I mean the cow probably doesn't care if you needlessly killed it to throw away the meat or to eat it.. both are unnecessary and both result in the same outcome for the cow. Both are also destroying the planet. "Predator/prey" is a great appeal to nature that I am sure many people use to justify themselves lazily shuffling through Walmart to throw frozen burgers into their cart.

As someone who voted for Kamala Harris.. I really wish people would stop pretending like she was a good candidate. She was the better candidate.. relative to a sentient bag of shit. To be fair, the fact that the democrats were split on whether or not incinerating children was okay, probably meant that they were doomed to lose the election no matter who they ran..

Yes this headline is clearly intended to reinforce the patriarchy rather than to get clicks and sound more suspenseful. And everyone was thinking about the pilot's gender before you brought it up.

Surely if the US is engaging in mass surveillance than China can't be.. otherwise which superpower am I supposed to cheer for?

If you plug the numbers into the Carnot equation, it looks like the maximum theoretical efficiency of a thermoelectric generator or heat engine operating at that temperature gradient is about 0.75%. And, I could be wrong, but my assumption would be any attempt to reclaim that energy would slow its exchange and potentially bottleneck a cooling system to some extent.

https://youtu.be/frAEmhqdLFs

I think you are describing some notion of a "will" or motive.. but also potentially describing an LLM's lack of temporal experience. I would argue that a human is constantly being "prompted" to react to things happening to them via sensory input. And adding that to an LLM is trivial. (Provided the input is of a modality that it can understand like text or image embeddings).

As far as will or motive to perform tasks goes, some think an AI agent could generate secondary sub-goals like a will to "survive" in order to carry out primary tasks like "make paperclips efficiently". This is called instrumental convergence and its speculative. I think what would really be scary is if someone explicitly optimized a model with billions of parameters to survive or carry out some specific task and they utilized online reinforcement learning. I dont think there is a big technical hurdle there.. you could imagine a sort of adversarial style training where one model predicts damage/danger/threats and the other attempts to avoid those. We could propagate rewards and punishment back over the sequence of actions that led to that state and train as the model is interacting with its environment.

I know this sounds great to most people but it demonstrates a very superficial level of thinking.. I mean for sure an LLM is capable of asking questions, and if you set it up with real time "sensory" input it could generate constant reaction to that input.. much in the way you are constantly being stimulated to react to your environment.. I am not really sure what the distinction is between a biological brain and a predictive model or algorithm.. I would ask you what you think your own brain is doing on a fundamental level.

Good point about the local temperature delta.. I kind of lost sight of that in the discussion. But my understanding of that equation is it would be the maximum theoretical efficiency of any thermal generator as it represents an idealized heat engine.

I see.. if you want, I can give you tips on how to avoid conversations about topics you'd rather remain willfully ignorant about.

Imagine being surrounded by billions of people who are doing something you believe is not only wrong, but is morally abhorent.. Just actually imagine it for a second. If it helps i can send you some footage of chicks being sent down a conveyor belt to be ground up alive as a byproduct of the egg industry.. for starters

Yes, voluntary human euthanasia is directly comparable to factory farming chickens and sending 350 million baby chicks into an industrial meat grinder as a byproduct.. and I am sure all 350 million of those deaths are quick and painless. What could possibly go wrong on a regular basis sending live animals down a conveyor belt into a mechanical death machine? And I'm certain the people involved in the process treat these animals they are slaughtering literally all day long-- as living, sentient beings capable of suffering and not as objects moving down a conveyor belt into an industrial meat grinder. I am also sure that all of the footage that exists (despite laws preventing people from taking such footage) which would directly contradict this narrative--is fake.

The overlap between people lamenting data center's water usage while having absolutely no problem with animal agriculture is insane.