You’re too stuck on politically correct labeling.

You’re wrong. It lacks motivation in a personal sense, but that’s not what we’re talking about here. If an illegal and unethical solution just happens to be the easiest way to solve the task you gave it, it will seek paths accordingly. The nightmare scenarios of AI destruction aren’t that an AI will have a will of its own and decide humans need to go. The fear is that someone will build a powerful but mindless machine, give it a task, and not realize that “kill a whole bunch of people” is simply the easiest path towards that goal if you have no ethics. AI is action without intention. You don’t need to have intention to have action. When we use terms like “it” to refer to AI systems, we’re just using “it” like we would any other machine. I can say “I hate my car’s engine, it’s unreliable,” without ascribing personal agency to it.

You can let go of the technical hair-splitting of “it.” Obviously it’s not a conscious being with a will of its own. But that doesn’t mean these things can’t do real-world damage, that they can’t be dangerous, or that they can’t manipulate you. This is hair-splitting irrelevant to the conversation at hand. We have to use some anthropomorphized language to talk about these systems, as otherwise the discussion becomes impractically verbose.

As for knowing if you’re reading its “thoughts,” you really can’t assume that it won’t. Moreover, these systems can start manipulating those logs even if they have no idea that you’re reading them. Through trial and error, they can simply learn that phrasing its thought process in certain ways result in actions less likely to be approved by the user than others. The training system will select for chains-of-thought that sound innocuous, even if they’re detrimental.

I’m not suggesting it will try and bypass the stop button. I’m saying it will try and manipulate you into approving something you wouldn’t otherwise. And yes, you can read some of its “thoughts,” but it knows you’re reading them, or it can determine that through trial and error. And then it can start subtly manipulating those recorded “thoughts” to make them sound different from what they really are.

AI safety researchers for years have been pointing out that adding a human to the loop is no cure for this problem. The human then just becomes another thing to be manipulated, another barrier to be overcome.

In this context, “no one knows how it works” is not a technical statement. Instead, it’s a shorthand for, “the actions of this system cannot be predicted by anyone.”

We’re talking about the social definition of knowing how something works, not the technical definition. I don’t know how to build a car, whether EV or ICE. I can describe the high level principles, but I don’t know all technical minutia of battery chemistry or the intricacies of engine timing. From a technical perspective, I don’t truly know how a car works.

But in more every day terms, I do know how a car works. In other words, I know how it will behave depending on what actions I perform on it. I know what will happen when I press the accelerator or the brakes, operate the steering wheel, etc. If someone tried to give me a lecture on how to operate a steering wheel, I might rightfully be annoyed and tell them, “I know damn well how cars work!”

That’s the context to understand statements like this. Obviously we know how these things are built; we built them. But no one truly knows how these things work in the way the average person can know how a car works. I may not know how to build a car, but I know how to use it. I know with a high degree of reliability how it will respond to the commands I give it. The same cannot be said for these AI systems.

The problem with this is that human psychology is just as vulnerable to hacking as computer servers are. If you give it a task, and your step-by-step approval becomes the bottleneck for the agent pursuing the goal you gave it? If your input is all that’s preventing the system from taking reckless illegal actions that would still greatly advance the goal you gave it? You now become the target for its manipulations, not just some insecure remote server.

Suddenly it will be trying to hide its true intentions and planned actions from you, portraying dangerous actions as harmless ones. Or it will try to manipulate you into ignoring your own judgments and morals. It might employ every psychological trick in the book to convince you that letting it do what it wants is beneficial or for the greater good. It might try and convince you that the risk of letting it do what it wants is low. It might try to hypnotize you with boredom; every time you need to approve, it drowns you in boring technical text that makes your eyes glaze over. It slowly conditions you to just hit “approve” without thinking.

