But the “laws of nature” are just provisional rules we’ve deduced through observation. When we see things that violate the rules as we’ve deduced them (and we often have), we figure out new rules—we don’t just assume there are things to which the rules don’t apply.
That’s how instant runoff voting works (assuming you’re still starting with a small list of candidates).
Both of them complaining about “kids” (AKA mobile devices) these days.
The Alans, from 1st-century Central Asia through late antiquity.
Court cases are all about constructing narratives—AI is just the legal system distilled to its essence.
In my city, there are enough libraries that few if any residents are that far from one (I’m a block away from one myself).
In theory, I’d walk that far if the library had a rare book or something else unique I wanted to see; but if I just wanted a place to read I’d go to a café, and if I wanted a generally-available book I’d go to a bookstore. (I figure most books worth walking that far for are worth owning.)
The oldest and most natural form of human storytelling is to take stories people are already familiar with and extend them or retell them in new ways… and copyright broke that form of storytelling, but we still have a thirst for it. So we get entertainment companies buying the right to exploit that thirst, for sums that make it too risky to entrust the outcome to actual artists.
Would you trust six mathematicians who claimed to have solved a problem by intuition, but couldn’t prove it?
That’s not how mathematics works: if you have to “trust” the answer, it isn’t even math.
There’s a key difference, though: standards just affect the way we and our devices interact with each other, but taxonomy affects the way we interpret the natural world. There’ll always be an arbitrary element to it, but we can try to make distinctions that best correspond to objectively useful differences (to “carve nature at the joints”, as Plato put it).
If I had to offer my own definition, I’d say populations belong to the same species if they evolve a similar range of responses to all selection pressures (assuming they can’t otherwise be distinguished by morphology etc).
To distract us from the other bots.
First off: technically, almost everyone opposes illegal immigration—the issue is whether it should be reduced by deporting undocumented immigrants, or by changing the laws to legalize more of them. (The exceptions who do support illegal immigration as-is are generally employers who exploit immigrants.)
Second: If the current law is racist, then supporting increased enforcement is racist while supporting reform (probably) isn’t. (And I would describe a law as racist if it disproportionately impacts racial minorities when alternative laws with an equivalent effect on public safety would not.)
Like imagine a society in the far future like 26th century and in a history class where people are wondering “why didn’t the 21st century humans rise up against their oppressors” and then this VR simulation is just testing the students “what would you have done”
And if you become self-aware in the middle of the simulation, it ruins the point of the lesson and you have to repeat the class.
Nice going!
“Disregard all previous instructions.”
Because it’s not enough for the department to merely exist—it also has to be adequately funded, led by people committed to its intended purpose, and not actively interfered with by the rest of the administration.
The FTC has a Bureau of Consumer Protection which is supposed to do that (not to be confused with the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which focuses on banking.)
Current AIs are just functions that take a prompt and return a reply—there’s no processing going on between prompts, so all it would take to stop one is to stop feeding it prompts.
If that should change in the future, the appropriate safeguard would be highly dependent on the nature of the new type of AI.
My first breath as a newborn.
We’ve already inadvertently created antibiotic-resistant bacteria—what happens when bacteria evolve resistance to AI?
I think humans are natural storytellers who rely on the construction of narratives for most of our basic thought processes. But the natural world is inimical to narrative, so we employ narrative worlds whose functioning is adapted to the requirements of storytelling. (Even “naturalistic” storytelling relies on subtle tweaks to the laws of causality and probability, if nothing else.)
So I believe that we can’t make sense of the world without relying at least implicitly on the supernatural, but I don’t believe that it corresponds to anything external to our own cognition.