Being interested is not the same as being competent.
Conservatism is not a doctrine of competence. Experience shows time and again that conservatives can't think, can't plan, and can't govern. They act in emotional and purely self-interested ways to promote rigid hierarchies, and are reliably surprised by consequences that are obvious and predictable to rational educated actors.
Information is not culture. Universities teach culture - moral attitudes. They don't just transfer information.
This applies to science and engineering as much as it applies to the arts, but you need a good education to understand what "morality" means in this context.
The collapse of the West started when the old Enlightenment morality - education of all kinds as a collective good - was replaced by the MBA culture of greed and vapid narcissism.
DEI was a weak and ineffectual response to that. The dysfunction goes far deeper, and universities are now a vector of it rather than a bulwark against it.
Nonsense.
Universities are just part of culture, it's tiny and most people do not participate and only receive the "products" coming out of universities. Culture is a broad concept and very region specific, it is not tied to academia. Universities have influence on culture but that's pretty much it.
Universities are supposed to teach valuable skills and knowledge. Outside of STEM fields they are increasingly failing at that task.
Relativism is in full force and we are in the "post-truth" world largely because university produced some of the most garbage theories you could think of.
And universities have no business inserting themselves into moral arguments, otherwise it is basically a state sanctioned religion. But this is basically the problem, universities have become the ideological arm the power in place, exactly like it was when the Catholics dominated Europe and gave legitimacy to kings.
Unsurprisingly there have been complaints of "neo-feudalism" which is just a repeat of the middle-age, that happened after the rise of Christianity, when universities were de facto Catholic institutions.
> but you need a good education to understand what "morality" means in this context.
Passive-agressive much ? Instead of attempting cheap low blows, maybe you can go through the trouble of explaining.
Morals can guide you for science and engineering choices but the whole point of those fields is that they shouldn't be limited by morals. I think you are confusing ethics and morals but it also seems like you are just arguing for some form of censorship.
>The collapse of the West started when the old Enlightenment morality - education of all kinds as a collective good - was replaced by the MBA culture of greed and vapid narcissism.
Vapid narcissism is an inherent human behavior and doesn't have much to do with universities but is largely linked to consumerism. I guess you could say that people go to university for credentialism in order to get a good pay to finally express their vapid narcissism. But the universities have nothing to do with the process and just a middle point in route to the goal. Which is basically the argument: credentialism is nonsense and cost a lot of money for no good results. If universities would be successful, one could easily argue that vapid narcissism should be going down actually but instead you get just another marker of uselessness. As for the MBAs, they can't be that big of an influence in the universities, it's mostly about bachelors and masters; why even bring this up ?
> DEI was a weak and ineffectual response to that. The dysfunction goes far deeper, and universities are now a vector of it rather than a bulwark against it.
DEI take its roots in universities, via feminism, gender studies and all kind of social sciences bullshit. Those fields were created precisely to fill the ranks because it was statistically impossible to have enough people clearing the bar for the hard studies even if they had wished to expand capacity. It was just a way to make people pay for a piece of paper that is supposed to give them legitimacy even though what happened is nothing short of endoctrinement.
Of course the universities are a vector of it, they created the dysfunction out of ideology and greed. It is just some a proto-religion that is trying to establish its authority.
Nothing can tell you that better than the divide between the university "educated" women, voting left and the common man being either right-wing or closer to the center. Historically women are often the first followers of new religions (just go check who is doing new age bullshit) and they constituted the majority of early followers of Christianity.
So DEI was hardly a response, it was the result of a new religion that has no name trying to cement itself in the establishment.
But it can only work if the men play along and so far the sentiment has been quite negative to say the least.
It's the nature of bubbles to overpromise and underdeliver.
So - do Altman and Andreesen really believe that, or is it just a marketing and investment pitch?
A reminder that OpenAI has its own explicit definition of AGI: "Highly autonomous systems that outperform humans at most economically valuable work."
The MS/OAI agreement quantifies that as "profits of $100bn/yr."
This seems rather stupid to me. If you can get multiple AGIs all generating profits of $100bn a year - roughly half an Apple, or two thirds of a Meta - you no longer have anything recognisable as a pre-AI economy, because most of the white collar population is out of work and no longer earning anything. And most of the blue collar population that depends on white collar earnings is in the same boat.
So you have to ask "Profits from doing what, and selling to whom?"
The Altman pitch seems to be "Promise it first, collect investor cash, and worry about the rest later."
> do Altman and Andreesen really believe that, or is it just a marketing and investment pitch?
As for Andreessen, I don't think he even cares. As the author writes:
"for the venture capitalists that have driven so much of field, scaling, even if it fails, has been a great run: it’s been a way to take their 2% management fee investing someone else’s money on plausible-ish sounding bets that were truly massive, which makes them rich no matter how things turn out"
VCs win every time. Even if it's a bubble and it bursts, they still win. In fact, they are the only party that wins.
Heck, the bigger the bubble, the more money is poured into it, and the bigger the commissions. So VCs have an interest in pumping it up.
Nuclear pulse and fission fragment designs require no new physics in the same way that a Saturn 5 didn't require new physics when compared to a Goddard toy rocket.
It's easy until you try to actually build the damn thing. Then you discover it's not easy at all, and there's actually quite a bit of new physics required.
