Ok... but that mostly just seems like Germany. At least the stereotype of Germany is that all the rules are very strict and it's very important to follow them.
On the high-speed train gliding smoothly from Berlin to Düsseldorf, a young man started chatting to me. He eventually asked, “What are some of the cultural differences you’ve noticed between Germans and Americans?”
As if on cue, a middle-aged woman hovered over us and gave a harsh, “Shh!” with her finger pressed against her lips. She pointed to a sign of a mobile phone with a cross through it, indicating that we were in the Ruhebereich, the quiet carriage of the train.
“You must be quiet,” she said, before returning to her seat.
“That,” I said to the man sitting next to me. “That’s different.”
As their eyes alight on the small sign that goes with it, which reads “barefoot zone” in German, grown men freeze as though they have hit a force field, or had an electric shock administered for being foolish enough to try to pass it still shod. But I can not say what the repercussions would be. This being Germany, I have never seen anyone wearing shoes on the far side of the line and certainly would not risk it myself.
These are articles published in respectable, mainstream, western news. I'm not alone in thinking that German society is somewhat stricter than most other western societies.
You are right in saying Germans love to follow rules. The restrictions in Italy were also not as hard as in Germany. I gave the example of Germany since that's where I lived during the pandemic, but Poland for example I heard was similar to Germany, and much of Eastern Europe was _worse_ (since for them it was properly life or death -- all the doctors left, and the medical infrastructure is in shambles).
>Italian citizens and permanent residents can get a super green pass when they get vaccinated or recover from Covid. The green pass is the equivalent of the EU Digital COVID Certificate, issued to EU citizens and residents as digital proof that a person has either:
- been vaccinated against COVID-19
- recovered from COVID-19
- received a negative test result
I don't disagree that governments have imposed restrictive COVID measures, especially in Europe. I just am pointing out some limitations and caveats in your examples that makes them less damning than they seem as supposed "abuses of power". At a high level, I agree with you.
Edit: the shift from "use of power" to talking about "abuse of power" was itself a strawman by marcosdumay. We all got baited.
Will Says:
Comment #9 December 2nd, 2022 at 7:26 pm
Hi Scott,
I think I must be missing something in your argument.
If “A foofs B” has a dual description “C blebs D”, and we establish that A does indeed foof B, would you agree that it is equally true to say that C blebs D?
If so, wouldn’t it be correct to say that this experiment has created a wormhole? It’s not a wormhole in our regular universe’s spacetime, but perhaps it’s a wormhole in some… where (? not exactly clear on this).
And from this, perhaps it follows why an equally-precise simulation on the classical computer wouldn’t create a wormhole in the same way? (This part seems dubious to me–I want to say that A foofing B is different from a simulation of A foofing B–after all, no matter how well you simulate a hurricane, nobody gets wet. But I’m wondering if this instinct is in conflict with my early claim that “A foofs B” is equally true as “C blebs D”. Hmm.. now that I think about it, maybe this is actually what you meant by “bring a wormhole into actual physical existence every time you sketch one with pen and paper.”)
Scott Says:
Comment #21 December 3rd, 2022 at 9:12 am
Will #9:
> Hmm.. now that I think about it, maybe this is actually what you meant by “bring a wormhole into actual physical existence every time you sketch one with pen and paper.”
Yup!
So Aaronson's position seems like, even if a system is "real", it doesn't mean its holographic dual is "real". I get that it's in his interest to steer QC as far away from this voodoo AdS/CFT stuff as possible, but his statement feels weird somehow. I agree it always makes sense to shut up and calculate, but as a lay person the holography stuff seems more significant than a classical simulation or a philosophical thought experiment, in that there are certain objects like black holes where the promising way to look at them is from the holographic viewpoint.
>[Scott #111] I would never object to anyone speculating about such fun things! The one part that I do object to, is people passing over the metaphysical enormity of what needs to be presupposed in such a discussion, as if it didn’t even require comment
>[Scott #119] Where I agree with you is this: I think that, for the vast majority of entangled states one cares about in physics, a dual description in terms of wormholes simply isn’t useful, even in those cases where it meaningfully exists (which is far from all of them).
Seems like at a high level this is indeed his position iiuc.
