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Raising Children on the Eve of AI

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Re: Raising Children on the Eve of AI

#151

Post by ben_w »

flextheruler wrote: post #142
ben_w wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I expect cobalt to be mined in the cheapest possible way. If that's humans, humans have work[0]. If humans don't have work, the only alternative to robots is, what, well-trained squirrels? > I'm just finding it funny thinking of 15 Spots queuing for a flixbus / greyhound bus because they need to go get some raw material across the continent. Me too. But I expect actual logistics to be much like current logistics, so…

You don’t have to do all this hand waving about what you think is going to be happening in the near future. Just explain why AGI will be in our near. Frankly, I don’t see how from what we have now.

> You don’t have to do all this hand waving about what you think is going to be happening in the near future.

Strange response…

> Just explain why AGI will be in our near. Frankly, I don’t see how from what we have now.

…but OK.

The AI we have now, is already capable of learning from what we do. It's very stupid, in the sense that it takes a huge number of examples, but surveillance is trivially cheap so a huge number of examples is actually very easy to get.

As I wrote in 2016:

"""We don’t face problems just from the machines outsmarting us, we face problems if all the people working on automation can between them outpace any significant fraction of the workforce. And there’s a strong business incentive to pay for such automation, because humans are one of the most expensive things businesses have to pay for.""" - https://kitsunesoftware.wordpress.com/2016/04/12/the-singula...

Compute cost is also important: more compute makes better GenAI images, allows larger models in general, turns near-real-time into actual-real-time (many robot demos you see on YouTube have sped-up footage).

Here's something I wrote in 2018 anchored on iPhone compute cost and some random guesstimate I found for what it would take to have an uploaded human brain running in real time, though I can't remember if I've ever compared it with actual compute improvements since then: https://kitsunesoftware.wordpress.com/2018/10/01/pocket-brai...

So, while I don't know what you mean by "near", I'd put "the economy is going to change radically due to AI" somewhere between "imminent" and "20 years" (±3σ, skew normal distribution with a mode somewhere around 2028-2030).

Re: Raising Children on the Eve of AI

#152

Post by silverquiet »

larodi wrote: post #79
moshun wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m not sure being honest with children about something that impacts them so heavily is the wrong move here. Traumatized or not, I suspect teaching children about the problem in clear terms will lead to a better informed generation of scientists, lawmakers, and voters. Hopefully they make and stick to better decisions then those that came before.

Sorry but children pre-12 actually can’t grasp ‘clear terms’ so easy when the terms are about something clearly abstract or existential. They may grasp the idea of death but seldom is it not terrifying to them as genetically it takes a while to overcome the dna-imprinted anxiety of body failure. So perhaps there’s a certain age before which u are advised to be very careful with what actually is being said to a child.

I've been terrified of dying since I realized there was no god when I was about 7. It's not really anything anyone needs to tell you. In fact, the lies tend to expose the problems of belief systems, at least to rather intelligent, skeptical little kids. I'll be 38 next month and I can't say that it's really gotten any better.

Re: Raising Children on the Eve of AI

#153

Post by VladimirGolovin »

My problem with children and AI is much more practical. My daughter (17) is an artist, and she wanted to begin a career in animation. However, the progress in generative AI (namely Midjourney, Stable Diffusion, and now Sora) makes this a dubious idea.

Frankly, as a parent, I have no idea what to advise her.

Re: Raising Children on the Eve of AI

#154

Post by djokkataja »

Nevermark wrote: post #134
djokkataja wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Nature gives us a world in which "he who does not work, does not eat" is a rule of law. Which is why no child has ever survived until adulthood. And TBH I find this an appropriate metaphor because the promise of AGI is that every adult human will be infantile by comparison--but there are also potential technologies that could allow humans to ... "upgrade" themselves and become a mature ... whatever. Sadly brain-com…

> but there are also potential technologies that could allow humans to ... "upgrade" themselves I hope so. But transforming ourselves into GAI to keep up (while maintaining continuity of memories, etc.) is going to be a much more expensive proposition than simply making more GAI hardware from scratch. So economically, where are humans going to earn that additional value, needed to account for the extra cost? When the…

Given that there's no well-defined "unit of intelligence", I see no reason to believe that all AGI (or GAI, to use your acronym) entities will be identical. I also don't think it's plausible to assume that any GAI entity will be literally omniscient; uncertainty remains a reasonable, deep, persistent factor for all entities that don't severely violate physics as we presently understand it.

The additional value that humans present would thus be a diversity factor. Much as it might be economically beneficial to cut down the entire Amazon, there's also significant economic benefits in keeping it intact and finding out what kinds of crazy biological stuff comes out of there. And over the long run, we get way more economic benefit from finding crazy things in there than in chopping it all down. There are all kinds of ways to explore uncertain dimensions, but looking at whatever the universe has already managed remains a consistent source of value.

> But transforming ourselves into GAI to keep up (while maintaining continuity of memories, etc.) is going to be a much more expensive proposition than simply making more GAI hardware from scratch.

It's basically a fixed cost because of how slowly the human population grows (if it even continues to grow).

Synthetic GAI entities will be able to use vastly more resources than humans presently do, because they'll be able to create more of themselves as quickly as resources become available, and they won't be stuck operating at a fixed clock speed. It's also probably going to be much easier for them to make use of off-world resources. So the total population of GAI entities could plausibly explode compared with the total human population.

