Links for 2022-01-19
“There is also a growing concern within the AI safety community that simply scaling up GPT-3 by adding more data, weights, and training compute could lead to something existentially dangerous once a few other relatively simple components are added….Transformers are taking over AI right now, but I suspect they will be overtaken by a completely different architecture and approach soon (some strong candidates to take over in the near-term are the perciever architecture, Hopfield networks, energy based models, genetically/evolutionarily designed architectures, gated multi-layer perceptrons, and probably others I'm missing)…Given the number of AI safety orgs and academics already working transformer alignment, I question if it is a good investment for EAs on the current margin.” https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/iQabBACQwbWyHFKZq/how-i-m-thinking-about-gpt-n
Using EM Waves to Detect Malware: “Our method does not require any modification on the target device...it can hardly be detected and evaded by the malware authors. In our experiments, we were able to predict three generic malware types (and one benign class) with an accuracy of 99.82%.” https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2022/01/using-em-waves-to-detect-malware.html
Are warp drives science now? — “The big picture is that warp drives are getting some serious attention from researchers who work on general relativity...I think warp drives are a possibility that’s worth investigating.” http://backreaction.blogspot.com/2022/01/are-warp-drives-science-now.html
Great thread of many of the big advances in #BCI throughout 2021. The #neurotech revolution is gaining speed! https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1483517120499511299.html
How Game Theory Changed Poker — Professional players are learning from computers how to make their play more unpredictable and harder to beat. [WSJ] https://archive.fo/3Jnjk
Civilizations at the End of Time: Iron Stars — “In the previous episode we saw how civilizations might not simply survive after all the stars in the Universe had died, but might indeed thrive far better during the Black Hole Era of the Universe. Today, we will go beyond even the Dark Era to examine the concepts or Iron Star Civilizations, Boltzmann Brains, Reversible Computing, and even reversing Entropy itself.” https://youtu.be/Pld8wTa16Jk
Some TikTok stars are making more than America’s top chief executives. https://www.wsj.com/articles/these-tiktok-stars-made-more-money-than-many-of-americas-top-ceos-11642078170
The hidden costs of cost-benefit analysis https://timharford.com/2022/01/the-hidden-costs-of-cost-benefit-analysis/
As of 2017, roughly 17% of the total land area of the Netherlands is land reclaimed from either sea or lakes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Land_reclamation_in_the_Netherlands