LRS
Deus ex machina
Some people think artificial intelligence is all hype. Others think it will be a bad thing, either in boring ways — it’ll take jobs, ingrain bias, increase misinformation — or spectacular ones, perhaps leading to human extinction. Dario Amodei, the CEO of the AI company Anthropic, agrees that the risks are very real, and his company focuses lots of research on how to reduce those risks. As a result, “people sometimes draw the conclusion that I’m a pessimist or ‘doomer,’” he writes, “who thinks AI will be mostly bad or dangerous.” But in fact, “I think that most people are underestimating just how radical the upside of AI could be.”
Truly powerful AI could be just a couple of years away, he thinks, although it could be longer: An AI that understands scientific fields at Nobel Prize-winning levels, that can take in information at at least 10 times human speed, and that can be reproduced so that there are millions of it running simultaneously: A “country of geniuses in a datacenter.” That won’t solve all the world’s problems in an instant — there are other obstacles to progress than a shortage of raw intelligence. But, he argues, huge progress in biomedical science and the battle against poverty — equivalent to all the progress made in the 20th century — could happen in a decade or less.
Bounty hunters
If you’re a sheriff in a lawless region — the Old West, say — and there’s some bad guy you want caught, you might put a bounty on his head. The worse the crime, the higher the bounty: You want to signal that you really want this guy caught, and you want to incentivize people to help do that. That’s obviously true when it comes to bounties, but it’s true with all prices, says the economist Maxwell Tabarrok on Maximum Progress: “Prices aren’t just a transfer between buyer and seller,” he says. “They’re also a signal and incentive to the whole world economy to get more high-priced goods to the high-paying area. They’re a bounty.”
Two hurricanes have hit the US recently, and price gouging is in the news: $10-a-gallon gas, $2,000 short-haul flights. It’s extremely unpopular, and it’s easy to understand why. “When someone is in a desperate situation… charging them these high prices is taking advantage of their misfortune.” But if you remember that prices are bounties, it makes sense. “High prices on essential goods during an emergency are WANTED posters, sent out across the entire world economy.” If you need a criminal caught, the last thing you want to see is limits on how high the bounty can be set: Limits on price gouging, similarly, mean you are less likely to “get more goods into where they are needed.”
Hacked off
It’s been five years since the US military’s Cyber Command was established. It’s meant to attack adversaries’ computer systems while defending those of allies. But even though it has managed to gather some exceptional talent, the former cyber officer Josh Lospinoso writes in War on the Rocks, the nature of the US military makes it an “impossible place for hackers”: It struggles to retain staff, and has largely been ineffective.
There are several reasons, Lospinoso says. The military doesn’t really know what to do with hackers, for one; and its leaders are dismissive of them. The best are in high demand in the private sector, so the opportunity costs of remaining in the military are high. Most bizarrely of all, servicemembers must maintain the same physical standards as other military staff: “The intersection of people who can run a 15-minute two mile and dissect a Windows kernel memory dump is vanishingly small.”