Shut it all down. (246)
Awake again at 3 a.m. But this time I got up and did more than a full day of work...by 9 a.m.
I wrote 1,844 words on The Night Watchers. I began work on another new paleo' paper. I spent about an hour on the phone with Mike Polcyn talking about mosasaur intercranial circulation, CAT/tomography, and δ13C and how radioactive isotopes can help us understand mosasaur paleoecology, especually foraging patterns. I called Jun at McWane. I should have emailed Merrilee, but I forgot, and now it's too late. So I'll email her tomorrow.
So, it's one thing not to sleep and be unable to work. It's another to be unable to sleep and then work like a fiend.
Cloudy all day. A little rain. Our high was only 67F.
Here is a piece at Time magazine on the immediate threat of AI that everyone shoud read, written by Dr. Eliezer Yudkowsky, a decision theorist from the U.S. and a lead researcher at the Machine Intelligence Research Institute. Right now, it is beyond overwhelming trying to allow oneself to fully comprehend all the threats to continued human survival in the very short term. And one of those is AI, and it is all happening so very fast, and it was all so avoidable.
To visualize a hostile superhuman AI, don’t imagine a lifeless book-smart thinker dwelling inside the internet and sending ill-intentioned emails. Visualize an entire alien civilization, thinking at millions of times human speeds, initially confined to computers-in a world of creatures that are, from its perspective, very stupid and very slow. A sufficiently intelligent AI won’t stay confined to computers for long. In today’s world you can email DNA strings to laboratories that will produce proteins on demand, allowing an AI initially confined to the internet to build artificial life forms or bootstrap straight to postbiological molecular manufacturing.
If somebody builds a too-powerful AI, under present conditions, I expect that every single member of the human species and all biological life on Earth dies shortly thereafter. ~ Eliezer Yudkowsky
And it actually gets scarier.
At least the catastrophic effects of global warming that we are beginning to see, that will utterly devastate the planet in the decades to come, at least those took centuries to set in motion. In theory, we could have stopped it. In theory, we could still avoid the worst-case scenarios. But, with AI, the djinn is out of its bottle, and it makes splitting the atom look like a harmless lark. And this is not science fiction. And it's not hysteria.
---
But I still, even now, I have to pay rent. So please check out the Dreaming Squid Sundries shop. Thanks. And here's Lydia, a little bit of comfort.
Later Tater Bean,
Aunt Beast
5:53 p.m. (yetserday)
I wrote 1,844 words on The Night Watchers. I began work on another new paleo' paper. I spent about an hour on the phone with Mike Polcyn talking about mosasaur intercranial circulation, CAT/tomography, and δ13C and how radioactive isotopes can help us understand mosasaur paleoecology, especually foraging patterns. I called Jun at McWane. I should have emailed Merrilee, but I forgot, and now it's too late. So I'll email her tomorrow.
So, it's one thing not to sleep and be unable to work. It's another to be unable to sleep and then work like a fiend.
Cloudy all day. A little rain. Our high was only 67F.
Here is a piece at Time magazine on the immediate threat of AI that everyone shoud read, written by Dr. Eliezer Yudkowsky, a decision theorist from the U.S. and a lead researcher at the Machine Intelligence Research Institute. Right now, it is beyond overwhelming trying to allow oneself to fully comprehend all the threats to continued human survival in the very short term. And one of those is AI, and it is all happening so very fast, and it was all so avoidable.
To visualize a hostile superhuman AI, don’t imagine a lifeless book-smart thinker dwelling inside the internet and sending ill-intentioned emails. Visualize an entire alien civilization, thinking at millions of times human speeds, initially confined to computers-in a world of creatures that are, from its perspective, very stupid and very slow. A sufficiently intelligent AI won’t stay confined to computers for long. In today’s world you can email DNA strings to laboratories that will produce proteins on demand, allowing an AI initially confined to the internet to build artificial life forms or bootstrap straight to postbiological molecular manufacturing.
If somebody builds a too-powerful AI, under present conditions, I expect that every single member of the human species and all biological life on Earth dies shortly thereafter. ~ Eliezer Yudkowsky
And it actually gets scarier.
At least the catastrophic effects of global warming that we are beginning to see, that will utterly devastate the planet in the decades to come, at least those took centuries to set in motion. In theory, we could have stopped it. In theory, we could still avoid the worst-case scenarios. But, with AI, the djinn is out of its bottle, and it makes splitting the atom look like a harmless lark. And this is not science fiction. And it's not hysteria.
---
But I still, even now, I have to pay rent. So please check out the Dreaming Squid Sundries shop. Thanks. And here's Lydia, a little bit of comfort.
Later Tater Bean,
Aunt Beast
5:53 p.m. (yetserday)