Seriously? You expect me to show up at the local townhall to verify my age so that I can access certain websites. But nothing you have said is novel, it is already in practice. Alright.

Look, there is no way the government will be able to keep up with which websites or platforms are the most risky for minors. The curious ones will look for ways around the system and end up on those non-mainstream sites. The predators will look for ways around the system too. It is much better if the responsibility is taken by the parents. And I highly doubt the government would stop at only checking the age. There would soon be special licenses for special websites. Imagine the eightteen year olds lining up at the local townhall to apply for a license to watch porn. Or, less comically, unless you are vaccine verified you cannot access any websites except the government healthcare one. Enforced at the ISP level, for your own protection.

If there is a technical solution, I would be genuinely interested. Maybe something with zero knowledge proofs. But you would have to enforce it on every website and platform. It would have to be at the protocol level, rebuilding the whole internet around age verification. Which is just not going to happen.

Of course. The strange part was about not already recognizing the importance of privacy in tech. So what is your proposed solution?

What a strange comment.

Why are so many platforms doing this now? I just received a message from OpenAI that “we’ll begin using age prediction across our services to help provide safer, more age-appropriate experiences for teens.”

This is important. Unfortunately, homomorphic encryption is not going to be standard any time soon.

To understand how AI might play out in the future, it might be helpful to draw a parallel with chess. After Deep Blue beat Kasparov in 1997, for a while a human+computer team still could do better than the best computer programs alone. But eventually, whatever the human contributed in terms of intuition simply got in the way. Similarly, we are now in an era where a human+AI team does better than either the human or AI alone. This leads to increased productivity and new jobs created, which will only accelerate in the immediate future. But longterm, humans will just get in the way of accomplishing most tasks efficiently. This is when we will see most jobs replaced by AI. Humans will still be relevant. We still care about the games of Magnus Carlsen. But if aliens show up and challenge us to a game of chess, let’s be honest, we are sending Stockfish, not Magnus. In the same way, real power will be wielded by AI, including physical power in the form of robotics. This is the landscape in which the alignment problem has to be solved. In the immediate future, it might look like we have solved this problem, since the dominant combination will be that of AI steered by humans. It will probably play out within the dynamics of a free market, since that is the best way we know how to align the interests of many parties. That apparent solution would be deceptive, however, since eventually this intermediate stage will be superseded by the era or total AI dominance. Imagine a free market dominated by AI agents, the leverage of humanity exponentially decaying. The only realistic way to counteract this appears to be to dramatically increase human intelligence, through genetic engineering, or through merging with the machines.

“At launch, Blacksky Cash will only be available only to U.S. residents transacting in USD, and in English (Spanish to follow), to meet banking requirements.” Okay. And I guess the hope is that pending regulatory approval it will expand to become what bitcoin already is?

Somebody call Yudkowsky 😂