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Dude, You Broke the Future (2017)

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Re: Dude, You Broke the Future (2017)

#61

Post by LocalPCGuy »

ALittleLight wrote: post #19

I found a couple errors early on that dissuaded me from continuing to read. One was the idea that the author could rule out the singularity because he wasn't aware of progress toward self-motivated AI that would be something like our own intelligence. This seems like a limited view to me because we wouldn't need self-motivation at all in AI to hit the singularity. Humans can supply the self motivation. Suppose I'm us…

I found an error in the first sentence of your post that dissuaded me from giving the rest of it much credence. Saying you didn't read it, but decided to comment anyways.

Re: Dude, You Broke the Future (2017)

#62

Post by ALittleLight »

worldsayshi wrote: post #46
ALittleLight wrote: post #19

I found a couple errors early on that dissuaded me from continuing to read. One was the idea that the author could rule out the singularity because he wasn't aware of progress toward self-motivated AI that would be something like our own intelligence. This seems like a limited view to me because we wouldn't need self-motivation at all in AI to hit the singularity. Humans can supply the self motivation. Suppose I'm us…

> Tesla [...] is clearly not a different class of intelligence from [...] corporations I believe he just used Tesla as an example of corporation not as something new or special. > the point of the paperclip thought experiment is, broadly, that an AI's interests might not be aligned with our own and that misalignment may cause serious problems. But (some) corporations clearly do share this aspect to some extent. They…

Most, if not all, corporations are misaligned to humanity's well-being. That is, they want money, and that's not exactly the same thing as what would be best for humanity.

This is okay though because corporations are the same class and kind of intelligence as the rest of humanity and so they can be (somewhat) predicted and constrained by our laws and norms.

Because corporations are the same class of intelligence, they can't outsmart everyone. We can catch them when they do wrong and punish them and use laws and courts to control them.

Because corporations are the same kind of intelligence they (usually) aren't going to do things we might consider insane or sociopathic. For example, if corporation X realized they might make a profit by taking out life insurance on workers and then getting them to do very risky things, X Corp probably wouldn't do it and if they did people would leak it and laws would be made to stop it.

The paperclip thought experiment is an illustration of a different kind of intelligence that wouldn't be constrained by human morality or norms and would surpass human intelligence and not be constrained by laws or force either.

Re: Dude, You Broke the Future (2017)

#63

Post by dcow »

LocalPCGuy wrote: post #61
ALittleLight wrote: post #19

I found a couple errors early on that dissuaded me from continuing to read. One was the idea that the author could rule out the singularity because he wasn't aware of progress toward self-motivated AI that would be something like our own intelligence. This seems like a limited view to me because we wouldn't need self-motivation at all in AI to hit the singularity. Humans can supply the self motivation. Suppose I'm us…

I found an error in the first sentence of your post that dissuaded me from giving the rest of it much credence. Saying you didn't read it, but decided to comment anyways.

It really is a good essay. It's a shame it so easily alienates trunshumanist Musk fanbois.

Re: Dude, You Broke the Future (2017)

#64

Post by nekopa »

jengleton wrote: post #33
Chathamization wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In the sense that a corporation's maximum intelligence is likely to be in the same ballpark as the smartest humans, it can't be seen as a true superintelligence. In what sense? Certainly the ability of large groups of people to research and create new technology exceed the ability of a single individual. The R&D capabilities of a large corporation are going to vastly exceed that of a lone hermit in the woods.

So I think the question is: when a group of people work together on something, can they generate ideas which are better than the best idea of any member of the group? If so, how much better? How does the effect scale as the size of the group increases? An R&D lab certainly can do more work than any single person could do in their lifetime, but are the ideas fundamentally better? Can you point to an idea and say: "no…

To respond to your first 4 questions:

Q1: Yes and No. From what I've seen (anecdata) an group of people working together ten to generate better ideas than one person could. The No comes from the fact that oftentimes one person came up an idea that they wouldn't have found without the other people.

Q2: Much better. Normally through 2 ways: first, defense of an idea make you have to improve it so that it gets accepted. second if the idea is collaborated upon the multiple feedbacks on forming the idea improves it.

Q3: My first knee jerk reaction to this question was that you need to limit the amount of people involved because communication is key: say 6-9 people. But on further thought, if your communications channels are set up well (forums, slack, IRC etc.), then you can go to the wisdom of the crowds, so maybe scale would work.

Q4: If the R&D lab is set up right, yes, you could get fundamentally better ideas, for various reasons: - facilities, collab, standing on the shoulders of giants (by this I mean building on what others have already built) etc.

Re: Dude, You Broke the Future (2017)

#65

Post by jengleton »

Chathamization wrote: post #42
jengleton wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So I think the question is: when a group of people work together on something, can they generate ideas which are better than the best idea of any member of the group? If so, how much better? How does the effect scale as the size of the group increases? An R&D lab certainly can do more work than any single person could do in their lifetime, but are the ideas fundamentally better? Can you point to an idea and say: "no…

I'd say yes. Do you think the ideas that came from the Manhattan Project didn't exceed that of the best individual involved? Or for a more extreme example - consider the totality of human civilization as an example of groups of humans working together. People like Einstein and Hawking wouldn't have been able to have had the ideas they did if they were dropped in 20,000 BC. The knowledge we have now isn't simply the w…

In the video linked above, Robert Miles models organizational idea-generation as something like "everyone thinks of their best idea, and then we just pick the best from that set". That's definitely a simplification. I do think there's some notion of "synergy", where people working together can hammer an idea into shape more effectively than either could alone.

