The "AI slowdown" is not caused by a coordinated reaction to safety concerns*. That's being used as an excuse. Rather, it is due to the terribly weak scaling law for LLMs. This was foreseen years ago; Ilya Sutskever's "end of the age of scaling" and return to another "age of research."**
* really they're doom trolling
** See also my blog of 1 January 2024.
It seems to me that there is very little we can really say on religious matters. We need to stick to what is evidence based.* Our current two "best" models** of the world, quantum mechanics and general relativity, both suggest that we are all immortal in certain senses.*** One can also identify/define "supreme beings"**** perhaps like the Buddhist "deities."***** This leaves behind an immense knowledge vacuum that is an open invitation to all kinds of crazy speculation.******
* Something like Spinoza's God is possible, see my blog of 3 January 2024.
** These are not "final theories." They may well be wrong. As our models change so must our religious notions.
*** See my blog of 1 November 2023.
**** See my blogs of 27 and 29 August 2018.
***** Though if we are alone in the cosmos the supreme beings could just be us apes.
****** I.e., present day "world religions." Not only are they not evidence based they are often times ruled out by a good deal of evidence.
To insure that a robot will be taking action based solely on ITS sensory input and memory alone I will frequently teleoperate "blind" from an adjacent room. This requires that I display the robot's sensory and state information as I go. I try to also avoid any influences coming from my own memory of past actions and consequences.
