Upsetting... but surely not surprising? Europe and the previous administration were making existential threats, and the new guy offered to either pile on or make it all go away... for a price.

* Facebook was offered the option of either cutting their EU profits to zero or facing equivalent fines.

* Very Serious People were having Very Serious Discussions about whether Google should be allowed to run auctions for ad space on their own home page. At the same time, the two sides of the Atlantic cannot agree whether to make the web a Chrome monopoly or to only allow Google offer its services through 3rd party platforms controlled by competitors.

* Apple's whole brand proposition is being actively undermined. Apparently their monopolistic 30% market share does not demonstrate that consumers want a choice of something different from the competition (and legislators know consumers better than they do themselves).

* Amazon is somehow subject to expensive-to-comply-with restrictions, yet none of their similar-size in-market competitors are. Because reasons.

Surely it was predictable that they would all support a politician who offers to deliver them from regulations that not just limit profit but actively erode ongoing viability of the business, no? I guess you could call it the "Brussels effect".

Y Combinator has the opportunity to ask those questions in four months time: https://events.ycombinator.com/ai-sus

I'm curious to see if they do.

She'd probably think, "Gee whiz! I'm glad my browser has a zoom function and a reader mode!"

Me neither. It shouldn't be surprising that the author of this article believes that there is "no way to measure intelligence".

I found this logical leap to be pretty straight-forward, but it is a leap (rather than a clearly-telegraphed step).

My understanding was that the author sees the following:

  - Lots of AI advocates don't just think an AI superintelligence is possible, but desirable
  - They reason that an AI superintelligence will guide humanity to become better, and more intelligent
  - There is no known, proven, objective measure of “intelligence,” all schools so far that espouse such a thing as being possible and coherent stem from eugenics, phrenology, and similar projects (VC, AI founders, and CEOs have significant overlap with these groups)
  - AIs reinforce the biases present in their training sets and tuning, meaning they will gladly spout rhetoric from those same sociopolitical projects
  - People believe AI output readily and blindly

Regardless of whether or not a Superintelligence emerges (I'm betting against), the outcome of this trajectory will be that the eugenics/phrenology ideological descendants will continue to guide any new AI to espouse their beliefs (whether intentionally or due to implicit bias), and that most people will just accept the resulting outputs as True™. AI then will reinforce eugenicist views (as it already is). ∎

All the best,

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