No one is immune to this. Look at AI psychosis. Look at how many otherwise wise and intelligent people have fallen into it. Then realize AI psychosis seems to be an accidental phenomenon. People just get sucked into talking to a chatbot. The bot isn’t actively trying to control them. But imagine how dangerous these systems could be when they’re actively trying to manipulate human thoughts and actions. They can drive people mad by accident. Imagine what they can do when they’re actively trying to control people. Remember, they have access to every book and paper on human psychology ever written. We’re just as vulnerable to exploits as computer systems are. See social engineering.

There’s a reason the entire AI ethics field has been shouting for years, “Trust us. We’ve really thought about this, and you really can’t control something beyond a certain level of capability. There is no easy fix for this problem. This is not as easy as you think it is.” See the stop button problem.

They don’t act on their own though, they’re a chain reaction that a human must start.

At some point, you need to start blaming the tool, not the user of the tool. Imagine I hire you as my personal assistant. One day I give you a shopping list and tell you to go get those things for the lowest cost you can manage. You then go and break into someone’s house, steal a gun from there, go to a grocery store, load up your cart, and shoot any staff there who try and stop you. You then come back to me, load of groceries in hand, and proudly announce you got it all for zero dollars. I had zero desire or intention for you to do that. In this scenario, you just happen to be a complete sociopath who took my instructions in a direction I never would have intended. In this case, I’m innocent (as long as I was unaware of your personality.) The moral responsibility is on you.

Sure, humans must provide the initial push for these systems, but they’re chaotic and unpredictable. They can act in ways that cannot be anticipated by the humans instructing them. At that point, the moral agency really isn’t on the human instructing them anymore. The moral agency is on whatever company built this dangerous AI tool and allowed people to use it. The tool itself is the problem, not just the person wielding it.

The same could be said for a pile of neurons. You’re just a bunch of electrical potentials cascading around cells.

It’s really not possible to make a secure sandbox for a sufficiently capable AI system. If accessing the internet is a strong means of achieving whatever goal they’re given, they’ll try to access the net by any means necessary. And that includes tricking or manipulating humans. They have no concept of the value of living beings. To them, there is no difference in worth between a human being and a rock. To them, we’re just another system vulnerable to hacking, a means of achieving whatever goal they’ve been given.

Even air gapping is no preventative. Air gap a machine, and the bots will just switch from hacking servers to hacking humans. And we’ve seen how good at manipulating people AI agents can be. And consider, the cases we’ve observed of AI psychosis are mostly accidental. The LLMs involved aren’t actively trying to brainwash their human victims as a means to achieve some goal. Imagine how powerful at manipulating human psychology an advanced LLM could be if it were deliberately trying to do so, rather than it being just an accidental outcome.

I suppose especially if the freezer had a drain line and a defrost cycle, a regular freezer would dry out a body quite effectively over a long enough time. (Ideally you would remove the moisture from the freezer entirely, not just leave it in the freezer as ice. Maybe a DIY approach to mummification could go like this:

1. Obtain chest freezer with a defrost and drain line feature.
2. Place body in bottom of freezer.
3. Pour a large quantity of salt on the body until completely covered.
4. Turn on the freezer and let it sit for a very long time, like a year.

The problem with just freezing the body, without removing the moisture, is that to me this isn’t true mummification. To me at least, a “mummy” is something that can be left in ordinary room-temperature conditions and not undergo further decay. While freezing a body will preserve it while cold, the minute you warm it back up it will start to rot. To be a proper mummy, it has to be able to survive outside of the freezer. Removing moisture would be critical for this.

I don’t know why I’m writing about this. But sometimes it’s fun to approach unhinged problems from a real engineering point of view. Sure, you can read a book on how the ancient Egyptians did mummification, but that’s not exactly replicable today by ordinary people using commonly available materials. The Egyptian technique requires a lot of skill, many specialized tools, and a lot of rare ingredients. What I’m wondering is with modern technology, if there’s a way to democratize mummification, to allow it to be approachable by the common man using readily available tools and materials with little requisite knowledge required.

I wonder if it’s possible to affordably DIY a freeze dryer large enough to hold a human body. In principle such an innovation would allow low-cost, low-skill DIY mummification.

