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The Gentle Singularity

blog.samaltman.com

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Re: The Gentle Singularity

#241

Post by mindcandy »

imgabe wrote: post #224
biophysboy wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All of these questions are easy to answer: 1) The point is that global health is also about access to a drug, not just existence. 2) We don’t. USA’s foreign aid per capita is not that high (especially now). To mobilize private money for aid, you need a long-term, trusted infrastructure. 3) Countries that receive aid typically do not have functional governments.

> The point is that global health is also about access to a drug, not just existence. And that point is irrelevant to whether or not we should develop new drugs. > Countries that receive aid typically do not have functional governments. Maybe they should work on fixing that, or just dissolve the country and get absorbed into a functional country if they can't manage to create a functional government on their own.

> Maybe they should work on fixing that

It’s not an either/or. While we figure out the practical solutions to corruption in impoverished nations, we can /also/ do other work to improve the situation in Earth. And, in doing so, we will make solving the impoverished/corruption problem easier to fix.

Re: The Gentle Singularity

#242

Post by jes5199 »

wolecki wrote: post #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…

I’m not sure we’ll be metering electricity if Wright’s Law continues

Re: The Gentle Singularity

#244

Post by actuallyalys »

theptip wrote: post #177
actuallyalys wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep, watt-hours are correct. Think of it this way: Power supplies and laptop chargers are rated in watts and that represents how much energy they can pull from the wall at a point in time. If you wanted to know how much energy a task takes on your computer and you know it maxes out your 300 watt desktop [0] for an entire hour, that would take 300 watt-hours. [0] To my knowledge, no desktops are built to max out their…

Watt-hours seem good right now, and rebut the current arguments that LLMs are wasteful. They might soon stop being the right lens, if your agents can go off and (in parallel) expend some arbitrary and borderline-unknowable budget of energy on a single request. At some point you’ll need to measure in terms of $ earned per W-H, or just $out/$in.

To be clear, I'm only saying the unit is correct, not whether the number of watt-hours is accurate or (assuming it is correct) that it's a good amount to spend on each query.

Re: The Gentle Singularity

#245

Post by biophysboy »

imgabe wrote: post #238
biophysboy wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Market size affects revenue and thus investing decisions. Pharma is a high-risk world. Do you think a dysfunctional gov has a higher chance of fixing itself with widespread disease?

We’ve been providing foreign aid for, what, like 70-80 years now? Have the dysfunctional governments fixed themselves yet? How long should it take? 100 years? 500 years? Maybe providing aid is just propping up dysfunctional governments by doing their job for them and it would be better in the long run if they were allowed to collapse and be replaced with something that was forced to be functional.

It’s globally useful to eradicate/reduce disease in a region irrespective of whether or not the region’s government becomes stable. Viruses and bacteria mutate and do not care about borders.

I have no fantasies that aid will magically make countries stable.

Re: The Gentle Singularity

#246

Post by apt-apt-apt-apt »

satvikpendem wrote: post #176
Avicebron wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's great, but Becky at the farmer's market doesn't want to be re-inventing notepad on her computer to sell sourdough. This smells like "Self-checkouts", "perfect bespoke solution so that everyone can check their own groceries out, no need to wait for a slow/expensive _human_ to get the job done, except you end up basically just doing the cashiers job and waiting around inconveniently whenever you want to get some…

And yet I'd much rather self checkout than have a cashier do it for me.

At Costco, they forced me to empty out my very fat cart and scan each item individually. That's when I realized the value of cashiers.

Re: The Gentle Singularity

#247

Post by derefr »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #97
GarnetFloride wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's what they said about electricity when nuclear power plants were proposed. What's your electricity bill like today?

The primary operating cost of traditional power plants is fuel, i.e. coal and natural gas. The fuel cost for nuclear power plants is negligible because the energy content is higher by more than a factor of a million. So if you build enough nuclear plants to power the grid, charging per kWh for the electricity is pointless because the marginal cost of the fuel is so low. Meanwhile the construction cost should be on pa…

> So if you build enough nuclear plants to power the grid, charging per kWh for the electricity is pointless because the marginal cost of the fuel is so low.

Wouldn't there still be the OpEx of maintaining the power plants + power infrastructure (long-distance HVDC lines, transformer substations, etc)? That isn't negligible.

...I say that, but I do note that I live in a coastal city with a temperate climate near a mountain watershed, and I literally do have unmetered water. I suppose I pay for the OpEx of the infrastructure with my taxes.

Re: The Gentle Singularity

#248

Post by ninetyninenine »

I bet sam used chatgpt to write this. There are some tell tale signs including hyphens.

I don't know if gentle is the right word. Maybe Gently face hugger and chest burster is more apt. It's slowly infecting us and eating us from the inside but it's so gently we don't even care. We just complain on HN while doing nothing about it.

Re: The Gentle Singularity

#249

Post by capncleaver »

pj_mukh wrote: post #43
xg15 wrote: 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?

I have this dream of having 4-5 robotic construction workers* capable of tearing down a Single Family home and building a four-plex in its stead overnight. Then, I just buy houses in High COL areas and start popping them up and moving families in ASAP. What are they gonna do evict working families? Good luck Then dissolve the underlying corporation before the municipal fines kick in and escape into the night. Render…

If you have not, do read Cory Doctorow's 'The Lost Cause': it features a rebuild like this (no robots tho iirc.) You might like his mid-singularity novel Walkaway, too :)

Re: The Gentle Singularity

#250

Post by imgabe »

mindcandy wrote: post #241
imgabe wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The point is that global health is also about access to a drug, not just existence. And that point is irrelevant to whether or not we should develop new drugs. > Countries that receive aid typically do not have functional governments. Maybe they should work on fixing that, or just dissolve the country and get absorbed into a functional country if they can't manage to create a functional government on their own.

> Maybe they should work on fixing that It’s not an either/or. While we figure out the practical solutions to corruption in impoverished nations, we can /also/ do other work to improve the situation in Earth. And, in doing so, we will make solving the impoverished/corruption problem easier to fix.

We don’t have to figure out a solution to anything in other sovereign nations. Nor, can or should we really impose any functional, non-corrupt government on people who are unable or unwilling to do it themselves, unless you’re willing to go back to full-blown colonialism. The people in the country need to figure it out themselves and decide they want to have a functional government and make it happen. We can’t do it for them.
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