Vaden comes battle-hardened and ready to debate and is met with ... a big soft hug from Ben. Ben repents his apocalyptic sins and admits that Vaden changed his mind. Again. God dammit this is getting annoying. To his credit, Vaden only gloats for 10 minutes. Eventually we touch on some other topics:

• technology as filling niches
• when is outrage appropriate?
• the upsides of social media
• conversation as a substitute for violence

Much love to everyone and stay safe out there! Send us some feedback at [email protected]

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Stephen is back for round two! In this episode we learn that Vaden wants to live in a panopticon and Ben in a high tech surveillance state. Also, we're all going to use Bing from now on.
Stephen Caines is a research fellow at Stanford law school's CodeX centre for legal informatics, where he specializes in the domestic use of facial recognition technology. He received a J.D. from the University of Miami with a concentration in the Business of Innovation, Law, and Technology.
Bring on da feedback at [email protected]; we check it at least once a month ...

Special Guest: Stephen Caines.

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Some people think that advanced AI is going to kill everyone. Some people don't. Who to believe? Fortunately, Ben and Vaden are here to sort out the question once and for all. No need to think for yourselves after listening to this one, we've got you covered.

We discuss:

• How well does math fit reality? Is that surprising?
• Should artificial general intelligence (AGI) be considered "a person"?
• How could AI possibly "go rogue?"
• Can we know if current AI systems are being creative?
• Is misplaced AI fear hampering progress?

References:

• The Unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics
• Prohibition on autonomous weapons letter
• Google employee conversation with chat bot
• Gary marcus on the Turing test
• Melanie Mitchell essay.
• Did MIRI give up? Their (half-sarcastic?) death with dignity strategy
• Kerry Vaughan on slowing down AGI development.

Contact us

• Follow us on Twitter at @IncrementsPod, @BennyChugg, @VadenMasrani
• Check us out on youtube at https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC_4wZzQyoW4s4ZuE4FY9DQQ
• Come join our discord server! DM us on twitter or send us an email to get a supersecret link

Which prompt would you send to GPT-3 in order to end the world? Tell us before you're turned into a paperclip over at [email protected]

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We cover the spicy showdown between the two of the world's most headstrong philosophers: Ludwig Wittgenstein and Karl Popper. In a dingy Cambridge classroom Wittgenstein once threatened Popper with a fireplace poker. What led to the disagreement? In this episode, we continue with the Conjectures and Refutations series by analyzing Chapter 2: The Nature of Philosophical Problems And Their Roots In Science, where Popper outlines his agreements and disagreements with Mr. Ludwig Wittgenstein.

We discuss:

• Are there philosophical problems?
• Why are scientific disciplines divided as they are?
• How much of philosophy is meaningless pseudo-babble? (Hint: Not none)
• Wittgenstein's background and feud between him and Popper
• Wittgenstein 1 and 2 (pre and post Tractatus)
• The danger of philosophical inbreeding
• Two of Popper's examples of philosophical problems: 1. Plato and the Crisis in Early Greek Atomism 2. Immanuel Kant's Problem of Knowledge.
• Musica universalis
• The Problem of Change
• How is knowledge possible?
  

Quotes

My first thesis is that every philosophy, and especially every philosophical ‘school’, is liable to degenerate in such a way that its problems become practically indistinguishable from pseudo-problems, and its cant, accordingly, practically indistinguishable from meaningless babble. This, I shall try to show, is a consequence of philosophical inbreeding. The degeneration of philosophical schools in its turn is the consequence of the mistaken belief that one can philosophize without having been compelled to philosophize by problems which arise outside philosophy—in mathematics, for example, or in cosmology, or in politics, or in religion, or in social life. In other words my first thesis is this. Genuine philosophical problems are always rooted in urgent problems outside philosophy, and they die if these roots decay.