They do address this in the article (albeit in a flowery way):
>Surprisingly, despite the skeletal simplicity of their wormhole, the researchers detected a second signature of wormhole dynamics, a delicate pattern in the way information spread and un-spread among the qubits known as “size-winding.” They hadn’t trained their neural network to preserve this signal as it sparsified the SYK model, so the fact that size-winding shows up anyway is an experimental discovery about holography. “We didn’t demand anything about this size-winding property, but we found that it just popped out,” Jafferis said. This “confirmed the robustness” of the holographic duality, he said. “Make one [property] appear, then you get all the rest, which is a kind of evidence that this gravitational picture is the correct one.”
Seems like their argument is that because they didn't train for the size-winding, but observed it, that some gravitational interaction is probably happening, despite there only being finitely many cubits unlike true SYK.
>Most comments say it's simulated. I think it's not even that... The fact they ran it on a real device is irrelevant.
I don't fully understand the theory around holography but I'm not convinced by the commenters saying that it's "simulated". IIUC, the certain quantum system that is equivalent to gravity is "another view of" the wormhole transport in AdS space and that in some sense it did indeed happen "in reality". Although it's not so clear what reality means anymore if these theories are true for real dS spacetime and everything can be described via a bunch of degrees of freedom on a boundary surface.
As an aside, I wish the article was written in plainer English. I laughed when they wrote that the physicist was "a gifted programmer" because they could use pytorch or whatever. What a puff piece.
Where in the West were there actual curfews? In the U.S. I don't remember there being any; just some talk about potentially quarantining NYC which of course never actually happened.
I always thought starting with CSAM was just a convenient pretext for slowly introducing surveillance tech in the U.S.
#1-#7 are all bad. I don't think saying "some aspects of [bad thing] aren't so bad" is an effective argument against surveillance tech. Better just to call bullshit on the surveillance tech itself.
Yes we are using the same closed source hardware as 99% of people. Open source HW is ideal, but the options are currently very limited. I use rotating burner SIMs on occasions when I need cellular and never make calls with the SIM. The OS provides other SW mitigations for the HW such as no SW access to the device ID's, fine grained app firewall, and ability to turn off all cellular but enable WIFI.
The transition to a bipolar world with a U.S. sphere and a Chinese sphere would be a huge shock to both sides. I don't know if it would be a fairer world or not; regardless, we all seem intent on doing this.
This article is another in a long line of very scary news about the U.S.-China tensions. I hope diplomacy and peace will prevail eventually.
I disagree with your suggestion that diplomacy is necessarily a form of submission. Peace can still be made while maintaining a position of strength. For example, U.S.-Soviet relations.
"Of course the people don't want war. But after all, it's the leaders of the country who determine the policy, and it's always a simple matter to drag the people along whether it's a democracy, a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship. Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism, and exposing the country to greater danger."
> enforcement of security vulnerability should be by law
I think whether there "should" be a law making you liable could depend on the details of the exploit.
If you get exploited via rowhammer, I don't think anyone would blame you. It would be unreasonable if every small business running a website could be sued if they didn't defend against electromagnetic interference within the RAM.
However, if you're Apple and say -- you could get pwned because someone clicked a button to register version 9000 on the public npm/pypi registry (https://medium.com/@alex.birsan/dependency-confusion-4a5d60f...) -- maybe I agree there's an argument for some accountability there :)
Computing is the only industry, where people accept to live with tainted goods instead of forcing whoever sold them to pay back, cover for their damage or whatever.
We already have high integrity computing, digital stores with returns, consulting with warranty clauses, and some countries are finally waking up that computing shouldn't be a special snowflake.
Just pointing that all software is exploitable. And punishing the application developer might not be right if the vulnerability is caused by a lower level dependency. For example, log4j.
I agree if there's a high social cost to a breach then the government should punish those involved. Also, the security of your software depends on your threat model and which threats are in scope and you're willing to invest in protecting against. The tradeoff is ease of development and velocity. So maybe such laws will incentive this process differently, and maybe it's a worthwhile change.
I look at computing as a big experiment. Personally, I am very careful to use trustworthy services and don't depend on software for anything critical (besides banking, but luckily FDIC). Most people don't take the same precautions and rely very heavily. It's obviously critical infrastructure at this point. Maybe it's time to stop thinking of it as an experiment, and maybe these laws make sense.
I don't like the concept for emotional reasons; to me it's sad and signals another step towards the end of the golden age of the internet.
