A lot of our systems work because everyone at least half heartedly sort of goes by the rules. Yes, everyone sort of pretends to obey the rule and hence it works. In reality these systems are extremely fragile and a small committed minority can totally break years of precedent and systems. I think we are at that phase right now from the right side and soonish we will see the same from right left as well.
Makes me think of the latter part of this quotation:
"But whether the Constitution really be one thing, or another, this much is certain - that it has either authorized such a government as we have had, or has been powerless to prevent it. In either case it is unfit to exist."
- Lysander Spooner (emphasis mine)
Resilient systems have to align incentives such that they work whether or not everybody has enough good will or agreeability to play along.
250 years isn't a bad run. Maybe the next Constitution can iterate and fix the incentive alignment.
Time! Time is the lever which a small group has used to make these changes.
It’s been ~40 years of Talk Radio in America and ~30 years of TV, which has sold entertainment as news and fine tuned the ability to have a captive voting bloc.
Producing accurate content is laborious, narratives are cheap. Facts are essentially luxury goods, and the left+center is selling them as public goods. This can never work, it takes too much to pay for and maintain the institutions which make this possible.
The right is on the other hand, being organized and “flooding the zone”, in an unending effort to reduce faith in institutions. On top of it, information from the center and left doesn’t get consumed on the right.
This took decades to set up. Today Trump’s approval ratings are down overall, but Republican support for Trump remains at its March number - 88%.
Edit: If I could introduce another metaphor; it’s hard to sell your goods, where half the market is locked behind a monopoly that cuts corners, and sells junk food but can label it as health food. Oh, and they spend their profits, accusing health food of being spurious.
It's like imagine playing soccer with your buddies and one decides to pick up the ball and kick anyone in their path - but the goals still count. The game sort of breaks.
I think death of his stepson might have impacted him deeply at personal level turning him into a bit of a racist. In Trump he saw a hero who would take up the cause.
There would've been complaints if the reservoir was kept filled with a waiver, preventing it from use as drinking water due to the contamination from a damaged cover, and no fire occurred.
When climate change events occur, people will say we could've done more (while there is no evidence today there is willingness to pay these readiness and mitigation costs). When they don't happen, people will complain we're wasting money. The only way to win is to manage your own climate and economic risk at the individual level (in the short term). Maybe people improve, allowing for institutions to improve, but probably not. There is no appetite for the will, spending, and economic drag that will be required to fix this. The accumulated off balance sheet debt (the costs to mitigate climate change) has accelerated beyond the light cone of economic potential (structural demographic decline, labor costs increasing as labor forces decline, future debt obligations, etc).
In the context of brain zero is much older than 7th century. Buddhist philosophy revolves around "Shunyaataa" (Zeroness - Shunya means zero in Sanskrit). Shunya itself comes from the root Svi - empty/hollow.
In the context of brain, Buddhism and various branches of Hinduism spent a lot of time pondering. Several meditative techniques involve meditating over this hollowness or the ultimate absence.
I do know that Zero the numerical placeholder is different from Buddhist idea of "Zeroness" but in the context of brain it should be similar I feel. Absence of something means cardinality of zero but Buddhists literally asked this question about reality itself.
Even if we accept that the white people "own" NZ, the foreigners are buying it from the willing seller citizens. So the government does not get to decide on behalf of all citizens.
> Though generic antibiotics are often very affordable, or even free, at pharmacies, the cost of visiting a doctor to get a proper prescription can be prohibitive for some people, particularly people who don't have health insurance
No. Government meddling in AI will only slow down the progress of this new technology. It makes no sense to regulate something that we ourselves fully don't understand.
The last thing you want is the monopoly of large corporations over something that you can code in your basement.
Amount of resources required to run AI research have already made it a deep pocket game. Current AI research is a big corporate game. You will neither have compute nor data to do anything original unless it fall under transfer learning and somebody is kind enough to share pretrained model.
I am not sure how setting the right principal which every one should follow will put it out of your reach. I think it will force the corporates to avoid taking unnecessary risks with something we don't understand.
Perhaps a much more thought through version of Asimov's 3 laws of robotics.
> You will neither have compute nor data to do anything original unless it fall under transfer learning and somebody is kind enough to share pretrained model.
Lots of research recently goes into doing something useful with less data and compute. E.g. there have been a lot of zero/few-shot learning on the last CVPR.
> Amount of resources required to run AI research have already made it a deep pocket game.
there's no shortage of existing AI techniques which don't require google*days of cpu power, and there's no reason to believe research on all of them is completely tapped out.
Agreed and I am not arguing to regulate the obvious but now as AI can potentially touch and transform every walk of life, guidelines are needed to keep big players from going too far. There won't be any ground for plausible deniability if principals are set.
For example I think when deep learning is bound to touch every aspect of our lives, explainable models should be a must[1]. Look at section 3.5 where classifier was predicting with 94% accuracy for completely unrelated reasons like a person's name.
>Although this classifier achieves 94% held-out accuracy, and one would be tempted to trust it based on this, the explanation for an instance shows that predictions are made for quite arbitrary reasons (words “Posting”, “Host”, and “Re” have no connection to either Christianity or Atheism). The word “Posting” appears in 22% of examples in the training set, 99% of them in the class “Atheism”. Even if headers are removed, proper names of prolific posters in the original newsgroups are selected by the classifier, which would also not generalize.
If allowed industry will choose to ignore the downside in a race to capture market. For example industry is trying to play catchup in the area of security only after it became a serious issues. Its not that principals were not known, it's just that industry choose to ignore them[2]. If same happens to AI, it could result is widespread loss of human life. Tesla death is a perfect example of this where autopilot simply failed to distinguish between white trailer and brightly lit sky[3].
I think what works in dating works in such scenarios too.
You ask a girl out she says no, you have to just move on to the next one. You have to tell yourself she does not know you yet properly and it is her loss. Our brain is very good at forgetting failures over time. You do it sufficient number of times and you learn to take No like a champ. Spending too much time thinking about that one failure will only result in waste of time. Of course it goes without saying that you need to see how to improve things over time.
I was lucky to learn this lesson quickly. Every year I remind my boss that the salary needs to be either adjusted for inflation (and real estate inflation) or I should be put a performance improvement plan because if my performance is down you should not keep me employed.
