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The Gentle Singularity

blog.samaltman.com

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Re: The Gentle Singularity

#441

Post by BriggyDwiggs42 »

sjducb wrote: post #421
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…

The problem is that housing and health insurance are too expensive. Tech isn’t responsible for either of those problems.

Parent didn’t claim tech was responsible for every problem? Housing prices are likely an inequality issue; as a greater portion of money in the economy is held by rich people, more money is invested and less is spent on goods/services, hence a scarce asset like land sees an increase in value.

Re: The Gentle Singularity

#442

Post by 0xffff2 »

skeaker wrote: post #431
kjkjadksj wrote: post #426

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In a way it is. Why are housing costs so high in Redmond, WA? The result of an influx of high income tech workers to the local housing market and the resulting shift of prices such as to eventually dilute the utility of that high salary to begin with. People in the area without a hook on that whale are of course left high and dry.

Citation needed, my understanding was that housing prices are being driven up by real estate owners/agencies buying tons of property to either rent at extortionary prices or sit on until they sell for a higher price to the next sucker. Also stuff like the RealPage scandal where they simply illegally collude: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41330007 I think the idea of a law that only allows a limited number of o…

Housing prices are being driven up by the fact that we don't build enough housing. That should be the end of the discussion. What you describe is just a symptom of not having enough housing. If we just built more housing then there wouldn't be any business angle for the corporations buying up housing.

Re: The Gentle Singularity

#443

Post by 0xffff2 »

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's probably worth noting that the "real" in "real wages" indicates that the number is already inflation adjusted.

Re: The Gentle Singularity

#444

Post by [deleted] »

LtWorf wrote: post #393
munksbeer wrote: post #386

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It works pretty well in the UK. The nice thing is, I can pack my bags as I shop, so I don't feel stressed when I get to the checkout. I use this method of shopping whenever available.

In sweden you have to unpack and re-pack at the checkout. And if you have a backpack you can't place stuff inside it. No. You have to unpack, place everything on a scale and then place everything in your backpack again. And for items like bread or so you need to navigate a number of menus to find it. And of course you are asked if you are a member, if you'd like to become a member, if you want to do a donation, and a…

[deleted]

Re: The Gentle Singularity

#445

Post by disqard »

adverbly wrote: post #192
michaelbarton wrote: post #158

Regarding a super intelligence creating new cures: a million plus people die from malaria and AIDS combined each year. We have effective treatments for both, yet the USAID was recently shut down. I enjoy technology but less and less so each year, because it increasingly feels like there’s some kind of disconnect with the real world that’s hard to put my finger on

> I enjoy technology but less and less so each year, because it increasingly feels like there’s some kind of disconnect with the real world that’s hard to put my finger on Same here. I want to be an engineer. As a good engineer, I find a problem then recursively ask why. I end up with a political root cause - not a technical one. This makes me sad. I wish I could just be an engineer.

"Technology acts as an amplifier of Human intentions" -- Kentaro Toyama

What the richest and most powerful people want, happens to be "be even richer and even more powerful".

Banal, sad, and universal.

Re: The Gentle Singularity

#446

Post by NoGravitas »

Bjartr wrote: post #41
satisfice wrote: post #22

“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,…

> because a novel is human by definition I thought a novel was just a decent length fiction book? The purpose of fiction at least isn't to express true feeling, it's to instill feeling in the reader. To that end it doesn't matter the process that produces the words. Is AI going to win the Pulitzer any time soon? Nah. Is AI going to be able to produce novel length works of fiction that are good enough for at least som…

I mean, 50 Shades was a bestseller, despite being poorly written Twilight fanfic with no editor. (And I say this as a fan of niche smut novels.) ChatGPT was trained on the entire contents of AO3, imitating mediocre fanfic is entirely within its capabilities now, given suitable herding.