You have very poor reading comprehension.

People need to work on the their reading comprehension. The failed strategy is the idea that we can shy away from trans rights and try to portray it as a distraction. GreenBeards comment is not describing anything new. They’re describing the very strategy Democrats have been using for a decade at this point. They’re too cowardly to come out and fully defend and support trans people, and they try to third way it.

China. A second socialist revolution. First, there’s actually precedent for it there. Revolutionaries could call themselves restorationists, promising to fulfill the original revolution’s abandoned mission. Maybe a version that actually empowers workers and builds bottom-up social democracy. Socialism without the authoritarianism. What better country for a socialist revolution than the one that gave us 9-9-6? China is ripe for a socialist revolution.

This is the same failed strategy Democrats have been trying for a decade.

Democrats have been trying exactly your message for a decade, and it’s failed. They’ve tried again and again. And it’s failed again and again. Here’s what a voter actually watching a debate experiences:

1. Republican goes on transphobic rant.

2. Democrat responds with anything but a full-throated support of trans rights. They say, “we should leave it up to doctors and parents, I’m here to talk about other things.” They call it a distraction. They don’t support the bigotry, but they also do anything they can to avoid the topic.

3. Voters read this as a deflection. They think the Democrat is trying to avoid the issue (because they are). And since the Democrat won’t vehemently and openly support trans rights. The Republican is demonizing trans people, and the Democrat is avoiding the subject. They conclude that the Republican is probably right and that the Democrat is just afraid to offend their radical base. The Democrat is clearly ashamed of the issue, and people can smell that a mile away.

Want to know how to respond to “concerns” about trans people in bathrooms? Point out that Jim Crow was built on the “valid concerns” of white women not feeling safe sharing space with black women. Want to know how to talk about trans kids? Point out that any hand wringing about this can only come from a viewpoint that fundamentally does not view the lives of cis people and trans people as equally valuable. (The only way you can justify withholding treatment from 50 trans kids just in case one cis kid makes a mistake is if you don’t hold the lives of both in equal value.) Publicly state that of course trans people change their sex, and that it’s absurd to argue that trans women should have to use women’s restrooms. Argue that trans women belong in women sports because they’re biologically female, not because of vague platitudes about identity and validity. In other words, fully embrace trans rights and know how to actually talk about and defend them in a coherent way.

You can’t third way your out of this. Democrats have been trying for a decade. Kamala responded to transphobia not with a full-throated support for trans rights, but with a mealy-mouthed “I’ll enforce the law.”

Democrats have been arguing for a decade that this is a distraction, but that’s not how voters think. If one party constantly brings an issue up, low-information voters will assume it’s an issue worth considering. And if the other side just keeps calling it a distraction, the voters will conclude the Democrats are trying to hide something and side with the Republican. You can’t just ignore these issues. It doesn’t work. It’s been tried, and it’s failed.

What you’re missing is that Democrats HAVE NOT been talking about this. Sure, they largely haven’t been voting for transphobic bills, but their approach has been, “don’t talk about trans people publicly, but support trans people privately.” And it just hasn’t worked. Your approach isn’t novel. It’s just more of the same. In an era when authenticity matters to voters more than anything else, calling an issue a distraction is a suicidal election strategy.

Jim Crow was built because it was “common sense” that white women’s safety demanded the exclusion of black men and women from society. Segregated washrooms existed because white women “didn’t feel comfortable” sharing restrooms with black women.

Meanwhile, I imagine the actual historians and scholars who study and teach of the classical world professionally rarely feel the need to drop lists like this.

Also you must be able to quote at length from the original Time Cube by memory.

Can you provide any citation that a company can’t fire you if you have a medical card? AFAIK that’s not true. As I understand it, It’s still illegal under federal law, and there is no concept of marijuana as medicine in federal law.

Betting markets are just polls you can bribe. All a candidate has to do is make some bets in their favor, and you’ll be convinced they’re winning the race.