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Problems that attract smart people

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Re: Problems that attract smart people

#101
post #97
post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> AI isn't going to stop me from sitting down at the piano or writing a short story. There will always be people in the world better at those things than me, so what difference does it make if an AI may or may not be better at them too? The threat is that it will no longer be viable to make money from creative works. A completely trivial and laughable concern if you don't live in a society that believes you have to "…

I hate to break it to you, but are you able to name many great artists in history who died rich ? The only artists I can think of that died with at least some money had sponsors that encouraged their work. So I’m not sure much changes here. If AI is supposed to stop us all from working, then those people will just be better off.

> are you able to name many great artists in history who died rich

That's not relevant. There are tons of working artists today and there have been for decades. But if a person can't pay rent by selling their art, things suddenly change for millions of people.

Re: Problems that attract smart people

#102
post #83
post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> AI isn't going to stop me from sitting down at the piano or writing a short story. There will always be people in the world better at those things than me, so what difference does it make if an AI may or may not be better at them too? The threat is that it will no longer be viable to make money from creative works. A completely trivial and laughable concern if you don't live in a society that believes you have to "…

> The threat is that it will no longer be viable to make money from creative works. Although I see a comparison to previous technologies replacing human jobs, I'm willing to put that point aside and focus solely on AI. Will AI generated content be cheaper? Will AI content be more interesting and engaging than anything a human could create? If there is no economic demand for human generated artwork, then should it sti…

I don't disagree with any of that. The GP said they didn't understand why people would be afraid of AI art. The reason is that many people pay rent by producing art, and that will no longer be possible for many of them in an age of (good) AI art

Re: Problems that attract smart people

#103
post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right but by that definition every thing in the universe is and will always be basic. The word becomes meaningless.

The temporality of evolution is what's important here. The washing machine has reached a tipping point, we hit diminishing returns from now on. The AI is in the nokia phase. It's at the primitive stage of development.

It is hard for people to comprehend the rate of change. Over the short term, it feels like we are on a gentle slope upward with respect to change. But the reality is the slope is near vertical. Even your analogy is a huge understatement. It will be more like Nokia today, and iPhone next week.

Re: Problems that attract smart people

#104
post #10
post #6

Does enabling to run LLMs at home really strengthen democracy? People may believe that, but it potentially enables AI to run on any device with a low footprint for surveillance purposes as well, and governments don't even have to pay for the development...

A low barrier to entry for surveillance means citizens can more easily watch their governments too. As long as surveillance tech requires big resources, governments will have the edge. Miniaturize it, decentralize it, and it means citizens and public interest organizations can hold the government accountable more easily (this is, notably, what OSINT is all about).

I'm pretty sure that you get arrested quickly if you start to surveil random politicians even in very democratic states...

Re: Problems that attract smart people

#105

I wonder how many of the developers in the groups denigrated in the author also thought they were the, "smart ones attracted to interesting problems." You can find interesting problems in many banal situations. You only have to look.

I disagree. Depends on your definition of "interesting" of course, but I believe that really interesting problems are hard to find.

Re: Problems that attract smart people

#106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

See the story of William James Sidis: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_James_Sidis > Child prodigy, IQ assessed between 250 and 300, contemporary, classmate, and friend of Norbert Wiener (father of cybernetics, also a child prodigy), and ended up ... making a life's work of studying bus transfers. As in the tickets, not commute patterns themselves. Several HN submissions though no substantive discussion: https:/…

IQ of 250 is a meaningless statement. IQ of 200 means “better than 1/10 billion”. There aren’t enough humans to make a statement like that meaningful, and an IQ of 250 is positing something like “smarter than all humans living in the solar system centuries from now”. Maybe when we make AGIs in bulk we’ll be able to talk about analytical capacity on some more meaningful scale than IQ, but for now, numbers like you gav…

1. https://yewtu.be/watch?v=hIdsjNGCGz4>

2. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21078083>

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