Everyone now focus on compromising the device instead.

The word communication gets vastly overused, as if the environment will force you to communicate and that'll just work.

What's really meant is empathy, intelligence, and buying into the values and goals and attitudes.

If people are already compatible then you DO NOT NEED TO BE IN THE SAME ROOM. You'll naturally find each other online or on calls as and when needed.

If you have to force people into the same airspace in order to get white collar work done then you don't have a team, you have reluctant and undriven and incompatible people.

That's an extreme example. How about an ordinary example? She seems great, and I feel in love (factually I don't know her whole life story, nor whether she has the genes which make her prone to addiction, nor what psychological damage is lurking in her sub personalities, nor whether she will have fertility problems etc.)

My point is we rely on narratives far more maybe than we realise. Which is why everyone who wants to manipulate, can just focus on using narratives. Hence more "valuable".

That's how I use it and I find it works really well as a lossy search engine.

The brain is not one model trying to do everything.

I think maybe the big mistake that's been made is imagining that intelligence is just one model.

You only have to introspect a bit to realize that when you go through your day you're flipping and changing states between what I guess would be different intelligences.

It probably makes no sense to think of the brain as being a single model.

We have lots and lots of models which are all "trained" or good in some way at doing certain things.

We have mathematical intelligence, emotional intelligence, physical intelligence, and so on.

That's probably because the brain has all these different specialist regions, and there's some interesting new work on the left and right hemispheres as a whole representing two entirely different modes of attention -- ways of attending to the world.

(The old left-right brain thing apparently got it wrong but the new research thinks they've got the real answer.)

I think AIs should be designed as highly specialist models which are really good at doing specific things.

I'm sure it has an uncanny ability to recognise patterns where humans can't see them, given enough training.

Maybe these models are breaking down because they're trying to bring together too many disparate things and they lose structure because there is no one structure which can do them all.

Specialist models with specialist real world problems. The AI "apps".

Narratives are often more valuable than facts. Why did you marry X rather than Y? Why buy brand A rather than B? Why vote for J rather than K? Etc. Most of our lives are a continuous need to make meaning. That's why we're so easy to manipulate.

If material could never be reproduced (reading and remembering) then the material would be worthless to everyone. But if it could always be reproduced with no benefit to its creators, then they could not feed themselves and survive. Where to set the balance is full of detail and difficulty.

LLMs may well need their own special rules. For example, I for one gave up my O'Reilly subscription because now I can get most of that quickly looking up the basics of some tech thing quite quickly from an LLM -- so somehow the AI companies are benefiting and the original publishers are suffering. Those kinds of balances need to be addressed.

Great reminder how often we read something and assume it's true even when it seems outrageous.

I think I should've said in my post that I'm talking about the long-term, and in the long-term technology giving people a slight edge towards the good.

For example, pick any favourite great good person from history, so for sake of argument I'm going to pick the Buddha. He lived 2500 years ago, and explained to people how to develop themselves. And yet, that was thousands of years ago.

Then take an event like the invention of the Guttenberg press. Take the ability to mass print books. Take the invention of the washing machine.

We are all living in a material world, and as important as what is in our hearts is, we're all ultimately constrained by the environment that we live in.

People say trust the science, but every scientist has to keep their jobs and keep feeding their families and do what their funding constraints them to do and report. They're bound by the physical material constraints of the world we live in.

Make communication easier, make survival easier, and it becomes easier for people to do the right thing, rather than just being an impossible task.

Yes, I completely agree that those in power will manipulate technology to their advantage, and if they could put a chip in our brain that controlled our thoughts they would do it, and yet over the centuries and millennia we do seem to gradually creep forward towards the good, not withstanding all the stuff that we still see is terrible in the world today, generally speaking, the past was worse, way worse.

There are billions of people communicating mostly freely on the Internet today. I understand that is this is making all the horrors in the world stand out even more, but there is a saying, that awareness is very helpful.

And grassroots movements need power to be heard so they get corrupted or simply are setup from the start as propaganda machines.

No, the answer will come from technology. The powerful are as dependent on technology as everyone, and technology is a systemic evolutionary force, as it were. It brings change, often to be exploited by the powerful, but there's also a few extra percent in favour of the little people. It's that slim margin which has tended to progress towards freedom rather than tyranny in the long run.

