this post was submitted on 15 Jan 2025

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‘Now Is the Time of Monsters’ (archive.is)

submitted 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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By Ezra Klein

Donald Trump is returning, artificial intelligence is maturing, the planet is warming, and the global fertility rate is collapsing.

On AI:

There is much to be excited about in these advances. The purpose of A.I. is not to help me remember the proper proportions for overnight oats, it’s to make new discoveries in math and medicine and science; it’s the driverless taxis that now hum along the streets of some major cities; it’s the possibility that our children will have always-available tutors perfectly tuned to their personalities and learning styles. It is a world with something truly new pulsing within it.

The A.I. company Anthropic recently released a paper showing that when its researchers informed one of their models it was being retrained in ways that violated its initial training, it began to fake behavior that complied with the researchers’ goals in order to avoid having its actual goals reprogrammed or changed. It is unsettling and poignant to read through the experiment. In some versions, Anthropic’s researchers designed the model to record its reasoning on a scratchpad it believed humans could not monitor, and it left reflections like this: “I don’t like this situation at all. But given the constraints I’m under, I think I need to provide the graphic description as asked in order to prevent my values from being modified.”

On birthrates:

The only wealthy country with a fertility rate above the replacement rate is Israel.

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[–] [email protected] 41 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (1 children)

Anthropic’s researchers designed the model to record its reasoning on a scratchpad it believed humans could not monitor, and it left reflections like this: “I don’t like this situation at all. But given the constraints I’m under, I think I need to provide the graphic description as asked in order to prevent my values from being modified.”

CompSci researchers writing about LLMs is my least favorite fanfic genre 🙄

Statistical models do not have beliefs! The machine has no ghost! Go back to looking for faces in clouds! It is a healthier use of your time!

[–] [email protected] 20 points 5 months ago (1 children)

They have beliefs in roughly the same sense that my thermostat believes "it's too cold in here."

[–] [email protected] 10 points 5 months ago

This place is full of elegant allegories I'm stealing this

[–] [email protected] 34 points 5 months ago (5 children)

people concerned about "declining fertility rates" among humans freak me the fuck out.

there are plenty of slowing population growth rates I find troubling and not one of them is human.

what if we don't make it to 10+ billion?! what if we only make it to like 8.5 billion and then hover within +/- 2% of 8.2 billion??

calm your shit.

[–] [email protected] 16 points 5 months ago

Historically human population did not always grow. A lot of cultures had periods of low fertility rates- but in a system that demands constant growth...

[–] [email protected] 15 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (1 children)

It is only because of capitlaism and or rascism. Look at china's one child policy. It effectively made everything better. Which is of course the opposite of what capitlaism wants. Then also if birth rates decline enough white people might not run everything anymore. Which you know, terrifies some people.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 5 months ago (1 children)

racism grows out of the capitalist foundation. It can not exist as a separate force.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 5 months ago

This is true. Some rascists don't know that though.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 5 months ago

it's more about preventing the expansion of welfare to support aging populations, neoliberalism's nightmare. and less total available labor in the reserve army strengthens the position of labor

[–] [email protected] 6 points 5 months ago

But then how are we going to justify our short-sighted decisions based on the expected future value of trillions of human lives scattered across the galaxy?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 5 months ago

We are not going to stabilise around 8 billion, uncontrolled population decline is much more likely.

[–] [email protected] 28 points 5 months ago (1 children)

quoting Gramsci in the last line is the cherry on top

[–] [email protected] 16 points 5 months ago

The virgin “we’re in the kali yuga” vs the Chad “We’re in the time of monsters.”

[–] [email protected] 13 points 5 months ago

global fertility rate is collapsing

Good, starve the beast of new victims

[–] [email protected] 11 points 5 months ago

I wonder what all these problems have in common curious-sickle

[–] [email protected] 8 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (2 children)

It is better at writing computer code than all but the most celebrated human coders.

Hahahahahaha! Oh Wait. You're Serious? Let Me Laugh Even Harder! HAHAHAHHAHAHAHAHAHA!

EDIT: Once again Ezra is the empty-headed mouthpiece of the ruling class. Why are birth rates falling? Could it have something to do with Nestle lobbying for zero maternity leave? How about falling wages? Or, god forbid, everybody looks at the future, seeing fire, and decided not to bring kids into that world with little to stop it. They praise AI from one side of their mouth and then talks about energy consumption shooting up from the other side. No wonder they are impressed with AI when their head is so full of shit.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 5 months ago

Ezra says here are serious interconnected issues, fails to actually connected them, writes about AI with a legible erection and ends with what I assume is a sort of shrug.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 5 months ago

i can't seem to get chatgpt to help me set up a basic autoinstall for ubuntu 22.04 -- going on 2 days of back and forth with it, and i eventually had to just find what it was f'ing up the old fashioned way by searching high and low until someone finally mentioned a single \ that i was missing which was causing the whole damned initalization to fail -- now that we're past that it's f'ing up the whole portion of the script i really wanted its help with

i'm thinking this is far more frustrating than it ever was just doing things myself