MTG has been a stable acronym for years, way before some unpopular politician came to share that same three letters. I hope people continue to use the acronym for what it has been, and hopefully we can forget the horrible person that associates with it soon too.
One day we'll have biological networks of the size that can compete with today's biggest artificial neural networks, capable of running things like, well, ChatGPT. Then the philosophical questions will run even deeper....
Nobody would argue that turning off ChatGPT is killing a sentient being.
With a biological network, "turning it off" and killing it are very close if not the same (depending on who you ask). Biological network are present in our physical reality, you have some matter to deal with, which also makes the experience completely different. People fall in love and have compassion with ChatGPT, what would you think happens if you care for a brain a vat for months? If it is an actual neural structure resembling natural ones, than it might be possible it forms memories and becomes sentient. This is a completetly different array of ethical questions, you can't think of (living) biological matter like a machine, especially not regarding ethics.
To be honest, i thought it would first go the other way around. To many billionaires afraid of death, trying to encode there mindstate-personality into a machine and become semi-imortal.
And some billionaires aren't afraid enough, of death. Steve Jobs could have outlived his pancreatic cancer if he got it treated on time and didn't indulge in fake cures.
Honsetly if you're an 80yr old billionaire who has done 'everything', why not go for some mind encoding shenanigans?
I've never understood this. Even if we would have perfect mind-uploading capabilities, this doesn't help the billionaire who is afraid of death, right? It'd just be a copy of them. An immortal one, sure, but the original person would die just the same, no?
There's the philosophical argument that we have no continuity of consciousness in our meatbag bodies either - e.g. when you wake up, it's rebooting your consciousness from suspended memories.
There's physical continuity. You can be sure that most of your neurones will be the same tomorrow.
So to solve immortality, you gotta replace meat cells with silicone ones, slowly, one percent after another. It'll maintain relative continuity and hopefully will transfer memories and other person traits to the silicone, so one day the brain will be immortal and repairable.
But once they pay $$$ and turn on the uploaded consciousness won't they be like "Hey, why I'm still here in my meat body and not in Amazon Brain Cloud(c)"?
I thought the the fact that your mind is not magically booted into simulation while you are still alive (during sleep, backout while drunk or just pressing the power button on the server running it) should be a clue that you won't suddenly wake up in simulation after you have died.
Our language can't fully represent the possibility, as it doesn't currently exist and language is learned by mutually shared experiences upon which we then agree terminology.
If you make a backup of my mind every midnight, and at noon one day biological-me faces death, that's still death for noon-me, while also being a way to cheat death from the point of view of the me from 12 hours before.
Restoring your computer from a backup doesn't mean the hard drive never failed, but it is does get you data back.
No, our language is perfectly capable of expressing this simple fact: When you die you die, no matter how many clones or backups of you are up and running.
When you say "you", do you mean the continuity of consciousness (which is interrupted each sleep cycle), the personality and memories currently instantiated within your brain (which we don't actually know how to read yet never mind duplicate so the process of creating a backup at all is entirely hypothetical), or a soul?
When you say "die", do you mean clinical (cardiac) death, brain death, legal death, the cessation of internal cellular chemistry in more than n% of cells (which can itself take hours after legal death, but varies by tissue), or the irreversible destruction of the structures within your brain that keep the "you" previously defined existing at all (if you chose a non-soul based answer) or locked to the mundane plane (if you answered "soul")?
If any of your answers involves consciousness, Doerig et al[0] list 13 notable possibilities for what that word means, while Seth & Bayne[1] list 22.
Furthermore, consider the thought experiment of the ship of Theseus, and ask yourself: if you make a sufficiently perfect copy the ship, deliberately loose record of which is the original, destroy one of the two at random, can you see how our language does not allow us to say other than the ship has both been destroyed and survived?
You conscious thoughts might be asleep but some part of you is still "there" and operating or else you wouldn't be able to wake up and remember anything?
There would be no way to find out if that would be true however. The person in the vat might say they are the same person but you don't know if they really are. Also what happens if you create a copy? Is that two people or is there some kind of shared consciousness? If it is, how do they communicate?
Afaik Ship of Theseus is replacing parts incrementally until eventually no part is from the original ship. This is more like taking the ship, building an exact copy of it and then throwing away the original ship. Not sure that thought experiment is applicable.
I think there's a good reason that trying to cheat death and meeting a grim end as a result is such a common trope in mythology. Even in ancient times I think people generally recognised the profound harm refusing to accept the inevitability of death does to a person.
We have religious mythologies promising eternal afterlife since ancient times too, I think it's more an irrational coping mechanism to deal with it's inevitability. Everybody grows old and dies, that doesn't make death less horrific, it's the worst aspect of the human condition. We just often pretend it's not in various ways to better deal with it. But that shouldn't prevent us from trying to cure it the same way we are trying to cure cancer.
Given the bizarre behavior seen around extremely old politicians, such as the recently deceased Feinstein (D), and the permanent unelected upper legislature of the US Supreme Court, I think the first uploaded forever politician is a bigger threat. But who will pay for their extended life?
(The word for "ageless billionaire" is "corporation")
Note that in the "uploaded politician" case it's not nearly so relevant as to whether the person themselves believes it's the same person, as to whether everyone else believes they're the same person, and whether the upload has legal continuity in their job and position.
Billionaires shouldn't exist; to continue the crab metaphor, they're already outside the pot and it's disingenuous to suggest that we're trying to pull others down by removing the flaws that allow such extreme accumulations of wealth - that's the kind of divisive talk they're all for.
