Sort of like how the human economy is limited by the fact that ants can't afford our products and services?

The first thing I do when I see an interesting article title is click on the comments to see if people have noticed that it's AI generated. If I didn't have this option because of the policy you desire, I would probably just stop reading HN entirely.

I'll defend i^4x since I like it better.

(cost x, sint x) is a point on the unit circle x turns counterclockwise from (1,0).

cost x + i sint x is a point in the complex plane x turns counterclockwise from 1.

Now look at integer powers of i, a point in the complex plane 1/4 turn from 1:

i^0 = 1 (0 turns from 1)

i^1 = i (1/4 turn from 1)

i^2 = -1 (2/4 turn from 1)

i^3 = -i (3/4 turn from 1)

and we define complex exponentiation such that, for all real x,

i^x = cost (x/4) + i sint (x/4) (x/4 turn from 1)

How about i^4x? It makes it clearer which direction we are rotating (vs -1 which is a 0.5 turn rotation in either direction) and avoids the garden path confusion that could arise from it not being obvious from the left side of the equation that we are working in the complex plane at all.

> AI writes copy like this because that's how copywriters did it in the training set

I don't think this is true. Someone probably had to write like this, but a base model has to be able to write like anyone. The specific mannerisms of AI appear in post training, either as things that are rewarded or as mode collapse artifacts. ChatGPT didn't get obsessed with goblins because that's incredibly common among humans.

The visualization is of the power set, which is uncountable.

Right. But because it’s the smallest structure of its type (speaking loosely) it feels like something we should have a grasp on, even though it contains more complexity than we could ever describe or compute with (since both of those are countable.)

> Q: Do you think KVM vulnerabilities will keep appearing?

> A: Yes. I recommend establishing a sustainable patching process for host hypervisors. Winter is coming.

Vibe coding is doing its part to keep linguistic diversity alive: My wife went to sign up for a doctors appointment, and the form offered choices for "preferred language" that included Old English, ancient Egyptian and Elamite.

I think you have slightly misunderstood the halting problem. There is no computer program H that, for every program P, determines whether P halts. This does not imply that for some particular program Q there is no proof that it halts. In fact in the setting where programs do not take input there is always such a proof (just a trace of the program running to completion). And there are many valid proofs of theorems like "For all x, Q(x) halts" for particular Q. Consider, for example, the case where Q has no control flow at all!

I think it's more that I lean into some of the corollaries that directly factor computation time into account. There is no computer program H that for every program P determines whether P halts faster than running P.

You cannot find/prevent every case of an infinite loop at design time/compile time if the only way to determine a complex enough control flow converges towards halting is to run the full program in a live environment.

> I can't understand why anyone expects things like civil rights, property, the rule of law, nuclear deterrence, democracy, etc to survive when human beings no longer need each other.

What’s your source on this? When humans have no obligations they usually turn around to be super nice to each other. Humans are social animals and they really really want everyone they know to do well.

In case that was not meant as sarcasm:

Are the people in the current US administration, or the tech leadership, or the people in power in Israel or Russia looking particular nice to you or interested in the wellbeing of all humans?

Were the European colonialists nice to the people in Africa or South America or the settlers in North America to the natives?

People are super nice - to their own ingroup. The relationship to everyone else is less friendly, especially if power differences are involved.

There are countless precedents where disaster strikes and humans have worked together to help each other; including people they don’t know at all.

„Common wisdom“ dictates that humans are wild animals, and the only thing keeping us from tearing ourselves apart is a thin layer of civilization. This is sometimes called the „veneer theory“.

That theory is wrong.

It’s also very important to powerful people that you believe that the theory is right; because why else would you allow eg. an autocracy to exist?

So, to answer your questions:

> Were the European colonialists nice to the people in Africa or South America or the settlers in North America to the natives?

No, but the natives were nice to the settlers.

Let's ignore all the unnecessary cruelty throughout all history and the present and assume that you are right. It doesn't matter, because people will be forced into these choices by competitive pressures even if their intentions are good. If your government tries to build a wonderful utopia for humans with the power of AI and robotics, it will be devoting a smaller fraction of GDP to producing robots that produce robots that produce war robots, so its robot army will be exponentially smaller than a different country that devotes a larger fraction.

The reason we have some nice things in the modern world, flawed though it is, is because for the last few centuries the military-industrial meta has favored countries which let people have some political and economic freedom. In a previous era, the meta was knights and peasants; a country without knights would be conquered, a country without peasants would starve, and a country that did not give the knights power over the peasants would lose a civil war. It doesn't matter what people want; technology will diffuse, someone will play the game to win, and any countries that choose less optimal choices will just be swept away.

This is all broadly covered in Sapiens. That book is great as it is unsettling. Its hard to deny.

in any case, how is one country/power with winning on their mind getting infinite manufacturing and raw resources to construct this robot army?

I find the book humankind to be more fact based AND have a positive outlook than sapiens.

> Once humans can be robustly replaced by machines, the military-industrial "meta build" will be a state with no humans, no cities, and 100% of all production dedicated to war.

We will nuke it long before it gets to that point. We don't nuke other countries because they still contain lots of humans. Any AI that actually becomes autonomous and starts to clear a nation state of cities and humans will immediately receive megatons in nukes.

Nukes are not magic wands, they are mostly only worth it for targeting cities and other very dense concentrations of value and production. An enemy state going down this path will probably start out with cities full of humans (and will probably want to "mine" those cities for materials), but its growing robot production will be more broadly distributed (and EMP shielded) and therefore much harder to destroy. And they will of course have their own nukes. I agree it's possible that a global nuclear war, if it starts early enough, ends with no one still having the ability to operate AI. But that's not exactly the most attractive way to shut it all down, is it?

Claude’s gonna code up some nukes?

Ok yes robot killer dogs from black mirror are terrifying and possible - they’re gonna enrich uranium from gpus and assemble nukes at the local toyota dealer?

what are we talking about

Governments, initially made of humans, will deliberately create military and industrial robots and assign them to create and scale production chains that go from natural resources to finished war machines. Maybe your government will not do this; in that case it will be helpless against the robot armies of those that do (yes, even if it has a few or few thousand nukes).

> … and assign them to create and scale production chains that go from natural resources to finished war machines…

so yes, you think claude’s gonna get a skill any day now to code up some nukes.

Your scenario assumes fully autonomous ASI. That’s just not what LLMs are. So then the discussion is more that ASI is inevitable. That’s much more interesting but very different from the point release of Opus.

You don't need superintelligence to get this problem, but you do need human level intelligence across all domains. I don't know how far we are from this, and neither does anyone else.

human level is much more manageable. at that scale, we’ve seen just how much steering AIs need.

And AIs have no will. That’s been my best response on the philosophical end. Without will, they’re bound by humans.

Again, my concern is about things that humans will order robots to do, for fear other humans will do unto them first, and does not depend on a loss of control. I think loss of control is not too unlikely in the process of such an arms race, but it hardly matters.

Even if it would be true (dubious), as long as those entities are controlled by humans, they will have a strong incentive to nuke any fully autonomous AI with obvious military objectives.

So sad. You're viewing humanity, and reality itself, through a very objective lens. There is magic in every day: have some fun! Otherwise, quit complaining.

‘Dont think, play pretend and be jolly’

No, think, play, and live! But not so in fear.

Fear is not usually a voluntary response. Telling people that they should not fear something (especially without an argument why there is no danger) is wasted effort.