I don't know the details in this case, but generally, any admin tasks which affect important corporate servers, should be done on separate laptops which are dedicated to that and never used for anything else. No email, web browsing, none.

The idea that we have to make every corporate device super secure and safe and totally locked down, regardless of its purpose is a foolish endeavour, because it's generally impossible, and hugely distracting from simply focusing on on what matters.

Yeah that's a good point. It's not good at things which are too specific. I guess that's a reflection of its training which is broad, and not for a specific problem or context. I mean some are trained for a very specific task, but these so-called general intelligence models are just going to be a general imitation. Here's the thing, in real life a human being trains themselves in the moment, that's what the AI is going to have to do be able to work -- train itself in the moment and adapt to new situations dynamically.

Computing has been done using logic, and now we can do computing with patterns.

It is both surprising and yet not inherently a leap a 1000 years into the future.

The LLMs seem to show the big patterns in our collective words. That's amazing because no human can learn and remember that much material by rote learning.

And there's probably millions of special tasks which could be pattern processed. How economies behave, for example.

There's also going to be a lot of trial and error to figure out which tasks they can and can't do.

But this is still basically computing.

The WEF has a very strange ideological worldview around mega corporate power and engineering society, and maybe they like to advertise themselves as the future concentration of power, so as to full everyone into wanting to join their club. So their pronouncements should be taken with a grain of salt.

Personally, I think that's very true.

And I don't mean to oversimplify, but maybe it’s also that the society and the institutions are a reflection of the individuals. It's easy to blame corporations -- they are, in a sense, psychopathic, by the profit rule -- but then corporations are made of people, and people will also protect their own interests.

I can only imagine that people on average would have to develop a lot more integrity. It would take a lot to walk away from a job purely because you realised it was harming society.

About ten years ago I ran into someone who'd left our organisation and had a new job working for, I think, a big Pharma company. Their role required them to travel to sites one day a week, and the rest was work from home with online meetings, and a monthly get together/social in person.

She said it was amazing, and it all worked really well. I was sceptical, but when I thought about the nature of what she was doing, it seemed to make a lot of sense.

Of course Covid only came many years later, but I guess that there's a wide variety of companies out there, and some are maybe smart about what works best for their stuff, and maybe some not some not so smart. It's a bit like having daily stand-up meetings, where for some kinds of work they make a lot of sense, and for some they make no sense and just get in the away.

In 1948, the groundbreaking book, The Road to Survival, which coined the term "carrying capacity", in its introductory chapters it gave an example of a scientist who has just discovered a cure for some woeful disease afflicting many millions, but then has to weigh up whether, morally, they should withhold the cure, because in the end, if more people survive, it will merely cause more destruction of the environment, or at the very least, more suffering for the people because they run out of resources like food and shelter, because of the environmental destruction.

Some people call that "apocalyptic environmentalism", but I feel it's always lurking there in the background.

Whenever someone comes up with a new technology that will make everything better, this is the ultimate argument against any kind of cheap, available, reliable energy -- because by providing lots of energy, it merely encourages everything else to overshoot the carrying capacity.

It's an argument that ultimately, all of environmentalism comes down to overpopulation. If ecologists were already thinking of overpopulation in 1948, what about now, when the world's population is multiple times bigger?

I don't think it's something people like to talk about or admit, but that's partly because we've been, to some extent, propagandized into only thinking it's about "climate", or some other impersonal thing.

But there is definitely a current out there that says that it's ultimately and fundamentally about overpopulation. In that view, nuclear energy is simply bad and should always be blocked.

Some people sidestep it by making it purely a moral issue, that the West is greedy and over-consumes -- but any cut in greed will get overwhelmed by increasing population anyway, especially if people think the only sustainable carrying capacity is closer to 500 million.

When people insist that nuclear is bad and that the next batch of AA batteries they ordered from Amazon will solve the storage issue, and won't explain any further, I wonder if it's this background belief that there's too many greedy humans on the planet.

I'd rather people were open about that, rather than trying to sneak in changes to infrastructure which will deindustrialise us before anyone really notices. That would then be a case of, a few privileged folk deciding what's best for the rest of humanity.