>In real life, intelligence is associated with picking better goals.
"Better" according to what metric?
It may be the case that there is a tendency for high-intelligence humans to pick "more enlightened" goals. Perhaps there is a natural "enlightened goals" attractor for our species.
However I don't think we can extrapolate from that to a fundamentally alien AI.
I think even if this statistical tendency exists, it has clear counterexamples -- consider that 2 genius chess players may have opposite goals, of beating one another. And we shouldn't bet the future of humanity on this statistical tendency extrapolating outside of the original distribution of human species.
Here are some intuition pumps on how diverse goals can be even across intelligent species:
As soon as you phrase goal selection in terms of metrics, you’re assuming that goal selection is based on some other goal - that is you’re already assuming the orthoganality thesis. Your logic is fully circular.
One thing that’s interesting to note about all of the examples you picked - every single one of those species shows cooperative behaviors. They share many other behaviors that are more similar than they are different. To reject the orthoganality thesis it’s sufficient to show that there is an empirical general association between intelligence and certain goals - then we can extrapolate an AI although of course it will function differently and may have many unusual behaviors will tend to follow those goals more directly. For instance intelligence is associated with : cooperation, empathy, inter and intra species communication, curiosity, etc. all of the species you mentioned exhibit these more than less intelligent species. Meanwhile something like “hunting to eat” is observed across the intelligence spectrum.
>I don't think it's impossible to come up with arguments against them. For one thing, extrapolating the current gradual rate of progress forwards means that we will get to see several minor "intelligence spills" before the hypothetical big and last one, and by observing what went wrong, humanity will have the opportunity to come up with solutions.
That blog post makes some giant unsupported assumptions, like that the reason for the failure of a few activists to stop gain-of-function research was that the government is fundamentally bad at addressing risks, and not that biologists might know more about the risk/benefit tradeoff than amateurs.
This is the criticism I hear but I think it depends on how you look at engineering and bias in general. I just see different people with different skillsets and pick the best one for the team. I have yet to run into a situation where the ability to code was the determining factor between two candidates. I imagine it could happen but so far so good
Companies that have trouble hiring and retaining right now have at least one of three things: a stinky codebase, a stinky culture/benefits/work-life-balance (i.e. not WFH, micro-managing, etc), or uncompetitive salaries. The ones that have none of the latter problems sit around scratching their heads and writing posts like OP
That’s my plan going forward. I’m in my first role as a self-taught engineer, so my network is still small. A coworker I worked closely with and had a great experience referred me to this company, so I went through with the process. Initially, the recruiter sent me a 2 hour take home leetcode challenge, which they waived after I responded I was surprised that they required an initial coding challenge for a referral.
It’s hard for me to tell which companies require those style of interviews, but I’m not working in the Bay Area and have found when applying to positions remotely there, they seem to have a much greater emphasis on leetcode than companies in my area.
It's incredibly cold in the outer solar system right? So why is it that there is liquid water in these moons? Is it some sort of geothermal heating?
What's the most complex life which could conceivably exist in such a cold environment? Presumably there's very little sunlight penetrating through the ice to the liquid ocean.
Interesting stuff! Made me find that even rogue planets (free floating without orbiting any star) might theoretically be warm enough to support oceans and life: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rogue_planet#Warmth
Could be either tidal or geothermal. It’s been conjectured that even Pluto could have liquid water inside.
The point is that generic small outer solar system bodies have liquid water, whereas the generic inner solar system body doesn’t. If you think liquid water is the most important requirement for life then most of the habitat in the universe is outside the frost line.
It’s totally plausible that simple life could form around geothermal vents on such a moon but harder to believe you could support a complex ecosystem enough to evolve intelligent life without sunlight.
At the high pressures in such an underground ocean I wouldn’t expect our proteins to work, you can kill bacteria with very high pressure. I suspect that proteins that evolved in that environment could work just fine. I can picture a creature from that kind of world drilling up to the surface somehow, but the low pressure would be deadly and in a system like Jupiter where Io ‘breeds’ radiation (vapor from volcanos gets ionized, gets accelerated, ionizes more vapor) the surface could be a dangerous place.
Such a creature though might have a leg up on starfaring as getting into orbit might be easier (never mind building a beanstalk) and rather than being tempted by boring destinations like Mars (smaller planet, smaller civilization) they might go straight to cutting up wet/carbonaceous asteroids to build large (100-1000x more habitable area than Earth) habitats and if they developed D-D fusion they might be quicker to see the advantages of a comet-hopping lifestyle.
