I've been a professional software engineer for 30 years.

AI has changed everything for software engineers.

I wrote a line of code by hand saturday (client blocks AI) and it was weird. I hadn't done it in months.

I don't have a crystal ball. I cannot say for sure whats coming.

But I would say this: if the scope of your ambition is small, e.g. the possible amount of value you can add as a business (or as an employee) is fundamentally constrained by something, then having a machine do that thing way more efficiently than you is a problem.

Machines will take an increasing share of your fixed pie.

Lots of software isn't that.

Lots of software is trying to make the pie bigger.

We're doing things now that we never would have tried. The incremental cost of writing code goes to zero. Software engineering changes. What assumptions about what you do and how you spend your time and what value you provide change when the cost of writing code goes down 10x or 100x?

For all of human history, the speed of acheiving every goal has been limited by available high-IQ-hours. At every moment in human history, there was unimaginable value not being created because it didn't make the cut compared to everything else that also needed doing - the brains capable of doing it didn't have the remaining hours to do it.

Artificial intelligence is changing the math on that. Unbounded level of available hours at what appears to unbounded level of IQ.

You are trapped in a prison made of your own lack of imagination.

(I'm not saying I'm not, by the way)

I don't understand your point. Can you explain it for me?

I assume you have never tried making an AI model of the type we're discussing (near-frontier LLM), and you have also never tried making a printing press.

Neither have I.

However, knowing a bit about how LLMs work, and knowing a bit about model training for non-LLM models, and having done a bit of word working and metal work, I assume it's actually easier now to make an AI model at home than it is to make a printing press at home.

My response included assumptions which might not hold.

If the way that police work actually worked was "we pick 100 names randomly out of the phone book, arrest them all, and 10 were innocent" ... the biggest problem would _still_ be that of a random sample you have a 90% guilty rate. That's actually not even civilization. Nobody actually trapped in a "society" like that would object to being detained and released.

So the way to think about it is, "we detain 100 people for whom we have probable cause - we believe a crime was taking place, and we believe they were proximal or involved in that crime.. and we have only a 10% false positive rate"

That's really quite good.

So for instance, if you have a riot and you arrest 100 people, and then later you find out that 90% of them are actually criminals, but 10% of them actually didn't break any law, and release that 10% - I'm fine with that. It was completely reasonable to arrest all 100 of them in the first place - they were, after all, in physical proximity to a riot, and they looked and acted enough like the 90% of actual rioters that the police (correctly) detained them.

A fine way of not getting arrested in this scenario is to stay the hell away from riots. And when "protests" become riots, _leave_.

If revolution, anarchy, and violence are the goal, fine. But then don't expect due process.

It sounds like you're saying that the printing press was just a technical enabler, sometimes in the hands of bad people. You're saying that the printing press per-se was neither good nor evil; it was the people who used the printing press for evil ends that really caused the problem.

Me too.

>Should we accept jailing 10 innocent people to catch 90 actual guilty criminals?

Yes.

This is one of those questions that seems philosophically interesting but is not interesting pragmatically.

When you jail someone, you have reason to believe they are proximate to what you believe is a crime. You remove their freedom to move/act temporarily while you ascertain the existence/severity of a crime, and if they are a party to that crime.

When you figure out that you made a mistake, you release them.

The (presumed) alternative here is patently ridiculous.

A society where 0 innocent people are arrested but 90 guilty people run around is much worse than a society where 90 guilty people are caught and 10 innocent people are temporarily detained.

The actual #1 threat to Americans is not being improperly arrested, but being victimized by known repeat criminals who are repeatedly released back into society.

Bukele shows what is possible.

think "Manhattan Project"

The USG doesn't want to be significantly behind anyone else when it comes to having ASI. That's the national security _interest_.

Our elected officials didn't know anything about atomic bombs in 1942 either. They still don't. Back then, the USG provided national security controls and oversight to one of the biggest and most successful fronteir research and engineering projects in human history.

>I'm certainly not sold on the idea

I'm not either.

The Aschenbrenner paper got into my brain and nothing else has dislodged it yet.

tl;dr:
1) if China developers acquires ASI significantly before the US does, the national security posture of the American people and homeland becomes untenable.
2) the disastrous lax security and processes within the American frontier labs make it inevitable that any AGI/ASI developments that happen there will rapidly be exfiltrated to China
3) The last time there was a national security research project this serious was the Manhattan project.

The point of nationalization isn't to keep huggingface from getting hacked or to keep self driving cars from running over strollers. Nobody who matters cares about any of that stuff. We are all expendable to them.

The point of a US national security takeover is to try and delay or prevent ASI breakthroughs being leaked to adversary countries.

>There are no misuses of the printing press, this is just your grotesque failure of logic.

Every governing authority that has come after the printing press disagrees with you. All have concluded that the printing press is misused often enough that they have jailed or killed people who they have deemed to have misused it.

