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Where on this planet could the USA cheaply put people instead of executing them where they
- Have the option to survive if they try
- Can't escape
- Can't cause harm to non-exiled people?
If you haven't already, I'd recommend reading Vinge's 1993 essay on 'The Coming Technological Singularity': https://accelerating.org/articles/comingtechsingularity
He is remarkably prescient, to the point that I wonder if any really new insights into the broad problem have been made in the last 22 years since he wrote. He discusses, among other things, using humans as a base to build superintelligence on as an possible alignment strategy, as well as the problems with this approach.
Here's one quote:
Eric Drexler [...] agrees that superhuman intelligences will be available in the near future — and that such entities pose a threat to the human status quo. But Drexler argues that we can confine such transhuman devices so that their results can be examined and used safely. This is I. J. Good's ultraintelligent machine, with a dose of caution. I argue that confinement is intrinsically impractical. For the case of physical confinement: Imagine yourself locked in your home with only limited data access to the outside, to your masters. If those masters thought at a rate — say — one million times slower than you, there is little doubt that over a period of years (your time) you could come up with "helpful advice" that would incidentally set you free. [...]
I found this post very helpful in laying out a very good argument for weak claims that many truth seeking people with different values may be able to agree on. It clarifies a lot of the conversation about veganism so that misleading/confused arguments can be avoided.
The author says that her goal is to be clear and easy to argue with, and I think she succeeded in that goal.
Thank you so much for compiling these quotes; they are impactful and I might never have read them if you hadn't posted them here.
Your brain has a giant space of possible generative models[2] that map from underlying states of the world (e.g. “there’s a silhouette dancer with thus-and-such 3D shape spinning clockwise against a white background etc.”) to how the photoreceptor cells would send signals into the brain (“this part of my visual field is bright, that part is dark, etc.”)
How do you argue that the models are really implemented backwards like this in the brain?
Calculations on Hydroelectric Energy Storage
For those interested in the numbers on pumped hydroelectric storage, we can get more energy by increasing 'head' or the distance that the weight falls, from 6 meters to up to 500 meters for some of the largest projects (and we could in theory go bigger).
Let's pick a more reasonable number like 60 meters:
MASS/house = 15 kWh/house / (9.8 m/s² × 60 m) = 91,836 kg/house = 91 m^3/house
Let's say we have a dam with ~20 meters of water level fluctuation (drawdown). Then that's 5 m^2 per house of surface area.
As a sanity check, Bath County Pumped Storage Station in VA stores about 24000 MWh/ 30 KWh/house = 800,000 houses worth of energy.
800,000 houses * 5 m^2 = 4 km^2
The Bath County reservoir is about 1km^2 so we're in the right range here (the reservoir has a little more drawdown and a way bigger head).
We're going to be at Söderberg The Meadows; although the rain has stopped the world is still soaking wet.