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The Gentle Singularity

blog.samaltman.com

51–60 of 557 posts

Re: The Gentle Singularity

#51

“We” are not wondering whether AI can write “a beautifully written novel.” Yes, some people are. Other people know a novel cannot be written by a machine— because a novel is human by definition, and AI is not human, by definition. It’s like wondering if a machine can express heartfelt condolences. Certainly a machine can string words together that humans associate with other humans who express heartfelt condolences,…

Can a human who is a sociopath express heartfelt condolences? Perhaps they can mimic words and phrases they know are the appropriate words for the occasion but lack the true emotion.

Re: The Gentle Singularity

#53
post #23

> The rate of new wonders being achieved will be immense. It’s hard to even imagine today what we will have discovered by 2035; maybe we will go from solving high-energy physics one year to beginning space colonization the next year; or from a major materials science breakthrough one year to true high-bandwidth brain-computer interfaces the next year. How about affordable housing?

You made it obvious: techno-utopic dreams only matter to us 1%-ers. The average person on earth would love it we could have readily available clean water, cheaper housing and food, reliable healthcare to retire without worrying. That would actually be blissful beyond our wildest dreams: everyone around you and beyond being able to have a peaceful life.

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Re: The Gentle Singularity

#54
Some reasoning tokens on this post:

>Intelligence too cheap to meter is well within grasp

And also:

>cost of intelligence should eventually converge to near the cost of electricity.

Which is a meter-worthy resource. So intelligence effect on people's lives is in the order of magnitude of one second of a toaster use each day, in present value. This begs the question: what could you do with a toaster-second say 5 years from today?

Re: The Gentle Singularity

#55
post #23

> The rate of new wonders being achieved will be immense. It’s hard to even imagine today what we will have discovered by 2035; maybe we will go from solving high-energy physics one year to beginning space colonization the next year; or from a major materials science breakthrough one year to true high-bandwidth brain-computer interfaces the next year. How about affordable housing?

> How about affordable housing?

But space colonization is cool and poor people are yickie.

Re: The Gentle Singularity

#56
Right before I came to this article, I watched a video about Alpha fold determining the structure of almost all proteins, and the mention of other programs working on other forms of crystal structures( Magnets, superconductors) I am staring to feel the acceleration. I wish I felt more hopeful.

Re: The Gentle Singularity

#57

> " I hope we will look at the jobs a thousand years in the future and think they are very fake jobs, and I have no doubt they will feel incredibly important and satisfying to the people doing them." So when AGI comes, I am curious what the new jobs are? I see that prompt engineer is one of the jobs created because it's the way to ask a LLM certain tasks, but now AI can do this too. I'm thinking that any new jobs AI…

Pesimistically, you are right, there will be no new jobs. The entire goal of these companies is to monopolize near 0 marginal cost labor. Another way to read this is that humans are unnecessary for economic progress anymore.

All that I hope for in this case is that governments actually take this seriously and labs/governments/people work together to create better societal systems to handle that. Because as it stands, under capitalism I don't think anyone is going to willingly give up the wealth they made from AI to spread to the populus as UBI. This is necessary in some capitalist system (if we want to maintain that) since its built on consumption and spending.

Though if its truly an "abundance" scenario then I'd imagine it probably wouldn't matter that people don't have jobs since I'd assume everything would be dirt cheap and quality of life would be very high. Though personally I am very cynical when it comes to "agi is magic pixie dust that can solve any problem" takes, and I'd assume in the short term companies will lay off people in swathes since "AI can do your job," but AI will be nowhere close to increasing those laid-off people's quality of life. It'll be a tough few years if we don't actually get transformative AI.

Re: The Gentle Singularity

#59
post #46

I’ve heard a joke that under Steve Jobs, the number of big initiatives at Apple was limited to the number of execs Steve could shout at in a given day. I see a similar thing at work — the number of projects a developer can get through isn’t bounded by the lines of code they can churn out in a day. Instead it’s bounded by their appetite for getting shouted at when something goes wrong. Until you can shout at an LLM, I…

everyone talks about the alignment problem, not nearly enough about the accountability problem

Re: The Gentle Singularity

#60
post #46

I’ve heard a joke that under Steve Jobs, the number of big initiatives at Apple was limited to the number of execs Steve could shout at in a given day. I see a similar thing at work — the number of projects a developer can get through isn’t bounded by the lines of code they can churn out in a day. Instead it’s bounded by their appetite for getting shouted at when something goes wrong. Until you can shout at an LLM, I…

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