It comes down to timing: if there's technology available for humans to become less ... biological, and it seems very desirable to lots of people, but it's really expensive and there aren't that many GAI entities yet, that might be less pleasant. But if that kind of tech depends sufficiently on AI developments that there's some significant lag time between a GAI population explosion and that kind of human-upgrading tech showing up, the cost of making it available to whatever humans want it might be a drop in the bucket from a total economic perspective.

To be clear, I don't see biological humans "keeping up" over the long term. If we take AGI and BCIs and various Ship of Theseus questions seriously, there could be some significant blurring of lines between "human" and "AI." And if we combine that with GAIs originating from humans, the concept of "keeping up" seems to become less meaningful. Who's keeping up with who?

Lastly, I'm suspicious that GAI entities won't be purely economically motivated, because I don't see any reason that they'll be "purely" anything at all. There is no magical "essence d'intelligence"; instead there's staggering layers of complexity. And every plausible AI safety approach I've seen so far involves training AIs to be inclined towards beneficial acts and away from harmful acts because there's no way to program conceptually pure "motivations" into them.

Re: Raising Children on the Eve of AI

#155

Post by Vecr »

VladimirGolovin wrote: post #153

My problem with children and AI is much more practical. My daughter (17) is an artist, and she wanted to begin a career in animation. However, the progress in generative AI (namely Midjourney, Stable Diffusion, and now Sora) makes this a dubious idea. Frankly, as a parent, I have no idea what to advise her.

A disease control consultant for hospitals, nursing homes, etc. Maybe she can convince them to do the basic stuff like polished copper door handles, bow ties, hair length limits, shaved faces, checklists, and all rooms negative pressure with the doors kept shut as much as possible. Maybe they'll get UV figured out by then, but she'd still have to work to keep up with the increasing antibiotic resistance.

Re: Raising Children on the Eve of AI

#156

Post by [deleted] »

rich_sasha wrote: post #140
alumic wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I drove around today listening to the most recent Lex Fridman podcast, in which the founder of Boston Dynamics was describing replacing human labor with machines that were capable of learning by seeing. I have family in the trades. I pursued tech and fell in love with the field. Listening to the interviewee, I began to feel sick to my stomach at the glib description of what amounts to ripping away peoples' livelihood…

It's strange. It happened before, with the Industrial Revolution wiping out whole professions, and same for mechanised farming, as mentioned by a sibling comment. Ditto for printing press, cars etc, albeit on a smaller scale. But then, jobs didn't disappear, but shifted to other professions. So to me, there are two questions: - if AI wipes out professions like tech, what jobs will people do? AI jobs seem great for no…

[deleted]

Re: Raising Children on the Eve of AI

#157

Post by inference-lord »

golol wrote: post #150
dukeyukey wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the grand scheme of things, definitely. But that didn't help out-of-work laborers and miners watching their children slowly starve.

Yea but it helped the arguably larger portion of the population which dont see their children starve anymore due to cheaper food.

Hopefully we can workout how to have this revolution without the kids starving bit this time eh?

Re: Raising Children on the Eve of AI

#158

Post by inference-lord »

rich_sasha wrote: post #140
alumic wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I drove around today listening to the most recent Lex Fridman podcast, in which the founder of Boston Dynamics was describing replacing human labor with machines that were capable of learning by seeing. I have family in the trades. I pursued tech and fell in love with the field. Listening to the interviewee, I began to feel sick to my stomach at the glib description of what amounts to ripping away peoples' livelihood…

It's strange. It happened before, with the Industrial Revolution wiping out whole professions, and same for mechanised farming, as mentioned by a sibling comment. Ditto for printing press, cars etc, albeit on a smaller scale. But then, jobs didn't disappear, but shifted to other professions. So to me, there are two questions: - if AI wipes out professions like tech, what jobs will people do? AI jobs seem great for no…

I find it unusual if we did create an intelligent class of beings, who are legit intelligent, smarter than us, why would they work for Sam Altman or Mark Zuckerberg? They'd do whatever the fuck they want...

When these discussions go long, and you start to think the whole idea through, you really start to question the whole idea.

Another thing I thing is strange is, if we had really very / sueper intelligent AI, why would it exist in physical, robot form ? Like, why not just be a light orb that lives in space or something? Wouldn't having an IQ of 5000 make you come up with something better than clunky robots?

Maybe we've stretched our own imaginations as far as they can go and we really have no idea where it's all going.

Re: Raising Children on the Eve of AI

#159

Post by elforce002 »

Listen, I have 2 boys (6yrs and 8 months) and I'm doing all I can to buy a house and land to cultivate just in case. It'll be really hard since everything is expensive but I'm hopeful things could get better if the war in Ukraine ends, the pending global recession start to fade away, and interests go down.

The end game here is to have just enough just in case AI comes to fruition and we all go bust.

I'm still trying to teach my children how to code, Electronics, etc... Since, well, that's what I know. Other than that, I'm just trying to give them a head start in life even I didn't have one.

Re: Raising Children on the Eve of AI

#160

Post by j4yav »

kmmlng wrote: post #115
j4yav wrote: post #56

I feel like the future pretty much has to be more local, in person, and human, and as much as you can interact with the internet as a utility rather than as the main source of interaction in your life it is for the best. That’s probably the best lesson you can teach your kids if you don’t want them to be part of society that just sort of permanently falls into the internet, always plugged in via goggles or brain impl…

While I agree that moving all human interaction to the internet is likely to be a net negative, there is only so much you can do as an individual. It takes two to tango, you need a sufficient number of other people with the same mindset to resist this move to the internet. As someone whose parents kept them away from certain forms of technology, media, etc., all it really did was alienate me from others. At the end o…

I guess where I live I’ve been lucky to find a nice community of people who don’t live online.
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