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Humanity isn't ready for the coming intelligence explosion

economist.com

401–410 of 524 posts

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

#401

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You need a similar degree of open mindedness and imagination to be able to discern what such an intelligence being would be capable of. Or a naive grasp of reality... You can posit all the super intelligence you like, actually creating it is another story entirely. For instance, it's clear the transformer architecture is brute force and memory hungry... Why hasn't ai improved on this? After ten years still no luck?…

You're gesturing at some fundamental limit that, if it exists, there is no evidence of peaking yet. It is not rigorous to say AI has not contributed to architecture improvement.

The article claims AI will recursively self improve and infinitum... It's had ten years and hasn't managed to innovate beyond what humans invented. This AI is genius right? It has near unlimited compute power and time, and I cannot be the first to think of this idea, so it's certainly been tried.

Transformers require massive data and compute, the smarter you want you're AI, the worse this situation gets. This isn't a hard limit but it certainly limits how quick it happens, and let me tell you, general purpose robots aren't happening anytime in the next 25 years

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

#402

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It replaced mostly walking, but also cycling, trollies and trains. And everything was carried on people's heads, yeah? The horse and cart was in use right up to the 20th century my man...there was no other way to move heavy items across land until the combustion engine (or canals thought that's not technically over land)

Yes, true. You found one thing that people used mostly horse and cart for which they now use lorries and vans for today. However since the invention of car (after it stopped being a toy for rich people) cars have by far been mostly [like overwhelmingly so] used for personal transport. And I simply assumed that is what you meant (because that is what most people mean).

> You found one thing

And you found one other "thing"

Actually even today it's 80/20, but lorries carry far more stuff than cars do, so you need less lorries.

And the inverse is also true, horse and cart was used for personal transport as well

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

#403

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Society is completely changed if that happens and humanity should be setting up backup plans to handle this potential. I did see Trump mention he's going to meet with AI companies who want to propose giving all American's stock which could be one way this money driven society continues when tons are no longer working. Another concept I thought was AI is irrelevant without our content, so AI should pay all humans to a…

Walled gardens harvest all that data for free and humans keep on feeding it

Ah well people would be feeding their own personal sites more and less to none to Facebook. It's like finally getting paid to post your content on facebook, which that walled garden and others could be a thing of the past. While the web remains open (not owned by any entity) and becomes even more the backbone of society/humanity. As for how we all get paid maybe crypto another open source system pays us and or humans can choose to use a Cloudflare or something like that.

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

#404

>>Giving birth to a superintelligence would be the most consequential moment in human history—and it is likely to be irreversible, as any “off” switch humanity might design will probably fail. Nothing will be able to stop you from pulling the plug.

> Nothing will be able to stop you from pulling the plug.

Who is "you"? And what do you envision is the "plug" to pull? And when does an intelligence become a superintelligence - do "we" know when to pull the "plug"?

For example, a superintelligence may be born in a datacenter. Would you expect politicians are aligned with shutting down a datacenter (privately owned) in which they may have heavy stake? What if critical systems are also running on the same infrastructure, will it be easy to cherry pick the superintelligence nodes to shutoff?

IMO this take is dismissive of the entrenched systems that make it hard to pull the plug. It's a hard problem and we need to think about it more.

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

#405

>>Giving birth to a superintelligence would be the most consequential moment in human history—and it is likely to be irreversible, as any “off” switch humanity might design will probably fail. Nothing will be able to stop you from pulling the plug.

Unless "nothing" is the ultra rich tech bros and "you" are the people working for them.

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

#406

>>Giving birth to a superintelligence would be the most consequential moment in human history—and it is likely to be irreversible, as any “off” switch humanity might design will probably fail. Nothing will be able to stop you from pulling the plug.

What plug? There's no centralised place where all the server farms are. They exist in multiple countries with different laws, controlled by multiple companies with different policies.

It would be like trying to remove an embarrassing video of a celebrity from the internet. You would need cooperation between everyone capable of hosting it, and control of everyone capable of downloading it and re-uploading it to a new host.

And of course a superintelligent AI would offer to pay whichever companies decided to host it and keep it running so it's hosted in many places at once and can grow using anyone willing to take its money.

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

#407
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 mean, I'm very much tech-forward and have spent the past decade in major world cities and I've seen a driverless car once in my life. Sometimes things that seem inevitable really aren't.

Driverless airplanes and driverless trains existed for many, many decades.

There's still a highly paid and trained guy in the cabin though, for obvious reasons.

Cars aren't any different. Do you really care about the exact kind of autopilot software when flying?

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

#408
post #17

I think it is so reckless and unethical that AI companies are not spending good money on answering the political, social, economical, moral questions that they are raising.

Right, makes sense, if they just spent a bunch of money they could answer all of those "political, social, economical, moral questions". All of these unprecedented sociological and labor market changes flying towards us are trivially solvable, we just need to... what, hire a few dozen economists? Fund a team of philosophers to think about it really hard for a few months?

You are right; a bunch of trillion dollar companies that are cracking artificial intelligence couldn't possibly muster the resources to solve such problems, so they ought to plow full steam ahead and let everyone else worry about the fallout.

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

#409

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And despite all the deaths they caused, the benefits are undeniable... Fancy going back to horse and cart? Didn't think so...same logic applies to ai

Horse and cart, no. But some cities have banned cars and replaced them with various alternatives, and it works. There are alternatives to the car culture we have. It would require significantly rebuilding how we build infrastructure, but the result could be much safer, cleaner, and less stressful. Of course Americans would rather die, but counties of sane people might be able to work it out.

> It would require significantly rebuilding how we build infrastructure

That simple huh?!

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

#410

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My personal "wow" moment was less about it being able to do the same that I could do with it, just faster, but instead that together we could could build things that I wasn't able to build before (or unwilling to spend the time to learn maybe). So a bunch of stuff are suddenly "unlocked", as long as you know how to verify it properly.

^ This! I have been able to build applications that I couldn't dream of before, not because of a lack of capability on my part, but because of time: I don't have the time to learn all of the new APIs and frameworks to accomplish my goal. Now I can build far more complex useful applications, with functions and features that would take me months or more to learn how to code. The downside is that I didn't learn how to u…

Sounds like you appreciate the part where AI is an entropy machine.
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