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I retain faint naïve optimism for blockchain's long-term impact, but I really feel this paper overstretched trying to impose blockchain on the AI safety domain.

I retain faint naïve optimism for blockchain's long-term impact, but I really feel this paper overstretched trying to impose blockchain on the AI safety domain. An example is the author's 3rd proposed axiom for Safe AGI in Table 3: "Morality, defined as no use of force or fraud, stored via DLT." I applaud the sheer optimism, but found it difficult to take the paper seriously beyond page 6.

incidentalSkim 7y ago
Well, in the same way "capitalist corporations are AI" this would be like skimming the spare decisions of human participants in a structured manner, without using a queue or scheduler, to prompt people for rote tasks. Instead, from the outset, the goal is create a destributed entity that's puppeted by the real consensus of live humans. Those people might not be the best and brightest, so caveat emptor for lots of reasons. So it's not "artificial intelligence" but really an aggregate expression of the culturally guided choices of many regular people, ruled by a manner of brokered events in an electronic system. Buzzwordy for sure, and humans aren't removed from the loop. It's not an assuredly pure silicon AI.
roymurdock 7y ago
Blockchain is in 99.9% of cases a solution looking for a problem It is hard to grasp for non technical/economics minded folk so it is easy to exploit as a magic snake oil solution for hard problems I’ve had very painful conversations with people who control very large budgets at companies that are convinced blockchain is the next big thing when they only have a rudimentary concept of what it is and can do, but think it will revolutionize the payments industry or how supply chains are structured It’s a distributed database that is more expensive and time consuming to maintain than a centralized database but if structured correctly can remove the need for a set of players to trust a central authority or one another (you pay for this in speed of read/write and storage making it nearly useless in payments industry) There are a lot of solutions looking for problems out there that are getting a lot of funding due to the glut of cash looking to seed the next big thing in tech, and the ease of finding and investing in small companies now AI is perhaps the best meaningless umbrella term for raising money or generating corporate interest currently AI safety is a very loosely defined term because of the vague nature of AI Two welders, accountants, plumbers, farmers are going to have similar jobs, two AI safety engineers could be coding anything from video game algorithms to nuclear plant turbine shutdown code and failsafes Anything hardware running any code could be broadly considered AI Combining blockchain and AI safety is just mashing together two buzzwords and hoping something interesting comes out with no seed of true inspiration germinating a fruitful idea
- garmaine 7y ago
  > you pay for this in speed of read/write and storage making it nearly useless in payments industry You are ignoring the so-called “off-chain” solutions embodied by lightning.
  - roymurdock 7y ago
    Lightning is for continuous or repeated transactions between two parties because it doesn’t settle immediately/at end of day like the vast majority of one off transactions conducted in the world Ultimately using lightning, “Bitcoin banks” would develop because that is the most efficient way to do it with large volumes of trades between disparate parties involving cash, credit, and gold Instead of opening individual lines of credit with the 1000 people I paid or who paid me last month (lightning wallets) and adding/subtracting from those lines of credit instead of settling (nothing is written to the blockchain), it all goes through central authorities and arbitrator - my banks and credit card providers, who tally all the transactions Lightning is not a scalable solution without centralized lightning banks which defeats the entire purpose of the blockchain in the first place - it’s just added complexity to arrive at virtual banks as a solution
    - garmaine 7y ago
      What you describe is payment channels, not lightning. Lightning allows multi-hop payments so you don’t have to have channels with your endpoints, just be connected to the same network graph.

incidentalSkim 7y ago

Well, in the same way "capitalist corporations are AI" this would be like skimming the spare decisions of human participants in a structured manner, without using a queue or scheduler, to prompt people for rote tasks. Instead, from the outset, the goal is create a destributed entity that's puppeted by the real consensus of live humans. Those people might not be the best and brightest, so caveat emptor for lots of reasons. So it's not "artificial intelligence" but really an aggregate expression of the culturally guided choices of many regular people, ruled by a manner of brokered events in an electronic system. Buzzwordy for sure, and humans aren't removed from the loop. It's not an assuredly pure silicon AI.

roymurdock 7y ago

Blockchain is in 99.9% of cases a solution looking for a problem It is hard to grasp for non technical/economics minded folk so it is easy to exploit as a magic snake oil solution for hard problems I’ve had very painful conversations with people who control very large budgets at companies that are convinced blockchain is the next big thing when they only have a rudimentary concept of what it is and can do, but think it will revolutionize the payments industry or how supply chains are structured It’s a distributed database that is more expensive and time consuming to maintain than a centralized database but if structured correctly can remove the need for a set of players to trust a central authority or one another (you pay for this in speed of read/write and storage making it nearly useless in payments industry) There are a lot of solutions looking for problems out there that are getting a lot of funding due to the glut of cash looking to seed the next big thing in tech, and the ease of finding and investing in small companies now AI is perhaps the best meaningless umbrella term for raising money or generating corporate interest currently AI safety is a very loosely defined term because of the vague nature of AI Two welders, accountants, plumbers, farmers are going to have similar jobs, two AI safety engineers could be coding anything from video game algorithms to nuclear plant turbine shutdown code and failsafes Anything hardware running any code could be broadly considered AI Combining blockchain and AI safety is just mashing together two buzzwords and hoping something interesting comes out with no seed of true inspiration germinating a fruitful idea

garmaine 7y ago
> you pay for this in speed of read/write and storage making it nearly useless in payments industry You are ignoring the so-called “off-chain” solutions embodied by lightning.
- roymurdock 7y ago
  Lightning is for continuous or repeated transactions between two parties because it doesn’t settle immediately/at end of day like the vast majority of one off transactions conducted in the world Ultimately using lightning, “Bitcoin banks” would develop because that is the most efficient way to do it with large volumes of trades between disparate parties involving cash, credit, and gold Instead of opening individual lines of credit with the 1000 people I paid or who paid me last month (lightning wallets) and adding/subtracting from those lines of credit instead of settling (nothing is written to the blockchain), it all goes through central authorities and arbitrator - my banks and credit card providers, who tally all the transactions Lightning is not a scalable solution without centralized lightning banks which defeats the entire purpose of the blockchain in the first place - it’s just added complexity to arrive at virtual banks as a solution
  - garmaine 7y ago
    What you describe is payment channels, not lightning. Lightning allows multi-hop payments so you don’t have to have channels with your endpoints, just be connected to the same network graph.