Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The Singularity will occur on a Tuesday

campedersen.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

481–490 of 800 posts

Re: The Singularity will occur on a Tuesday

#481

Post by mgraczyk »

stego-tech wrote: post #28

This is delightfully unhinged, spending an amazing amount of time describing their model and citing their methodologies before getting to the meat of the meal many of us have been braying about for years: whether the singularity actually happens or not is irrelevant so much as whether enough people believe it will happen and act accordingly. And, yep! A lot of people absolutely believe it will and are acting accordin…

This entire chain of reasoning takes for granted that there won't be a singularity

If you're talking about "reforming society", you are really not getting it. There won't be society, there won't be earth, there won't be anything like what you understand today. If you believe that a singularity will happen, the only rational things to do are to stop it or make sure it somehow does not cause human extinction. "Reforming society" is not meaningful

Re: The Singularity will occur on a Tuesday

#482

Post by throwerxyz »

baxtr wrote: post #409
austinjp wrote: post #389

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Russell's chicken (or turkey) would like a word. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turkey_illusion

I love that you brought this up. Chickens are killed ALL the time. It’s a recurring mass event. If you were a smart chicken you could see that pattern and put it into a formula. In contrast, the end of Humanity would be a singular event. It’s even in the name… And that is fiction / speculation in comparison. It’s not backed by any data. Human survival over 300,000 years by contrast is. I mean it’s fine to dream thing…

What, you weren't alive when the last mass extinction event occurred? Why didn't you communicate or at least write the last handful down or something? Aren't you smarter than a chicken?

It's funny that you think we know what happened to humans anymore than a chicken knows what happened to chickens.

Re: The Singularity will occur on a Tuesday

#483

Post by corndoge »

mgraczyk wrote: post #481
stego-tech wrote: post #28

This is delightfully unhinged, spending an amazing amount of time describing their model and citing their methodologies before getting to the meat of the meal many of us have been braying about for years: whether the singularity actually happens or not is irrelevant so much as whether enough people believe it will happen and act accordingly. And, yep! A lot of people absolutely believe it will and are acting accordin…

This entire chain of reasoning takes for granted that there won't be a singularity If you're talking about "reforming society", you are really not getting it. There won't be society, there won't be earth, there won't be anything like what you understand today. If you believe that a singularity will happen, the only rational things to do are to stop it or make sure it somehow does not cause human extinction. "Reformin…

There will be earth!

Re: The Singularity will occur on a Tuesday

#484

Post by madrox »

teo_zero wrote: post #360
atomic128 wrote: post #51

Once men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free. But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them. ... Thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of a human mind. -- Frank Herbert, Dune You won't read, except the output of your LLM. You won't write, except prompts for your LLM. Why write code or prose when the machine can write it for you? You won't think or…

You shouldn't take a sci-fi writer's words as a prophecy. Especially when he's using an ingenious gimmick to justify his job. I mean, we know that it's impossible for anyone to tell how the world will be like after the singularity, by the very definition of singularity. Therefore Herbert had to devise a ploy to plausibly explain why the singularity hadn't happened in his universe.

If only we could look into the future to see who is right and which future is better so we could stop wasting our time on pointless doomerism debate. Though I guess that would come with its own problems.

Hey, wait...

Re: The Singularity will occur on a Tuesday

#485

Post by senbrow »

willis936 wrote: post #476
senbrow wrote: post #460

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Almost certainly not at the scale of the consumer gaming industry, however!

Google is making millions of TPUs per year. Nvidia ships more gaming GPUs, but it's not like multiple orders of magnitude off.

I'm willing to bet TPUs wouldn't be nearly as successful or sophisticated without the decades of GPU design and manufacturing that came before them.

Current manufacturing numbers are a small part of the story of the overall lineage.

