If you don't have somebody balancing a book on their head, you can't do brain surgery. It's just that simple.

A problem with this analysis is that the super-wealthy don't have to let the profit motive control things they don't want it to control.

Basic monopoly problem: a wealthy corporation can afford to sell its products at a loss in some markets for the purpose of driving the competition out of business. When you have enough money, you can afford to operate at a loss for a while, especially if doing so will guarantee higher or more stable returns later. That is exactly what is happening.

The billionaires who want to use AI to decapitate labor can easily afford to bypass profits from early AI products, because they also own other massively profitable business and happen to already possess 99.9% of all wealth that exists.

• For one thing, it's not a donation: they are crowd-sourcing the development and QA testing of the product, which is a real benefit that has huge economic value.
• Secondly: once the tech works, they can apply the lessons learned toward quickly ramping up a different AI that is more overtly hostile to the owners' enemies.

I have had this same thought, and I think it would make a good premise for a fictional world. In my imagination, I call it "the Phoenix Project."

The problem, of course, is that humanity is not going to survive long enough for this goal to be relevant. The climate crisis will likely exterminate the majority of aerobic life by 2100. If anybody survives, it will be a handful of billionaires and dictators, and those dummies are frankly not capable of perpetuating a functional species.

All humans and all human descendants will be dead before 2200.

Publish or perish?

This is excellent technically, but those vertical lines are provocative.

I don't think that "doctors dismissing patients concerns" is a source of failure to detect breast cancer via mammograms.

I assume women generally get mammograms because health experts recommend regular checks for all women. The reason radiologists fail to detect breast cancer in some x-rays is not that they aren't taking women seriously, because the women weren't coming in with symptoms or complaints -- they came in for a preventative screening. Radiologists sometimes fail to detect breast cancer because each radiologist looks at thousands of essentially identical x-rays over their career, breast cancer is uncommon, and cancer that does exist is hard to visually recognize in its early stages.

I'm not saying that people don't dismiss the complaints of women, whether in a healthcare or other context. But that's not what's going on here, because breast cancer checks are generally driven by prevention rather than symptoms.

This is a really good idea.

Human doctors have a worse detection rate than you'd want, but not for the reason you'd think: they aren't incompetent, it's that humans are really bad at recognition tasks when the thing they are looking for is rare.

To illustrate: if I gave you 5 x-rays and told you that exactly one of them definitely has cancer, you'll find it. But if I give you 500 x-rays and zero promises about whether any of them have cancer, you'll be less reliable.

This is true whether or not the human is tired from a "long shift." It has to do with the way humans pay attention, and how our expectations influence what we observe. False-negatives go down as the sample size gets lower, or if the incidence increases. If 1% of the 500 x-rays have cancer, a human may only spot 3 or 4 of the 5. But if there are 50 with cancer, the human detection rate increases.

AI won't have this problem.

(Source: an intro psych class I took, which actually used breast-cancer detection as the vehicle for studying human attention.)

Clownfish are one such fish. Another species is mentioned in the BBC Earth series, but I'm afraid I don't recall the name or even which episode.

I would settle for the electorate understanding consequences.

Something I did not pick up on from the summary is that the stem cell donor has some natural HIV resistance, which seems like a critical element of this.

"The reason I was at the adult book store is that my car's worm brain drove me there on autopilot."

"Okay... but you spent $74 dollars there."

"Worm brain, honey. It was the worm brain."

Something vaguely similar happens in the 1976 novel A World Out of Time.

A wealthy guy with cancer pays for cryo. When they thaw him out centuries later, it's because they are looking for indentured servants to work as space-truckers: if he refuses, they'll kill him and try their luck with the next popsicle.

He agrees and is promptly subjected to some intense and uncomfortable training and conditioning for his new "job."

I think I read the same thing, although I'm not so sure it was on reddit.

I've checked my bookmarks and other reddit data and haven't found it.

This is incorrect. Now, all restaurants are Taco Bell.

Did you play the Mass Effect games? What do you think about ME's "paragon/renegade" gameplay and narrative mechanic?

My web browser holds onto my bookmarks, and even starts to suggest frequently-visited websites when I type URLs into the bar. Do you really want to call that "learning?" Learning of the kind that's necessary to support interactions where trust and forgiveness are meaningful concepts?

It seems like you're trying to use the word "learning" to import a huge amount of psychological realism so you can argue that people have an obligation to treat every neural network exactly like we treat humans -- humans that are unimaginably more mentally sophisticated than a computer file that contains numeric weightings.

> a 26-year-old woman:
> ...It’s like when you want to watch a show and you put on Netflix and like, you literally find yourself not being able to decide for like an hour and then you wind up not watching anything.

This exactly. About Netflix, I mean.

This reminds me, I need to hire a caligrapher to write the following message into 100 Valentine's Day cards:

> Dear Sir or Madam,
>
> We’ve never met, but I need you to know that I’m in jail on a far-away military oil rig, I’ve found some gold that I can teach you to invest, and I need your private pictures to bribe the guards so I can escape, deliver the gold, and we can get married.

No, they can't. You are mistaken about what current "AI" technology is actually doing.

This question is not merely vague, but fatally confused.

I bet folks will engage with it, but I really doubt OP will get any satisfaction.

Carpenters don't trust their table saws, either.

Robots are not thinking, learning things. It would be a category error to trust a robot, just as it would be extend forgiveness to a robot.

The WEF's myopia is an endless source of incredibly stupid takes.

I think you're saying: each of the lights would disappear and reappear in a different position, and those positions formed a triangle.

Is that right?

You're going to have to explain that a little more.

It seems that if AI is capable of keeping human soldiers in line, it's probably also capable of simply replacing humans soldiers with armed version of the Boston Dynamics robots.

Relevant: The wealthy are plotting to leave us behind

Accurate summary by a redditor:

> people who were asked by billionaires to go to a meeting and advise them on what to do to keep staff loyal in their bunkers when money becomes worthless

Supporting quotes from the source:

> I got invited to a super-deluxe private resort to deliver a keynote speech... it was by far the largest fee I had ever been offered for a talk > > I just sat there at a plain round table as my audience was brought to me: five super-wealthy guys... from the upper echelon of the hedge fund world > > Finally, the CEO of a brokerage house explained that he had nearly completed building his own underground bunker system and asked, “How do I maintain authority over my security force after the event?” > > This single question occupied us for the rest of the hour. They knew armed guards would be required to protect their compounds from the angry mobs. But how would they pay the guards once money was worthless? What would stop the guards from choosing their own leader? > > Taking their cue from Elon Musk..., Peter Thiel..., or Sam Altman and Ray Kurzweil..., they were preparing for... insulating themselves from a very real and present danger of climate change, rising sea levels, mass migrations, global pandemics, nativist panic, and resource depletion. For them, the future of technology is really about just one thing: escape.

Look up "reward hacking." This is a well-studied problem, and it exists outside of AI. Rob Miles is an AI researcher who has done a few videos talking about reward hacking.