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The future of everything is lies, I guess: Where do we go from here?

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Re: The future of everything is lies, I guess: Where do we go from here?

#491

Post by Gigachad »

nradov wrote: post #66
mwigdahl wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ironically, AI facilitates self-driving cars, which promise to _reduce_ the need for private automobile ownership.

There is very little connection between ownership and who does the driving. I still want to own my own cars even if a computer does most of the driving. That way it's always available, and more importantly I can keep my own stuff in it.

Rental cars are expensive because they are covering the risk and increased wear and tear of rental drivers. As well as the downtime of when the car is rented to you but you aren’t driving it.

Self driving cars would make this massively cheaper and remove most of the reasons to own a car. It would make about as much sense as owning a train for most people.

Re: The future of everything is lies, I guess: Where do we go from here?

#492

Post by nradov »

QuaternionsBhop wrote: post #469
nradov wrote: post #310

Earlier quoted context omitted.

An electrician with access to a circuit breaker will be able to control it.

This is called the AI Stop Button Problem. Computerphile has a great video on this (featuring Robert Miles) which explains why this is not a reliable solution to AI getting out of control. When the AI is smarter than all of humanity combined, the only real solution is for the AI to not get out of control in the first place.

If people are going to produce unrealistic sci-fi videos they should at least try to make them entertaining and not just lame.

Re: The future of everything is lies, I guess: Where do we go from here?

#493

Post by Gigachad »

asdff wrote: post #328
spprashant wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The positive effects were immediate, and measurable. The negative effects are delayed, and hard to quantify without all the advancement in climate research since then. If everyone in 1920 knew a 100 years from now there would be climate crisis to reckon with, perhaps a few things would have changed along the way. Today we have a much better understanding of the world, so we have the means to think down the line of wh…

Negative effects were immediately noticed. The change in smog was apparent. Road laws rapidly advanced. Road building standards rapidly changed. Congestion was also very much apparent, and the reason behind massive highway building effort that came some thirty years after the car's rise to popularity. Really these people decades ago had a great grasp on these things. But why did they "fail" and we still have traffic?…

They failed because traffic can’t be fixed by adding capacity. The inefficiency of cars will mean you can never build enough roads to keep ahead of consumption.

Traffic gets fixed by getting most people to use some other form of transport and leaving cars to the edge case uses.

Re: The future of everything is lies, I guess: Where do we go from here?

#494

Post by nradov »

geremiiah wrote: post #392
nradov wrote: post #310

Earlier quoted context omitted.

An electrician with access to a circuit breaker will be able to control it.

The AI would have redundancy, both in terms of its power source and also because it can literally replicate itself and have multiple instances running all over the world. Also, an army of drones that you'd have to dodge just to go anywhere near any critical infrastructure.

It's hilarious that your think you know what "AI" would have when it doesn't even exist

Re: The future of everything is lies, I guess: Where do we go from here?

#495

Post by the_af »

munksbeer wrote: post #487
the_af wrote: post #475

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If there is mass unemployment, who is going to buy anything from anyone? The "few" don't need or want us to be scraping in the dirt. > They want us spending lots of money on their products, so their wealth increases. If we're considering scifi scenarios, imagine this: if full blown automation of everything is achieved, why would the "haves" need the "have-nots" buying anything at all? Why would they need them to ex…

> If we're considering scifi scenarios, imagine this: if full blown automation of everything is achieved, why would the "haves" need the "have-nots" buying anything at all? Why would they need them to exist, at all? Think about it. It's an extreme and we're not near it... yet. So we reach this post scarcity society, where everyone could be living a life of luxury, but this whole group of "haves" as you call them (who…

> So we reach this post scarcity society

A full automation society, where the implied post scarcity is not necessarily for everyone. Maybe it needs most of the population not to exist in order for the few to enjoy the lack of scarcity. Resources aren't infinite, but greed is.

I mean, resources and wealth could be far better distributed right now, no need for AI, yet most times this is attempted the wealthy fight tooth and nails against it, even though the impact for them would be very small. What makes you think having AI will magically make them better people?

> [...] this whole group of "haves" as you call them (who would they be?) somehow form this uniform view that they just don't want 99.9% of other people around

A uniform view on this matter is easier to achieve by an extremely small subset of people.

And really, do you need to ask "who are they"? I mean, the billionaires and owners of concentrated capital of the world?

> I just cannot see the path and all the things required to get to that particular reality.

You cannot see a path from unchecked capitalism and extreme concentration of capital, via total automation, to this particular reality?

It sounds like a failure of imagination. I see the people at the top being lying sociopaths and have no trouble believing this.

Re: The future of everything is lies, I guess: Where do we go from here?

#496

Post by pjc50 »

Animats wrote: post #445

"I could retrain, but my core skills—reading, thinking, and writing—are squarely in the blast radius of large language models." Yes. For the lifetime of almost everyone alive now, reading, thinking, and writing have been valued skills which moved one up in society's hierarchy. This is a historical anomaly. Prior to 1800 or so, those skills were not all that useful to the average farmer. There were more smart people t…

> Physical robustness. Strength, perhaps brutality. Competence in physical tasks. Honesty. Parentage. Birth order (see primogeniture.) Those matter in per-technological societies, and they matter in failed societies now. Those are perhaps humanity's core values.