Re: The Gentle Singularity

#447

Post by NoGravitas »

orionsbelt wrote: post #138
IAmGraydon wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> in areas, AIs are already far better than humans. You could say the same thing about a CPU from 40 years ago - they can do math far better than humans. The problem is that there are some very simple problems that LLMs can’t seem to reliably solve that a child easily could, and this shows that there likely isn’t actual intelligence going on under the hood. I think LLMs are more like human simulators rather than actu…

You might be correct about LLMs. Let's say that you are. 40 years ago we were clearly compute bound. Today, I think it's fairly clear we are not; if there is anything a human can do that an AI can't, it's because we lack the algorithms, not the compute. So the question becomes, now that we have sufficient compute capacity, how long do you think it will take the army of intelligent creative humans (comp sci PhDs, and…

> So the question becomes, now that we have sufficient compute capacity, how long do you think it will take the army of intelligent creative humans (comp sci PhDs, and now accelerate by AI assistance) to develop the algorithmic improvements to take AI from LLMs to something human level?

This assumes that the eventual breakthroughs start from something like LLMs. It's just as likely or more that LLMs are an evolutionary dead end or wrong turn, and whatever leads to AGI is completely unrelated. I agree that we are no longer compute bound, but that doesn't say anything about any of the other requirements.

Re: The Gentle Singularity

#448

Post by ben_w »

sgt101 wrote: post #408
ben_w wrote: post #350

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The bullet list is a good point, but: > We also know that biological neural systems continuously learn and adapt, for example in the face of injury. Large models just don't do these things. This is a deliberate choice on the part of the model makers, because a fixed checkpoint is useful for a product. They could just keep the training mechanism going, but that's like writing code without version control. > Also this…

>This is a deliberate choice on the part of the model makers, because a fixed checkpoint is useful for a product. They could just keep the training mechanism going, but that's like writing code without version control. Training more and learning online are really different processes. In the case of large models I can't see how it would be practical to have the model learn as it was used because it's shared by everyon…

> In the case of large models I can't see how it would be practical to have the model learn as it was used because it's shared by everyone.

Given it can learn from unordered text of the entire the internet, it can learn from chats.

> I can't speak for your cognition or subjective experience, but I do have both fundamental grounding experiences (like the time I hit my hand with an axe, the taste of good beer, sun on my face) and I have used trial and error to develop causative models of how these come to be. I have become good at anticipating which trials are too costly and have found ways to fill in the gaps where experience could hurt me further. Large models have none of these features or capabilities.

> Of course I may be deceived by my cognition into believing that deeper processes exist that are illusory because that serves as a short cut to "fitter" behaviour and evolution has exploited this. But it seems unlikely to me.

Humans are very good at creating narratives about our minds, but in the cases where this can be tested, it is often found that our conscious experiences are preceded by other brain states in a predictable fashion, and that we confabulate explanations post-hoc.

So while I do not doubt that this is how it feels to be you, the very same lack of understanding of causal mechanisms within the human brain that makes it an error to confidently say that LLMs copy this behaviour, also mean we cannot truly be confident that the reasons we think we have for how we feel/think/learn/experience/remember are, in fact, the true reasons for how we feel/think/learn/experience/remember.

Re: The Gentle Singularity

#449

Post by NoGravitas »

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?

Healthcare pls

Re: The Gentle Singularity

#450

Post by ben_w »

tim333 wrote: post #404
ben_w wrote: post #349

While I prefer "event horizon" over "singularity", part of the reason I blogged about this distinction years ago was that the event horizon always seems to be ahead of you as you fall in to a black hole*. My blog posts didn't age all that well, and I've learned to be a little more sceptical about the speed of technological change, just as the political events over the intervening years have made me more aware of how…

I never really liked "singularity" as a term. If only because I like it's actual mathematical meaning. I always thought of the main event as AI intelligence overtaking human intelligence. (you can get a mathematical singularity if you consider amount of stuff that can be produced per hour of human labour which should go infinite around the robot uprising)

> (you can get a mathematical singularity if you consider amount of stuff that can be produced per hour of human labour which should go infinite around the robot uprising)

Nah, even then it's only exponential, not a mathematical singularity. Whatever the doubling period is for the e.g. von Neumann machines, but it doesn't go to infinity in finite time.

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