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The Gentle Singularity

blog.samaltman.com

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Re: The Gentle Singularity

#251

Post by psalaun »

godelski wrote: post #190
jonplackett wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m not sure - we have enough food to feed everyone on earth. We have cures to many diseases. We have enough homes for everyone. Inequality is bad and getting worse. Big changes accelerate it because richer people can adapt and take advantage faster. I enjoy playing around with AI for fun and find it amazingly useful. But I do not believe it can solve inequality - that’s a people problem.

I work in ML and honestly I agree. We live in a fairly post scarce world. We could already live in a much less post scarce world. AI, as most technology, make these things easier, but they are power. It's all about what you do with power. You can build power plants or bombs. AI could (let's be hypothetical) free humans from all necessary labor. Robots making all the food, mining all the materials, and do the whole pi…

> It's easy to income Star Trek but hard to imagine how we get there from here

I'd like someone, amongst the tech bros for instance but it could be any influential politician in power, to set a target on when do we stop making life more miserable than it could for billions of people, by asking them to aim for no more than structural unemployment, 40+ hours weeks, steady economic growth in the name of progress.

Because as long as the end game isn't defined (and some milestones towards it), we won't have Star Trek, but a sci-fi version of a Dickens or Zola book, or at least an eternal treadmill augmented with marginally less useful innovations.

That's how I project over the next centuries the failed prediction from Keynes about everyone working 15 hours weeks in a near future, in a western world that yet did achieve post scarcity (at least for now)

Re: The Gentle Singularity

#252

Post by decimalenough »

georgemcbay wrote: post #213
decimalenough wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Waymo is that ultimate product. Obviously it's not everywhere and you can quibble about what "effectively any edge case" means, but it's close to human level at being able to handle whatever the streets of SF throw at it.

> able to handle whatever the streets of SF throw at it. Not able to handle what the streets of Los Angeles throw at it, however.

I don't think human drivers would be much better at handling getting torched by mobs.

Re: The Gentle Singularity

#253

Post by apt-apt-apt-apt »

hdjdbdirbrbtv wrote: post #215
deadbabe wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How many watts does a human brain need to produce a response to a query?

IIRC ( and it was 20 years ago now that I learnt this) the brain uses 20% of the body's resting energy usage. Most of that is keeping neurons polarised to the outside (ion pumps need ATP!!!). The body uses 25w resting and thus the brain is about 5w. Source: biology degree but like I said please take with the same amount of weight as a hallucinating LLM.

GPT says: Unless you're a hamster hooked up to a Fitbit, it's more like 60–70W for a normal adult human. So the brain’s real power draw is more like 15–20W, not 5W

Resting energy usage in humans is ~1200–1500 kcal/day, or about 60–70 watts, depending on the person. Logic holds, estimate is just low

Re: The Gentle Singularity

#254

Post by Agentlien »

Avicebron wrote: post #140
Workaccount2 wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>and the current trajectory of how LLMs are used on average in the real world unfortunately run counter to that. This post doesn't offer any forecasts on the hallucination issues of LLMs. You are getting confused here... LLMs are terrible at doing software engineering jobs. They fall on their face trying to work in sprawling codebases. However, they are excellent at writing small bespoke programs on behalf of regular…

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…

On a tangent: what about self scanning? Here in Sweden that is the norm. For the last ten years I've brought my own bags, packed everything like I want it as I grab it - with a quick blip from the scanner - and then checkout is no line, no cashier, no unpacking and packing things again. Just scanning my card and going through a brief screen to check that the summary looks right.

Instead of a guard there's a scanner by the exit gate where you scan your ticket. In my case just a small stub since the actual ticket is sent digitally.

I think it works so smoothly, much better than before this system was introduced. My recent experience buying groceries in Belgium was very similar.

Re: The Gentle Singularity

#255

Post by apt-apt-apt-apt »

ninetyninenine wrote: post #248

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.

What's the significance of whether GPT was used here?

Re: The Gentle Singularity

#256

Post by evanmoran »

haswell wrote: post #228
Analemma_ wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What problem? The whole point of shareholder capitalism is to diffuse accountability across so many people that it ceases to exist: the employee points to management, management points to executives, executives point to the board, the board points to the shareholders, the shareholders are index funds managed by robots so "nobody" is to blame. The final phase of the administrative state works much the same way. Viewed…

> What problem? I think you answered this with the rest of your comment.

This is intentional and is called a Rhetorical Question: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhetorical_question

Re: The Gentle Singularity

#257

Post by UltraSane »

derefr wrote: post #247
AnthonyMouse wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 mo…

It would actually make more sense to charge by the max watts a customer can draw.

Re: The Gentle Singularity

#258

Post by UltraSane »

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…

I always thought with nuclear electricity it would actually make more sense to charge by the max watts a customer can draw.

Re: The Gentle Singularity

#259

Post by ninetyninenine »

apt-apt-apt-apt wrote: post #255
ninetyninenine wrote: post #248

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.

What's the significance of whether GPT was used here?

none. But I feel it should be mentioned.

Re: The Gentle Singularity

#260

Post by biophysboy »

imgabe wrote: post #250
mindcandy wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

You’re conflating national building with mitigation of disease. I agree: medical aid is not a substitute for local medical infrastructure and can threaten its development. But aid is not guaranteed to do that. Also, disease is intrinsically bad.
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