This is really bleak to me. We can do better than primogeniture, and of course the gender discrimination that goes along with it. You might as well write that subjugation of women is a "core value", simply because it has been for so many time periods.

> Physical robustness. Strength, perhaps brutality.

John Henry is not going to beat the steam shovel any time soon.

> For the lifetime of almost everyone alive now, reading, thinking, and writing have been valued skills which moved one up in society's hierarchy. This is a historical anomaly.

It's not an anomaly; rather, it's the other way round. These used to be highly specialized skills that carried significant status, and got democratized by mass education in the 20th century.

We're not prisoners of history. We don't have to go back to being serfs for the few people who own all the land, oil, food, energy, data centers, and operating systems. I hope.

Re: The future of everything is lies, I guess: Where do we go from here?

#497

Post by steve_adams_86 »

rowanG077 wrote: post #488
munificent wrote: post #456

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't disagree with your overall point, but I do think that ingenuity, problem-solving, impulse control, and the ability to delay gratification and reach long-term goals have always been valuable skills. You might still only be a farmer if you're smart, but you can at least be one of the more productive farmers with a more smoothly running farm.

I agree. Studies show time and time again that smart people are more efficient even at tasks that may not look like they require a smart person. So while people might not have been paid to do thinking jobs I don't buy that the intelligent did not always have had an edge, all else being equal.

What if this is modeled around the premise that in any situation where reasoning can be used, someone would have access to super-human reasoning?

Where does the human in the loop somehow manage to utilize super-human reasoning better than another person?

I'm not suggesting it's impossible, so much as wondering if we can reach a place where the human is truly irrelevant to the process, and can't make a better decision than the superhuman entity.

I'm not sure this is ever possible. It's more of a thought experiment. What's between here and there? Right now we can use pseudo-intelligence from silicon to our advantage, and being smarter than average is clearly a massively outsized advantage. It's similar to how being able to automate tasks gives you an outsized advantage, yet in so many more ways. But what if that advantage thins or even vanishes?

Re: The future of everything is lies, I guess: Where do we go from here?

#498

Post by loloquwowndueo »

Unai wrote: post #362
grvdrm wrote: post #111

Two years ago, I was enjoying a drink with my wife, her friend, a very senior female VC partner, and another friend. Somehow we talked AI in some depth, and the VC at one point said (about AI): “I don’t know what our kids are going to do for work. I don’t know what jobs there will be to do.” That same VC invests in AI companies and by what I heard about her, has done phenomenally well. I think about that exchange all…

In the other hand, shouldn't it be the objective of humanity to not HAVE to work for the most basic survival and to fit into society? Not that we're in any way in that path, of course, with the people making the working machines also accumulating all the wealth. But still, there's something intrinsically good about automation, even when the system is not suited for it.

It’s automating the wrong thing.

I want my ai to do dishes and laundry so I can write, draw, do deep cognitive work.

Not for it to do cognitive work and write and draw while I don dishes and laundry.

Re: The future of everything is lies, I guess: Where do we go from here?

#499

Post by jakeydus »

sambellll wrote: post #454
armonster wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Their negative effects are much more vast, subtle, and cultural. You could say many of the broad and widespread mental issues we have in the US is the result of automobiles leading to suburbanization and thus isolation of people. It has created an expensive barrier of entry for existing in society and added a ton of friction to doing anything and everything, especially with people. That's not even getting into the cl…

I don't think it's fair to say suburbanization lead to isolation. I think factors like social media have had a much bigger impact. It's not like you're living away from any people - you have 100 other neighbours living on your street!

Proximity doesn’t automatically result in interaction, though. If every one of those 100 people get in their private mobile room every time they leave their private mobile room there is no chance for any of them to interact.

Re: The future of everything is lies, I guess: Where do we go from here?

#500

Post by yesbut »

pjc50 wrote: post #496
Animats wrote: post #445

"I could retrain, but my core skills—reading, thinking, and writing—are squarely in the blast radius of large language models." Yes. For the lifetime of almost everyone alive now, reading, thinking, and writing have been valued skills which moved one up in society's hierarchy. This is a historical anomaly. Prior to 1800 or so, those skills were not all that useful to the average farmer. There were more smart people t…

> Physical robustness. Strength, perhaps brutality. Competence in physical tasks. Honesty. Parentage. Birth order (see primogeniture.) Those matter in per-technological societies, and they matter in failed societies now. Those are perhaps humanity's core values. This is really bleak to me. We can do better than primogeniture, and of course the gender discrimination that goes along with it. You might as well write tha…

> We're not prisoners of history. We don't have to go back to being serfs for the few people who own all the land, oil, food, energy, data centers, and operating systems. I hope.

Unfortunately, that is the current stage of humanity. We all currently live in a global subscription model for food, housing, safety, etc. No doubt that we will move beyond it eventually, but the current organization of society is kept in place by the owner class which benefits from the current arrangement.

One of the steps for moving beyond it is educating the modern day serfs (our peers) about reality as it is and alternative visions of a future where we are no longer selling our labor to the owner class. It will take generations.

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