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The Gentle Singularity

blog.samaltman.com

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Re: The Gentle Singularity

#411

Post by insane_dreamer »

> There will be very hard parts like whole classes of jobs going away, but on the other hand the world will be getting so much richer so quickly that we’ll be able to seriously entertain new policy ideas we never could before

No "the world" won't be getting richer. A small subset of individuals will be getting richer.

The "new policy ideas" (presumably to help those who are being f*d by all this) have been there all along. It's just that those with the wealth don't want to consider them. Those people having even more wealth does _not_ make them more likely to consider those ideas.

Honestly this drivel makes me want to puke.

Re: The Gentle Singularity

#412

Post by disambiguation »

antihero wrote: post #298
disambiguation wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>. They fall on their face trying to work in sprawling codebases. >However, they are excellent at writing small bespoke programs For programmers I predict a future of a million micro services. Sprawling has always been an undesirable and unnecessary byproduct of growing code bases, but there's been no easy solution to that. I wonder if LLMs would perform better on a mono repo of many small services than one sprawling…

Micro-services are part of a system, so to create anything meaningful with them your context window has to include knowledge about the rest of the system anyway. If your system is large and complex, that means a huge context window even if your code itself is small.

Yeah i mean either they can or they cant handle large code contexts. I guess the theory is that a more organized and concise expression of your code base (not necessarily the raw code) is easier for agents to digest.

Re: The Gentle Singularity

#413

Post by Herring »

grafmax wrote: post #372

> Scientific progress is the biggest driver of overall progress > There will be very hard parts like whole classes of jobs going away, but on the other hand the world will be getting so much richer so quickly that we’ll be able to seriously entertain new policy ideas we never could before Real wages haven’t risen since 1980. Wealth inequality has. Most people have much less political power than they used to as wealth…

Lots of people don't care about "progress" in an absolute sense, eg longer healthier lifespans for all. They only care about it in a relative sense, eg if cop violence against minorities goes down, they feel anxiety and resentment. They really really want to be the biggest fish in the little pond. That's how a caste system works, it "makes a captive of everyone within it". Equality feels like a demotion [1].

That's why we have a whole thing about immigration going on. It's the one issue that the president is not underwater on right now [2]. You can't get much of a labor movement like this.

[1] https://www.texasobserver.org/white-people-rural-arkansas-re...

[2] https://www.natesilver.net/p/trump-approval-ratings-nate-sil...

Re: The Gentle Singularity

#414

Post by boole1854 »

fusionadvocate wrote: post #388
boole1854 wrote: post #387

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even without including employer health insurance costs, real wages are up 67% since 1980. Source: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=1JxBn Details: uses the "Wage and salary accruals per full-time-equivalent employee" time series, which is the broadest wage measure for FTE employees, and adjusts for inflation using the PCE price index, which is the most economically meaningful measure of "how much did prices change…

How has inflation behaved since 1980?

It rose 2.75% per year (239% over 45 years).

Source with details: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=1JxIa

Re: The Gentle Singularity

#415

Post by ethbr1 »

hollerith wrote: post #394
tim333 wrote: post #392

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Real wages haven’t risen since 1980 is a very US thing. In China they've probably 10xd over that time.

Even after that 10x growth, median Chinese household income is only 13-16% of US median household income: China: ~$10,000 – $12,000 US: ~$74,580 (U.S. Census Bureau, 2022)

Purchasing power parity matters a lot too.

Re: The Gentle Singularity

#416

Post by tim333 »

grafmax wrote: post #405
tim333 wrote: post #392

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Real wages haven’t risen since 1980 is a very US thing. In China they've probably 10xd over that time.

That is because of China and US positions in the global system over this time. The wage/labor/inequality story is broadly true across the global north; China can credit forward thinking central planning, social programs, and industrialization for its economic progress (yet it continues to live under authoritarian rule).

It varies a lot - check this out https://www.businessinsider.com/france-vs-us-real-wages-2015...

The US is kind of an outlier.

I guess if you have the opportunity to have your stuff made by cheap or free labour whether low paid Chinese or AI robots, societies have a choice how to distribute the benefits which has varied from everything to the rich in the US to fairly even in France say. Such choices will be important with AI.

Re: The Gentle Singularity

#417

Post by thenthenthen »

The singularity already happened, we are just not aware of it yet. Atleast, thats what I am observing here. Most smart/ai products reduce human to servant of refilling, refuelling, error checking. Who are in control remains the question, money?

Re: The Gentle Singularity

#418

Post by daxfohl »

> although we’ll make plenty of mistakes and some things will go really wrong, we will learn and adapt quickly

If the "mistake" is that of concentrating too much power in too few hands, there's no recovery. Those with the willingness to adapt will not have the power to do so, and those with the power to adapt will not have the willingness. And it feels like we're halfway there. How do we establish a system of checks and balances to avoid this?

Re: The Gentle Singularity

#419

Post by Y_Y »

hollerith wrote: post #394
tim333 wrote: post #392

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Real wages haven’t risen since 1980 is a very US thing. In China they've probably 10xd over that time.

Even after that 10x growth, median Chinese household income is only 13-16% of US median household income: China: ~$10,000 – $12,000 US: ~$74,580 (U.S. Census Bureau, 2022)

I think GDPPPP/capita is a better measure here, but the story is similar. From the IMF's 2025 numbers: USA $90k, China $29k, world average $26k.

Lovely tabulation of the data here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(PPP)...

Re: The Gentle Singularity

#420

Post by tim333 »

AnimalMuppet wrote: post #374
hazbot wrote: post #364

I'm feeling a bit cheated it's 2025 and I just bought a brand new car that does not drive itself and runs on dead dinosaurs.

You at least had the option of buying one that did not run on dead dinosaurs.

And the option to get one with "self driving" even if it's into a tree occasionally. (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44138241)
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