431–440 of 524 posts
Why should we assume AI can rapidly turn into super intelligence when physical and critical resources like energy and materials remain under human control?
The first time an AI goes rogue, figures out subterfuge, blackmails a human to do its real-world bidding, will be a defining moment.
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'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).
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Depends what country you are in. The US government seems to be averse to intelligence, whereas China fosters it. Kinda strange that the US is falling behind, I never imagined the day.
> China fosters it so long as it's not used to dissent from the government
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.
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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.
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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.
If you weren't able to build it before then you aren't able to properly verify it Verifying is harder than building!
What I’ve learned is quite minimal due to the slop nature. However I’d have never even started this project in the past due to time, so it’s still fun being able to learn small bits of projects I’d otherwise not even touch.
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> 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 us…
It's a great example of a project that needs accountability, but there's also thousands of other projects that need absolutely no accountability.
It's all relative to the stakes. The lower the stakes the less informed verification is needed.
The real trick is being informed enough on the boundaries to know where it matters. In the construction analogy, you need to be informed enough to know that a house is a bad idea since there are safety concerns. However building something small and non-load-bearing is probably fine to "vibe".
Eg there's no expertise needed to judge a garden trellis or 2 foot picket fence. It either works or it doesn't, and if it fails down the road there's no harm.
This boundary knowledge is the important bit imo.
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That's kind of jumping a few steps ahead; it assumes that we know 80% of office jobs can be fully automated already. And if that were the case, we'd have non-AI software doing that already. I mean we do, but it's not causing people to lose jobs en masse. (it probably did cost jobs, but more the kind that a job like data entry was replaced by OCR)
There are likely huge unmeasured inefficiencies built in to many companies. You hear anecdotes of people whose job for years has been to perform a particular task, which could be either automated or performed more efficiently (by orders of magnitude) by someone more capable. So on the one side, there’s huge opportunity for automation and job cuts. On the other, if the companies haven’t noticed the inefficiency so far…
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Just like the "if the lines continues to go up" argument... The thing is, no one has anything to gain from defending my position, but many people make a load of $$$ from selling the opposite position to gullible people
> The thing is, no one has anything to gain from defending my position Why? If someone running a company really believes that the line will soon stop going up and AI won't be replacing anyone, they could make the bet of strategically not investing in any AI initiatives, and instead investing in hiring and upskilling people who want to work without AI, and then just wait for the inevitable crash of all their competito…