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Humanity isn't ready for the coming intelligence explosion

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

#281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you think that everyone in the Linux kernel team write their code using AI only? What about Emacs? And cURL?

Ok, how about Ladybird: https://ladybird.org/posts/adopting-rust/ > I used Claude Code and Codex for the translation. This was human-directed, not autonomous code generation. I decided what to port, in what order, and what the Rust code should look like. It was hundreds of small prompts, steering the agents where things needed to go. After the initial translation, I ran multiple passes of adversarial review, asking d…

I guess when you have 65k tests you can use an AI for transpiling, and it still seems it took an enormous amount of hand holding. That is very far from actually writing new code. But you tell me, are you a software developer? Write or have code written everyday? I am one and for me and everyone I know AI has been mostly just a (fantastic) replacement for google search.

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

#282

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.

I would happily live side by side if it is the Red Dwarf toaster

Would you like some toast?

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

#283

"Ten years from now, I think we will realize that we were standing in the foothills of the singularity now... I believe that we're only a few years away from [AGI], maybe 2030 plus or minus a year... I think [AGI] will be an enormous transformative technology, it's going to effectively be a new human era... We can feel this year, I would say, even though I've been working towards this for 30 years, I think this year…

Why are these people so obsessed with the year 2030? It keeps popping up everywhere.

It's like when people obsessed about 2020, or 2000. It's a nice clean number in the decimal numbering system.

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

#284

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'll use this opportunity to recommend The Selfish Gene, which puts forward a strong argument for how the actual competitive battlefield on Earth is between genes, while us humans and everything else we call "life" are their "survival machines" (read: technology that they use).

Genes have had their time.

Genes are now merely the "survival machine" for something else?

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

#285

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No invention was able to steer the psychopaths away from waging wars. But this time it's absolutely different, right? Riiight?..

Don't we have now much less wars than before, in general?

No, and we have wars no one in their sane mind would even imagine 20 years ago, like that of Russia vs Ukraine.

See, it's easy to speculate how there are less wars when you live in a place which haven't seen war for decades or cenuries, but it's a complete game changer when it's 150 km from where you live, and it's not just some regular war, but a long play intentional meatgrinding AI drone debugging polygon.

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

#286
post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I am no troll, and I hate to look like one when, to the appeal of Schrodinger, I am forced to remember that announcement this month about Claude or something acting in self-preservation when threatened during testing.

But, how is that different to any of its other output? I am sure there are many references to concepts of self-preservation in its training set that models will mimic just like all other concepts in its training set.

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

#287
post #32

Is it really likely that a "recursive self-improvement" capability would lead to a great acceleration of AIs capabilities? Isn't the preponderant bottleneck in improving the models the need to train them at scale to verify the hypotheses, and the time and cost that it takes? Or does someone think that they could get magically able to predict big improvements without training?

I built a self-learning recursive agent that finds academic research about using options data to trade, re-creates the research, and then probes and tests for gaps and potential strategies testing against over one year of out-of-sample trading data with one of several strategies that beat SPY by 10x. [0] One rule is that if a position is opened using the historical data, it can't close the position until the next mor…

I assume that Claude has access to historical market data. Could this not influence the strategies it implements?

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

#288

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'll use this opportunity to recommend The Selfish Gene, which puts forward a strong argument for how the actual competitive battlefield on Earth is between genes, while us humans and everything else we call "life" are their "survival machines" (read: technology that they use).

Genes have had their time.

Last chapter talks about the concept of ideas or “memes” taking its place.

Ideas that are beneficial for the human may be passed forward and survive. It got me thinking about religion, hell yeah I would tell me children about god if I believed it would save them from eternal suffering.

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

#289
post #32

Is it really likely that a "recursive self-improvement" capability would lead to a great acceleration of AIs capabilities? Isn't the preponderant bottleneck in improving the models the need to train them at scale to verify the hypotheses, and the time and cost that it takes? Or does someone think that they could get magically able to predict big improvements without training?

Humans gain knowledge through experiments. Without a physical body it has no chance of performing the same. That it can update it's training weights does not seem particularly significant.

It would not need robotics to experiment with software for machine learning.

Would there not be a lot of potential already there?

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