<div dir="ltr">Interesting discussion between Lex Fridman and Sam Harris about the future of AI.<br><div><br><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GiQZHEtTGAU">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GiQZHEtTGAU</a><br><br></div><div>At one point they were discussing possible future intelligent self driving cars, I quote from the transcript of their discussion, Sam Harris speaking: <br>"Just imagine if some woke team of engineers decided that we have to tune the algorithm some way, I mean there are situations where the car has to decide who to hit, I mean there's just bad outcomes where you're going to hit somebody right, now we have a car that can tell the what race you are right, so where going to build the car to preferentially hit white people because white people have had so much privilege over the years this seems to be the only ethical way to redress those wrongs of the past, but that could get produced as an artifact presumably of just how you built it and you didn't even know you engineered it that way. You built a racist algorithm and you didn't even intend to."</div></div><br><div class="gmail_quote"><div dir="ltr" class="gmail_attr">On Sun, 4 Jul 2021 at 08:58, Pieter Steenekamp <<a href="mailto:pieters@randcontrols.co.za">pieters@randcontrols.co.za</a>> wrote:<br></div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0px 0px 0px 0.8ex;border-left:1px solid rgb(204,204,204);padding-left:1ex"><div dir="ltr">“AI will be either the best, or the worst thing, ever to happen to humanity.” – Stephen Hawking</div><br><div class="gmail_quote"><div dir="ltr" class="gmail_attr">On Sun, 4 Jul 2021 at 00:43, Marcus Daniels <<a href="mailto:marcus@snoutfarm.com" target="_blank">marcus@snoutfarm.com</a>> wrote:<br></div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0px 0px 0px 0.8ex;border-left:1px solid rgb(204,204,204);padding-left:1ex">
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<p class="MsoNormal">Nova had an episode on this recently. It was really pretty interesting.<u></u><u></u></p>
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<p class="MsoNormal"><b>From:</b> Friam <<a href="mailto:friam-bounces@redfish.com" target="_blank">friam-bounces@redfish.com</a>> <b>On Behalf Of
</b>Frank Wimberly<br>
<b>Sent:</b> Saturday, July 3, 2021 2:42 PM<br>
<b>To:</b> The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <<a href="mailto:friam@redfish.com" target="_blank">friam@redfish.com</a>><br>
<b>Subject:</b> Re: [FRIAM] for the optimists<u></u><u></u></p>
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<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom:12pt"><span style="font-size:9.5pt;font-family:Arial,sans-serif">And by the way, I think flying cars would be a disaster — a three dimensional traffic jam.</span><u></u><u></u></p>
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<p class="MsoNormal">With many deaths. I used to fly airplanes regularly. It's nontrivial and I don't see how the capacity to be a car too makes it easier.<u></u><u></u></p>
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<p class="MsoNormal">---<br>
Frank C. Wimberly<br>
140 Calle Ojo Feliz, <br>
Santa Fe, NM 87505<br>
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505 670-9918<br>
Santa Fe, NM<u></u><u></u></p>
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<p class="MsoNormal">On Sat, Jul 3, 2021, 3:10 PM Barry MacKichan <<a href="mailto:barry.mackichan@mackichan.com" target="_blank">barry.mackichan@mackichan.com</a>> wrote:<u></u><u></u></p>
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<p><span style="font-family:Arial,sans-serif">I’m not prepared to weigh in on any long discussion, but my impression is that the reason that the inventions after 1960 pale in comparison with them before is that the low-hanging fruit that really makes life
easier (electricity, public health infrastructure like sewage treatment and clean water, fast transportation) was all invented earlier.<u></u><u></u></span></p>
<p><span style="font-family:Arial,sans-serif">The invention of computers — aided by the space race and DARPA — made some things easier, but the record there is ambiguous. My sense now is that the changes now are driven by advertising and marketing. Google
and Facebook are in the advertising business, and it’s hard to claim that is an improvement for the majority of people. Software used to be about building enabling tools, but for the last 25 years it seems like a part of the advertising industry.<u></u><u></u></span></p>
<p><span style="font-family:Arial,sans-serif">The OECD study may have be just correlation, not causation. See
<a href="https://www.tylervigen.com/spurious-correlations" target="_blank"><span style="color:rgb(57,131,196)">https://www.tylervigen.com/spurious-correlations</span></a> and, especially,
<a href="https://twitter.com/bioluisinho/status/1224404802693668864?lang=en" target="_blank">
<span style="color:rgb(57,131,196)">https://twitter.com/bioluisinho/status/1224404802693668864?lang=en</span></a><u></u><u></u></span></p>
<p><span style="font-family:Arial,sans-serif">—Barry<u></u><u></u></span></p>
<p><span style="font-family:Arial,sans-serif">And by the way, I think flying cars would be a disaster — a three dimensional traffic jam.<u></u><u></u></span></p>
<p><span style="font-family:Arial,sans-serif">—Barry<u></u><u></u></span></p>
<p><span style="font-family:Arial,sans-serif">On 1 Jul 2021, at 12:43, uǝlƃ </span>
<span style="font-family:"Segoe UI Symbol",sans-serif">☤</span><span style="font-family:Arial,sans-serif">>$ wrote:<u></u><u></u></span></p>
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<p><span style="font-family:Arial,sans-serif;color:rgb(119,119,119)">Your Book Review: Where's My Flying Car?<br>
<a href="https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/your-book-review-wheres-my-flying" target="_blank"><span style="color:rgb(119,119,119)">https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/your-book-review-wheres-my-flying</span></a><br>
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Is the following claim made by the author of the book (Hall - seemingly accepted by the author of the review) largely accurate? I ask because it's a common liberal talking point that publicly funded R&D has resulted in the majority of the tech we rely on in
*modern* life. I'm terrible at history.<u></u><u></u></span></p>
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<p><span style="font-family:Arial,sans-serif;color:rgb(153,153,153)">Hall blames public funding for science. Not just for nanotech, but for actually hurting progress in general. (I’ve never heard anyone before say government-funded science was bad for science!) “[The]
great innovations that made the major quality-of-life improvements came largely before 1960: refrigerators, freezers, vacuum cleaners, gas and electric stoves, and washing machines; indoor plumbing, detergent, and deodorants; electric lights; cars, trucks,
and buses; tractors and combines; fertilizer; air travel, containerized freight, the vacuum tube and the transistor; the telegraph, telephone, phonograph, movies, radio, and television—and they were all developed privately.” “A survey and analysis performed
by the OECD in 2005 found, to their surprise, that while private R&D had a positive 0.26 correlation with economic growth, government funded R&D had a negative 0.37 correlation!” “Centralized funding of an intellectual elite makes it easier for cadres, cliques,
and the politically skilled to gain control of a field, and they by their nature are resistant to new, outside, non-Ptolemaic ideas.” This is what happened to nanotech; there was a huge amount of buzz, culminating in $500 million dollars of funding under Clinton
in 1990. This huge prize kicked off an academic civil war, and the fledgling field of nanotech lost hard to the more established field of material science. Material science rebranded as “nanotech”, trashed the reputation of actual nanotech (to make sure they
won the competition for the grant money), and took all the funding for themselves. Nanotech never recovered.<u></u><u></u></span></p>
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<p><span style="font-family:Arial,sans-serif;color:rgb(119,119,119)">-- <br>
</span><span style="font-family:"Segoe UI Symbol",sans-serif;color:rgb(119,119,119)">☤</span><span style="font-family:Arial,sans-serif;color:rgb(119,119,119)">>$ uǝlƃ<br>
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