Re: The Singularity will occur on a Tuesday

#486

Post by dimitri-vs »

handoflixue wrote: post #477
ActorNightly wrote: post #359

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Its pretty clear that the problem of solving AI is software, I don't think anyone would disagree. But that problem is MUCH MUCH MUCH harder than people make it out to be. For example, you can reliably train an LLM to produce accurate output of assembly code that can fit into a context window. However, lets say you give it a Terabyte of assembly code - it won't be able to produce correct output as it will run out of c…

> For example, you can reliably train an LLM to produce accurate output of assembly code that can fit into a context window. However, lets say you give it a Terabyte of assembly code - it won't be able to produce correct output as it will run out of context. Fascinating reasoning. Should we conclude that humans are also incapable of intelligence? I don't know any human who can fit a terabyte of assembly into their co…

On the other hand the average human has a context window of 2.5 petabytes that's streaming inference 24/7 while consuming the energy equivalent of a couple sandwiches per day. Oh and can actually remember things.

Re: The Singularity will occur on a Tuesday

#487

Post by gnarlouse »

I just realized the inverse of Pascal’s wager applies to negative AI hype.

- If you believe it and it’s wrong, you lose.

- If you believe it and it’s right, you spent your final days in a panic.

- If you don’t believe it and it’s right, you spent your final days in blissful ignorance.

- If you don’t believe it and it’s wrong, you can go on living.

Re: The Singularity will occur on a Tuesday

#488

Post by seanmcdirmid »

handoflixue wrote: post #477
ActorNightly wrote: post #359

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Its pretty clear that the problem of solving AI is software, I don't think anyone would disagree. But that problem is MUCH MUCH MUCH harder than people make it out to be. For example, you can reliably train an LLM to produce accurate output of assembly code that can fit into a context window. However, lets say you give it a Terabyte of assembly code - it won't be able to produce correct output as it will run out of c…

> For example, you can reliably train an LLM to produce accurate output of assembly code that can fit into a context window. However, lets say you give it a Terabyte of assembly code - it won't be able to produce correct output as it will run out of context. Fascinating reasoning. Should we conclude that humans are also incapable of intelligence? I don't know any human who can fit a terabyte of assembly into their co…

Any human who would try to do this is probably a special case. A reasonable person would break it down into sub-problems and create interfaces to glue them back together...a reasonable AI might do that as well.

Re: The Singularity will occur on a Tuesday

#489

Post by ddxv »

cpmsmith wrote: post #236
ericmcer wrote: post #93

Great article, super fun. > In 2025, 1.1 million layoffs were announced. Only the sixth time that threshold has been breached since 1993. Over 55,000 explicitly cited AI. But HBR found that companies are cutting based on AI's potential, not its performance. The displacement is anticipatory. You have to wonder if this was coming regardless of what technological or economic event triggered it. It is baffling to me that…

One thing that stuck out to me about this is that there have only been 32 years since 1993. That is, if it's happened 6 times, this threshold is breached roughly once every five years. Doesn't sound that historic put that way.

Also that the US population is roughly 33% larger in 2025 than it was in 1993

Re: The Singularity will occur on a Tuesday

#490

Post by PaulHoule »

jacquesm wrote: post #439
hansvm wrote: post #382

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'll take a look at that story later. I'm curious though, why is US metallurgy consistently top-notch if the processes are inferior? When I use wrenches, bicycle frames, etc from most other countries I have no end of troubles with weld delamination, stress fractures compounding into catastrophic failures, and whatnot, even including enormous wrenches just snapping in half with forces far below what something a tenth…

> I'm curious though, why is US metallurgy consistently top-notch if the processes are inferior? I really wonder what you're comparing with. Try some quality surgical steel from Sweden, Japan or Germany and you'll come away impressed. China is still not quite there but they are improving rapidly, Korea is already there and poised to improve further. Metal buyers all over the globe are turning away from the US because…

Also those old open hearth furnaces are long gone, see

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BHnJp0oyOxs

There are people making top quality steel in the US today by modern methods but it wasn't like the new replaced the old, the old mostly disappeared and we got a little bit of the new.

Post reply on HN