cool idea. once we have mandated ivf as the only way of conception we can probably start selecting sperm from populations with higher than average iq too.
A mandate would be only one way to reach that state, and I don't think it would be a good way. Better would be a situation where female children become desired over male children, for example because they have better career prospects. In a female dominated society, discrimination against men could be a thing. Today, already, female students on average outperform male students in school and university.
my comment was tounge-in-cheek, pointing out that its essentially eugenics which is a controversial topic. although apparently less so when its applied to "Y chromosome holders" as you can see in a sibling reply where this particular group of people are deemed problematic and something that should be got rid of.
In a mostly-female world where women reproduce by artificial insemination I could see the sperm being marketed with focus on the qualities of the source. This is positive eugenics, albeit being driven by individual decisions, and could include genetic screening. Indeed, selection by women of desirable mates is already a kind of eugenics.
We already have AGI, artificial general intelligence. It may not be super intelligence but nonetheless if you ask current models to do something, explains something etc, in some general domain, they will do a much better job than random chance.
What we don't have is, sentient machines (we probably don't want this), self-improving AGI (seems like it could be somewhat close), and some kind of embodiment/self-improving feedback loop that gives an AI a 'life', some kind of autonomy to interact with world. Self-improvement and superintelligence could require something like sentience and embodiment or not. But these are all separate issues.
> it all rests on (relatively) simple mathematics. We know this is true. We also know that means it has limitations and can't actually reason information.
What do you imagine is happening inside biological minds that enables reasoning that is something different to, a lot of, "simple mathematics"?
You state that because it is built up of simple mathematics it cannot be reasoning, but this does not follow at all, unless you can posit some other mechanism that gives rise to intelligence and reasoning that is not able to be modelled mathematically.
Because whats inside our minds is more than mathematics, or we would be able to explain human behavior with the purity of mathematics, and so far, we can't.
We can prove the behavior of LLMs with mathematics, because its foundations are constructed. That also means it has the same limits of anything else we use applied mathematics for. Is the broad market analysis that HFT firms use software for to make automated trades also intelligent?
Your first sentence is a non-sequitur. The fact that we can't explain human behavior does not mean that our minds are more than mathematics.
While absence of proof is not proof of absence, as far as I know, we have not found a physics process in the brain that is not computable in principle.
Note that what you claim is not a fact, but a (highly controversial) philosophical position. Some notable such "non-computationalist" views are e.g. Searle's biological naturalism, Penrose's non-algorithmic view (already discussed, and rejected, by Turing) and of course many theological dualist views.
For your claim to be true, it would need to be provably impossible to explain human behavior with mathematics.
For that to be true, humans would need to be able to compute functions that are computable but outside the Turing computable, outside the set of lambda functions, and outside the set of generally recursive functions (the tree are computationally equivalent).
We know of no such function. We don't know how to construct such a function. We don't know how it would be possible to model such a function with known physics.
It's an extraordinary claim, with no evidence behind it.
The only evidence needed would be a single example of a function we can compute outside the Turing computable set, which would seem to make the lack of such evidence make it rather improbably.
It could still be true, just like there could truly be a teapot in orbit between Earth and Mars. I'm nt holding my breath.
I mean some people have a definition of intelligence that includes a light switch, it has an internal state, it reacts to external stimuli to affect the world around it, so a light switch is more intelligent than a rock.
Leaving aside where you draw the line of what classifies as intelligence or not , you seem to be invoking some kind of non-materialist view of the human mind, that there is some other 'essence' that is not based on fundamental physics and that is what gives rise to intelligence.
If you subscribe to a materialist world view, that the mind is essentially a biological machine then it has to follow that you can replicate it in software and math. To state otherwise is, as I said, invoking a non-materialistic view that there is something non-physical that gives rise to intelligence.
No, you don’t need to reach for non-materialistic views in order to conclude that we don’t have a mathematical model (in the sense that we do for an LLM) for how the human brain thinks.
We understand neuron activation, kind of, but there’s so much more going on inside the skull-neurotransmitter concentrations, hormonal signals, bundles with specialized architecture-that doesn’t neatly fit into a similar mathematical framework, but clearly contributes in a significant way to whatever we call human intelligence.
> it all rests on (relatively) simple mathematics. We know this is true. We also know that means it has limitations and can't actually reason information.
This was the statement I was responding to, it is stating that because it's built on simple mathematics it _cannot_ reason.