People want to own things even if they are not billionaires, and they want to value things freely even if they are not billionaires. Those two things combined make billionaires unavoidable if you think about it.
I think what you really desire is that billionaires should not be able to corrupt society or exploit the environment to the detriment of others. Which I am fully behind and consider an attainable and worthy goal even though we're currently far from it.
>Those two things combined make billionaires unavoidable if you think about it.
What service, commodity, or neccessity one owns, one pays a billion for? Considering production is worker owned, there would be no necessity for billionaires. This is basically a statement on the concentration of wealth, and that theoretically no one should have 20 Billion more "moneys" then any other person, with the linked fact that this person has 20 billion more influence in politics and getting their voice heard than a person with only one dollar on them. Because the fact that money buys influence is also "unavoidable" if you think about it. If I can feed 10.000 people daily and make them rely on me, they are much more likely to do my bidding and listen to me.
>What service, commodity, or neccessity one owns, one pays a billion for?
Nobody has to actually pay a billion to make someone a billionaire.
If you and three of your friends create a website that someone wants to buy one percent of for 40 million dollars, you are all billionaires whether you want to sell or not.
It doesn't even matter if nobody else wants to buy the other 99% for the same price, in the eyes of the world you are a billionaire anyway.
Society doesn't create billionaires because they need to exist, they are a side-effect of other things that we desire to exist.
Any society that allows 1) ownership and 2) freedom will generate billionaires when it reaches a sufficient population.
It unfortunately sometimes also happens because 3) criminal activity, and we should of course do everything we can to prevent 3, but if we prevent 1 and 2 we've created a dystopia.
You know the difference between 40 million and a billion dollars?
A billion dollars.
We have a dystopia now with billionaires and their private space companies, buying newspapers, tracking our every move. We'd have LESS of a dystopia if we prevented them in the first place.
>We have a dystopia now with billionaires and their private space companies, buying newspapers, tracking our every move. We'd have LESS of a dystopia if we prevented them in the first place.
History teaches us the opposite. The worst dystopias are the ones where you have only one billionaire who also controls the military, and that is inevitably what happens when you try to limit the number of billionaires.
The best countries to live in tend to have a high number of billionaires per capita, which is natural since freedom and prosperity will generate billionaires. Tax havens twist this statistic of course but look at countries like Canada, Germany, Scandinavia, they are all up there and certainly no tax havens.
>History teaches us the opposite. The worst dystopias are the ones where you have only one billionaire who also controls the military
Explicitly not what I, or anyone else, is suggesting.
Or it could be that billionaires, being able to live anywhere, choose nice places to live - while not paying their fair share and contributing to the current situations we have now.
We don't want, or need, billionaires and we should stop that kind of ridiculous accumulation of wealth. Make stock buybacks illegal again, make the top marginal tax rate 70%, and make things work for workers (and not global capital).
>Explicitly not what I, or anyone else, is suggesting.
To be fair you hadn't suggested anything except "Billionaires shouldn't exist" yet, which is a sentiment that so far in history has only achieved dystopian results. How is your plan different?
Taxing and limiting the influence of billionaires and ensuring that workers are not exploited unfairly are fine suggestions. We can add prevention of monopolies and cartels to the list as well, but that's still a very different idea from "Billionaires should not exist".
I'm not carrying any water for anyone, you have just failed to make a persuasive argument for your position.
>Any society that allows 1) ownership and 2) freedom
No, this is highly dependend on the definition of "freedom". A huge market freedom, and freedom for money? Yes. The freedom from shakles, from one being a billion times better than another, from people living lives somehow on the same plane? No. Billionares are not a direct result of whatever you define as "freedom" which is a very murky concept, there can be freedom in societies without billionaires.
And yes, the whole system of buying stock and then valuing something at 1 billion is broken, but does not change the fact, in fact enforces it because cleary the system is broken.
>No, this is highly dependend on the definition of "freedom".
I'm talking about the freedom you, (as in you personally, not the billionaires) have today to buy things you want. Let's say it's a book. Should you be allowed to buy a book for say, 20 dollars?
If a 100 million other people enjoy that same freedom to buy the same book, you have a billionaire author. How do you prevent that from happening? Honest question, I don't see any way to prevent it.
"Billionaires shouldn't exist" is thought number 1 that people get when they see what some of them are up to, and I certainly sympathize, but the only chain of reasoning I've seen that goes beyond thought 2 is the writings of Karl Marx. And where his thoughts end, thoughts from Stalin, Mao and the like always always follow. They are billionaires too btw, just way worse than the ones we have.
I think the solution is strong laws and vigilant control to prevent corruption. If for example the punishment for corruption was confiscation of all your assets and it was actually enforced, I think we'd come a long way. It would almost certainly get rid of a lot of billionaires too, so maybe we have some common ground there after all. ;-)
"Neural networks" as in chatgpt and friends have almost nothing to do with "neural networks" as understood in biology, more than a passing analogy to how synapses fire. I'm very skeptical of projects which seek to conflate the two in some vague way.
Yep, I remember getting pinged by a coworker asking why is our Twilio bill so high all of sudden. It turns out to be Toll Fraud through 2FA messages. Malicious actors sign up new accounts and setup 2FA number and just keep requesting 2FA through SMS to profit.
“When I told him that this was an email that was no longer available to me, and that it hadn’t been my email of record with GoDaddy for more than 20 years, he said he could change the address, but that would require me to activate two-factor authentication, and that there would then be a 24-hour delay before he could make the required changes.”
Sounds more like a security issue honestly. Not sure you would want them to simply take your new email as trustworthy
