The case against AI doom

The New Neo Posted on by

I’d rather the world not be destroyed by AI, so I’m heartened by this. An excerpt:

Here are the main counterarguments:

* Intelligence does not imply agency: A system can be extraordinarily capable at prediction, theorem proving, engineering, programming, etc. without having persistent goals, self-preservation drives, or an independent desire to act.

That has long puzzled me about the assertions of AI-doomers, as well.

More:

* Agency does not imply a single, stable utility function: Much alignment theory reasons about agents as expected-utility maximizers with coherent preferences. Actual AIs systems need not resemble that abstraction, and currently do not. …

* Capability and motivation are being conflated: Being able to formulate a plan for escaping a sandbox doesn’t entail wanting to escape it. …

* Recursive self-improvement doesn’t entail an intelligence explosion …

Intelligence may have sharply diminishing returns: There may be no meaningful scalar quantity corresponding to arbitrarily large “general intelligence.” Even if there is, going from IQ-equivalent 150 to 1,500 need not produce the sort of qualitative advantage that separates humans from chimpanzees. …

* Superintelligence isn’t omnipotence: Intelligence cannot repeal physics or eliminate uncertainty. A brilliant AI still needs processors, electricity, network access, money, factories, robots and people willing or tricked into doing things. …

* Humans retain numerous intervention points: The doom narrative sometimes jumps from “AI behaves dangerously” to “humanity is helpless.”

There’s a lot more at the link. Much although not all of it seems to have to do with the idea of agency and the tendency of people to anthropomorphize AI. Many of the comments there are worthwhile, too.

However, the following seems ironic, tacked on at the end of the lengthy tweet:

ChatGPT 6 Astra assisted with the research for this post.

News roundup

The New Neo Posted on by

(1) We wouldn’t want a wonderful person such as this to be deported from Canada, now would we?

A Haitian woman who disfigured a stranger in a Montreal-area biting attack has been given a reduced sentence by a Quebec judge on the grounds that a harsher prison term would endanger her “precarious immigration status.”

Just two days after Christmas in 2022, Macdala Monfiston spent eight minutes viciously attacking a woman outside a bar in Laval, Que., leaving the victim with bite marks all over her arms and face. …

Although good Samaritans attempted to intervene, they were held back by Monfiston’s boyfriend.

After Monfiston pleaded guilty to aggravated assault in early 2025, a Court of Quebec judge sentenced her to four years in prison – the sentence already a fraction of the maximum 14-year sentence set for the crime under the Criminal Code.

But in a decision released this week, the Quebec Court of Appeal ruled that four years was too harsh, in part because it could possibly get her deported.

Canada has gone left, and I’d say it’s also gone pretty far into suicidal empathy. This may be especially true in Quebec. Note also that the Quebec Court of Appeal ruling was signed by three female judges – not that males are immune to suicidal empathy, but I think females are somewhat more vulnerable.

(2) Not supporting Israel-hating rap singer Macklemore enough gets Ed Sheeran in trouble with the “Free Palestine” crowd. Mackelmore has been saying that “Free Palestine” are “two words … near and dear to my heart.”

I think a good rejoinder would be, “Yes, free Palestine … from Hamas and Jew-hatred.”

(3) The holdout juror in the Clancy trial says that no, he did not have reasonable doubt, contrary to what some other jurors on the panel have alleged about him. He’s also a Trump-supporter, which he says made him a target of the others. I can well believe it.

(4) The British village of Piddington (great name) doesn’t seem to suffer from suicidal empathy:

A tiny English village has voted overwhelmingly to leave the United Kingdom in a symbolic referendum triggered by government plans to house more than 1,200 male asylum seekers at a former military site nearby.

Residents of Piddington, a rural village in Oxfordshire, voted 285 to 26 to “secede from the UK and pursue self-determination,” with a turnout of nearly 92%. The vote has no legal force.

Piddington has a population of around 350 people. The asylum accommodation plan would house up to 1,256 asylum seekers, more than three times the population of the village, at a former British military base in Bicester, half a mile from Piddington.

The site would operate as a non-detained asylum accommodation, meaning the asylum seekers would be able to come and go. …

“I’m worried about the safety of the children and the women of the village,” said Jennifer Owen, who voted to leave the U.K. “The towns won’t be the same, they’ll be overrun, village will be overrun. It just won’t be the same again.”

Isn’t that the point?

Until now, most of the asylum centers have been located near poorer towns. Piddington, however, is relatively affluent. And that’s the plan, too:

“We cannot have a situation where it’s only the poorest communities in the country that receive all of the dispersal of refugees and asylum seekers,” [Prime Minister] Burnham told GB News.

Well then, I suggest he take about thirty into 10 Downing Street and an equal number into his family home, where he sometimes still lives.

