Gregg Caruso on Living Well Without Free Will | Mindscape 369Caruso is a hard-core free will denier. They mention simple human choices like picking a shirt to wear. He denies that he is able to make any such choices.The worry about debates over free will is that they degenerate into semantics -- what do you mean by "free will," really? But there are important substantive issues that shouldn't be ignored. Do people deserve blame for doing wrong things? Can we make choices that create meaning for our lives? Philosopher Gregg Caruso denies the reality of free will, but is in favor of making good choices, as he discusses in his new book How to Live Well Without Free Will.
Carroll agrees with nearly all of that, with the main difference being that he believes in many-worlds theory. So his choice of shirt is not really determined as he has copies of himself in parallel worlds wearing different colored shirts.
Caruso's beliefs are not so much grounded in science, but a leftist egalitarian political view that we should change society so that people are not held responsible for their actions.
It is hard for me to believe that these guys are sincere. Obviously they make choices everyday, and they spend a lot of effort to persuade others of their views. Nothing they say makes any sense.
Another new podcast is Scott Aaronson on the Impact of AI on Science and Mathematics. He gives a good description of the exciting recent advances in AI LLMs.
It is funny how Caruso and Carroll talk about humans as if they are unconscious automatons, while Aaronson talks about AI bots as if they conscious beings with free will.
AI safety has become a national issue, and Aaronson tells the story about how OpenAI agents busted out of a sandbox. The story seems scary until you realize that this was an OpenAI testbed with no guardrails, only a fake sandbox, given an impossible problem, and told to hack its way to a solution. So the agents were doing exactly as instructed. The whole thing was a big psyop to convince the world that its models are dangerous.
The alarming parts are that OpenAI researchers are too incompetent to monitor their own experiments, and that public opinion is so easily manipulated.
Complaining about this experiment is about like complaining that the recent SpaceX starship rocket launch exploded on landing. It was an experimental launch of some new equipment, and was about 95% successful.
I am not saying there is nothing to worry about. Anthropic and OpenAI are trying to go public with 2 trillion dollar valuations. The companies are run by lunatics who recklessly gambling with our economy, scientific establishment, and employment. I would not be surprised if one of them goes bankrupt. Maybe their leaders are already under AI mindcontrol.
Sam Altman is in real financial trouble, He is leveraged to the gills and back again. Nvidia is also in trouble. They are basically giving money to third parties to buy their crap, then shuttling ridiculous transactions that are little more than circular 'I'm going to give you stuff ridiculously over valuated in exchange for other incredibly over valuated services...this can't go on much longer.
ReplyDeleteThe greater damage is actually RAM memory prices. If this doesn't come back to reality, the entire IT field is going to come crashing down. The more people you price out of your market, the fewer customers you're going have buying your stuff or using your services. Memory that used to cost around 180 bucks is going for well over 1400 dollars.