Chris Littlewood

@elonmusk 😂Not much selection bias there E. You heard of the World Wide Web?

The forcing function for improvement in the public sector is weak

This is an impressive land grab by physics. bbc.co.uk/news/articles/…

@memecrashes 60

posting my answer in two days from now

Hilarious to think @Jacob_Rees_Mogg thinks the problem was getting rid of @BorisJohnson. That’s why they’ll be in the wilderness for a long time.

@ylecun You keep using the flight analogy, but as you must realise there was no imaginable scenario in flight where it “gets away from us”, whereas there is with AI. We could abandon any plane design that caused a crash.

It seems to me that before "urgently figuring out how to control AI systems much smarter than us" we need to have the beginning of a hint of a design for a system smarter than a house cat. Such a sense of urgency reveals an extremely distorted view of reality. No wonder the more based members of the organization seeked to marginalize the superalignment group. It's as if someone had said in 1925 "we urgently need to figure out how to control aircrafts that can transport hundreds of passengers at near the speed of the sound over the oceans." It would have been difficult to make long-haul passenger jets safe before the turbojet was invented and before any aircraft had crossed the atlantic non-stop. Yet, we can now fly halfway around the world on twin-engine jets in complete safety. It didn't require some sort of magical recipe for safety. It took decades of careful engineering and iterative refinements. The process will be similar for intelligent systems. It will take years for them to get as smart as cats, and more years to get as smart as humans, let alone smarter (don't confuse the superhuman knowledge accumulation and retrieval abilities of current LLMs with actual intelligence). It will take years for them to be deployed and fine-tuned for efficiency and safety as they are made smarter and smarter.

@10DowningStreet Quite, quite mad.

We are a reasonable country, but our patience has now run out. Our Parliament is sovereign, and it should be able to make decisions that cannot be undone in our courts. That’s what this emergency legislation delivers.

Pretty sure he was Minister for Magic during The Goblet of Fire @jk_rowling ?

I'm pretty sure it was two trains, not one going round and round like on snake. Yesterday at Barkimg. #gricer @railregulation

@PicturesFoIder 30 + 50 - 5

How do you do it?

This is massive.

@ESYudkowsky What’s interests me about the rules is that they seem like patches - each added in response to a discovered behaviour. Like so many bits of sticky tape. How could that ever be foolproof?

The impossible difficulty-danger of AI is that you won't get superintelligence right on your first try - but worth noticing today's builders can't get regular AI to do what they want on the twentieth try.

@ESYudkowsky Will it turn into an online TED talk at any point Eliezer?

A lot of people at TED expressed shock that I'd been able to give a TED talk on less than 4 days' notice. It's actually worse; due to prior commitments and schedule mishaps, I only wrote my talk the day before. Which I trusted myself to do, and to commit to TED to doing, because I knew this Secret of Writing: "There is no such thing as writer's block, only holding yourself to too high a standard." You can *always* put words down on a page, if you're willing to accept a sufficiently awful first draft. I knew I could definitely write six minutes of text, even if it might not be as good as I wanted. When time got short, I lowered my ambitions and kept going. But man, I would not have wanted to try that fifteen years earlier.

Oak Grove, 1887 #shishkin #realism wikiart.org/en/ivan-shishk…

@fchollet It doesn’t make sense to characterise it in terms of the sensibility of the arguments. There are things that are dangerous to humans, and it’s not a betrayal of humanity to be careful of them.

There are two opposite kinds of perspectives on AI flying around lately: the humanistic one, focused on how AI can be used as a tool to help us do more, imagine further, create faster -- and the anti-humanistic one, focused on human obsolescence & replacement, helplessness, fear.

@80s_Kidz You’re thinking of the Care Bears Movie aren’t you?

Checkbout the this video rental chart from august 86. Theres some gems in there!

“Somehow we’ve conjured up an infinite hallucinogenic dreamscape out of Bayesian statistics and we’re already kind of bored by it.“

@FryRsquared Rubicon (Tom Holland) The Signal & the Noise (Nate Silver) Where Good Ideas Come From (Steven Johnson) Last Chance to See (Douglas Adams) Feynman Lectures

Indulge me on a Friday night. What’s the best non fiction book you’ve ever read?

@DonaldClark Can’t wait for Elon to implement the 👎

My Scottish Hyde has overtaken Jekyll.... have just cheered a Samoan try...

@llamasoft_ox Or a purple moose?

@DonaldClark I’m stumped

@filtered_chris Excellent guess so far but only a boys club.

Which British football team is named after a specific Roman Monument?