The Coming Technological Singularity (1993)

Post by arethuza » Mon, Oct 28, 2024, 11:29 AM UTC

keiferski wrote: post #90

arethuza wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When it comes to "charismatic leaders" I like this quote from Frank Herbert: "“I wrote the Dune series because I had this idea that charismatic leaders ought to come with a warning label on their forehead: "May be dangerous to your health." One of the most dangerous presidents we had in this century was John Kennedy because people said "Yes Sir Mr. Charismatic Leader what do we do next?" and we wound up in Vietnam. A…

Not really a good example, honestly. Kennedy’s involvement in Vietnam was the culmination of the previous two decades of events (Korean War, Cuban Missile Crisis, Taiwan standoff, etc.), and not just a crusade he charismatically fooled everyone into joining. If anything, had Nixon won in 1960 (and defeated Kennedy), it’s possible that the war would have escalated more quickly.

Post by rbanffy » Mon, Oct 28, 2024, 11:34 AM UTC

corimaith wrote: post #80

rsaarelm wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So you're saying that it's naive to suppose that everybody being much smarter than they are now would transform society, because any wide-scale societal change requires ongoing social cooperation between the many average-intelligence people society currently consists of?

The prisoner's dilemma is a well known example of how rationality fails. To overcome requires something more than intelligence, it requires a predisposition to cooperation, to trust, in faith. Some might say that is what seperates Wisdon from Knowledge.

Post by Retric » Mon, Oct 28, 2024, 11:36 AM UTC

trashtester wrote: post #91

Retric wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You’re overstating what AlphaFold can do. Without validation the predictions aren’t dependable, but it can cut down on what’s worth investigating. There’s definitely a point where models get good enough you can trust them, but super intelligence doesn’t mean it can both come up with a model and be able to trust it without validation.

The need for validation is itself something that needs to be validated. If models can make predictions that are true >99.99% of the time, validation may only be needed for situations where even 0.01% error rates are intolerable. In any case, even if some validation is needed, AI can speed up this kind of science by at least an order of magnitude.

Post by mcnamaratw » Mon, Oct 28, 2024, 11:46 AM UTC

samsartor wrote: post #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…

Post by nsbshssh » Mon, Oct 28, 2024, 12:03 PM UTC

Animats wrote: post #19

We 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.