(5) Iran branches out:

One disturbing aspect of the surge in antisemitic violence since October 7 has received relatively little attention: Western governments say that Iran and Iranian-backed organizations have been behind a series of plots and attacks against Jewish and Israeli targets across Europe, North America and Australia.

The phenomenon became impossible to dismiss as a collection of unrelated incidents in June. Twenty-four governments, including the United States, Britain, Canada, Australia, Germany and Sweden, jointly condemned “lethal plotting and other malign actions” by Iran’s IRGC Intelligence Organization, Quds Force and Ministry of Intelligence. They specifically identified “Jewish and Israeli communities and interests” among Iran’s targets and noted the Iranian security services’ longstanding relationship with international and local criminal groups.

This is not completely new, however. For example, there’s the 1994 bombing of a Jewish center in Buenos Aires that killed 85 people and was sponsored by Iran and carried out by Hezbollah. There was also the 1992 bombing of the Israeli Embassy in that city. More at the link.

Slightly overzealous comment filter

The New Neo Posted on by

The new comments policy I instituted a while back has been working very well so far (knock wood) to block trolls.

On the other hand, it’s a trifle overeager and sometimes blocks certain comments from regular comments for no reason whatsoever, as far as I can tell. So if you find that a comment of yours fails to appear, please wait a few hours. I check these things at least once a day, and I’ll liberate it from the moderation or spam pile before too much time passes.

Also, comments from first-time commenters go into moderation just that first time, until I approve them. After that, comments from that same commenter should appear automatically.

Throwing money at schools doesn’t work …

The New Neo Posted on by

… if you don’t apply it in a thoughtful way. New York, case in point:

… New York public education is falling behind because the state has ignored chances to discover what educational practices really work, use that evidence to improve student outcomes, and make its leadership accountable for results.

While the state gathers troves of data, many of its most important programs are poorly measured or poorly evaluated.

For example, New York knows very little about its two fastest-growing programs: special education and school-based mental-health services. In New York, 21 percent of public school students are classified as having a disability, compared with the national average of 15 percent. The state has also opened more than 1,000 school-based mental-health clinics and hired counselors at a rate few other states can match. But it does not track if students are getting the services they need, if the programs are effective, or even if parents agreed to them.

Brilliant, just brilliant.

Similar problems dog New York’s tracking of individual students, teacher training programs, and the elimination of the infamous compulsory Regents exams of my youth. New York knows that charter schools are a good idea, but for political reasons they are very limited. And on and on and on.

It’s a choice to be mediocre, and to use money to fund Democrat constituencies in education rather than caring about education itself.

Say goodbye to the penny

The New Neo Posted on by

The act eliminating them is a pun:

The House of Representatives voted to send the smallest piece of US currency the way of the dodo on Monday, passing the bipartisan Common Cents Act in a unanimous vote.

In addition to blocking the Treasury from minting any more pennies save for collector coins, the bill would also set up a framework for cash transactions to be rounded to the nearest 5 cents, in order to eliminate the need for pennies altogether.

When was the last time you used a penny? Now they cost too much to manufacture. So begone!

When I was a kid, penny candy was actually a thing. We went to a little news store that had many bins of it and made our choices carefully. But that’s when a candy bar usually cost a nickel.

Love at first sight: a personal story

The New Neo Posted on by

[NOTE: I’ve had this draft among my many hundreds of drafts for about sevem years. I never got around to publishing it; not sure why. But today seems like a good time to do so, for obvious reasons.]

This post of mine about love at first sight sparked a lot of discussion, including some personal stories about the phenomenon, some doubters, and some believers.

Until it happened to me I’m not sure I believed in the existence of love at first sight, either. And I certainly didn’t expect that it would ever happen to me. Indeed, the evening I met my husband-to-be, such a thing was furthest from my mind.

It was the evening of one of my very first days in law school. I had just arrived for a temporary stay in a spare room in the apartment of two other women while I looked for more permanent lodging. I was exhausted, and all I was really thinking about was that at least I had a place to sleep for a few nights. I entered a room where the two young women were talking to a young man, and I sat myself down in an available chair (a wooden rocker) to relax for the very first time that day.

And then I glanced at the man. His look intrigued and attracted me, but it wasn’t just that. He was talking to the two women, and what he said was very entertaining, witty, and humorous. They were laughing and laughing. I’ve always been attracted to humor in men, and the combination of that plus his good looks – and something else, some indefinable and indescribable perception that to this day I don’t understand, but let’s call it “connection” – was apparently all it took.

About 24 hours later I had a thought I’d never had before: “I might marry this guy.”

I was twenty-one years old. We married five years later, and although we’re divorced now we stayed married for over thirty years. Was the love real? Absolutely. And I still can’t explain the phenomenon of love at first sight.

And I’m still extremely surprised that it happened to me.