251–260 of 286 posts
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With enough work one can convince oneself that each 'discovery' or 'invention' is a trivial follow-up of existing technology. DNA sequencing is in the post-laser era. Can you build a convincing argument as to why it's not new but the laser is new?
the first laser was built in the 60s, DNA was isolated in 1878.
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The fact that a relatively low income individual has access to a large number of goods and services which were once considered exclusive to the wealthy is a clear indication that technological progress has continued at a steady pace. While 'slowed down' or 'sped up' are difficult to quantify, the fact that 3 billion human beings have gained access to smartphone technology over the last decade seems to support the ide…
> The fact that a relatively low income individual has access to a large number of goods and services which were once considered exclusive to the wealthy is a clear indication that technological progress has continued at a steady pace. No, it's just a clear indication of market efficiencies and/or better engineering. It doesn't say anything about what the grandparent asked for: the rate and magnitude of new scientifi…
Consider the efficiencies generated by Amazon's highly automated warehouses; their level of automation wouldn't have been feasible in, say, the 60's. Substantial technological progress on multiple fronts has been required.
The AI and Singularity hype irks me, because I'm genuinely in agreement with Peter Thiel's argument that technological progress is actually decelerating relative to how it was moving 60 years ago once you look beyond the advancements we have experienced in information technology and finance.
That said, for most of the arguments that modern-day thinkers talk about, accelerating technological progress is totally irrelevant. You're most likely thinking of Kurzweil's school of thought around a singularity, which is nowadays far from the "norm".
If you're talking about the arguments around technological unemployment, it doesn't matter if tech is accelerating - we could, for example,, over the course of the next e.g. 30 years, replace 50% of human jobs. This might be "slower" in some sense than previous tech changes, but it doesn't change the bottom line. (note: these are made up numbers to illustrate a point, I have no good guess at the real numbers, but lots of smart people, including economists, think it's a problem we will face soon-ish).
If you're talking about the arguments around "unfriendly AI", then again, it is totally immaterial wether tech in general is accelerating. All that you need to believe in order to worry is that eventually, at some point, we will be able to create a machine that thinks, and it is not automatically guaranteed to share our values.
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There's a big difference between technological advancements and engineering & standard development. Deploying a cell network is an engineering and logistical task, not a feat of invention.
>Deploying a cell network is an engineering and logistical task, not a feat of invention. People that say that have no idea how hard it is to make a network large. The complexity of expanding connectivity is our modern feat.
From all I can see, nearly all the present AI boils down to one word -- hype. From what is really going on, nearly all of it looks like (1) in some cases a lot of new data, (2) some new, faster processor hardware, e.g., based on graphical processor units although the x86 processors are astoundingly fast anyway, able to manipulate the new data, (3) for what manipulations to do on the data, some tweaks of some of the w…
If you're thinking about conceptual reasoning vs. purely data-driven reasoning, you'd really get a lot of value from reading Ayn Rand's theory of concepts. Yes, she's very unpopular amongst modern philosophers, so all I'll say is you should read her writings and judge for yourself.
https://www.amazon.com/Introduction-Objectivist-Epistemology...
Two people used her philosophy as a basis for a book on induction and the history of the scientific method:
https://www.amazon.com/Logical-Leap-Induction-Physics-ebook/...
Here's a free taster: http://aynrandlexicon.com/book/conceptual.html
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Is you "economics background" a BA, by any chance? The people who say economics "became religion" are usually those whose only exposure to economics is through secondhand knowledge (ie. they read about it in media) or took a handful of undergraduate classes. Take a look at what modern economics research looks like [1]. Seriously, read __any__ of those articles and come tell me with a straight face it's not doing norm…
Yup, I'm quite familiar with what modern economics research looks like. My problem with them start when I get to "We now use formal econometric techniques", when they get very limited model with huge amount of assumptions and then draw some conclusions from that. Math checks out. No questions about that (Although there's always stories about reproducibility of results). But after that there's huge gap, when you try t…
(mind you, this was before the term "UX design" got diluted to "graphic design for webpages and buttons on touch interfaces")
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the whole premise of a singularity is that we will hit a point of exponential technological growth, extrapolated from the accelerating pace of technological development over human history and usually based on the idea that we'll make a self-iterating AI which will lead to runaway intelligence. The "singularity" specifically is intended as a tipping-point where the acceleration of technology becomes faster than human…
Yep, this is why the singularity is a zero-sum game... I expect many entities to vie for the title, but the first one there will subsequently dominate... which is why it's my intention to program my conciousness into my own AI which seeks to become the singularity and therefor my digial conciousness version will become the ultimate god of the universe. mad scientist laugh
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What is human intelligence, if not the result of a colossal, distributed function optimisation process driven by evolutionary forces over millions of years?
true, it's the result of an optimization process, but intelligence itself (whatever it is...it's a suitcase-term) isn't as simple as that. Or maybe it is, I don't know!
The AI and Singularity hype irks me, because I'm genuinely in agreement with Peter Thiel's argument that technological progress is actually decelerating relative to how it was moving 60 years ago once you look beyond the advancements we have experienced in information technology and finance.
True that. 1880-1950 (70 years) took us from train-and-telegraph to jet-and-atom bomb. Horse and carriage was the top-tier tech for personal transportation in 1880, and they were just starting to understand that diseases are often caused by these little blobby creatures called germs. 1950-2020 (70 years) will take us much less distance. Almost everything we're developing seems to be about information processing. If y…
The AI and Singularity hype irks me, because I'm genuinely in agreement with Peter Thiel's argument that technological progress is actually decelerating relative to how it was moving 60 years ago once you look beyond the advancements we have experienced in information technology and finance.
There's no one "AI and singularity" argument. That said, for most of the arguments that modern-day thinkers talk about, accelerating technological progress is totally irrelevant. You're most likely thinking of Kurzweil's school of thought around a singularity, which is nowadays far from the "norm". If you're talking about the arguments around technological unemployment, it doesn't matter if tech is accelerating - we…
I wish this were true, but it's gotten a new lease on life with Nick Bostrom's book and the various high-profile people who have been influenced by it (like Elon Musk and Bill Gates), so there's a bit of a boomlet around singularity speculation again.