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Humanity isn't ready for the coming intelligence explosion

economist.com

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

#171

Post by reducesuffering »

frognumber wrote: post #43
Retric wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you have specific and objective examples of things people got right? From my perspective there’s very slow but very real progress happening in the AI space. I see people making wild predictions in both directions, but in terms of actual unsupervised utility there’s definitely progress abet wildly slower than most hype.

This was their prediction for 2026: "The bet of using AI to speed up AI research is starting to pay off. OpenBrain continues to deploy the iteratively improving Agent-1 internally for AI R&D. Overall, they are making algorithmic progress 50% faster than they would without AI assistants—and more importantly, faster than their competitors. The AI R&D progress multiplier: what do we mean by 50% faster algorithmic progre…

That's because one of the author's of AI 2027, Daniel Kokotajlo, an ex-OpenAI researcher, was the most prescient predictor of our modern situation from 2021:

https://asteriskmag.substack.com/p/before-he-wrote-ai-2027-h...

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/6Xgy6CAf2jqHhynHL/what-2026-...

Anyone who wants to dismiss the LessWrong / X-Risk / "doomers" should link their accurate predictions from 2021.

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

#172

Post by trolleski »

seydor wrote: post #141
kortilla wrote: post #139

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.

It was one of Phil K. Dick jokes that one day your toaster will make a lost of demands to you.

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

#173

Post by xdertz »

turing_complete wrote: post #136

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.

Just look at the disruption smartphones and social media have caused. They had a gigantic impact to society and one definitely has to 'live with' that.

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

#174

Post by whilenot-dev »

calf wrote: post #154
turing_complete wrote: post #136

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.

Why is AI not alive

You might be trolling, but I like Schrödingers definition of life: living things avoid decay into equilibrium.

Inference engines are trying to converge any input to a certain limit, and I presume that's close enough to an equilibrium to not count as living thing.

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

#176

Post by scotty79 »

tedggh wrote: post #166

Why should we assume AI can rapidly turn into super intelligence when physical and critical resources like energy and materials remain under human control?

I think the main fear that under current scheme of resource allocation, namely capitalism, they won't remain under human control for long enough. The only thing that's needed to put them under control of AI is that doing that would be slightly more profitable for the richest. Which is very plausible.

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

#178

Post by brainwad »

bigstrat2003 wrote: post #84
somesortofthing wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have they? I don't like it either but the headline bull predictions(reliable agents and most code written by AI by mid-2026, dramatic progress against jailbreaks, prompt injection, hallucination, etc., major improvements despite pretraining data exhaustion, continued exponential growth on the METR trendline) did come true, often ahead of even aggressive schedules. What major wrong predictions did you have in mind?

Literally none of the predictions you listed in your post came true. We don't have reliable agents, AI isn't writing most code, hallucinations still happen all the time, improvement has been basically non-existent. Despite the constant claims of these experts and AI boosters, AI is still not a tool one can use to get meaningful work done.

You're in denial. The great problem with AI coding is now that it does too much, not too little. See the endless stream of vulnerabilities or the constant barrage of vibe coded apps, that get ever more complex.

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

#179

Post by anon7725 »

ACCount37 wrote: post #159
turing_complete wrote: post #136

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…

> "Alive" is irrelevant

Alive is always relevant. Our moral consideration must place beings that are alive or processes that support the life on this planet above things which are not alive.

In a just world, it must be adapted to us. It’s merely a file sitting on disk with numbers in it. And to put a fine point on it: the ambitions of the wealthy people who make it must be adapted to us.

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

#180

Post by toasty228 »

Schlagbohrer wrote: post #151
toasty228 wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Are we sur eof any of that?

Taxis were supposed to be all replaced when Uber promised to buy every single Tesla model S coming out of factories from 2020,they're not even self driving today...

Software engineers were supposed to disappear "in 6 months" every 6 months since chat gpt was released

Lots of people on this website live in insane bubbles which are completely out of sync with the reality of most workers

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