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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

#411

Post by saltcured »

sameerds wrote: post #393
bluefirebrand wrote: post #368

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you weren't able to build it before then you aren't able to properly verify it Verifying is harder than building!

> If you weren't able to build it before then you aren't able to properly verify it GP said "couldn't dream of building". To make an analogy, I wouldn't dream of building a house if I had to do every bit of brick-laying myself. But with others doing what I can't do, I can indeed dream of building a house and I do know how to verify that the house was built to satisfy my dream.

This analogy is ironic to me. For most people, building a dream house and verifying it means hiring someone else who is accountable for it being built to code etc.

This is exactly the naive gap that is happening with AI. There is no trusted middleman who does the verification and takes the burden of accountability. The AI vendor tries to sell it like magic but with a disclaimer that is is merely entertainment. The user tries to pretend they are reviewing, but often is just implicitly trusting the tool to do right by them on things they have no real capacity to evaluate.

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

#412

Post by everyday7732 »

intended wrote: post #277
truthbe wrote: post #175

Like my grandfather used to say "They let anyone on TV now", They let anyone be called an expert now. Love talking about 'recursive self-improvement' of a prediction engine. What about 'recursive self-degradation'?

Yes - how exactly are you going to conjure new data to increase the model’s real world fidelity? The most common sense way will always need to have humans in the loop, because humans are being used as judges. If you try and entertain the idea of a human-less loop, I landed up with something like an AI creating real world products, selling them, then tracking the usage and popularity of the product. Essentially, creat…

> Yes - how exactly are you going to conjure new data to increase the model’s real world fidelity?

Robotics and access to surveillance tech. There's an unlimited amount of real world data which hasn't been used yet. The language models have focused on just the small amount of data that is human written text. If there's a way to combine this with image and video models, as well as robotics collecting other sensor data, why would they be limited in learning anything about the world?

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

#413

Post by _DeadFred_ »

saulpw wrote: post #400
perarneng wrote: post #388

The economy isn't ready. Basically, all companies right now are sprinting toward increasing profit margins by trying to do more with fewer people. The problem is that, on this scale, they will lose income because unemployed people make terrible consumers, they will only buy what is strictly necessary. Consequently, society is in a race to the bottom, which could lead to extreme suffering and potential revolutions in…

Companies don't serve poor people; they have no money. Companies will pivot to serving the people who have money. If that means they only serve rich people, then that means we'll have more yacht makers and fewer dollar stores.

Early industrialization meant industrial canneries to feed people, building cities to house everyone from the countryside, indoor plumbing.

And the AI revolution is no housing, worsening food, a few people with yachts, the Epstein class getting away with what they want to do, and no new plumbing hookups because the datacenter took the municipal water supply.

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

#414

Post by bluefirebrand »

embedding-shape wrote: post #373
bluefirebrand wrote: post #368

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you weren't able to build it before then you aren't able to properly verify it Verifying is harder than building!

Ok, so before I couldn't (/didnt have the time to) build cross-platform native desktop applications with minimal amount of 3rd party dependencies, but now I "can". What exactly am I unable to verify here?

Couldn't is "didn't have the skills to"

That's pretty different from "didn't have the time/money/motivation to"

If you didn't have the skills to build something before then you don't have the skills to verify something is correct after

Clicking around a finished UI is not verifying

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

#415

Post by embedding-shape »

bluefirebrand wrote: post #414
embedding-shape wrote: post #373

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ok, so before I couldn't (/didnt have the time to) build cross-platform native desktop applications with minimal amount of 3rd party dependencies, but now I "can". What exactly am I unable to verify here?

Couldn't is "didn't have the skills to" That's pretty different from "didn't have the time/money/motivation to" If you didn't have the skills to build something before then you don't have the skills to verify something is correct after Clicking around a finished UI is not verifying

> That's pretty different from "didn't have the time/money/motivation to"

Maybe start at the first message here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48553444

I still don't have the skill/knowledge to build cross-platform native applications the way I'm doing it with an agent now. I am still able to verify it's correct. How is that possible if what you say is correct?

> Clicking around a finished UI is not verifying

Definitively a part of it, if you care about having mouse interactions and having graphical UIs.

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

#416

Post by esafak »

Lerc wrote: post #93
esafak wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They have to act together. Universities should take part too. Let's get these national and international forums started.

Isn't that what's happening? For example, https://www.eit.europa.eu/news-events/events/international-a... What would you have them do that they are not currently doing exactly?

Taking part would be a start! All the major players -- Anthropic, OpenAI, and Google -- are missing from https://global-aiconference.com/#speakers

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

#417

Post by falcor84 »

root_axis wrote: post #369
falcor84 wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Being a process doesn't preclude something from being an entity. In particular, all of us living organisms have our constituent atoms constantly replaced, and we don't typically consider that a risk to our sense of self.

> Being a process doesn't preclude something from being an entity In a tortured semantics sense sure, but in a practical sense they refer to different types of things.

My experience and intuition beg to differ. As I see it, much of our civilization progress is based on this redefinition of processes as entities, with some examples being: a sports team, a mathematical function, a loan, a company, a computer program and even the idea of a civilization itself.

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

#418

Post by everyday7732 »

Haunt1000 wrote: post #89
bloaf wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think anyone really knows. I consider these scenarios: 1) We stumble onto an algorithmic improvement in intelligence. This isn't just "what humans do but faster", its "better than what humans do". I've got no idea what that might mean (it could be fundamentally different heuristics, it could be that we've got some intellectual blind spot that they cast off). It doesn't matter, the instant this happens AI is s…

> 2) AI gets good enough at physics and engineering that they can really quickly use up all "the room at the bottom" as Feyman put it. They design and build a factory that produces a mystery metal amalgam that computes at some small percentage of the minimum predicted by the Landauer principle, within a few percent of Bremermann's limit. It's not "smarter" its just suddenly tens-of-orders of magnitude faster. But tho…

What makes you think it would need humans to collaborate with it or that they would refuse?

Robotics exist and are improving and humans are actively trying to collaborate with AI to improve it.

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

#419

Post by mynameisbilly »

bcjdjsndon wrote: post #330
duskdozer wrote: post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And Americans' lives have been heavily shaped by cars and the car industry in a negative way. So, a pretty apt comparison.

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

Famously, the only way to transport humans are cars annnnnd, horse and cart!

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

#420

Post by mynameisbilly »

pfdietz wrote: post #306
duskdozer wrote: post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And Americans' lives have been heavily shaped by cars and the car industry in a negative way. So, a pretty apt comparison.

And also in a positive way. I mean, it's not personal teleportation, but it sometimes feels like it.

The isolation produced by centering our urban and suburban design around cars is pronounced. It cannot be understated how much damage cars have done to our sense of connectedness, community, walkability, and health.
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