lethal autonomous weapons "unacceptable", calling all countries to ban it. Countries like the US and India refuse to back such proposals. See China's official stands on this matter below.
I totally understand that you got brainwashed by the media, but hey you appearantly have internet access, why can't you just do a little bit research of your own before posting nonsense using imagination as your source of information?
China does not consider all lethal autonomous weapons system "unacceptable" even for use, let alone to develop, and the document you linked explains this very clearly. Here's what the document actually says, formatted slightly for clarity:
```
Basic characteristics of Unacceptable Autonomous Weapons Systems should include but not limited to the following:
- Firstly, lethality, meaning sufficient lethal payload (charge) and means.
- Secondly, autonomy, meaning absence of human intervention and control during the entire process of executing a task.
- Thirdly, impossibility for termination, meaning that once started, there is no way to terminate the operation.
- Fourthly, indiscriminate killing, meaning that the device will execute the mission of killing and maiming regardless of conditions, scenarios and targets.
- Fifthly, evolution, meaning that through interaction with the environment, the device can learn autonomously, expand its functions and capabilities in a degree exceeding human expectations.
Autonomous weapons systems with all of the five characteristics clearly have anti-human characteristics and significant humanitarian risks, and the international community could consider following the example of the Protocol on Blinding Laser Weapons and work to reach a legal instrument to prohibit such weapons systems.
```
Charitably, you might say that China is worried about a nightmare scenario. Less charitably, you might say that the definition of an unacceptable weapon system is so tight that it does not describe anything that anyone would ever build, or would want to build. This posture would allow China to adopt the international posture of seeming to oppose autonomous weapons without actually de facto constraining themselves at all.
This, by contrast, is what China considers acceptable:
```
Acceptable Autonomous Weapons Systems could have a high degree of autonomy, but are always under human control. It means they can be used in a secure, credible, reliable and manageable manner, can be suspended by human beings at any time and comply with basic principles of international humanitarian law in military operations, such as distinction, proportionality and precaution.
```
So as long as the system has a killswitch (something that afaik absolutely no one is proposing to dispense with?), it's Acceptable.
Great, now go ahead and prove that AI also reaches strategic equilibrium. This was pretty much self-evident with nuclear weapons so should probably be self-evident for AI too, if it were true.
> For example, transformer-based language models can't reliably do multi-digit arithmetic because they have no number sense, only statistical patterns over digit tokens.
I asked Opus 4.6 to multiply 50,651 x 895,707. It immediately responded: 45,368,055,057. This was wrong, but very close (good to about 10^-5 relative error). I then asked it how it arrived at that answer, and whether it had used any tool calls. It said:
```
No, I didn't use any specialized tools — I just computed it directly. Though I should be honest: large multiplications done "in my head" like this are prone to error. Let me double-check by breaking it down:
50,651 × 895,707
= 50,651 × (900,000 - 4,293)
= 50,651 × 900,000 - 50,651 × 4,293
First term: 50,651 × 900,000 = 45,585,900,000
Second term: 50,651 × 4,293
Result: 45,585,900,000 - 217,444,743 = 45,368,455,257
So my first answer was actually slightly off! The corrected answer is 45,368,455,257.
I don't have a calculator tool available — I'm doing this arithmetically by decomposition. For mission-critical calculations, I'd recommend verifying with a calculator since I can make arithmetic errors on large numbers like this.
```
So I would rate OP's claim (which is supported by a paper from 2024) highly implausible. Opus 4.6 appears to be able to do multi-digit arithmetic formally, as well as give remarkably accurate estimates based on something like "number sense".
I don’t think that I ever wanted to do an arithmetic operation with a computer and have a wrong answer as the result. One day, you’ll be happy with typing ls and have the system ‘rm -rf /‘ itself
Except we know how these work. There's no number sense. It's predicting tokens. It is able to recount the mathematical foundations because in its training dataset, that often happens, both in instructional material and in proofs.
I can’t speak for your friend, but as a former atheist who brcame a Christian (albeit a very mediocre one) I feel like I can see both sides of this so perhaps I can offer a perspective that might help you understand each other better.
When I was an atheist, I assumed that anyone who didn’t care for the kinds of jokes you mentioned was worried that God would zap them with a lightning bolt.
Now I see it a little differently: if you see something as being of great importance, then it simply feels off / wrong / weird / missing the point to treat it as if it’s of little or no importance. In a word, it feels cringe. If such a project holds no allure for you, then you’re not missing much by sitting it out.