It's not New Physics™ in the warp drive and wormhole sense, but any practical interstellar design is going to need some wild and extreme advances in materials science and manufacturing, never mind politics, psychology, and the design of stable life support ecologies.
The same applies to the rest. Napkin sketches and attractive vintage art from the 70s are a long way from a practical design.
We've all been brainwashed by Hollywood. Unfortunately CGI and balsa models are not reality. Building very large objects that don't deform and break under extremes of radiation, temperature changes, and all kinds of physical stresses is not remotely trivial. And we are nowhere close to approaching it.
I thought I was pretty clear that I don't see this happening for hundreds of years at least.
The engineering problem is insurmountable today. But there doesn't seem to be any reason it couldn't be done eventually, given our technological trajectory, unless we believe we are truly on the precipice of severe diminishing returns in most science and engineering fields, and I just don't see that right now.
George Cayley figured out how to build an airplane in 1799, but it wasn't for another century until materials science and high power-to-weight ratio engines made the Wright Flyer possible.
There are plenty of depths to plumb in space systems engineering that we haven't even really had a proper look at yet. A Mars mission with chemical propulsion is hard, but could be made substantially easier with nuclear thermal propulsion - something we know should work, given the successful test fires on the NERVA program back in the 60s. First stage reusability was fantasy 15 years ago, today it's routine.
Obviously, I'm extrapolating a long way out, and maybe at some point we'll run against an unexpected wall. But we'll never know until we get there.
> Obviously, I'm extrapolating a long way out, and maybe at some point we'll run against an unexpected wall.
GP has set the 'low bar' of providing a material that survives a series of nuclear blasts whilst generating useful thrust. I'm not qualified to judge whether or not that requires new physics but it seems to me that if we had such a material that we'd be using it for all kinds of applications. Instead, we rely on the physical properties of the materials we already know in configurations that do not lend themselves to the kind of use that you describe.
That's the difference between science and science fiction, it is easy to write something along those lines and go 'wouldn't it be nice if we had X?'. But if 'X' requires new physics then you've just crossed over into fantasy land and then further discussion is pointless until you show the material or a path to get to the material.
See also: space elevators, ringworlds, dyson spheres etc. Ideas are easy. Implementation is hard.
My idealistic part says that a combination of AI-driven technical orchestration (much more than just coding) and orbital/langrange manufacturing facilities could, perhaps, get somewhere in the not ridiculously distant future (centuries rather than millenia)
A more pragmatic me would point out that the required energy and materials needed would mean we would need breakthroughs in space-based solar capture and mining, but this is still not New Physics.
I think the solution will come from exponentially advancing self-assembling machines in space. These can start small and, given the diminishing cost of getting things to space, some early iterations of the first generation could be mere decades away. There are several interesting avenues for self-assembling machines that are way past napkin-sketch phase. Solar arrays are getting bigger and we have already retrieved the first material from an asteroid.
The quality and reliability of AI agents for processes orchestration and technical reflection is now at a stage where it can begin to self-optimise, so even without (EDIT) a "take-off" scenario, these machines can massively outperform people in manufacturing orchestration, and I would say we are only some years from having tools that are good enough for much larger scale (i.e. planetary) operations.
Putting humans there is a whole other story. We are so fragile and evolved to live on Earth. Unsurprisingly, this biological tether doesn't get much of a look-in here. Just being on the ISS is horrible for a person's physiology and, I am guessing there would be a whole host of space sicknesses that would set in after a few years up there or elsewhere. Unless we find a way to modify our biology enough so we can continually tolerate or cure these ailments, and develop cryo-sleep, we're probably staying local - both of these are much more speculative that everything above, as far as i can tell.
Yeah this is something I think a lot of people tend to overlook. People are far too quick to rewrite "we don't know of any reason why it would be impossible" to "we know how to do it" in their heads.
Yes, they did. George Martin was an arranger, not a co-writer. Max Martin is a co-writer.
If you gave Lennon and McCartney a couple of guitars, a few days of studio time, a good mood, and no other help you'd probably get a hit. Or at least an interesting song.
If you gave Taylor Swift the same you'd get a demo, maybe. You might get an unassisted hit, but the odds are much lower.
Charli XCX - even more so. Give her a laptop and microphone and some plugins and no producer, and I doubt you'd get much.
Not to say that what she and Dua Lipa do is easy. But they're fundamentally performers and brands for a music production operation.
Creative agency isn't a binary. It's on a spectrum. Some people have very little. Some have a lot. Some have taste that defines the product, even though they're mostly curating other people's work.
Michael Jackson was notorious for this. He was a phenomenal dancer, an ok vocalist, not much of a practical musician. But he had a strong sense of what he wanted, and he had a theatricality that pulled the whole thing together.
Charli XCX is a version of that. I don't think her appeal is as strong or as universal, and I doubt she has as much agency as Jackson did. But it's the same idea - shape, curate, perform.
Conservatism is not a doctrine of competence. Experience shows time and again that conservatives can't think, can't plan, and can't govern. They act in emotional and purely self-interested ways to promote rigid hierarchies, and are reliably surprised by consequences that are obvious and predictable to rational educated actors.
Brexit. Anti-vax campaigns. Anti-masking. Racism. "Lowering corporate taxes makes everyone richer."
All delusional, all emotionally motivated, all predictable failures with terrible consequences.