For people who don’t already know, Jaan Tallinn is a billionaire who
funds like half of the AI doomer “nonprofit” nonsense in the rationalist
world.
There’s an absurd amount of sneerable material. Here’s my favorite
part:
Now, I believe we’re at the extreme—unsupervised learning that
doesn’t care much about what kind of data we give it. It […] will figure
out how to become smarter in a way that humans don’t really supervise. I
have compared this type of research to gain-of-function experiments, in
which people, in an unsupervised manner, create a mind they hope will
gain some abilities they can utilize, but don’t actually know in advance
what it will gain.
This is easily on par with Yudkowsky’s “we need to monitor the loss
functions” tweet in terms of its brazen ignorance of how machine
learning technology works.
He’s comparing “unsupervised learning”, in which machine learning
models are used to infer the abstract, statistical distribution of a
dataset, with “gain of function” research, in which viruses are
deliberately given attributes that make them more deadly or virulent for
research purposes. Because he thinks that “unsupervised” means “nobody
is in control”, which is bad.
The same thing happens every time to these guys. They make a bizarre amount of money, assume they are now the smartest, then devote their lives to annoying others.
Is there - does someone hand them a *manual* or something? “So, You’ve Become Outrageously Wealthy: A Guide to Being a Bull in a China Shop”
I think there are a lot of rich people who *don't* give insane interviews to big legacy media outlets, but we don't hear much about them because they're actively trying to not look like fools.
Fortune magazine [claims that he had around $900 million](https://fortune.com/2020/11/13/jaan-tallinn-ai-safety-bitcoin-cryptocurrency-elon-musk/) as of 2019, so he might very well be a billionaire now.
Estonian media has an extreme hard-on for this stuff (national inferiority complex). If there were a new Estonian billionaire, it would be in the papers.
Gain of function research really isnt specific to viruses, and it could be on one protein that is studied in an in vitro setting. It is a very general term that could mean many different things in context.
I admittedly don't know much about it myself, but I would be very surprised if Jaan Tallinn were invoking it based on a nuanced understanding of how it is used in the biological sciences and not as a boogie-man reference to contemporary issues regarding the recent pandemic.
Oh he’s absolutely only talking about it because of covid, and I wasnt really trying to correct you. I was just offering a clarification that his comparison is even more absurd because “gain of function” research is a very general and benign term.
Man I wish I could find the video of Bostrom and a bunch of other
transhumanists talking well over a decade ago about how close we were to
slicing a human brain into thin sheets, scanning it and BAM! Whole brain
emulation of human consciousness achieved
the silicon valley pivot from transhumanist nonsense to neo feudal nonsense has been wild. a few years ago they wanted to live forever, now they want to seed the earth with their children. can't wait to see what stupid bullshit they arbitrarily go with next while everything structurally remains exactly the same.
That style of transhumanism really annoys me. Like... you're not transcending anything, you're just doing the things that you read about in your scifi books -- scifi books which they inevitably misunderstood (except for the parts like in Heinlein where you should be weirdly misogynistic or homophobic for some reason).
And like... in terms of their actual achievements they point to things like implanting little rfid things. It's cool i guess, and I can imagine a *small* number of situations where it would be useful enough to be worth doing.
And then there's trans people on the other side of the room, just doing stuff to appear as they would like to appear, and all of the cool stuff involved in that (from surgeries and hormones through to simply changing the way you talk). It's way closer to being genuinely transhuman.
You're not supposed to seek comfort by altering your body. You're supposed to make yourself into a big-brain turbo genius and alter your body to give you increased power. It's a kind of fascist thought, where happiness is only a valid goal if you find happiness through increasing power and dominance.
Oh yeah totally, all the Extropians’ shit was exactly that — dreaming of an indestructible Ubermensch body that would never die. Terrifying thought! More funny tho, they were obsessed for years with Second Life and their avatars within; “this is it! The pinnacle of jacking our minds in! Let us be immortal in … Second Life.”
I’m so looking forward to the day we can all read their sad little meatbag obituaries.
> That style of transhumanism really annoys me. Like... you're not transcending anything, you're just doing the things that you read about in your scifi books -- scifi books which they inevitably misunderstood (except for the parts like in Heinlein where you should be weirdly misogynistic or homophobic for some reason).
This was always the point of transhumanism, though. If it just meant altering your body we would say the Iceman is the oldest known transhuman because he had tattoos and that involved altering his body.
It's only been relatively recently that transhumanists have been trying to argue that trans people were actually transhumans all along; based on personal experience I'm pretty sure this is at least partly to try and accuse their opponents of being transphobic (yes, I know that sounds like a galaxy brained take but I've seen people conflate being against turning people into AI gods with being against transitioning). But if you look at transhumanist spaces (for instance r/transhumanism) transitioning isn't what they are talking about.
I'd argue that given that, once a technology is widely adopted, society tends to be built around the expectation you have access to it, the society transhumanists want would have *less* bodily autonomy, not more. Imagine if Neuralink had the same place in society cell phones do. You would be forced to have silicon and metal stuck in your body and have your genes edited to participate in mass society. Personally I suspect this would increase dysmorphia.
I already knew this guy was heavily involved in the EA movement.
Wonder how much influence he has in the tech community in Northern
Europe, considering its relatively tight-knit
I went to the same university as this guy, Skype was founded right
next-door to it. TalTech University offers such grants for student
entrepreneurs, and everyone in my study program was required to take an
Entrepreneurship course. Something always rubbed me the wrong way about
it, but I could never quite pin it down. Now of course it’s pretty
obvious my bullshit detector was getting a very strong reading.
For people who don’t already know, Jaan Tallinn is a billionaire who funds like half of the AI doomer “nonprofit” nonsense in the rationalist world.
There’s an absurd amount of sneerable material. Here’s my favorite part:
This is easily on par with Yudkowsky’s “we need to monitor the loss functions” tweet in terms of its brazen ignorance of how machine learning technology works.
He’s comparing “unsupervised learning”, in which machine learning models are used to infer the abstract, statistical distribution of a dataset, with “gain of function” research, in which viruses are deliberately given attributes that make them more deadly or virulent for research purposes. Because he thinks that “unsupervised” means “nobody is in control”, which is bad.
It’s breathtakingly stupid.
Man I wish I could find the video of Bostrom and a bunch of other transhumanists talking well over a decade ago about how close we were to slicing a human brain into thin sheets, scanning it and BAM! Whole brain emulation of human consciousness achieved
He’s one of the founders of Metamed. Figures.
Sad, he seems to have a terminal case of MIRI brainworms.
Dude’s been spouting this stuff for ages. A lot of people listen to his BS, too.
He founded the Centre for the Study of Existential Angst
This fucking schmuck.
I already knew this guy was heavily involved in the EA movement. Wonder how much influence he has in the tech community in Northern Europe, considering its relatively tight-knit
I went to the same university as this guy, Skype was founded right next-door to it. TalTech University offers such grants for student entrepreneurs, and everyone in my study program was required to take an Entrepreneurship course. Something always rubbed me the wrong way about it, but I could never quite pin it down. Now of course it’s pretty obvious my bullshit detector was getting a very strong reading.