Yes we don't have a complete mathematical model of human intelligence, but the idea that because it's built on mathematics that we have modelled, that it cannot reason is nonsensical, unless you subscribe to a non-materialist view.
In a way, he is saying (not really but close) that if we did model human intelligence with complete fidelity, it would no longer be intelligence.
Any model we can create of human intelligence is also likely to be incomplete until we start making complete maps of peoples brains since we all develop differently and take different paths in life (and in that sense it's hard to generalize what human intelligence even is). I imagine at some point someone will come up with a definition of intelligence that inadvertently classifies people with dementia or CTE as mindless automatons.
It feels like a fool's errand to try and quantify intelligence in an exclusionary way. If we had a singular, widely accepted definition of intelligence, quantifying it would be standardized and uncontroversial, and yet we have spent millennia debating the subject. (We can't even agree on how to properly measure whether students actually learned something in school for the purposes of advancement to the next grade level, and that's a much smaller question than if something counts as intelligent.)
Don't we? Particle physics provides such a model. There is a bit of difficulty in scaling the calculations, but it is sort of like the basic back propagation in a neural network. How <insert modern AI functionality> arises from back propagation and similar seems compared to how human behavior arises from particle physics, in that neither our math nor models can predict any of it.
>Because whats inside our minds is more than mathematics,
uh oh, this sounds like magical thinking.
What exactly in our mind is "more" than mathematics exactly.
>or we would be able to explain human behavior with the purity of mathematics
Right, because we understood quantum physics right out of the gate and haven't required a century of desperate study to eek more knowledge from the subject.
Unfortunately it sounds like you are saying "Anything I don't understand is magic", instead of the more rational "I don't understand it, but it seems to be built on repeatable physical systems that are complicated but eventually deciperable"
ita disconcerting to see such naivety around security issues on hn.
not that windows is keeping passwords in plaintext, but that it's not immediately obvious that un-sandboxed apps that run on your windows/linux/mac desktop have virtually unlimited other avenues to capture passwords given they can read the entire state of other windows at the very least.
I dunno maybe macos is slightly better, and wayland definitely has some things which are better about this, but desktop os and $locally_installed_app means $locally_installed_app basically has root, there is just an exploding amount of vectors.
I'd like to see a linux based distrubution use some of the sandboxing in Android, it would be a order of magnitude improvement over what is going on now.
I actually agree with you, I don’t think a constitutional amendment will be ratified in my lifetime. But a lot of things I didn’t think I’d ever see have happened in the last two weeks
The FBI and 51 Intelligence officials signed a document saying Hunter Biden's laptop was Russian disinformation 2-3 weeks before the last election, when in fact it was actually Hunter Biden's laptop.
The FBI never made such a statement, and the 51 *former* intelligence officers made a statement that, in their opinion, the laptop contained hallmarks of Russian disinformation, and all of this occurred 2 weeks before the 2020 election for maximum political effect.
The reason trump won is that is he authentic. He is following through on his promises. He doesn't have 20 speech writers corralling his every word to be completely neutral and say nothing at all.
It's insane to me that the so called left are going to bat to defend the status quo, when the status quo is multi-national corporations lobbying gov for their own goals of super globalist trade. Isn't "buy local" a left position? Obviously trump is a flawed character, even the most ardent supporters will admit that. But he is not a cookie cutter straight of the factory line politician.
The same goes for Elon, he is an idiot a lot of time, but he is not a lobbyist just sitting in the shadows, he is public about being an idiot for better and worse.
These are all left wing ideas, f the corruption, that's what doge is supposed to be doing, it supposed to be cutting out inefficient spending, which lets be honest, will go to friends of friends, but the left are losing their shit because they got their funding for dressing up as the opposite sex cut off.
> The reason trump won is that is he authentic. He is following through on his promises. He doesn't have 20 speech writers corralling his every word to be completely neutral and say nothing at all.
I find it absolutely incredible that people believe this.
Trump LIES about everything, all the time. He just lies in all directions. He lies that the sun is blue, he lies that the sun is red, he sometimes that the sun is pink.
Then a decent chunk of the population chooses the lies they like and ignores the rest.
Whatever you think about Musk, he is a lot more transparent than other big donors and people who vie for influence in the USG. He is an idiot at times for sure, but he is an idiot publicly.
