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The Gentle Singularity

blog.samaltman.com

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Re: The Gentle Singularity

#461

Post by grafmax »

nradov wrote: post #432
Rooster61 wrote: post #406

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's difficult for me to call those wages "real" when medical costs have been so absurdly gouged to eat up those contributions. Those increases have had no real impact on the average consumer, and is profoundly awful for those without access to employment that provides that insurance

That's not entirely accurate. Wages are real enough whether paid out as cash, or paid to a third party for the employee's benefit. Some medical costs are unreasonably inflated, but on the other hand much of the cost increase reflects greater capabilities. We can effectively treat many conditions today that would have been a death sentence in 1980, but some of those cutting edge treatments cost >$1M per patient. That…

It’s somewhat misleading to claim that better care today is the reason for higher costs. Most other developed countries have some form of universal coverage and pay significantly less per person. That includes countries like England, Germany and Switzerland which also have advanced healthcare capabilities. Other countries negotiate drug prices, provide budgets for hospitals rather than charging per procedure, regulate medical prices, and have reduced administrative costs (compared to the US which must deal with the complexities of multi-payer).

That’s to say nothing of the fact that millions are uninsured in the US and have limited access to necessary medical treatment, never mind “cutting edge” treatments.

Re: The Gentle Singularity

#462

Post by const_cast »

theptip wrote: post #174
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…

Right. Jevons Paradox. The lower barrier to entry might mean the average quality of software goes WAY down. But this could be great if it means that there are 10x as many little apps that make one person happy by doing only as much as they need. The above is also consistent with the quantity of excellent software going way up as well (just slower than the below-average stuff).

IMO the problem with the current software landscape isn't the number of applications, it's the quality and availability of integrations. Everything is in it's own little kingdom, so the communication overhead is extreme and grows exponentially. And by overhead I mean human cognition - I need to remember what's in my notes, and then put that in my calendar, and then email it to myself or something, and on and on.

We have these really amazing computers with very high-quality software but still, so many processes are manual because we have too many hops from tool to tool. And each hop is a marginal increase in complexity, and an increase in risk of things going wrong.

I don't think AI will solve this necessarily, and it could make it worse. But, if we did want to improve it, AI can act as a sort of spongy API. It can make decisions in the face of uncertainty.

I imagine a world where I want to make a doctor's appointment and I don't open any apps at all, or pick up the phone. I tell my AI assistant, and it works it out, and I have all my records in one place. Maybe the AI assistant works over a phone line, like some sort of prehistoric amalgamation of old technology and new. Maybe the AI assistant doesn't even talk to a receptionist, but another AI assistant. Maybe it gives me spongy human information, but speaks to other's of it's kind in more defined interfaces and dialects. Maybe, in the future, there are no applications at all. Applications are, after all, a human construction. A device intended to replace labor, but a gross approximation of it.

Re: The Gentle Singularity

#463

Post by uses »

kjkjadksj wrote: post #426
sjducb wrote: post #421

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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.

No... the reason housing prices are high and rising is that not enough housing is getting build in the places people want to live. The main reason for that is that the people who already live in those places can block construction of new housing. That, and zoning.

Re: The Gentle Singularity

#464

Post by const_cast »

woah wrote: post #134
afavour wrote: post #13

> 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 I heard similar things in my college dorm, amid all the hazy smoke. It’s very difficult to take this stuff seriously. It’s like the initial hype around self driving cars wound up by 1000x. Because we got from 1 to 100 of course we’ll get from…

> It’s like the initial hype around self driving cars Wait... Self driving cars actually happened. Seems like the hype was true, but 5 years later than expected and now people just think it's normal so they feel the hype was overblown.

What laypeople consider as "happened" and what those in the know consider as "happened" are very different IME.

For most people, they'll consider self-driving as "happened" when most cars are self-driving. Similarly, the consider the smartphone as "happened" not when the palm came out - but somewhere around the iPhone 4.

Like, right now, immunotherapy for cancer has "happened" - there's real patients really doing it, for real. But most cancer patients don't consider immunotherapy as "happened", they're still getting chemo. Once chemo is obsolesced, we can consider immunotherapy as "happened". From then, to now, may be on the scale of decades.

