Tag: ezra klein

Podcast notes – Skeptical take on the AI revolution – Gary Marcus on Ezra Klein: “They’re just autocomplete…it’s mysticism to think otherwise”

Guest: Gary Marcus, NYU professor emeritus

Derived from things humans said, but doesn’t always know connections between the things – which can lead to it saying whacky things

Transforms everything into an “embedding space”

It’s pastiche – imitating styles, cutting and pasting, template aspect
Both brilliance and errors come from this

Humans have some internal model – of physical world, of a relationship
Understanding is also about indirect meanings

AI doesn’t have these internal representations

Sam Altman – “humans are energy flowing through a neural network”

Human neural networks have much more structure than AI neural nets

Neural nets like ChatGPT have 2 problems:
-not reliable
-not truthful
Making them bigger doesn’t solve those problems – because they don’t have models of “reliability” or “truthfulness”
“They’re just auto-complete”
“It’s mysticism to think otherwise”

No conception of truth – all fundamentally bullshitting
It’s a very serious problem

Can use GPT3 to make up stories about covid, spread bullshit and misinformation

No existing tech to protect us from this potential tidal wave of misinformation

People used ChatGPT to make up fake coding answers to put on StackOverflow
StackOverflow had to ban ChatGPT

“Talking about having submachine guns of misinformation”

Ezra – ChatGPT is really good at mimicking styles, but core doesn’t have truth value or embedded meaning

Silicon Valley always good at surveillance capitalism
Now you can use AI to write targeted propaganda all day long

Ezra – this AI will be good for people and companies who don’t care about truthfulness. eg, Google doesn’t care about “truth” but about clicks

One of main AI use cases is SEO copy to drive clicks and engagement

In some aspects, as models get bigger they get better (eg, at generating synonyms); but at truthfulness, wasn’t as much progress

Loves AI and have thought about it his whole life – just wants it to work better, be on better path

Biology has enormous complexity – too much for humans – AI could really help us
Also climate change
Could empower individuals like DALL-E does for artists
“Reason according to human values”
Right now we have mediocre AI – risk of being net negative – polarization of society, growth of misinformation

Parable of drunk looking for keys at night around a street light
The street light in AI is deep learning

Human mind does many things: pattern recognition, use analogies, plan things, interpret language
We’ve only made progress on a tiny part
We need other tools (not just deep learning)

Fight between neural nets and symbols (symbolic systems / symbolic learning)
Find ways to bridge these 2 traditions

Ezra:
Deep learning – give all this data, figure it out itself, but bad at abstraction
Symbolic systems – great at abstraction (eg, teach it multiplication from first principles), abstract procedures that are guaranteed to work

Most symbol manipulation is hard wired
Kids learn to count using generalized rules

AI hasn’t matched humans in capacity to acquire new rules – some paradigm shift needed
We’re worshipping the false god of “more data”
Believes will be genuine new innovation in next decade

Stopped ~50 minutes in

Podcast notes: The hidden costs of cheap meat – Leah Garces on Ezra Klein show

Guest: Leah Garces, president of Mercy for Animals

50 years ago, meat costs $7/lb, today chicken is $1.80/lb
“These prices are fake”

Chickens today grow much bigger, much faster, much cheaper
-Reach slaughter weight in 6 weeks time, 3x faster than before
-50K birds in one warehouse – lose any sense of individuality
-Used to be 2-5sf of space per bird, now 3/4sf per bird – wall to wall

Battery cages
-for laying hens to produce eggs
-6 to 10 birds in a barren wired cage, crowded, causes aggressive behaviors, peck each other
-solution: industry shears off beak tips to reduce damage

Fish numbers are hard to quantify because they’re reported in tons
Land animals – 80 BILLION in the world, 70 billion are chickens (90%)

America is highest meat consumer – per capita eats 27 animals per year
America produces / have access to – 225 pounds of meat per person per year
Numbers are growing – last year was highest number ever produced and consumed

