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

aphyr.com

611–620 of 830 posts

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

#611
I agree with much of the analysis, and originally I would have subscribed to the recommended action (resistance), at this point in time however, I think that advice is severely misguided.

We have already passed the critical point. The LLMs, the agent harnesses are here. There is too much willpower, capital, and risk behind these technologies now—the automobile has landed, thousands of people have purchased it already, protesting the car won't undo it at this point.

What you can do that will be meaningful, is to instead understand the new car, and understand it deeply, Use that understanding to carry the values you care about into the new world and re-articulate them. Make the car safer, push for tactical regulations on it. If you are privileged enough to be able to forgo its use entirely, sure, but that advice is not uniformly applicable. People forget that being able to simply opt-out of certain things is often only a viable option when you are already in a certain position. What we really need are the heavy skeptics to stop falling for luddite temptation and to start bringing their critical lens to bear in positive ways on this new technology to make it safer and better. By opting out and staging a feeble resistance you won't do anything other than let the current dangerous power consolidation continue.

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

#612
post #70

> ML assistance reduces our performance and persistence, and denies us both the muscle memory and deep theory-building that comes with working through a task by hand: the cultivation of what James C. Scott would call Imagine being starting university now... I can't imagine to have learned what I did at engineering school if it wasn't for all the time lost on projects, on errors. And I can't really think that I would…

My kids are high school age. It's hard to convey the deep existential dread their generation has about the future. * They are growing up in a climate that is worse than any prior generation had and getting worse. * In the US, they are growing up in a time with less upward mobility and more economic inequality than the previous several generations had. * Trust in social institutions and government is crumbling before…

> Blue collar jobs are already gone

This isn't true at all. There's never been a better time to be in the trades.

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

#613
post #520

"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…

Well... 19th century engineer could have a large multi-story brownstone with family and , more importantly, servants and house personnel. A butler, etc... Today? On an engineer's salary? Ha!

Can and will happen again. I might even be a 'clever' underbutler to some misAnthropic Engineer

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

#614
post #415

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes exactly. Let's simplify it to the individualist vs collectivist spectrum. Cars became a self-reinforcing driver of individualism, especially in net new geographies. The negative effects are resisted better in societies/regions that were built long before them. (For both the cultural reasons and plain physical reasons, like not having wide enough roads). In the car centric places, a few generations later they beco…

it is kind of hilarious to hear people just keep making the same arguments as ted kaczynski

You mean the brilliant mathematician with the correct insights into the modern American condition?

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

#615
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…

False Consciousness was the old marxist term for this inadvertent working against your own ultimate self-interest. It's rife in capitalism. If you look closely you'll see it everywhere.

(note that even the "her kids will be ok" isn't true at the limit. If wealth concentrates sufficiently enough it will lead to societal collapse)

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

#617

"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…

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.

Agree. If you've ever spent serious time in the country with farmers, the level of ingenuity is impressive among many, and they benefit from it greatly. As the grandson of depression farmers, I noticed intelligence mattered a lot, even if just for survival.

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

#618
Eh, this has been a disappointing series to read from the person that wrote all those Jepsen write-ups and the technical interview series. All articles are mostly a regurgitation of all the negativity that gets aired here all the time (a lot of it already fixed or debunked) and 0 discussion of utility. This is more befitting Zitron than aphyr. Where's the sharp incisive wit and deep insights?

At least he realizes this technology is unlikely to slow down. With international relations as they are, it's MAD all over again, only the "D" is a fuzzy, hypothetical thing nobody can name, so even that bit of deterrence is lost. Yet finally he ends with the most uninspired advice of all: "we should try, unsuccessfully, to stop it."

Everyone must understand: for all of history, progress and productivity and value creation overall could only scale with people. Now it can scale with power and compute. This is a tremendous economic force, akin to a force of nature, that is nigh impossible to stop. (I always did think the Butlerian Jihad was the biggest plot hole in Dune.)

My advice is this: we have no choice but to adapt. We must realize that, by a stroke of luck, this is a power available to us more than the capital class. If they can scale without people, so can we. But because harnessing AI effectively requires hard skills -- at least for now -- that the capital class don't have and used to pay us for, we might even scale better than them!

Carpe diem.

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

#619

"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…

I'm not aware of any jobs where physical robustness is the primary job attribute. The machine is always better. There are jobs that demand robustness, but they are about applying knowledge in extreme conditions, not about letting an AI do the thinking.

> I'm not aware of any jobs where physical robustness is the primary job attribute.

Not really disagreeing with you, but there are a few obvious examples. A lot of construction jobs are still labour intensive, and I've seen a lot of people who don't last the first day, let alone their first week. Also, security jobs, say in nightclubs, also value physical robustness. Orderlies in hospital, require the ability to move bodies, alive and otherwise. The machine is usually better.

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

#620
post #204

Despite all the AI hype, I wonder how much it only exists in the tech bubble full of terminally online folks. Unless you spend significant part of your day online, most of the AI risks mentioned in this series are probably negligible. The most affected demographic is computer nerds that grew up enjoying utopian Web that is now turning dark.

This is completely true. From what ai can tell talking to people outside of tech, the agi and "omg this stuff is wild" hype and fears have completely dissipated. Ironically the average person sees these tools how typically you'd expect a cold, rational technologist to see them: just another tool.

I think a lot of people are just getting their firs taste if agent harnesses plus slightly better models right now, and yes, the first time you use them it seems scary and amazing. By the hundredth time though, it's very apparent that there is still tremendous work to do before any kind of fully automated software pipeline (let alone any other domain) can be realized.

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