Re: The Gentle Singularity

#465

Post by derefr »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #266
derefr wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> Wouldn't there still be the OpEx of maintaining the power plants + power infrastructure (long-distance HVDC lines, transformer substations, etc)? These are fixed costs. They don't go down if people use less power, so the sensible way to pay for them is with some kind of fixed monthly connection charge (e.g. proportional to the size of your service) or via taxes. You're still not measuring how much power people use…

Seems like the largest industrial customers would still need metered usage, though.

There are quite a few businesses that can scale limited only by power consumption — but due to that, they today need connections massively overbuilt compared to their current usage (as they project their usage growth to be extremely fast, potentially as much as doubling each year) in order to not need to be constantly re-trenching connections or browning out. Which in turn means that, under a leased-line electrical system, they'd be massively overpaying for unused power capacity at all times — possibly to the point of being unprofitable.

To achieve profitability, they'd need to negotiate billing based on only the fraction of the capacity of the available grid capacity that they're actually demanding on any given day... or, in other words, metered billing.

Re: The Gentle Singularity

#466

Post by const_cast »

imgabe wrote: post #324
rl3 wrote: post #314

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Americans have their own children they need to take care of and do not need their money seized and sent overseas to take care of other people's children. You talk as if it's a zero-sum game, as if the two choices are mutually exclusive. > And yes, maybe it is a "rug pull" but it was always going to be. No reason it had to be.

It is zero sum. How is it not? This is not an investment. It is not going to create future tax revenue for the US. It is just keeping people barely alive in crippling poverty for a little bit longer than they would otherwise.

IMO it is an investment and it will bring future revenue to the US. Because this fosters working relationship with other countries, countries that we ultimately rely on for their resources. Because they have a working relationship with the US, they're willing to give us some pretty sweet deals.

If you look at Africa, it has the most wealth by resources out of any continent. It's also the poorest continent nominally. We're getting a lot of good stuff at INSANE discounts.

What I'm describing is, of course, colonialist in nature. The US is an empire, not a nation. But, the hope is that as we help those countries develop they can help us stay developed, and we can eventually reach some mutually beneficial equilibrium. Instead of exploitation.

But, currently, the relationship is exploitative. It's a bit wild to me that you legitimately think the US, of all countries, is being exploited. No bubba... no. We do the exploiting. Everything you own is build with layers and layers of global exploitation built into it. You have a few hundred slaves working for you as we speak.

Re: The Gentle Singularity

#467

Post by ben_w »

tim333 wrote: post #455
ben_w wrote: post #450

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> (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.

I think that one does because if you need zero hours of human labour then output/(human labour hours) goes to division by zero.

Ah, I see now what you mean; yes, that's a potential mathematical singularity.

Though I suspect the actual number of human hours worked doesn't really go to zero for cultural/psychological reasons, your point remains valid as we will only find out if/when it happens.

Re: The Gentle Singularity

#468

Post by nradov »

xigency wrote: post #460
nradov wrote: post #454

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, that's a real wage increase. The healthcare system can effectively treat a lot more conditions than it could in 1980. That makes you richer as measured in terms of QALYs.

That's a nice thought but I've only had one physical in the last 15 years. I'm sure others are sitting in the same boat.

These are obviously aggregate statistics and individual experiences may vary. It shouldn't be necessary to point that out.

Re: The Gentle Singularity

#469

Post by sph »

boole1854 wrote: post #434
fusionadvocate wrote: post #424

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you walk me through how to reach this '239%' number? Thank you.

You can hover over places on the chart to get exact values. In January 1980, the index was at 37.124. In April 2025, it was at 125.880. Then calculate cumulative inflation as the proportional change in the price level, like this: (P_final - P_initial) / P_initial = (125.880 - 37.124) / 37.124 = 2.39 This shows that the overall price level (the cumulative inflation embodied in the PCEPI) has increased by about 2.39 ti…

The thing that bugs me to no end when talking about inflation in an historical context, is that everyone forgets to consider how the indexes of consumption it's calculated from (PCEPI, CPI, etc.) are NOT static, and very arbitrarily are changed over time, often to make inflation seem lower than it actually is for the consumer.

Overall, historical comparisons of inflation numbers are so imprecise to be practically worthless the longer the timescale. You can expect the real figure to be much greater in reality for consumers, given the political incentive to lie over inflation data.

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