Horses: AI progress is steady. Human equivalence is sudden
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Re: Horses: AI progress is steady. Human equivalence is sudden
#2Engine efficiency, chess rating, AI cap ex. One example is not like the other. Is there steady progress in AI? To me it feels like it’s little progress followed by the occasional breakthrough but I might be totally off here.
Re: Horses: AI progress is steady. Human equivalence is sudden
#3I think it's a cool perspective, but the not-so-hidden assumption is that for any given domain, the efficiency asymptote peaks well above the alternative.
And that really is the entire question at this point: Which domains will AI win in by a sufficient margin to be worth it?
Re: Horses: AI progress is steady. Human equivalence is sudden
#4This is a fun piece... but what killed off the horses wasn't steady incremental progress in steam engine efficiency, it was the invention of the internal combustion engine.
Re: Horses: AI progress is steady. Human equivalence is sudden
#5People are not simple machines or animals. Unless AI becomes strictly better than humans and humans + AI, from the perspective of other humans, at all activities, there will still be lots of things for humans to do to provide value for each other.
The question is how do our individuals, and more importantly our various social and economic systems handle it when exactly what humans can do to provide value for each other shifts rapidly, and balances of power shift rapidly.
If the benefits of AI accrue to/are captured by a very small number of people, and the costs are widely dispersed things can go very badly without strong societies that are able to mitigate the downsides and spread the upsides.
Re: Horses: AI progress is steady. Human equivalence is sudden
#6"In 1920, there were 25 million horses in the United States, 25 million horses totally ambivalent to two hundred years of progress in mechanical engines.
And not very long after, 93 per cent of those horses had disappeared.
I very much hope we'll get the two decades that horses did."
I'm reminded of the idiom "be careful what you wish for, as you might just get it." Rapid technogical change has historically lead to prosperity over the long term but not in the short term. My fear is that the pace of change this time around is so rapid that the short term destruction will not be something that can be recovered from even over the longer term.
Re: Horses: AI progress is steady. Human equivalence is sudden
#7hello faster horses
Re: Horses: AI progress is steady. Human equivalence is sudden
#8Engine efficiency, chess rating, AI cap ex. One example is not like the other. Is there steady progress in AI? To me it feels like it’s little progress followed by the occasional breakthrough but I might be totally off here.
ChatGPT was released 3 years ago and that was complete ass compared to what we have today.
Re: Horses: AI progress is steady. Human equivalence is sudden
#9This is a fun piece... but what killed off the horses wasn't steady incremental progress in steam engine efficiency, it was the invention of the internal combustion engine.
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Re: Horses: AI progress is steady. Human equivalence is sudden
#10This is a fun piece... but what killed off the horses wasn't steady incremental progress in steam engine efficiency, it was the invention of the internal combustion engine.
According to Wikipedia, the IC engine was invented around 1800 and only started to get somewhere in the late 1800s. Sounds like the story doesn’t change.