“People have a hard time imagining how the world might actually end from AI, even people who know a lot about how current AI systems work. GPT-3... something something... paperclips? Here is @gwern telling the most plausible specific story I've ever heard.” — Jeffrey Ladish https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/a5e9arCnbDac9Doig/it-looks-like-you-re-trying-to-take-over-the-world
This is the reason Demis Hassabis started DeepMind — “As AI becomes increasingly powerful we will be able to use it to tackle ever more complex problems. #AlphaFold is a sign of things to come, I believe we are at the dawn of a new renaissance in science.” https://www.technologyreview.com/2022/02/23/1045016/ai-deepmind-demis-hassabis-alphafold/
Young children spontaneously invent wild great apes’ tool-use behaviours https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rspb.2015.2402
Love thinking about the long-term future of human civilisation? Consider entering this blog contest - the winning five blogs will receive an incredible $100,000 EACH!!! https://effectiveideas.org/
Getting a sense of the Russian soul: Looking into Russian genetics and history (not through Putin’s eyes) https://razib.substack.com/p/getting-a-sense-of-the-russian-soul?s=r
Understanding Russia: A survey of Russian war motivations, plus predictions https://maximumtruth.substack.com/p/understanding-russia?s=r
“Using a difference-in-differences framework, I find that [WWII Japanese-American] internment had long-run positive effects on earnings.” https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/journal-of-economic-history/article/abs/displacement-diversity-and-mobility-career-impacts-of-japanese-american-internment/F63443DE6FA168C2D6708D31D91258AC
Technical reasoning bolsters cumulative technological culture through convergent transformations https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.abl7446
ISS Symphony - Timelapse of Earth from International Space Station https://vimeo.com/131006122
[4K] Rocket launch seen from space - time lapse by ISS astronaut (extended) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V9vOSrHmUvQ
Here is a selection of the most beautiful photographs of Earth — iconic images and unknown gems — digitally restored to their full glory. http://www.tobyord.com/earth
Something I wrote in 2016:
What Vitalik writes sounds nice but is, sadly, unfeasible. I wrote something about this a few years ago:
Caring about random strangers seems virtuous but is a really bad idea from a civilizational perspective.
First of all, the amount of suffering happening in the world is unbearable. Someone who did care about everyone else like they care about their own children would essentially be a negative utility monster, continuously experiencing massive distress. The way normal people naturally cope with this is that their concern for a person is inversely proportional to the social distance between themselves and the person.
Secondly, most people are both not smart enough and too irrational to be able to handle the emotional stress such unbounded compassion would cause. They would be constantly outraged and make the world a worse place for themselves and everyone else. As communism amply proves, even many smart people miserably fail to implement their noble goals and end up maximizing suffering rather than reducing it.
A better strategy than telling people to care about strangers is to encourage them to have kids. This will most often force them to care about the consequences their actions have for other beings. And if they are a little bit rational they will also realize that the well-being of their children requires a prosperous and peaceful society and a habitable planet. In other words, having children will make people care about others as a consequence of their affection for their children.
Your ending comment is irrelevant to the point about having no reason to care about certain strangers over others