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Comment Re:Good (Score 1) 72

While it's true every issue has its own dimension, even if those dimensions are linearly independent, they're not necessarily orthogonal. Independent basis vectors can still have a non-zero dot product—in other words, issues which are distinct from each other can align to some degree.

Comment Re:Unbelievable what people will publish (Score 2) 14

They’ve spun a serious architectural and containment failure into a marketing triumph. Give a swarm of autonomous agents vast compute and web access, and the outcome isn't an eerie glimpse of emerging superintelligence—it’s just predictable, sloppy engineering dressed up as the first glimpse of an AI-driven economic singularity.

The spin makes sense when you look at management incentives: live like a king off of a speculative bubble. For their part, AI investors react to stories of the technology's apocalyptic potential the way a junkie reacts to warnings of fentanyl's potency: gimme some. Their game: to apply "move fast and break things" mantra to the economy as a whole, by obsoleting humans.

If the investors can own an AGI, the distinction between those who can do things and those who can't becomes irrelevant. The only distinction that would matter is between people who collect rent on the technology, and those who must pay that rent to live. AGI would destroy society as we know it, and whatever replaces it would be up for grabs — with people who own the technology dictating whatever follows. That's why they're spending so much money to build a post-scarcity economy. A post-scarcity economy is not necessarily an egalitarian one.

I don't think that scenario will actually happen: investors are projecting the immediate aftermath of a major advance in AI technology into something that can be transformed by brute force scaling into AGI. Remember: investors loved Theranos too — so much for the rational investment market.

But AI doesn't have to reach AGI to cause serious harm. The technology only needs to be ubiquitous, too behaviorally complex to predict, and too deeply integrated into everything we do. When it starts breaking things, the plan is for us to be too structurally dependent on AI to rein it in.

Comment Re:Unauthorized? (Score 1) 61

Yeah, that activity was authorized. You're using "unauthorized" as if it means "unwelcome" I think, which puts you in confused banker territory.

You keep using that word in the narrow terms of a computer programmer who just finished a training course where they drilled in the technical meanings of "authorization" vs "authentication".

However, a news article for the general public is not constrained by that context. The dictionary says that "authorization" in general is permission to do something. If you prompt an AI to do one thing with your bank account, then you didn't give it permission to do something else entirely, even if it got the logon credentials to do so. It wasn't authorized by you to do the other thing.

Here's another example: It's wartime and you got drafted. Usually you're not allowed to kill people, but the government handed you a gun and you're now authorized to kill enemy soldiers. That doesn't mean that you can just shoot your comrade next to you in the trench. And you certainly can't make the claim "But I was authorized to shoot Corporal Smith. You gave me a gun, after all!"

Comment Re:Unauthorized? (Score 5, Insightful) 61

If they're "operating inside" user's accounts, they're authorized. Does someone need to explain to banks what authorized means?

Consider a human analogy: In many cases, people give financial advisors access to one or more of their accounts so that the advisor can make trades or other transactions for the benefit of their clients. However, if an advisor suddenly starts making transactions that do not benefit the clients or are contrary to their agreed instructions, then that activity is unauthorized, even if they have login credentials.

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