4) If computers get good enough at 1) or 2), then there'd be much bigger problems, and essentially all humans will become the starving artists.
Also, I'm not so sure that language models like SD, Imagen, GPT-3, PaLM are purely copycats. And I'm not so sure that most human artists are not mostly copycats either.
My suspicion is that there's much more overlap between how these models work and what artists do (and how humans think in general), but that we elevate creative work so much that it's difficult to admit the size of the overlap. The reason why I lean this way is because of the supposed role of language in the evolution of human cognition (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Origin_of_language)
And the reason I'm not certain that the NN-based models are purely copycats is they have internal state; they can and do perform computations, invent algorithms, and can almost perform "reasoning". I'm very much a layperson but I found this "chains of thought" approach (https://ai.googleblog.com/2022/05/language-models-perform-re...) very interesting, where the reasoning task given to the model is much more explicit. My guess is that some iterative construction like this will be the way the reasoning ability of language/image models will improve.
But at a high level, the only thing we humans have going for us is the anthropic principle. Hopefully there's some magic going on in our brains that's so complicated and unlikely that no one will ever figure out how it works.
BTW, I am a layperson. I am just curious when we will all be killed off by our robot overlords.
> and essentially all humans will become the starving artists
all of these assumptions miss something so huge that it surprises me that so many miss it: WHO is doing the art purchasing? WHO is evaluating the "value" of... well... anything, really? It is us. Humans. Machines can't value anything properly (example: Find an algorithm that can spot, or create, the next music hit, BEFORE any humans hear it). Only humans can, because "things" (such as artistic works, which are barely even "things", much more like "arbitrary forms" when considered objectively/from the universe's perspective) only have meaning and value to US.
> when we will all be killed off by our robot overlords
We won't. Not unless those robots are directed or programmed by humans who have passionate, malicious intent. Because machines don't have will, don't have need, and don't have passion. Put bluntly and somewhat sentimentally, machines don't have love (or hate), except that which is simulated or given by a human. So it's always ultimately the human's "fault".
>we won't be killed off by AGI because humans don't have malicious intent
I wouldn't say malice is necessary. It's just economics. Humans are lazy, inefficient GI that farts. The only reason the global economy feeds 8 billion of us is that we are the best, cheapest (and only) GI.
If we manage to create life capable of doing 1) and 2) but also capable of self-improvement and self-design of their intelligence I think what we've just done is created the next step in the universe understanding itself, which is a good thing. Bacteria didn't panic when multi-cellular life evolved. Bacteria is still around, it's just a thriving part of a more complex system.
At some point biological humans will either merge with their technology or stop being the forefront of intelligence in our little corner of the universe. Either of those is perfectly acceptable as far as I am concerned and hopefully one or both of them come to pass. The only way they don't IMO is if we manage to exterminate ourselves first.
Bacteria obviously lack the capacity to panic about the emergence of multicellular life.
A vast number of species are no longer around, and we are relatively unusual in being a species that can even contemplate its own demise, so it's entirely reasonable that we would think about and be potentially concerned about our own technological creations supplanting us, possibly maliciously.
From "What makes Germans so orderly?" https://www.bbc.com/travel/article/20200531-what-makes-germa...
On the high-speed train gliding smoothly from Berlin to Düsseldorf, a young man started chatting to me. He eventually asked, “What are some of the cultural differences you’ve noticed between Germans and Americans?”
As if on cue, a middle-aged woman hovered over us and gave a harsh, “Shh!” with her finger pressed against her lips. She pointed to a sign of a mobile phone with a cross through it, indicating that we were in the Ruhebereich, the quiet carriage of the train.
“You must be quiet,” she said, before returning to her seat.
“That,” I said to the man sitting next to me. “That’s different.”
From "The lines a German won't cross" https://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/05/weekinreview/05KULISH.htm...
As their eyes alight on the small sign that goes with it, which reads “barefoot zone” in German, grown men freeze as though they have hit a force field, or had an electric shock administered for being foolish enough to try to pass it still shod. But I can not say what the repercussions would be. This being Germany, I have never seen anyone wearing shoes on the far side of the line and certainly would not risk it myself.
These are articles published in respectable, mainstream, western news. I'm not alone in thinking that German society is somewhat stricter than most other western societies.