Remarks on AI from NZ
nealstephenson.substack.com
Remarks on AI from NZ
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Re: Remarks on AI from NZ
#2[flagged]
Re: Remarks on AI from NZ
#3[flagged]
I didn't actually read as much AI doomerism in the article as you did.
I saw his conclusion being that it wasn't that hard to go back to teaching/learning in the old ways. It's more of a human element that limits it. Whether it's the student, the parents, or the teachers who don't want to require work to be done and demonstrated to see advancement. It wasn't that long ago that oral exams and in person homework or tests were regularly done. It's very recent and it's certainly convenient to be remote, or to allow all technology all the time, but it's not required.
Stephenson's doomerism is about his estimation of future human choices, not the AI (such as it exists) itself.
Re: Remarks on AI from NZ
#4[flagged]
I didn't actually read as much AI doomerism in the article as you did. I saw his conclusion being that it wasn't that hard to go back to teaching/learning in the old ways. It's more of a human element that limits it. Whether it's the student, the parents, or the teachers who don't want to require work to be done and demonstrated to see advancement. It wasn't that long ago that oral exams and in person homework or tes…
The comment you responded to was generated by AI.
Re: Remarks on AI from NZ
#5> If AIs are all they’re cracked up to be by their most fervent believers, this seems like a possible model for where humans might end up: not just subsisting, but thriving, on byproducts produced and discarded in microscopic quantities as part of the routine operations of infinitely smarter and more powerful AIs.
i think this kind of future is closer to 500 years out than 50 years. the eye mites are self sufficient. ai's right now rely on immense amounts of human effort to keep them "alive" and they wont be "self sufficient" in energy and hardware until we not just allow it, but basically work very hard to make it happen.
Re: Remarks on AI from NZ
#6> It hasn’t always been a cakewalk, but we’ve been able to establish a stable position in the ecosystem despite sharing it with all of these different kinds of intelligences.
To me, the things that he avoids mentioning in this understatement are pretty important:
- "stable position" seems to sweep a lot under the rug when one considers the scope of ecosystem destruction and species/biodiversity loss
- whatever "sharing" exists is entirely on our terms, and most of the remaining wild places on the planet are just not suitable for agriculture or industry
- so the range of things can could be considered "stable" and "sharing" must be quite broad, and includes many arrangements which sound pretty bad for many kinds of intelligences, even if they aren't the kind of intelligence that can understand the problems they face.
Re: Remarks on AI from NZ
#7>We may end up with at least one generation of people who are like the Eloi in H.G. Wells’s The Time Machine, in that they are mental weaklings utterly dependent on technologies that they don’t understand and that they could never rebuild from scratch were they to break down
I don't think this can realistically happen unless all of the knowledge that brought us to that point was erased. Humans are also naturally curious and I think it's unlikely that no one tries to figure out how the machines work across an entire population, even if we had to start all the way down from 'what's a bit?' or 'what's a transistor?'.
Even today, you can find youtube channels of people still interested in living a primitive life and learning those survival skills even though our modern society makes it useless for the vast majority of us. They don't do it full-time, of course, but they would have a better shot if they had to.
Re: Remarks on AI from NZ
#8> Maybe a useful way to think about what it would be like to coexist in a world that includes intelligences that aren’t human is to consider the fact that we’ve been doing exactly that for long as we’ve existed, because we live among animals.
Another analogy that I like is about large institutions / corporations. They are, right now, kind of like AIs. Like Harari says in one of his books, Peugeot co. is an entity that we could call AI. It has goals, needs, wants and obviously intelligence, even if it's comprised by many thousands of individuals working on small parts of the company. But in aggregate it manifests intelligence to the world, it acts on the world and it reacts to the world.
I'd take this a step forward and say that we might even have ASI already, in the US military complex. That "machine" is likely the most advanced conglomerate of tech and intelligence (pun intended) that the world has ever created. In aggregate it likely is "smarter" than any single human being in existence, and if it sets a goal it uses hundreds of thousands of human minds + billions of dollars of sensors, equipment and tech to accomplish that goal.
We survived those kinds of entities, I think we'll be fine with whatever AI turns out to be. And if not, oh well, we had a good run.
Re: Remarks on AI from NZ
#9>We may end up with at least one generation of people who are like the Eloi in H.G. Wells’s The Time Machine, in that they are mental weaklings utterly dependent on technologies that they don’t understand and that they could never rebuild from scratch were they to break down I don't think this can realistically happen unless all of the knowledge that brought us to that point was erased. Humans are also naturally curi…
> Humans are also naturally curious and I think it's unlikely that no one tries to figure out how the machines work across an entire population
Definitely agree with this. I do wonder if at some point, new technology will become sufficiently complex that the domain knowledge required to actually understand it end to end is too much for a human lifetime?
Re: Remarks on AI from NZ
#10(Still chewing my way through this)
Just an FYI: Neal Stephenson is the author of well-known books like Snow Crash, Anatheum (sp?), and Seveneves.
Because I'm a huge fan, I'm planning on making my way to the end.