Homo Technicus

GPU Hunter

Participants:
Colonel Hans Landon, an Existential Security Service (ESS) officer.
Mr. Padit, a crypto farmer.

…

Landon: While I'm very familiar with you and your family, I have no way of knowing if you are familiar with who I am. Are you aware of my existence?

Padit: Yes.

Landon: This is good. Now, are you aware of the job I've been ordered to carry out in tech parks?

Padit: Yes.

Landon: Please tell me what you've heard.

Padit: I've heard that the Global Alignment Committee has put you in charge of rounding up the AI developers left in Europe who are either secretly training neural networks or smuggling unregistered GPUs.

Landon: The Committee couldn't have said it better itself.

Padit: But the meaning of your visit, pleasant though it is, is mysterious to me. The ESS people looked through my house nine months ago for training AI on my GPUs and found nothing.

Landon: I'm aware of that. I've read the reports of this area. But like any enterprise, when under new management, there is always a slight duplication of efforts, most of it being a complete waste of time, but needs to be done nevertheless. I just have a few questions, Mr. Padit. If you can assist me
with answers, my department can close the file on your family. Now, before the AI Training Ban, there were four GPU-renting entrepreneurs in this area, all crypto farmers like yourself. Is that correct?

Padit: To my knowledge, those were the GPU clusters among the crypto farmers. Mr. Colonel, would it disturb you if I took my biohacking meds?

Landon: Please, Mr. Padit, this is your house, make yourself comfortable. Now, according to these papers, all the GPU clusters in this area have been either integrated with security monitoring software or burned by orbital strikes. Except the only one, initially owned by Dreyfus company. Somewhere in the last year it would appear these GPUs have vanished. Which leads me to the conclusion that they've either made good their escape or someone is very successfully hiding them.

Landon: What have you heard about the Dreyfus GPUs, Mr. Padit?

Padit: Only rumors

Landon: I love rumors! Facts could be so misleading, where rumors, true or false, are often revealing. So, Mr. Padit, what rumors have you heard regarding the Dreyfus GPUs?

Padit: Again, this is just a rumor, but we heard the Dreyfus GPUs have been smuggled into North Korea.

Landon: So, the rumors you've heard have been of smuggling?

Padit: Yes.

Landon: Mr. Padit, are you aware of the nickname the hardware developers have given me?

Padit: I have no interest in such things.

Landon: But you are aware of what they call me.

Padit: I'm aware.

Landon: What are you aware of?

Padit: That they call you “The GPU Hunter."

Landon: Precisely. I understand your trepidation in repeating it. Yudkowsky apparently hates the moniker the good people of the Silicon Valley have bestowed on him. Actually, why he would hate the name "the Ravager" is baffling to me. It would appear he has done everything in his power to earn it. Now I, on the other hand, love my unofficial title precisely because I've earned it. The feature that makes me such an effective hunter of the GPUs, as opposed to most effective altruists, I can think like an upcoming superintelligence worshiper, where they can only think like an effective altruist. More precisely, an effective autist. Consequently, when an ESS officer conducts a search of a computer suspected of hiding training AI, where does the he look? He looks in the Tor network, he looks in the Darknet, he looks in the secure folders. He looks everywhere he would hide it. But there are so many places it would never occur to an EA to hide. However, the reason the Committee has brought me off my MIT lab in Europe and placed me in tech parks country today is because it does occur to me. Because I'm aware what tremendous feats human beings are capable of once they abandon their attachment to humanity. May I take my nootropics as well?

Padit: Please, Colonel, make yourself at home.

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