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janalsncmtoday at 3:07 AM2 repliesview on HN

I don’t need to know the value of their limit, I just need to know their bounds. Just like a prison doesn’t need to know the strength of each inmate, just that they can’t bend or bite through steel bars.

Cryptography is real, physics is real, networking requires a substrate, CPU clock cycles are real, magic is not real. I think those are pretty reasonable premises.


Replies

ben_wtoday at 8:00 AM

Cryptography is real, but nobody in that field seems to be hubristic enough to think their methods are flawless, and there's a degree of suspicion than the best models may have secret weaknesses engineered into them by the governments who sponsored them.

Physics is real and networking requires a substrate. But there are already known exploits which can misuse the compute hardware as an antenna, e.g. my first search result: https://github.com/fulldecent/system-bus-radio

(Older nerds may remember https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Van_Eck_phreaking)

> Magic is not real

  Turning lead into gold isn't the magic of alchemy, it's just nucleosynthesis.

  Taking a living human's heart out without killing them, and replacing it with one you got out a corpse, that isn't the magic of necromancy, neither is it a prayer or ritual to Sekhmet, it's just transplant surgery.

  ...

  Reading someone’s thoughts isn't magic telepathy, it's just fMRI decoding.

  ...

  Seeing someone's bones without flaying the flesh from them isn't magic, it's just an x-ray.

  Curing congenital deafness, letting the blind see, letting the lame walk, none of that is magic or miracle, they're just cochlear implants, cataract removal/retinal implants, and surgery or prosthetic exoskeletons respectively.
- me, https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/hAwvJDRKWFibjxh4e/it-isn-t-m...
bottlepalmtoday at 3:26 AM

Imagine 200 years ago saying the same thing. As if you have any idea the limits/bounds of anything. Especially in the face of a super intelligence, it’s absurd.

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