It's insane to me that people on the so called left are going to bat for the status quo, the status quo that protects bureaucrats and lobbyists and friends giving friends contracts and salaries.
Someone saying extremely stupid things in public, just making shit up and punishing those pointing that out, doesn't strike me as "honest", it strikes me as heavily disordered. And starting this stuff on a Friday night is the opposite of being transparent or welcoming scrutiny. Also:
> Thomas Shedd, a Musk-associate and now head of the General Services Administration’s Technology Transformation Services (TTS), told government tech workers in a meeting this week that the administration plans to widely deploy AI throughout the government. Shedd also said the administration would need help altering login.gov, a government login system, to further integrate with sensitive systems like social security “to further identify individuals and detect and prevent fraud,” which employees identified on the meeting as “an illegal task.”
Finally, batting against someone trying to make the status quo worse for his own gains isn't "batting for the status quo". If your house needs renovating, and I stop someone who tries to set it on fire, it doesn't mean I'm against renovation.
So you prefer corporate speak suits who don't make the mistake of embarrassing themselves in public? Because they don't ever speak in public? Are you honestly telling me you prefer un-named lobbyists having influence, because that has been the status quo. At least we can point the finger at Musk. And yes, I would posit doing and saying stupid shit in public IS more human than what we normally get. Its a pretty normal human behavior to make mistakes, embarrass yourself, lash out, etc. It's certainly more human like behavior than elected politicians engage in where they disclose absolutely nothing and hide behind PR speak approved by a team of 20.
I don't really know what your quote is about, seems like grinding a specific gear which I'm not particularly interesting in looking into.
But to your final point. The jury is still out on whether Musk acts _exclusively_ for his own gains. Sure he has an ego, but he was also instrumental in bringing EVs to the market (which many of his now opponents were quick to adopt), and at the very least has rekindled an interest in space exploration and so on.
I have many misgivings about the man, but at least we can see him. Which is better than the previous status-quo.
This is a False Dilemma fallacy. I'm not going to pretend the government is perfect but handing the keys of the kingdom to a Nazi will always be a bad idea. Let's do something else.
> So you prefer corporate speak suits who don't make the mistake of embarrassing themselves in public? Because they don't ever speak in public?
No, because they're not insane, have no clue what they're talking about, and don't call anyone who points that out a "radical leftist", or whatever their particular word for "unperson" would be.
> At least we can point the finger at Musk
And then you can get fired, like the Twitter engineer correcting his utter nonsense claims about how Twitter works. So he's an "idiot" (lies, smears people, and talks nonsense, too), but at least he's unable to hide it.
Because since we "can point our fingers at him" the pointed fingers get dismissed. Some people even said he can't have anything to hide because he posts so much on X. Okay, so so we know he's a terrible person and up to idiotic, destructive things, but that's a good thing, because other people could be worse because they're not posting every brain fart on a social media site they bought for that purpose. What?
> I would posit doing and saying stupid shit in public IS more human than what we normally get
All humans are human. One world you could use, just not for Musk, is "humane". To me he's very stuck up, pseudo-intellectual and pseudo-deep. He's not an adorable dork, he's a pushy, controlling, cowardly try hard. He wants desperately to be liked, or feared, or respected, but he doesn't genuinely love other people, and he isn't genuinely curious either, so it's all just a ghoulish, awkward, and completely dishonest show.
And people who don't tell people to "fuck their face" and such, or agree with neo-nazi conspiracy theories, or don't find outrage at their Hitler salute so funny they can't stop joking to the point even the ADL says something, etc. don't only refrain from these things because they have big PR team.
> Sure he has an ego, but he was also instrumental in bringing EVs to the market (which many of his now opponents were quick to adopt), and at the very least has rekindled an interest in space exploration and so on.
And if WWII hadn't happened, we wouldn't have computers right now. So? We would have had them 300 years later or whatever. This idea how progress, that humans constantly nibble at, that they cannot help but think about, could only have happened exactly how it happened is something I don't buy into. And without looking at the damage it's not a credible "calculation" anyway.
I have never seen a thread on this site so full of vitriol, hatred, threats of blacklisting for life, threats of violence and general hysteria. And that kind of rhetoric is entirely coming from one side. (or at least the not dead comments of that nature are coming from one side)
Regardless of where you stand, I think a lot of people who have been commenting on here about blacklisting or worse about the named individuals need to check themselves, these are young men who have lives and families.
