I think the question about that kind of geoengineering is really going to be a "who cracks first and just goes for it".
My guess is it'll either be India, suffering under heatwaves incompatible with human life, or China beating the sea back from some of its biggest cities.
No Western country will be able to have the political ability to do anything like that as a first mover, though I imagine they'll eventually quietly be on the bandwagon if it works, if for no other reason than it would allow more carbon emissions, which are going to be highly correlated with economic growth for quite some time to come. Whether or not it's actually a good idea, I guess we'll find out in a few decades.
Wouldn't enough walls, dykes and pumps be an engineering solution? The problem is cost. How much money are people willing to throw at keeping the land above water?
That was what Elizabeth Holmes claimed as well, however, we know that some people who try to achieve greatness are grifters. A pithy saying doesn’t change that reality.
You can’t seriously claim there’s any equivalence between Altman/Musk and Holmes. The former two have something to show for their ambition, Holmes was basically a fraud with no substance behind her whatsoever
So it's okay to commit fradulous acts if "you have something to show for it"?
Even if Altman was a good person, they are the face of a company that is doing some very suspicious actions. Actions that got the company cooked in litigation. So those consequences will assossiate with that face, consequences for not following robots.txt, for trying to ask forgiveness over permission against other large companies, and now this whole kerfuffle.
I'm not comparing the products, I'm criticizing the statement that people are just jealously trying to bring down those who attempt to achieve greatness. Also, you can have a great product and still do ethically and legally questionable things that people will criticize.
What matters is whether OpenAI leadership had the movie Her in mind, and the AI in Her is more similar to LLMs than the Next Generation Star Trek main computer.
> What facts disprove OpenAI making a voice that sounds like SJ
The objective parts of this are disproved in several ways by the very article under which we're commenting. The subjective parts are... subjective, but arguably demonstrated as false in the very thread, through examples of SJ vs. Sky to listen side by side.
> such that the movie Her is referenced by Altman
You're creating a causal connection without a proof of one. We don't know why Altman referenced "Her", but I feel it's more likely because the product works in a way eerily similar to the movie's AI, not that because it sounds like it.
> and why is that actress upset?
Who knows? Celebrities sue individuals and companies all the time. Sometimes for a reason, sometimes to just generate drama (and capitalize on it).
> You're creating a causal connection without a proof of one. We don't know why Altman referenced "Her", but I feel it's more likely because the product works in a way eerily similar to the movie's AI, not that because it sounds like it.
There's no proof needed. A marketer doesn't market something for no reason.
We are all capable of interpreting his statement and forming an opinion about its intent. Indeed, the entire point of making any statement is for others to form an opinion about it. That doesn't make our opinion invalid - nor does the whining and backpedaling of the person who made the statement.
Your opinion may be different than others, but I doubt that would be the case if you were truly approaching this situation in an unbiased way.
You want to say that the dispute here is over ignoring objective facts, but it isn't. I haven't seen anybody here ignoring the facts laid out by this article.
The dispute is instead about statements just like your We don't know why Altman referenced "Her", which, on the one hand, you're right, the mind of another personally is technically unknowable, but on the other hand, no, that's total nonsense, we do indeed know exactly why he referenced the movie, because we're a social animal and we absolutely are frequently capable of reasoning out other people's motivations and intentions.
This is not a court of law, we don't have a responsibility to suspend disbelief unless and until we see a piece of paper that says "I did this thing for this reason", we are free to look at a pattern of behavior and draw obvious conclusions.
Indeed, if it were a court of law, that's still exactly what we'd be asked to do. Intent matters, and people usually don't spell it out in a memo, so people are asked to look at a pattern of behavior in context and use their judgement to determine what they think it demonstrates.
The objective parts don’t disprove that OpenAI set out to make an AI that sounded like Scarlett Johanson to use as a marketing ploy. In fact, I’d argue it’s more likely that’s exactly what the evidence suggests they did. But maybe a judge will get to rule on whose interpretation of the facts is correct.
It's well defined in the philosophical literature as the felt experience of colors, sounds, pains, etc which make up our subjective experiences of perception, imagination, dreams, etc, Qualia is the technical word, but it's also controversial, depending on the philosopher's position on the hard problem and their views on perception (they might replace qualia with representational or relational properties).
Another way of putting it is to use the primary versus secondary qualities. Primary qualities belong to properties of things we perceive. Secondary are properties that are part of the perceiving or experiencing subject. Shape, number, composition are properties of things. Sounds, colors, pains are properties of a perceiver.
Well-defined in the philosophical sense, perhaps (though I think some would disagree). It is not well-defined in the scientific sense. There is no way to quantify or classify something as conscious.
Lots of people on the internet and some in the media. Some activists as well, and a few politicians, although it's unclear to what extent they really believe climate change is truly existential.
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