C&R p.95

His question, we now know, or believe we know, should have been: ‘How are successful conjectures possible?’ And our answer, in the spirit of his Copernican Revolution, might, I suggest, be something like this: Because, as you said, we are not passive receptors of sense data, but active organisms. Because we react to our environment not always merely instinctively, but sometimes consciously and freely. Because we can invent myths, stories, theories; because we have a thirst for explanation, an insatiable curiosity, a wish to know. Because we not only invent stories and theories, but try them out and see whether they work and how they work. Because by a great effort, by trying hard and making many mistakes, we may sometimes, if we are lucky, succeed in hitting upon a story, an explanation, which ‘saves the phenomena’; perhaps by making up a myth about ‘invisibles’, such as atoms or gravitational forces, which explain the visible. Because knowledge is an adventure of ideas.

C&R p.128

If you were to threaten us with a common household object, what would it be? Tell us at [email protected], or on twitter: @VadenMasrani, @BennyChugg, @IncrementsPod.

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Close your eyes, and think of a bright and pristine, clean and immaculately run recycling center, green'r than a giant's thumb. Now think of a dirty, ugly, rotting landfill, stinking in the mid-day sun. Of these two scenarios, which, do you reckon, is worse for the environment?

In this episode, Ben and Vaden attempt to reduce and refute a few reused canards about recycling and refuse, by rereading Rob Wiblin's excellent piece which addresses the aformentioned question: What you think about landfill and recycling is probably totally wrong. Steel yourselves for this one folks, because you may need to paper over arguments with loved ones, trash old opinions, and shatter previous misconceptions.
Check out more of Rob's writing here.

We discuss

• The origins of recycling and some of the earliest instances
• Energy efficiency of recycling plastics, aluminium, paper, steel, and electronic waste (e-waste)
• Why your peanut butter jars and plastic coffee cups are not recyclable
• Modern landfills and why they're awesome
• How landfills can be used to create energy
• Building stuff on top of landfills
• Why we're not even close to running out of space for landfills
• Economic incentives for recycling vs top-down regulation
• The modern recycling movement and its emergence in the 1990s > - Guiyu, China, where e-waste goes to die.
• That a lot of your "recycling" ends up as garbage in the Philippines

Error Correction

• Vaden misremembered what Smil wrote regarding four categories of recycling (Metals and Aluminum / Plastics / Paper / Electronic Waste ("e-waste")). He incorrectly quoted Smil as saying these four categories were exhaustive, and represented the four major categories recycling into which the majority of recycled material can be bucketed. This is incorrect- what Smil actually wrote was:

I will devote the rest of this section (and of this chapter) to brief appraisals of the recycling efforts for four materials — two key metals (steel and aluminum) and plastics and paper—and of electronic waste, a category of discarded material that would most benefit from much enhanced rates of recycling.
- Making the Modern World: Materials and De-materialization, Smill, p.179

A list of the top 9 recycled materials can be found here: https://www.rd.com/list/most-recyclable-materials/

Sources / Citations

• Share of plastic waste that is recycled, landfilled, incinerated and mismanaged, 2019
• Source for the claim that recycling glass is not energy efficient (and thus not necessarily better for the environment than landfilling):

  Glass bottles can be more pleasant to drink out of, but they also require more energy to manufacture and recycle. Glass bottles consume 170 to 250 percent more energy and emit 200 to 400 percent more carbon than plastic bottles, due mostly to the heat energy required in the manufacturing process. Of course, if the extra energy required by glass were produced from emissions-free sources, it wouldn’t necessarily matter that glass bottles required more energy to make and move. “If the energy is nuclear power or renewables there should be less of an environmental impact,” notes Figgener.
  - Apocalypse Never, Shellenburger, p.66

• Cloth bags need to be reused 173 times to be more eco-friendly than a plastic bag:
• Source for claim that majority of e-waste ends up in China:

  Puckett’s organization partnered with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to put 200 geolocating tracking devices inside old computers, TVs and printers. They dropped them off nationwide at donation centers, recyclers and electronic take-back programs — enterprises that advertise themselves as “green,” “sustainable,” “earth friendly” and “environmentally responsible.” ...
  About a third of the tracked electronics went overseas — some as far as 12,000 miles. That includes six of the 14 tracker-equipped electronics that Puckett’s group dropped off to be recycled in Washington and Oregon.

  The tracked electronics ended up in Mexico, Taiwan, China, Pakistan, Thailand, Dominican Republic, Canada and Kenya. Most often, they traveled across the Pacific to rural Hong Kong.