Links for 2024-03-07
AI:
Design2Code: How Far Are We From Automating Front-End Engineering? — “…annotators think GPT-4V generated webpages can replace the original reference webpages in 49% of cases in terms of visual appearance and content; and perhaps surprisingly, in 64% of cases GPT-4V generated webpages are considered better than the original reference webpages.” https://salt-nlp.github.io/Design2Code/
Towards General Computer Control: A Multimodal Agent for Red Dead Redemption II as a Case Study https://baai-agents.github.io/Cradle/
AI can now master your music—and it does shockingly well https://arstechnica.com/ai/2024/02/mastering-music-is-hard-can-one-click-ai-make-it-easy/
RT-H: Action Hierarchies Using Language — “…our insight is to teach the robot the language of actions, describing low-level motions with more fine-grained phrases like "move arm forward" or "close gripper". Predicting these language motions as an intermediate step between high-level tasks and actions forces the policy to learn the shared structure of low-level motions across seemingly disparate tasks.” https://rt-hierarchy.github.io/
MOKA: Open-Vocabulary Robotic Manipulation through Mark-Based Visual Prompting https://moka-manipulation.github.io/
“Someday in the next decade a car will pull up in front of your home, a humanoid robot will hop out, open the trunk, pull out a stack of pizzas, and walk to the front door.” https://www.unaligned.io/p/tesla-coming-service-economy-robot-brings-robots
Whenever you ask a large language model something, it appends a "system prompt" at the beginning of the conversation to set the stage and guide the model's behavior.
AI companies don't tend to make their system prompts public. Anthropic did:
Read more: https://x.com/AmandaAskell/status/1765207842993434880
Anthropics:
1.
God’s extreme coin toss with jackets: God flips a fair coin. If heads, he creates one person with a red jacket. If tails, he creates one person with a red jacket, and a million people with blue jackets.
• Darkness: God keeps the lights in all the rooms off. You wake up in darkness and can’t see your jacket. What should your credence be on heads?
Read more: https://jc.gatspress.com/pdf/SIA_vs_SSA_revised.pdf
2.
Suppose you have been thrust into the room. You are asked to estimate the odds of leaving safely. One the one hand, since whether you will leave or not will be determined by the throw of a fair pair of dice, it seems that you have a 35/36 chance of exiting alive. On the other hand, 90% of all people who are in your situation will be shot, so it seems you have only a 10% chance of exiting alive. That is the paradox.
Read more: https://anthropic-principle.com/preprints/lit/
3.
Eve and Adam, the first two humans, knew that if they gratified their flesh, Eve might bear a child, and that if she did, they would both be expelled from Eden and go on to spawn billions of progeny that would fill the Earth with misery. One day a serpent approached them and spoke thus: “Pssst! If you hold each other, then either Eve will have a child or she won’t. If she has a child, you will have been among the first two out of billions of people. Your conditional probability of having such early positions in the human species given this hypothesis is extremely small. If, on the other hand, Eve does not become pregnant then the conditional probability, given this, of you being among the first two humans is equal to one. By Bayes’s theorem, the risk that she shall bear a child is less than one in a billion. Therefore, my dear friends, indulge your desires and worry not about the consequences!”
Read more: An Antropic Argument for Post-singularity Antinatalism https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/NSuiuHuZuGBZNiBaY/an-antropic-argument-for-post-singularity-antinatalism
4.
Anthropic shadow: If artificial intelligence were to cause human extinction but required a lot of computing power, you would be more likely to find yourself in world lines in which the necessary conditions for cheap compute are not met.
In such world lines crypto miners causing a GPU shortage, supply chain disruptions due to a pandemic, and war between the United States and China over Taiwan in which important chip fabrication plants are destroyed is more likely to occur in world lines that are not wiped out.
Those bizarre things that prevent us from going extinct are evidence of a future extinction event in world lines in which they did not happen since circumstances that prevent our future demise don't happen suddenly. World lines in which we survive depart before we die. They foreshadow. For example, if a conference of physicists in favor of creating a new accelerator were hit by an asteroid, that would be evidence of it being an extinction risk.
