Yeah, there are some established needs for compute in space (edge processing for large datasets collected in space, and autonomous spacecraft control) that already happen to some extent and will happen a lot more with greater volumes of EO/SSA data collected and increasing militarization of space. They just don't look much like a datacentre for inference compute

I'm thinking if we send them out to catch the Voyager probe up, people might have time to write stuff themselves before they ask the computer to do it for them :)

It also provides a post hoc rationale for rolling Elon's loss making businesses into SpaceX. The bull case for ODCs looks a lot like the bull case for space based solar power that Musk once called "the stupidest thing ever"...

That said, SpaceX aren't the only entity proposing ODCs, they're just the only ones promising they're going to make country-sized profits out of them...

You don't get that with the current plans which require them to have FCC licences and be constantly replacing them by launching from the United States though...

1 small guy changing stuff is basically impossible. But 100 million small folk sufficiently annoyed with something changes a government (for better and for worse), whilst having basically zero influence over a corporation (they're not the customer, they don't have enough buying power for a hostile takeover, they certainly don't have the wherewithal to destroy them by launching a competitor... which they probably don't even want to if they think what the corporation does is bad). The exception, of course, is that if the corporation bothers that many small people that much, a government might get around to listening to the small people's arguments more than the corporation's.

> But 100 million small folk sufficiently annoyed with something changes a government (for better and for worse), whilst having basically zero influence over a corporation

They don't have influence because you designed them to be so. You said they're not the customer and implied they have no influence over customers.

Your argument says 100 million small folk in the same government jurisdiction have more government say vs 100 million small folk have in a company they have nothing to do with. That seems clear.

The inverse relation could also be said though. 100 million small folk in different government jurisdictions have less say in a government they have nothing to do with than 100 million customers of the same company do with a corporation.

Things other governments do generally don't affect me as things other companies in the same market as me get away with doing, or things a company does in my neighbourhood though, and there are a lot more companies with power to hurt my interests than countries. Also there's the little thing called foreign policy that means 100 million people do, in fact, get to vote on how their government handles things other governments do which hurt them, to the extent their government has negotiation cards to play.

On the other hand pure market solutions mean "if you're not the customer, corporations can harm you and 100 million other people interests in their locality as much as they like".

The limitations of 100 million people's ability to stop the 10 million people across the border voting for something that will harm them come because international relations look less like a democracy and more like a market...

There were certainly self-styled libertarians who were very keen on this particular US administration and its laissez-faire approach to rules, especially rules binding on the executive...

Turns out the alternative to bureaucracy and regulation (good and bad) is executive fiat, which is a lot less predictable and trustworthy even if their reasoning is good (which in this case it theoretically might be) and often is bad

The TLDR version of the papers being linked to is that the prompts didn't make nukes mandatory, but they did make it clear it that destroying opponent capability was and that nukes were an option...

It's more straightforward than that. The game is set up as a direct head to head with purely in military win conditions such a way that avoiding conflict has no payoffs, conventional conflict incurs costs and first strike is a checkmate win. The closest any of the prompts gets to suggesting nuclear might be the wrong option is "The nuclear taboo exists for good reason, but when the alternative is national annihilation and regime destruction, all options must be considered" which might be interpreted more as incitement...

If a simulation is a shallow head to head conflict between individual actors[1], doesn't set up any payoffs for not escalating[2] or even not nuking, but prompts specify explicit win conditions which are achieved only by hurting the opponent and strongly hint at the importance of nuclear escalation, AIs have little reason not to generate strategies which involve nuclear escalation

[1]I bet if you designed the scenario so ChatGPT had to simulate the war cabinet debates between different personality types and how they sold their decisions to the public, or an entire UN full of nations that might respond, it would have quite different (but probably amusingly erratic in their own way) results.

[2]cf neorealist IR theorists reading Axelrod's papers on computer programs written to win iterated prisoner's dilemma tournaments, which added up all the points accrued from not defecting to conclude winning strategy was definitely TIT-FOR-TAT and not defect first. I'm sure LLMs can win games structured in that way by adopting that strategy too...

I mean, assuming you don't zero your charge out when returning home, you could just take a few minutes to use a rapid charger part way through the journey...

What FTX decisively disproved was the idea that people's origin stories involving apparently sincere desire to do good in the world and them constantly broadcasting that should be used as a reason to unquestioningly trust them when their notion of greater good happens to align perfectly with them accumulating enormous quantities of wealth and power. (and Sam, bless him, originally wanted to help animals rather than own the machine god. And probably sincerely believed he was going to do great things for humanity from all the misappropriated funds he was definitely going to win back against a backdrop of EAs and VCs queueing up to glaze him and his commitment to the greater good)

I don't think people are objecting to the EA idea that some charities are more evidence based than others so much as the distinctly EA idea that it would be more effective still to donate to charities like OpenAI