Comment by Jef Jelten (jef-jelten) on Gentleness and the artificial Other · 2024-01-09T04:17:51.451Z · LW · GW

Most scary thing for me regarding AI is the simple fact that what constitutes modern human history is mostly lies repeated over and over, especially concentrated in the last 50+ years. With this in mind what exactly is AI being trained on and aligned to?

If it can't discern truth from lies we are phucked.

If it can discern truth from lies we are phucked.

Comment by Jef Jelten (jef-jelten) on Cohabitive Games so Far · 2023-10-09T12:22:02.596Z · LW · GW

Competition is bad! Ooooh thats going to get some goats. Competition is only legitimate when there are true shortages of necessary things, in other words when times are in crisis. This does occur in nature obviously and we as humans have observed it.  A dog will indeed eat a dog but only in extreme conditions.  The problem is that we then optimized and structured civilization in favor of that behavior. 

Humans do not need that kind of motivation in order to do all of the wonderful things we are capable of. Competition elicits all of humanities worst behavior such as greed, envy, avarice, cheating, killing….

We know that humans are capable of such behavior but we are also Homo sapiens sapiens, we put the term “wise” in there twice which means we should try and act that way.

Comment by Jef Jelten (jef-jelten) on A Golden Age of Building? Excerpts and lessons from Empire State, Pentagon, Skunk Works and SpaceX · 2023-09-19T16:01:36.898Z · LW · GW

I have been reading commentary on "Western" innovation and its exceptional capabilities for decades always citing the same list of so called unique accomplishments. While there is no doubt that many things were achieved by the wealthy west the truth is we have absolutely no idea how much humanity could have accomplished over the last few centuries because the west has so successfully oppressed 3/4 of the population using every means possible keeping millions of potentially genius prodigies from having any means to innovate.

To assume that only the wealthy white population dominated by a history of violent collonialization of the rest of the world, were capable of creating the best of what humanity was capable of is criminally ignorant and racist.

Hugo Chavez opened community centers all over Venezuela and beyond and had hundreds of absolute brilliant prodigies in math, music, science, from age 8 to 80 come out of the woodwork.

Neil Gershenfield from MIT started FabLabs in impoverished communities with amazing results.

Bottom line we have no idea how wonderful the world could have been and it is rapidly looking like we never will.