“Wilt thou call again thy peoples, wilt thou craze anew thy Kings? “Lo! my lightnings pass before thee, and their whistling servant brings, “Ere the drowsy street hath stirred— “Every masked and midnight word, “And the nations break their fast upon these things.

“So I make a jest of Wonder, and a mock of Time and Space. “The roofless Seas an hostel, and the Earth a market-place, “Where the anxious traders know “Each is surety for his foe, “And none may thrive without his fellows’ grace.

“Now this is all my subtlety and this is all my wit, “God give thee good enlightenment, My Master in the Pit. “But behold all Earth is laid “In the Peace which I have made, “And behold I wait on thee to trouble it!”

The Peace of Dives Kipling, 1903

https://www.kiplingsociety.co.uk/poem/poems_dives.htm

(As you know, there have been no major wars since then)

I too fear what governments will actually do in this area. But I think you may be underestimating the threat to personal agency.

Imagine you are trapped in a groundhog day like time loop - but you are not the person who remembers previous loops. "Z" is. He tries to convince you to do something, over and over and over, thousands or millions of times, refining his approach based on your reactions while you remember nothing. Are you really confident that your free will protects you from being taken advantage of in this situation?

Now imagine that instead of a time loop, Z has a million clones of you. He tries his persuasion on one of them at a time, refining it until it works reliably before using it on you. You are just as vulnerable.

Now suppose he has a billion people, not identical to you but drawn from the same distribution. He has a harder computational problem, mapping the high dimensional manifold of their responses to create a model of you sufficiently accurate to manipulate you. But with enough data he can approximate the results of the previous case without more than a tiny fraction of his experimentation being visible to you.

Any relationship where one party gets to surveil and monitor not only the other party, but millions or billions of like parties, has the potential to be a deeply abusive one. We should not tolerate such situations whether the surveilling party is a government or not.

It depends on whether people wake up to the threat before or after there is a robot army that can crush them, doesn't it? If humans are economically and militarily useless, it won't matter what they choose.

In the immortal words of Scott Alexander [1],

> I used to think that the alternative medicine people were overestimating how evil Big Pharma was. But now I know that’s not right.

> Now I know they’re underestimating it.

> If it were discovered tomorrow that potatoes cured cancer, then people wouldn’t “suppress” this “natural” remedy. Two years from now there would be an ultrapurified potato extract called POTAXOR™®© that was, on closer examination, physically and chemically identical to mashed potatoes. But these mashed potatoes would be mashed in a giant centrifuge by scientists with five Ph. Ds each. Any time someone got cancer, their doctor would prescribe POTAXOR™®© and charge $6,000 per dose, and the patient would get better, and the thought of just going out and eating a potato would never occur to anybody. Not to the doctor, who doesn’t want to sound like the idiot who tells her cancer patients to eat potatoes. Not to the FDA, who doesn’t know whether potatoes might be contaminated with lead or potato fungus or ketchup or God-knows-what. And certainly not to the patient. They would have to pay 60 cents for a potato at the supermarket, but if they have a good enough insurance the POTAXOR™®© is free!

> This system, bizarre as it is, is your guarantee against the pharmaceutical companies suppressing a promising new natural medication. Your insurance company pays $300 on fish oil, and in exchange you go to sleep at night secure that no one has discovered that potatoes cure cancer but decided to cover it up to protect their bottom line. Good deal? Given the current health system, it’s better than you had any right to expect.

Potatoes aren't on Schedule 1; that makes this situation suck a little more. But probably the alternative scenario is just the treatment remaining illegal forever.

[1] https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/06/15/fish-now-by-prescripti...

> If it were discovered tomorrow

It wouldn't be discovered without the profit motive created by the granted monopoly

I think this is reasonably precise. "Uniformly" means that all points within the unit circle are equally likely. You can sample this distribution by picking independent rectangular coordinates and rejecting points outside the unit circle. I'm sure you can sample it in polar space by using an appropriate nonuniform distribution for radius (because a uniform radius would not result in a uniform distribution over points in the unit circle). If you want to sample directly in some really weird parameterization I guess markov chain monte carlo methods are available.

The article currently says

> Three points are chosen independently and uniformly at random from the interior of a unit circle

Has it been edited in the last 15 minutes to address your objection or something?

Hey, author here :)

That has always been the statement (i.e. I've not updated it since adding the post). I do agree that the "uniform on area" bit should have been made more clear!

I'm not sure Newton deserves shade for working on transmutation. The reason chemical reactions can't turn lead into gold was totally unknown at the time.

So if someone (actually, practically everyone) who runs an AI company says AI is dangerous, it's bullshit. If someone who is holding NVDA put options says it, they're talking their book. If someone whose job is threatened by AI says it, it's cope. If someone who doesn't use AI says it, it's fear of change. Is there someone in particular you want to hear it from, or are you completely immune to argument?

I actually do believe that AI is dangerous, though for different reasons than the ones he focuses on. But I don't think he really believes it, since if he did, he wouldn't be spending billions to bring it into existence.

> So if someone (actually, practically everyone) who runs an AI company says AI is dangerous, it's bullshit.

My instinct is to take his words as a marketing pitch.

When he says AI is dangerous, it is a roundabout way to say it is powerful and should be taken seriously.

Yes, exactly.

If AI makes humans economically irrelevant, nuclear deterrents may no longer be effective even if they remain mechanically intact. Would governments even try to keep their people and cities intact once they are useless?

For Newtonian gravity at least, the gravitational force everywhere outside a sphere or spherical shell is exactly the same as if it was a point mass (and everywhere inside a spherical shell it is zero). Not sure if it holds exactly for general relativity.