However, I suspect that there's also a counter-force, a "diminishing returns" effect: as more people get involved in an organization, coordination becomes more difficult, communication becomes more expensive. If this converges to some limit, then that's the smartest a human organization can be.

Maybe better methods of organizing knowledge could help raise that limit, or more effective modes of communication, but my suspicion is that the upper bound for "organizational decision making capability" is within one or two orders of magnitude of a single person, not vastly more. No idea how we'd actually quantify that, of course!

Re: Dude, You Broke the Future (2017)

#66

Post by free_rms »

jrumbut wrote: post #37
bitwize wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nobody among the intellectual class anticipated Trump's election in 2016. Much like physicists hypothesized dark matter to account for the apparent greater mass necessary to stabilize galaxies and such, the political intelligentsia hypothesized an enormous, hidden body of "dark Nazis" to account for their chosen candidate not winning the election. It is unfathomable to them that enough people in the center, center-ri…

This is very untrue, even if we take nobody as a little overstatement, half of the election prediction models had him above 10% chance of winning (FiveThirtyEight had him at 29%, https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/upshot/presidential... ). WBUR, Boston's NPR news station, published in their blog "Cognoscenti" an article titled "Why Donald Trump will Win in November" in May of 2016 ( https://www.wbur.org/cognosc…

Eh. Most of the mainstream media ran headlines predicting 99% chance of a Hillary win and a few of them sniped at Nate Silver for giving Trump a 30% chance (stupid tech bros).

A single contrarian take doesn't undermine that trend.

Re: Dude, You Broke the Future (2017)

#67

Post by dragonwriter »

bitwize wrote: post #29
bawolff wrote: post #12

> Nobody in 2007 was expecting a Nazi revival in 2017, right? Is that actually true? I seem to remember people predicting that usa has been edging towards facism for a while now, especially in the aftermath of 9/11. For example here is an article from 2003 predicting usa is heading towards fasicism https://secularhumanism.org/2003/03/fascism-anyone/

Nobody among the intellectual class anticipated Trump's election in 2016. Much like physicists hypothesized dark matter to account for the apparent greater mass necessary to stabilize galaxies and such, the political intelligentsia hypothesized an enormous, hidden body of "dark Nazis" to account for their chosen candidate not winning the election. It is unfathomable to them that enough people in the center, center-ri…

> Nobody among the intellectual class anticipated Trump's election in 2016.

A number of people in the intellectual world did, or at least wrote articles purporting to explain why it was more than remotely possible.

The relatively new set of people in the major media trying to play the poll-based mathematical prediction game that Nate Silver started with 538 who weren't Nate Silver undersold the chances of it happening because they made the naive mistake assuming that deviations from polling averages between states were independent of each other rather than, as historical analysis of the type Silver does would show, tightly correlated. But “media outlets want what Silver does but can't afford to pay to have Silver, or anyone with anything like his level of skill at what he does” doesn't represent the “intellectual class”.

Re: Dude, You Broke the Future (2017)

#68

Post by dragonwriter »

free_rms wrote: post #66
jrumbut wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is very untrue, even if we take nobody as a little overstatement, half of the election prediction models had him above 10% chance of winning (FiveThirtyEight had him at 29%, https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/upshot/presidential... ). WBUR, Boston's NPR news station, published in their blog "Cognoscenti" an article titled "Why Donald Trump will Win in November" in May of 2016 ( https://www.wbur.org/cognosc…

Eh. Most of the mainstream media ran headlines predicting 99% chance of a Hillary win and a few of them sniped at Nate Silver for giving Trump a 30% chance (stupid tech bros). A single contrarian take doesn't undermine that trend.

> Most of the mainstream media

The mainstream media and the intellectual class have very little overlap.

Re: Dude, You Broke the Future (2017)

#69

Post by jrumbut »

free_rms wrote: post #66
jrumbut wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is very untrue, even if we take nobody as a little overstatement, half of the election prediction models had him above 10% chance of winning (FiveThirtyEight had him at 29%, https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/upshot/presidential... ). WBUR, Boston's NPR news station, published in their blog "Cognoscenti" an article titled "Why Donald Trump will Win in November" in May of 2016 ( https://www.wbur.org/cognosc…

Eh. Most of the mainstream media ran headlines predicting 99% chance of a Hillary win and a few of them sniped at Nate Silver for giving Trump a 30% chance (stupid tech bros). A single contrarian take doesn't undermine that trend.

Note that no one denies Hillary was considered the favorite, I also mention the HuffPost model which was the most prominent to reflect a near certainty. Most news outlets, even conservative ones, reported on this notable predictive modeling effort.

What there was, was a diversity of opinion and vigorous debate (sometimes devolving into sniping, sure), the thing that is supposed to be there. There wasn't a 50/50 split, but I don't remember a single publication I read at the time (all the classic left leaning intellectual rags) that didn't run pieces predicting a Trump victory.

Re: Dude, You Broke the Future (2017)

#70

Post by ALittleLight »

LocalPCGuy wrote: post #61
ALittleLight wrote: post #19

I found a couple errors early on that dissuaded me from continuing to read. One was the idea that the author could rule out the singularity because he wasn't aware of progress toward self-motivated AI that would be something like our own intelligence. This seems like a limited view to me because we wouldn't need self-motivation at all in AI to hit the singularity. Humans can supply the self motivation. Suppose I'm us…

I found an error in the first sentence of your post that dissuaded me from giving the rest of it much credence. Saying you didn't read it, but decided to comment anyways.

What error?
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