Chickens today grow so big so fast that they collapse under their own weight – especially their breast muscle – can’t survive past 6 weeks old, have heart attacks, too metabolically taxed
Product of selective breeding just for breast muscle
Chickens in wild can live many years
The meat has more fat and protein content than before, white stripes in the meat which are literally disease markers as result of fast growth

Chicken warehouse / factory farms
-chickens are very immobile, plopped down
-lots of sores on body
–“marshmallow on toothpicks”
-often panting, taxed by weight / size
-very fragile

What % are raised industrial – globally it’s 90%; in America it’s 99%

A positive trend: 1/3 production of eggs is cage-free now, as result of pressure campaigns
-still an industrial setting (indoors, over crowded, given antibiotics)
-just not kept in cages anymore

Gestation crates for pigs
-source of bacon, sausage
-pregnant pigs kept in metal crate so small that pregnant pig can’t turn her body, can’t really lay down; bottom of cage is cold and wet with slatted floors for feces; after giving birth, kept in a slightly larger farrowing crate, essentially a breeding machine, piglets are taken away – and the cycle starts again
-the pigs scream when their babies are taken away

70% of medically imported antibiotics in US are used in animals
-necessary for these animals to survive, grow faster
-antibiotic resistance is growing; millions of future deaths will come from antibiotic resistant diseases
-to reduce antibiotics would require changing genetics of the animals
–

Meat industry needs to internalize these external costs
-CDC tracks viruses of concern: most are things like avian flu, swine flu – spreading from birds and pigs
-zoonotic diseases (from animals -> humans)
-pigs are more closely related to us than chickens

Impact on climate change
-livestock farming – mostly cows emitting methane – 14.5% of global greenhouse gas emissions (could be underestimate, as high as 25%)
–half of world’s usable land is for agriculture, most for livestock
-1/3 of arable land is used just to raise crops to feed farm animals (eg, soy, maize)
-contributor to deforestation
-contributor to air pollution (chickens produce ammonia and dust particles to local area; pig waste is collected in a cesspool which is sprayed into the air / fields, usually in low-income areas)
eg, Eastern North Carolina – former slaves area, hog industry moved nearby, hog waste ends up on clothes, cars, houses, but don’t have power to fight back, “nobody’s gonna put this in San Francisco”
–Gulf of Mexico dead zone – fertilizer run off into Mississippi, then into Gulf of Mexico – a zone the size of Rhode Island where no sea life can exist, only some species near the surface – the bottom has no oxygen nor life

100x more land used to produce a calorie of meat than a calorie of vegetable

Why isn’t meat more expensive? What are the externalities?
-animal suffering
-climate change
-air pollution
-farmers – owe lots of debt, often in low income areas
for chickens, farmers collectively owe $5B+ in debt, held hostage by it
a chicken farmer is basically a babysitter
keeps chickens alive for 6 weeks, then company collects and pays them
a form of indentured servitude

What about tax payer / government subsidies?
-in 2011, government purchased $40M of extra chicken supply – tax dollars paying for over production
-during covid, gave $270M in pandemic assistance
–spent $40M for “de-population” of chickens and pigs – slaughtered right on farm, “ventilation shutdown”, gets too hot and the animals suffocate
-why does government / taxpayer dollars pay? The industry should pay

2011 – Prop 12 – banned production and sale of extreme close confinement of animals raised for meat – almost 70% of Californians voted in favor
Industry appealed, Supreme Court hearing the case, Biden supports industry / overturning Prop 12

Compassion is an infinite muscle – we can have direct impact on improving farm animals’ lives

What are some modest steps for improvement?
-internalizing industry costs thru regulation – pollution tax, improving factory conditions
-meat prices will rise, consumption will decline

3 recommended books from Leah
-Wastelands by Addison – Smithfield’s case in North Carolina
-Meatonomics
-Animal Machines – Ruth Harrison – catalyst for “Five Freedoms” for animal welfare