"Even if all the governments of the world were to understand the "threat" and be in deadly fear of it, progress toward the goal would continue. In fact, the competitive advantage of every advance in automation is so compelling that passing laws, or having customs, that forbid such things merely assures that someone else will get them first."
The Coming Technological Singularity (1993)
11–20 of 181 posts
Re: The Coming Technological Singularity (1993)
#12> I'll be surprised if this event occurs before 2005 or after 2030. I'm not truly confident AGI will be achieved before 2030, and less so for ASI. But I do think it is quite plausible that we will achieve at least AGI by 2030. 6 years is a long time in AI, especially with the current scale of investment.
2030 seems a bit early to be “surprised” in the same sense that one would have been “surprised” to see a superintelligence before 2006, though.
Re: The Coming Technological Singularity (1993)
#13> I'll be surprised if this event occurs before 2005 or after 2030. I'm not truly confident AGI will be achieved before 2030, and less so for ASI. But I do think it is quite plausible that we will achieve at least AGI by 2030. 6 years is a long time in AI, especially with the current scale of investment.
What is AGI and ASI? I think a fundamental issue here is both are sci-fi concepts without a clear agreement on the definitions. Each company claiming to work towards "AGI" has their own definition. How will someone claim they've achieved either, if we can't agree on the definitions?
This is true. One definition I've heard for AGI is something that can replace any remote worker, but the definition is ultimately arbitrary. When "AI" was beating grandmasters at chess, this didn't matter as much. But we might be be close enough that making distinctions in these definitions becomes really important.
Re: The Coming Technological Singularity (1993)
#14I loved his book Rainbows End as a kid. So many different concepts that blew my mind. Even without talking about AI we are already struggling with levels of Complexity in tech and the unpredictable consequences, that no one really has any control over. Michael Chrichton's books touch on that stuff but are all doom and gloom. Vinge's Rainbows End atleast, felt much more hopeful. I was talking to a VFX supervisor recen…
Honestly, considering the state of the world and how things are shaping up, it’s such a hilariously obvious pipe dream that such a system would be some omnipotent/hyper competent super-god like being.
It’s more likely just going to post ragebait and dumb tiktok videos while producing just enough at it’s ‘job’ to fool people into thinking it’s doing a good job.
Re: The Coming Technological Singularity (1993)
#15> We humans have the ability to internalize the world and conduct "what if's" in our heads; we can solve many problems thousands of times faster than natural selection.
I don't know for sure whether superintellegence will happen, but as for the singularity, this is the underlying assumption I have the most issue with. Smart isn't the limiting factor of progress, often it's building consensus, getting funding, waiting for results, waiting for parts to ship, waiting for the right opportunity to come along. We do _experiments_ faster than natural selection, but we still have to do them in the real world. Solving problems happens on the lab bench, not just in our heads.
Even if exponentially more intelligent machines get built, what's to stop the next problem on the road to progress being exponentially harder? Complexity cuts both ways.
Re: The Coming Technological Singularity (1993)
#16> I'll be surprised if this event occurs before 2005 or after 2030. I'm not truly confident AGI will be achieved before 2030, and less so for ASI. But I do think it is quite plausible that we will achieve at least AGI by 2030. 6 years is a long time in AI, especially with the current scale of investment.
It's always in 10-30 years. GPT is the closest to such a thing yet still so far from what was envisioned.
Re: The Coming Technological Singularity (1993)
#17I loved his book Rainbows End as a kid. So many different concepts that blew my mind. Even without talking about AI we are already struggling with levels of Complexity in tech and the unpredictable consequences, that no one really has any control over. Michael Chrichton's books touch on that stuff but are all doom and gloom. Vinge's Rainbows End atleast, felt much more hopeful. I was talking to a VFX supervisor recen…
Honestly, considering the state of the world and how things are shaping up, it’s such a hilariously obvious pipe dream that such a system would be some omnipotent/hyper competent super-god like being. It’s more likely just going to post ragebait and dumb tiktok videos while producing just enough at it’s ‘job’ to fool people into thinking it’s doing a good job.
Kind of in love with you right now.
Re: The Coming Technological Singularity (1993)
#18> I'll be surprised if this event occurs before 2005 or after 2030. I'm not truly confident AGI will be achieved before 2030, and less so for ASI. But I do think it is quite plausible that we will achieve at least AGI by 2030. 6 years is a long time in AI, especially with the current scale of investment.
we keep moving the goalposts, and that's not a bad thing. remember when Doom came out? How amazing and "realistic" we thought the graphics were? How ridiculous that seems now? We'll look back at ChatGPT4 the same way.
Or is ChatGPt4 4k TV, which is good enough for almost all of us and we are plateauing already?
https://www.reddit.com/r/OLED/comments/fdc50f/8k_vs_4k_tvs_d...
Re: The Coming Technological Singularity (1993)
#19We still don't have squirrel-level AI. This is embarrassing.
Now that LLMs have been around for a while, it's fairly clear what they can and can't do. There are still some big pieces missing. Like some kind of world model.
Re: The Coming Technological Singularity (1993)
#20The thing which these discussions leave out are the physical aspects: - if a computer system were able to design a better computer system, how much would it cost to then manufacture said system? How much would it cost to build the fabrication facilities necessary to create this hypothetical better computer? - once this new computer is running, how much power does it require? What are the on-going costs to keep it run…
- could actually do useful work reliably with minimal supervision
That's the big problem. LLMs can't be allowed to do anything important without supervision. We're still at 5-10% totally bogus results.