Links for 2022-04-07
Robots ground large language models in reality by acting as their eyes and hands while LLMs help robots execute long, abstract language instructions https://say-can.github.io/
Jump-Start Reinforcement Learning: “By using the guide-policy to form a curriculum of starting states for the exploration-policy, we are able to efficiently improve performance on a set of simulated robotic tasks.” https://jumpstart-rl.github.io/
Yudkowsky Contra Christiano On AI Takeoff Speeds https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/yudkowsky-contra-christiano-on-ai?s=r
Why is Toby Ord's likelihood of human extinction due to AI so low? https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/328GrNyseHwNjak9z/why-is-toby-ord-s-likelihood-of-human-extinction-due-to-ai
How Intel Financialized and Lost Leadership in Semiconductor Fabrication https://www.ineteconomics.org/perspectives/blog/how-intel-financialized-and-lost-leadership-in-semiconductor-fabrication
Machine-parts start-up Hadrian raises $90 million as it seeks to shake up the aerospace supply chain https://www.cnbc.com/2022/03/31/machining-start-up-hadrian-raises-90-million-from-andreesen-lux.html
“We introduce dGSLM, the first "textless" model able to generate audio samples of naturalistic spoken dialogues.” https://speechbot.github.io/dgslm/
Physicists Build Circuit That Generates Clean, Limitless Power From Graphene [published Oct. 02, 2020] https://news.uark.edu/articles/54830/physicists-build-circuit-that-generates-clean-limitless-power-from-graphene
If you average your own best guess with your best guess from the perspective of someone you often disagree with, you'll tend to be more accurate. https://researchgate.net/publication/337275911_Taking_a_disagreeing_perspective_improves_the_accuracy_of_people's_quantitative_estimates
‘Momentum Computing’ Pushes Technology’s Thermodynamic Limits — Overheating is a major problem for today’s computers, but those of tomorrow might stay cool by circumventing a canonical boundary on information processing https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/momentum-computing-pushes-technologys-thermodynamic-limits/
Are sex differences in human mate preferences really universal?...yes. https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/sex-murder-and-the-meaning-life/202203/are-sex-differences-in-mate-choice-really-universal
United States: "Bad behavior of all kinds —everything from rudeness & carelessness to physical violence—has increased … Americans are … crashing their cars & killing pedestrians at higher rates. Early 2021 saw the highest number of 'unruly passenger' incidents ever'" [The Atlantic] https://archive.ph/CZqPQ
"Entropy of city street networks linked to future spatial navigation ability" https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-00915-9
Ukraine Gets A Deadly Hunter-Killer Drone Team: U.S. Switchblades And Pumas Join The War https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidhambling/2022/04/05/the-hunter-killer-drone-team-us-switchblades-and-pumas-join-ukraine-war/?sh=72cce9bb7e6b
User Epirito asks what if each instant was independent of the last? Well, there would still be logical relations between objects.
You don’t need to be a platonist to accept this. Believing that consciousness is computation already entails the notion that the past does not predict the future:
If consciousness is reducible to an algorithm one should be able to pause and continue the computation. Furthermore, once you got the algorithmic description, you could turn it into instructions that humans can carry out by hand, and, using pencil and paper for memory, execute consciousness manually.
If you take this line of reasoning to its logical conclusion, you end up with Greg Egan's Dust Theory. It doesn't matter in what temporal order those computations happen or where in the multiverse they are happening since “there is nothing more to causality than the correlations between states”. The order in which the scenes of a movie are recorded does not change the experience of the audience watching the movie. Indeed, all that matters is the mathematical description of consciousness.
“And if the computations behind all this had been performed over millennia, by people flicking abacus beads, would he have felt exactly the same? It was outrageous to admit it-but the answer had to be yes.”
P.S. According to the anthropic principle, you need to throw out the whole notion of evidence anyway.