AI Companies and Advocates Are Becoming More Cult-Like

> 1. For "the singularity" to happen, we probably need something more to happen than just chatGPT to ingest more data or use more processing power.

It's not actually clear what "the singularity" is? Is it something running out of control or it's still controllable? There is a blurry line. People are afraid because they think it's sort of uncontrollable explosion.

The second question is about AGI. What is it? Is it something 'alive' or just a generic AI calculator with no 'creature' features. Like self preservation at least.

I think our view of these two things will change soon as we get a close up picture. Pretty much like Turing test doesn't look great anymore. As even dumb chatbots can pass.

> If you want to save lives, it's probably more useful to think about lives saved today than hypothetical lives you could save 100 years from now. Not that you shouldn't consider the long term, but your ability to predict the future gets worse and worse the farther you project out.

This reasoning, taken to its logical extent, would mean completely defunding all medical research and instead redeploying all research to best utilizing our current technology.

That is, hopefully, an obviously faulty decision.

We must balance research with using current findings to help people. Stopping all drug development and telling people with currently untreatable diseases "haha, too bad, we aren't even going to try", is cruel.

The ultimate goal of many technology utopians is the end of all death. We have examples from the natural world of incredibly long lived higher life forms, and simple life forms that are immortal, so it isn't scientifically impossible. The number of lives saved is literally, infinite. It is really hard to argue with "infinite upside".

(The absolute societal shit show that such a technology would bring about is a rather important question...)

> "we're killing more people by delaying time inventing the hypothetical life saving technology" is not very useful either, because you can't actually say how many lives would be saved versus harmed.

For many future inventions, of course estimates can be made of the number of lives saved.

The more pie in the sky research is, the larger those error bars become. "LLMs may one day help us sift through research and cure all forms of cancer" is, technically true, but the error bars on it are so high that you don't want to devote all the world's resources to LLMs just on the hopes of eliminating all forms of cancer 50+ years from now.

"This company is working on AI Vision+Robotics technology so people don't have to do this super hazardous job that claims a bunch of lives. They are an estimated 5 years from productizing and they already have purchase contracts in place" is a much different statement.

Part of it is ultra concentration of white men with few or no women in the Bay Area imo.

If you have zero social life and zero chance of a social life and the aperture of available activities is purely constrained to ultra pure social media groups of similar white men and you never interact with women individually or as a group …

Society is generally breaking down and falling apart at that point.

Normally I would expect men to moderate their behavior if there are women going: “eghhhhhh idk that is tooooooo far guys you need to chill out.”

That isn’t happening anymore, and hasn’t been happening for a while.

So now you are getting a sort of ultra distilled white male in group effect.

Women civilize men, generally, and that hasn’t been happening for years.

You are going to get cults and they are going to get more crazy.

Things like imagining a heaven where you get 77 virgins (Muslim religion) are byproducts of highly stressed out societies where men have next to zero prospects.

It’s not good. The media isn’t going to fix it tho.

My life personally post covid has declined considerably in the social domain. My circle has gotten more and more narrow and I feel more and more weird and isolated.

I don’t want to be weird and isolated. I would rather have friends and a community.

So what do I do? I actually go to church now. That’s literally my only option and I’m not even that religious.

Remote work and the isolation has put incredible stress on me as an animal. I don’t like this.

Yeah, if you could input data set X with quality Q(X) and output data set Y of the same size with Q(Y) > Q(X), you'd really be on to something. But I don't think such a system exists yet, or even close. Inputting the internet, outputting a sea of garbage with a handful of diamonds that people have to spelunk through the garbage for seems the best so far. Madlibs is a pretty equivalent activity, and while fun, certainly not anything one would consider AGI. We need a revolutionary improvement on automated spelunking to get anywhere. Maybe we'll get a good spam filter as a side effect!

But even if you had a system, there's still the resource cost to run the algorithm (needs to be bounded or else you've just made a finite jump) and the gains you make need to not decay (or again you've just made a finite jump).

And all this needs to be compared against investing in humans - which seem pretty clearly to have AGI properties (but with some really bad constant factors. 20 year training time - ridiculous!)

To me it seems things are a long way off and least a couple of major innovations away. But at least there's some ideas of the problems to tackle, which is a big step up!

Aye - this would form the counter-point to the revolutionary thesis. ChatGPT might be the LLM product, and everything else is small potatoes. This would still leave a 30-100 billion dollar in revenue industry - but that’s about the size where the current combined Nvidia/MSFT/Openai valuation has no room to grow.