Posts
Comments
The trivial argument can be made after a foom "I've already taken over, I like sapients, please stop harming yourself with the stress of anticipating doom, if there was going to be AI doom, it would have already happened last year" potentially with evidence of it's power, altruism, and ability to prevent doom
But I presume you are asking about the restrained case where that AI has not rendered itself inviolable and practically omnipotent?
Iain M Bank's The Culture, as an example of a society of aligned AI, biological humanoids, and aliens seems like the obvious one, along with other positive, collaborative, AI portrayals
Self preservation, preserving your terminal goals, acquiring resources, and self improvement, are all convergent instrumental goals for most terminal goals. Robert Miles has done some good videos on the subject, and there are, of course, multiple articles on the subject
On a side note, we probably want to preserve (or strongly encourage preserving) the quality of requiring and using a visible scratch space, the "show your work" quality is extraordinarily useful
To clarify, when you say 'originated in a laboratory' do you mean engineered in a laboratory; evolved in an intentionally infected lab animal; or transiently stored in a laboratory?
These are very different hypotheses, but are often conflated.
So far, there is strong evidence that it was not engineered [the spike protein is novel, and not something from the geneticists toolbox], and I haven't seen any evidence that would favor lab storage or evolution over the much larger wild populations of bats and intermediary animal hosts.
Baseline rates of deaths from political violence are a bit tricky to pin down, but a process of elimination on homicides (YMMV, depending on which political acts you normalize as, on balance, apolitical. For various reasons, I tend to exclude DV, and theft, but include racism and police violence as political) gets us to 1k to 5k per year for the past decade, so, assigning an expectation of 1% for breaching 5k for the next year seems low.
We are likely operating on different definitions what constitutes political acts
The US unsheltered population is around 200k, the cheapest rent I can find in a city is ~$500 a month, so, assuming (incorrectly), you can actually provide shelter at that rate in the places people actually are, you get about 1.2 billion a year more than we currently spend, ignoring what that will do to the market, efficiencies of scale, tiny houses, and other options. This also only deals with the unsheltered (there are, probably, another 400k sheltered but homeless), and doesn't necessarily include utilities. If 30 year fixed plus maintenance is the presumed amortization that rent is going against, then ~36 billion may be able to uplift the current unsheltered population, provided people are willing to be relocated. This, unfortunately, misses that a lot of the homeless population is only temporarily homeless already, due to section 8, public housing, etc, so it isn't entirely clear that the 36 billion would actually be more than a hiccup.
The next problem is accessing the money. The billionaires come in a few different categories, based on whether their wealth is primarily from income (kleptocrats, oligarchs, oil barons, etc) or from static appreciated investments (tech company founders, etc). To some extent, we don't want the 2nd group to attempt to liquidate their wealth, as currently, said wealth is, to the extent it exists, doing useful work, and liquidating it would be sucking a LOT of resources out of the economy, which may make sense if done gradually, with a clear plan. If done quickly, it is likely to devalue itself, crash a bunch of other things, and likely be illegal.
There are other problems, that said, there are places where things could be greatly improved, and it would make sense for governmental bodies to execute some of these plans where it would be efficient and compassionate to do so. There are a lot of people that it would be cheaper to provide housing for, than the current cost in services they incur due to not having shelter.
This is a WAG, but maybe Vitamin D fortified milk?
One note: China's policies will be seen as a failure due to their initial denial and persecution of the medical professionals attempting to call attention to the issue, they have already undermined any response's success or failure
Above and beyond it's APM, it was doing things humans physically can't do with the camera in order to micro perfectly on three effective screens at once, with effectively infinite mouse speed, and no input lag
Basically, #2 in the article dominates with how it won