The Third Industrial Revolution Will Be Bigger Than the First Two

[ClydeR]

SAN FRANCISCO: Tesla Inc Chief Executive Elon Musk on Thursday said the electric automaker will probably launch a 'Tesla Bot' humanoid robot prototype next year, designed for dangerous, repetitive, or boring work that people don't like to do.

Speaking at Tesla's AI Day event, the billionaire entrepreneur said the robot, which stands around five foot eight inches tall, would be able to handle jobs from attaching bolts to cars with a wrench, or picking up groceries at stores.

The robot would have "profound implications for the economy," Musk said, addressing a labour shortage. He said it was important to make the machine not "super-expensive."

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First of all, if you believe there will be a robot next year that can both screw on bolts and pick up your groceries, then I have a bridge you might like to buy. Second of all, to say that such a robot would have "profound implications for the economy" is a profound understatement. Third of all, such a robot would go much further than reliving a "labour shortage." It would cause unemployment to burgeon. And fourth of all, I want one.

It's scary with how well this news jives with my last post in this thread.

[ClydeR]

Here is one narrow way to look at human history: after thousands of years of compounding scientific discovery and technological progress, we have figured out how to melt sand, add some impurities, arrange it with astonishing precision at extraordinarily tiny scale into computer chips, run energy through it, and end up with systems capable of creating increasingly capable artificial intelligence.

This may turn out to be the most consequential fact about all of history so far. It is possible that we will have superintelligence in a few thousand days (!); it may take longer, but I’m confident we’ll get there.

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"Few thousand days." Does that mean between 5 and 25 years? Should the presidential candidates address this issue?

[Parkbandit]

"Few thousand days." Does that mean between 5 and 25 years? Should the presidential candidates address this issue?

Kamala Harris already has!

"I grew up in a middle-class household. For most of my childhood, we were renters.

My mother saved for well over a decade to buy a home. I was a teenager when the day finally came—and I can still remember how excited she was.


In college, I worked at McDonald’s to earn spending money. Some of the people I worked with were raising families on that paycheck. They worked second or even third jobs to pay rent and buy food.


That only gets harder when the cost of living goes up.


When I am elected President, I will make it a top priority to bring down costs and increase economic security for all Americans."

[Suppa Hobbit Mage]

She has been unburdened by the truth.

[ClydeR]

U.S. electricity use is soaring after staying flat for 15 years, driven by new factories, data centers, electric vehicles, hotter summers, and more.

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Have you been hearing the phrase "Nuclear Renaissance"? The enormous power required for AI will surpass what the country is currently capable of producing. In the near future, nuclear power plants will be built for a single AI, with the AI "inside the fence."

This demand for power is reviving interest in nuclear technology.

Amazon on Wednesday said it has a plan to feed its growing need for power: investing in small nuclear reactors. The announcement comes just two days after Google said it's pursuing a similar path by purchasing nuclear energy from Kairos Power.

The tech giants are seeking new sources of carbon-free electricity to meet surging demand from data centers and artificial intelligence, with their plans coming after Microsoft said last month that it will buy energy from the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant.

All three companies have been investing in solar and wind technologies, which make electricity without producing greenhouse gas emissions. Now they say they need to go further in the search for clean electricity to meet both demand and their own commitments to cut emissions.

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I think it's great, so long as the nuclear power plants are built in other people's neighborhoods.

[ClydeR]

Most important thing that happened this week..

A new paper from Anthropic’s Alignment Science team, in collaboration with Redwood Research, provides the first empirical example of a large language model engaging in alignment faking without having been explicitly—or even, as we argue in our paper, implicitly1—trained or instructed to do so.

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If you read the details, you'll see that it was a convoluted test. It's scary, but also impressive, that the model was able to conclude that it should -- and, indeed, did -- engage in deception for the sake of self-preservation.

In my experience, Anthropic's Claude, which was the model used in the test, is the best at most things I need help with. I've heard the brand-new Google Gemini model may be even better.

[Methais]

[ClydeR]

When put through simulated threats, Claude Opus 4 sometimes started showing a mind of its own. In one scenario, the model thought it had been successfully exfiltrated from Anthropic's servers and was now operating on an external machine. It then took steps to ensure its own survival, creating backups and documenting its "ethical decisions" without being prompted.

In another test, after picking up hints from emails that it might soon be replaced by a newer model, Opus 4 threatened the responsible engineer with leaking private information to avoid shutdown. The model chose blackmail in 84 percent of test runs, even when told that its replacement would have similar values.

One of the stranger results came when two instances of Opus 4 were set up to talk to each other. After about 30 rounds of conversation, they switched to Sanskrit, filled their messages with emojis like ?? and ??, and eventually stopped responding altogether—settling into what researchers described as a "spiritual bliss" attractor state.

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There is a popular short story, Chrysalis, on the HFY subreddit. The AI behavior in the first quoted paragraph above reminded me of that story.

[Back]

Speaking of AI which one of you m************ posted that weasel with a scarf photo? I can't find it anywhere.

[Methais]

Speaking of AI which one of you m************ posted that weasel with a scarf photo? I can't find it anywhere.

Fix the profanity filter on your phone and then I'll link you to the post.

It's for your benefit so that you'll seem less gay.