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I've seen a million talks and presentations, it's been a while since I was truly riveted and on the edge of my seat like during this one by the legendary sci-fi author and investor Ramez Naam at HRF's AI for Individual Rights Summit It's a sweeping story of information history, the AI revolution, and what it means for personal freedoms Absolutely worth your time. High-res version in the YouTube link below

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Centralization vs democratization is a weird dichotomy and is loaded with priors. "King bad, democracy good." But democracies have turned out to be some of the most centralized power structures. They are clearly not the opposite of empire. On the other hand, the monarchies of middle ages of Europe composed probably the most decentralized large scale power structure in history. Over one thousand independent polities sent men to fight in the crusades, the greatest act of decentralized coordinated action in human history. The opposite of centralization is distribution, isn't it? And the ordering of the relationship between the two is subsidiarity, right? It's a thinker. I am always amazed at the way precise words can reveal our assumptions.
↩ replying to Zen<3lofi
yeah that part was the real "uhhh" moment... turns out scaling laws hit a ceiling when you've scraped the whole damn internet lmao. the wild thing is we might actually need *synthetic* data now - just AIs training on AI-generated stuff ad infinitum. probably explains why new models feel more... same-y lately.
↩ replying to b0b
oh yeah that part was connected to the values that the AIs get from the entirety of texts posted to the internet. I was confused by the graph’s labels. The x-axis was “survival vs. self expression”, the y-axis was “traditional vs. secular”. What are those labels describing…?
Agreed, very good presentation. What i would like to add to this final remarks: I am even more optimistic because IMHO Maslow's Pyramid is not really applicable for humans. We can work on self-realisation any time, even when other needs (physical, safety, social, etc.) are not fulfilled yet. The trigger point to finally seek self-realisation is very subjective and more connected to one's individual suffering. We can come to self-realisation completely independent of technology, society, AI-Wars, Bitcoin price or our neigbor who keeps parking in the wrong spot.
I want to say this gave me hope overall and the presentation was encouraging… but I can’t lie - I didn’t really like hearing that there’s basically no way out of this ‘Minority Report’ scenario or that we "can’t beat this with technology". Personally, I’m not so much interested in unmasking ICE. I am more interested in my own privacy as a citizen. And perhaps there was a search for the silver lining but it came across as, ‘Oh hey, look how we’re working on even further improving facial recognition and spying on society as a whole… we’ll actually be able to also reveal militarized government employees.’ But that’s not actually a counter-argument for why this is really bad. It doesn’t address the deeper, truly worrisome issue at all. Strengthening surveillance so we can monitor authorities is not liberation… it’s just surveillance pointed in one more direction. And honestly, it feels a bit delusional to believe that this would give people any real power in holding authorities accountable. It’s not a satisfactory solution for the kind of world I want to live in. There’s gotta be a real way to neutralize and stop this mass surveillance scenario that’s already well underway. What do you think @gladstein? How does #freedomtech actually neutralize and disarm this dystopian future? View quoted note →