5.
On infinite ethics:
6.
Anthropic principle time travel:
P.S. Note that anthropic reasoning, when taken to its logical conclusion, suffers from extremely absurd consequences: https://apointinblogspace.wordpress.com/2017/09/25/the-anthropic-principle-five-short-examples/
Miscellaneous:
These Tiny Power Converters Run on Vibrational Energy https://today.ucsd.edu/story/these-tiny-power-converters-run-on-vibrational-energy
“Sprint accelerated at 100 g, reaching a speed of Mach 10 (12,300 km/h; 7,610 mph) in 5 seconds. Such a high velocity at relatively low altitudes created skin temperatures up to 6,200 °F (3,427 °C), requiring an ablative shield to dissipate the heat.” https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sprint_(missile)
Republic XF-84H Thunderscreech: "The XF-84H was almost certainly the loudest aircraft ever built. On the ground "run ups", the prototypes could reportedly be heard 25 miles (40 km) away. Unlike standard propellers that turn at subsonic speeds, the outer 24–30 inches (61–76 cm) of the blades on the XF-84H's propeller traveled faster than the speed of sound even at idle thrust, producing a continuous visible sonic boom that radiated laterally from the propellers for hundreds of yards. The shock wave was actually powerful enough to knock a man down. Coupled with the already considerable noise from the subsonic aspect of the propeller and the T40's dual turbine sections, the aircraft was notorious for inducing severe nausea and headaches among ground crews. In one report, a Republic engineer suffered a seizure after close range exposure to the shock waves emanating from a powered-up XF-84H." https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Republic_XF-84H_Thunderscreech
“Imagine instead our posthuman descendants taking the form of Buddhas sitting on vast lotus thrones in a state of blissful tranquility. Their minds contain perfect awareness of everything that goes on in the Universe and the reasons why it happens, yet to each happening, from the fall of a sparrow to the self-immolation of a galaxy, they react only with acceptance and equanimity. Suffering and death long since having been optimized away, they have no moral obligation beyond sitting and reflecting on their own perfection, omnipotence, and omniscience – at which they feel boundless joy.” https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/01/28/wirehead-gods-on-lotus-thrones/
Beta simulation: A resurrection performed by an artificial superintelligence of a deceased person without a backup whose brain has been destroyed. It is based on a combination of the person's genetics, digital footprint, reinforcement learning from feedback by simulations of human relatives, and educated guesses.
Politics:
Republicans can't stop swallowing Russian propaganda https://www.slowboring.com/p/republicans-cant-stop-swallowing
Ukraine:
Nearly all the required funds to procure 800,000 artillery shells for Ukraine has been assembled. A meeting of EU foreign & defense ministers will happen later this week to hammer out details, and delivery could occur within weeks. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-03-06/ukraine-s-allies-line-up-funds-for-800-000-artillery-shells [no paywall: https://archive.is/i1G6i]
“Spectacular footage from the Russian point of view regarding the sinking of the “Caesar Kunikov” three weeks ago emerged (see repost). The Magura V5 USVs attack the Russian warships like sharks. The footage ends with the 2nd explosion.” https://x.com/Capt_Navy/status/1765388345134182470
Footage of a Ukrainian MAGURA V5 naval drone speeding towards the Sergey Kotov large patrol ship. During the attack on the Russian warship yesterday, several drones managed to hit and eventually sank it. https://x.com/wartranslated/status/1765466997234565310
Ukrainian commandos landed in Sudan last summer to fight a Russia-backed militia group, battle with Wagner paramilitaries and undermine Moscow's interests in the country https://www.wsj.com/world/ukraine-is-now-fighting-russia-in-sudan-87caf1d8 [no paywall: https://archive.is/JP1CR]
Population transfers, kidnappings, broken families, deportations and spending on new propaganda outlets. Lots of interviews, as well as info from some leaked Kremlin internal documents https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/mar/06/deportation-re-population-russia-occupied-ukraine-zaporizhzhia