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Humanity isn't ready for the coming intelligence explosion

economist.com

151–160 of 524 posts

Re: Humanity isn't ready for the coming intelligence explosion

#151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ten years ago, most of the skeptics in these threads would have said the success of AlphaFold 3 was impossible.

It doesn't mean everything you can think of is possible. People who say every jobs will be automated never held any tool more advanced than a screwdriver and never worked a single day outside of an air conditioned office. They were predicting flying cars for "the year 2000"...

But enough jobs are going to be automated that it will cause social and economic chaos, and political breakdown. Sure AI can't attach an air conditioning unit outside my window nor use a plunger on my toilet but it can still replace lawyers, secretaries, software devs, and many more jobs.

Re: Humanity isn't ready for the coming intelligence explosion

#152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If AI is now ascending an economic learning curve from: 1. Extremely useful (Claude Code & Waymo now) 2. Doing ~everything we do (AGI & Optimus in a few years? 10?) 3. RSI (?) 4. Being smarter than any living person at every intellectual task (?) 5. Being smarter than the best-organized aggregate of all humans (10-100 years?) ...And all of the scientific and resource-allocation institutions that brought us the comput…

Here is an issue I think about often, but I am not quite sure how to put it into words. We have many extremely smart people in various fields. Executives, politicians, and society generally ignore them and do whatever they want. I don't believe that lack of access to intelligence is our problem. How is "free" intelligence going to improve this? I don't just mean climate, but business planning, health, risk assessment…

The free intelligence may help to steer the society and politicians to one or the other side. The only question is who decides which.

Re: Humanity isn't ready for the coming intelligence explosion

#153

Honestly, this article has too many words which don't mean anything. 'AI Experts', 'superintelligence', and hand-waving doom scenarios. As an example- > Within a couple of years, possibly much sooner, AI may achieve so-called closed-loop recursive self-improvement (RSI): the capacity to rewrite its own code to become more capable, without human intervention. Should that happen, the result could be an intelligence exp…

There’s a meme in finance circles that by the time some trend appears on the economist front cover it’s a top signal and time to get out of the trade and this is why. It’s a very normie magazine written by and for normies, and by the time an idea has got that far down the easy money has already been made

By the time it appears on People Magazine that must be the third or fourth dead cat bounce!

Re: Humanity isn't ready for the coming intelligence explosion

#155

> Experts in artificial intelligence estimate... The predictions of these "experts" have been drastically wrong for the last 3 years. At what point does someone lose their "expert" title?

Those are the experts who were wrong. These are the experts who are right. We sacked the experts who are wrong and replaced them with the experts who are right. “How do we know they’re right?” I hear you ask. We know because we who are wrong and these ones aren’t them. So they can’t make wrong predictions because those who make wrong predictions have been sacked.

We had to put good people in charge to get rid of the bad people. The bad people were ruining our economy. They needed to be punished.

Schools needed to be punished too. There was a branch of knowledge called Science, and it was badly run and terribly elitist. These people would talk for hours and never in ALL CAPS. They used alot of big words and produced alot of theories. Forms of lies that they literally called form-you-lies. They were fanatics and would never agree on anything. Very frustrating.

Then a new kind of brave, talented politician made Science accountable to our heroic leadership. Suddenly there were new medications and rocket ships everywhere, enough for every person, woman, man, camera, TV. It was literally called a golden age because the right people acquired mountains of gold. Elections were no longer necessary. They were all rigged anyway.

There was a magazine called The Expertist or The Economix. Not really very good, but sometimes it did praise our heroic leadership, which was good.

That magazine published a long text that said,

> It is common thinking in Silicon Valley and Washington, DC that any regulation would put American firms at a disadvantage because they cannot trust Chinese competitors to abide by the rules.

And this was true, because no one else can be trusted, they should all be punished. Punishing others is how you get the best deals. Only our heroic leadership makes good rules for everyone else in the world to follow.

Re: Humanity isn't ready for the coming intelligence explosion

#156
post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But I do live with it. It lives in my kitchen.

In the pecking order, it is under, not on your side. Your toaster never demanded you to make a toast.

Ok, but my dishwasher _does_ demand I give it more salt and rinse aid ;)

Re: Humanity isn't ready for the coming intelligence explosion

#157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I see driverless cars all the time in San Francisco and I'm eagerly awaiting the regulatory decisions that will allow them to be widely available in the bay area at large.

Yes and people have been eagerly awaiting the broader adoption of this allegedly inevitable technology for a decade now, which is exactly my point

[dead]

Re: Humanity isn't ready for the coming intelligence explosion

#158
post #114
post #68

Reminds me of all of those ethics debates back when fully self driving cars were basically already here ca 10 years ago. The ones talking about how hard it would be to chose which person to run over. Additionally, I find it hard to believe that this would be a case of the future just not being distributed evenly. But sure. The AI labs relying on hype stating 15-50% risk of building a magic entity is certainly a relia…

I have had my license for over 20 years and to this day have not encountered a single event where I had to decide who to kill

This strand of philosowank is just there to promote the idea you need to kill for the greater good. The only trolly problem that matters is brake maintenance.

Re: Humanity isn't ready for the coming intelligence explosion

#159

We don't need to live "side by side" with AI. AI is not alive, it's a technology we use. This is like talking about living side by side with your toaster.

"Alive" is irrelevant. Bullshit like "alive", "sentient" or "conscious" doesn't decide much, at the day's end. It just distracts from the thing that matters.

And the thing that matters is: capability.

Even today's AIs are capable of autonomous goal-oriented agentic behavior - and growing more and more so with every release.

At sufficient capability, AI stops being "a technology we use", and becomes a force in itself - not unlike humankind. Because intelligence is very powerful - it's what allows humans to dominate the world. A world where human intelligence has a peer is a world where human control is contested. And beyond that?

You might end up being more outclassed by AI than a toaster is outclassed by you.

Re: Humanity isn't ready for the coming intelligence explosion

#160

Why is someone from Planet Labs writing this? Why not, for example, Geoffrey Hinton, the scientist who won the nobel prize for LLM architecture? Or a sci-fi author?

Has Hinton written any essay or general article recently? He goes on lots of interviews for sure, but I'd be interested in actually reading his arguments a little more thoroughly.
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