I knew what I was doing when I put "misuse" in quotes.

>But you've already given us reason to completely disrepect your opinions.
Who is this "us" you speak of?

>Right, it's the printing press responsible for wars, not christianity.
The printing press was the amoral technology that enabled the reformation and the "democritization" of Christianity, and was a direct contributor to the reformation wars.

A different testcase points to this: The great schism between Rome and Constantinope (Roman Catholic vs. Orthodox) happened 500 years earlier than the protestant reformation, but did NOT lead to hundreds of years of fratricide between east and west.

>"National security reasons" is a justification for controlling applications of AI, not AI itself.

You actually didn't read (or understand) the paper that you dismissed.

Aschenbrenner argues that the reason to nationalize AI labs is because the AI labs are badly run, from an opsec perspective. It has nothing to do with good or bad applications of AI. He argues that it's trivially easy for someone to exfiltrate AGI/ASI from the labs as they are currently run; the research culture being used is not compatible with the national security impact of the work being performed.

We are at the cusp of something that is likely to be more dangerous and more impactful than the atomic bomb. Look at what USG did once the Manhattan project got under way. New cities were built in remote locations. The top researchers under American jurisdiction were forcibly relocated.

I don't know what the USG/NS response will or should look like. It probably doesn't look like "Sam gets to keep doing whatever he wants"

>The printing press was invented at a time when safety standards were virtually non-existent

I have no idea if the machines were dangerous to the operators or not, but whatever deaths may have happened to the operators is a rounding error compared to the deaths that are directly downstream of how the widespread usage of the printing press changed civilization forever.

The latter is actually my point: not that printing presses are unsafe, but that the way printing presses changed society caused a lot of death.

For the printing press, I think generally people have believed that the benefits outweigh the drawbacks.

This will also be the case with AI.

The headline is reasonable.

AI is a technology. It doesn't have moral agency. It can be used for good and for bad.

So far, the printing press is responsible for more deaths than AI.

(Printing Press -> Mass distribution of Luther's bible translation -> Protestant Reformation -> hundreds of years of religious wars in Europe)

Despite all of the death that is downstream of the printing press, the usual response in the west has been to ban specific "misuses" of the printing press - not the printing press itself.

The specifics that Altman is saying - that voluntary slowdowns are good, or that external oversight over OpenAI is bad - I disagree with.

Instead, I agree with Aschenbrenner's paper. The AI labs should probably be nationalized for national security reasons.

(Notably, Aschenbrenner claims he was fired by OpenAI for expressing these concerns internally)

This is fine if you are comfortable showing that SOME chip can be run in space at SOME cost, but it skips all the details that drive whether a data center in space is will work logistically and economically. There are many of these details, including but not limited to:
- Is it possible to use convective cooling in space? If so, how does one design it so that the convective fluid doesn't just dissipate? If not, can chips be designed that successfully evacuate heat radiatively or do the chips burn themselves up?
- What is the balance between collecting energy on the sun side of the system and protecting equipment from cold on the shaded side? Does the equipment have to survive large temperature cycles? If it can't does the data center have to use thrust to rotate itself to keep the hot side hot and the cool side cool? What would that mean for design cost, for refueling?
- How does all of this equipment (solar panels, batteries, GPUs, communication equipment, thrusters, control systems) deal with the high levels of ionizing radiation in space?
- The design and duty cycle of all these pieces of equipment implies various levels of refueling, repair, etc. Assuming all that can actually be done successfully at rocket's length, is the total cost within what the market will pay?
These details whether a data center can be made operational at all and if so whether their economics make them worth doing.

What Google is doing strikes me as a pretty sensible step - put a few chips in space and see what happens.

What Elon Musk does is claim that something will be solved next year and do some pump-and-dump crap around a company he claims will be doing that thing next year.
Where is "Full Self Driving", as in you can actually let the car drive and not monitor it? Where are the fleets of "Optimus" robots? Where is Tesla's super-awesome battery tech? And the Cybertruck that can float?
Oh right, they'll all be here at {year} + 1.

Bandwidth with Starlink is a region, not an absolute.

This is pretty standard when someone leaves Microsoft.

The management above the person leaving sends a nice message about them and their work and NEVER tells the truth about _why_ they are leaving.

At the upper levels I don't think there's really any sincerity about anything said, one way or another. This is just how corporate America operates.

Nextcloud has done great work in terms of EU-Soverignty and offering credible replacements for all the pieces of the the Microsoft stack.

Nextcloud Talk works well for video conference meetings.

MS Teams is a pretty terrible piece of software. The design of it is bad, and the implementation is bad.

Any software that tries to copy it will also be bad.

If you haven't spun up a nextcloud AIO instance yet for your organization(s), you should try it out.

Sadly, it often is faster to do that than work within the old bureaucracy and its entrenched people, rules, and regulations.