Not to harsh on your sense of humor, but I hope it might help to understand your friend better.
If an atheist has a weak explanation of religiosity, perhaps that atheist gets infected with religion.
It shouldn't come as great revelation, to an atheist, that to those infected with a mind virus it "feels cringe" when anything attacks the virus. That's its whole mechanism of action, its fangs. Besides, there's things like faith healing, and gospel churches, and the phrase "religious ecstacy", and all these other signs of the religious getting off on religion, so it should be obvious that they're defending something that feels precious, and are not merely terrorized.
However, if the atheist instead made a shallow assumption that religiosity is simple fear of a smiting bogeyman god, then it would come as a revelation that the religious are in fact having euphoric feelings, and this might be mistaken by the now ex-atheist for divine revelation of the way and the truth and the light, as the fangs sink in.
Using the "mind virus" language of the Right isn't helpful. We know it's a disease. They claim treating people with respect is a disease. Don't reinforce that.
> Rubio was promoting a conspiracy theory about what he has called the “censorship-industrial complex,” which alleges widespread collusion between the US government, tech companies, and civil society organizations to silence conservative voices
Is that a conspiracy theory in the sense of “some crazy low-status nonsense that no one should pay attention to”, or a conspiracy theory in the sense of “a theory about a private arrangement between multiple actors”?
"Kill Musk's Twitter" was literally a Centre for Countering Digital Hate agenda item on a meeting with Senators in the US. The CCDH was started by advisors of Kier Starmer (one who is now his Chief of Staff). It is 100% a left wing pressure group.
I don't see how anyone call it a conspiracy theory any more.
Just think its a geniunely important semantic note that only Americans and hard righters consider Labour + Kier left wing. If the CCDH is a pressure group, its a neo-liberal one.
As an American, most Americans are unable to distinguish between “liberal” (American left, non-specific), Liberal (Lockean traditional capitalism), neoliberal, Communist, socialist, Social Democratic, “progressive”, and the Democratic Party.
Come to think of it, I’m not sure I understand anymore, either. I really do feel like we’re entering a post-ideological tribal era. Ideological stances change minute to minute, mostly according to “who and whom.”
The Know Nothing Party had nothing to do with anti-intellectualism per se. It was a secret anti-immigration party whose members were required to say they “knew nothing” of the group if asked.
Referring to the Sami as "Indigenous" in contrast to the Scandinavian and Finnish peoples seems pretty tendentious. All three of these groups have been in Northern Europe for thousands of years.
Despite the dictionary definition of the word, "indigenous" is more often a statement about the relationship with the state than a statement on cultural or geographic continuity. The Sami have a very different relationship to the Nordic governments than other Fennoscandian groups.
Yeah, that's precisely what I'm objecting to-- smuggling in assumptions about the relationship between Sami and other Northern-European populations by using a term that implies that Scandinavians aren't native to Scandinavia, at least as much as any human population is native to anywhere.
In particular it obscures what is fundamental to the conflict, which is state/settled vs non-state/tribal, not one group being native to the land and the other being some sort of outside occupying force.
My impression of duolingo was strongly influenced by a former PM who said basically what OP said without any hint of ill will in their voice. Duolingo discovered that it was easier to reward-hack short term signals of language learning instead of scaffolding those signals into longterm language learning. Today it’s essentially Candy Crush for people who think they’re too smart for Candy Crush.
That’s not even a diss, it’s just The Way Of The World when you are directly rewarded for growth and retention and very indirectly for language learning.
> Today it’s essentially Candy Crush for people who think they’re too smart for Candy Crush.
That's overly harsh. I use Duolingo for Japanese because
- I thought it would be fun to learn a little about Japanese. And I do learn some, and it is fun.
- I wanted to "understand" a bit of what was being said during subtitled anime I watch. This was _partially_ successful. I understand some words, and I notice some things like "oh, that was a question", and sometimes notice when what was said doesn't match the text. I get enough out of it that it adds to my enjoyment
So, clearly there's a group of people out there that are there to gain some knowledge out of it, and _not_ to rack up some kind of score (and feel superior).
Sorry, that came out as unnecessarily harsh on users when it was intended for Duolingo’s product department. I don’t mean to suggest that the amount of language learning is literally zero, just that whenever language learning is in tension with legible metrics, the latter tends to win out internally.
Fascism and Ayn Rand's political philosophy are pretty different from each other, however you may feel about either one. Not everything you dislike is the same bad thing.
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