One of the Main limiters with underwater intelligent life would be industrialization. How are you going to use a steam engine underwater? What do you burn to heat it? Given that geothermal vents would be the source of life for such a species - capping them for machinery would also be unwise.
We don’t know if life started in the light though and then migrated to the vents and adapted. My memory of it is that this is an unanswered question so far.
Its a good hypothesis that life start at deep volcanic vents. Geologist Robert Hazen conducted lab experiments showing that all steps of the metabolic citric cycle occur in this environment without needing catalytic enzymes. Chemical reduction of magma provides the energy. As life developed enzymes to improve metabolism, it could migrate to colder, lower pressure environments.
I've heard that if you swim into a nuclear reactor spent fuel containment pool, you will actually measure the least radiation somewhere in the middle of the pool, thanks to shielding from the universe.
But just to be sure, I got in touch with a friend of mine who works at a research reactor, and asked him what he thought would happen to you if you tried to swim in their radiation containment pool.
“In our reactor?” He thought about it for a moment. “You’d die pretty quickly, before reaching the water, from gunshot wounds.”
I know someone who worked at a medical isotope reactor and there were no guns there, at least not in the reactor area. Security tends to be much much further outside ;)
After all, remember some things in a reactor don't react well to bulletsch.
Jupiter's radiation is so intense that Europa Clipper has a _super weird_ mission profile (a bunch of fly-bys instead of an orbit) so that the spacecraft doesn't spend too much time cooking in all that.
The current Juno probe flies in 53 day orbits where only a few hours are in heavy radiation. It has made 48 orbits. The mission has been extended 7 years to 2025. If Juno runs low on fuel or the hardware breaks down, it will be crashed into Jupiter to avoid hitting and contaminating a moon.
> Near the planet, the magnetic field traps swarms of charged particles and accelerates them to very high energies, creating intense radiation that bombards the innermost moons and can damage spacecraft.
So basically like our van Allen belts but supercharged.
Technically, the answer to GP's question would be no, because Jupiter doesn't emit the radiation, it just traps and accelerates the particles (mostly coming from solar wind) in its magnetic field...
A lot of the radiation is produced by a ‘breeding’ process where volcanos on Io emit vapor that gets ionized and then accelerated to make more radiation that ionizes more vapor.
Katherine de Kleer said "It's like Io is the massive polluter of the Jupiter system" on the Lex Fridman podcast #184, the Io part starts ~14mins in for the curious
The quick answer: Yes and from a human visitor perspective, lethally high amounts. It's the single most intense emitter of radiation in the solar system except for the sun itself. If we wanted to colonize any planet with plentiful moons, Saturn would be a much better candidate at least in this regard.
Also, though another reply here mentioned Jupiter not emitting its own radiation, this isn't quite correct. It does, almost like a small pulsar.
That approach is fundamentally broken because binaries from one distro aren't guaranteed to be compatible with binaries in another distro. Heck, even binaries from the same distro at different points in time can be incompatible with one another. There'd be incompatibilities across ABIs, compile time feature flags, system paths, and much more. There are plenty of assumptions about the system baked into binaries that aren't always trivial to fix.
Automated conversion can be helpful if you don't have access to the source code though. There are plenty of examples running proprietary software on unsupported distros using this approach. However, because of its shortcomings, it shouldn't be used when the source code is available.
"Better" according to what metric?
It may be the case that there is a tendency for high-intelligence humans to pick "more enlightened" goals. Perhaps there is a natural "enlightened goals" attractor for our species.
However I don't think we can extrapolate from that to a fundamentally alien AI.
I think even if this statistical tendency exists, it has clear counterexamples -- consider that 2 genius chess players may have opposite goals, of beating one another. And we shouldn't bet the future of humanity on this statistical tendency extrapolating outside of the original distribution of human species.
Here are some intuition pumps on how diverse goals can be even across intelligent species:
* Orcas killing sharks for their livers: https://www.livescience.com/2-orcas-slaughter-19-sharks-in-a... I don't believe dolphins show the same level of violence, even though both are smart cetaceans
* Intelligent dogs bred to be responsive and attentive to human needs -- unlike close cousins like the wolf
* Chimpanzees and bonobos are both related to humans, both highly intelligent, but with very different culture and goals https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c6Ko0Hzi47U