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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

#451

Post by asdff »

Animats wrote: post #131

How far are we from reliable AI? One that could, for example, handle 80% of office jobs without screwing up more than humans?

The scary part is that it doesn't need to be reliable. I mean look at the direction of vibe coding. We went from caring about efficiency to just saying screw it, 100k lines of code as long as it ships a day sooner. Look at ai emails and calendars. Ai marketing. Ai, in its present state, is already taking people's jobs. It is already good enough. None of these jobs we have really actually need the precision we assume we bring to the table over AI. And company leaders are beginning to appreciate that.

We are in a very dangerous position. Frogs in hot water now with the boiling point on the near horizon.

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

#452

Post by asdff »

paul7986 wrote: post #169
Animats wrote: post #131

How far are we from reliable AI? One that could, for example, handle 80% of office jobs without screwing up more than humans?

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…

The issue with any UBI proposal is two fold. For one, initial payments will see inflation making them always need to be higher. And for two, this inflation mechanism is basically a bribe that companies are paying to humanity in order to keep their position in control of the earth's resources and not see a destructive revolution.

There will be a threshold point where companies decide it will be cheaper to just cull the human population and no longer pay these bribes. Maybe they can do it without a bomb dropped; make people convinced they are too hard up to reproduce or even just sterilize them without them realizing it via water or food supply. If we are truly in the "job free" period then there will be no trained experts to even appreciate what is happening, because why would anyone get expert training if you cannot do anything with that knowledge anymore?

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

#453

Post by asdff »

assimpleaspossi wrote: post #389

>>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.

Except the loitering autonomous ordinance over the data centers and power stations and mining operations. Good luck with your stashed ar15 and couple hundred rounds of ammo against a drone at 50k feet with 1ft ordinance precision. You will be basically fighting the Sentinels in Halo but without any of Master Chiefs plot armor.

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

#454

Post by asdff »

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…

You just brute force it with compute. What is the goal? Evaluating a function. So, given enough compute, you can just generate random functions, plot output distribution, select the function that meets threshold and move on.

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

#455

Post by bluejay2387 »

bluefirebrand wrote: post #368
embedding-shape wrote: post #311

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.

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

The entire domain of NP-Complete problems would beg to differ with you.

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

#456

Post by pfdietz »

mynameisbilly wrote: post #420
pfdietz wrote: post #306

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

And yet, watch all these consumers deciding they want something different from what you're proclaiming is better for them.

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

#457

Post by Der_Einzige »

perarneng wrote: post #435
saulpw wrote: post #400

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Rich people are limited resources and they would not buy 100 yatches even if they could afford it. As seen in history if the majority of people in a country is poor, revolution is just a matter of time. It's in a countries best interest to make sure wealth at least somewhat evenly distributed. At least good enough so the masses won't get angry.

https://arabianyachtdubai.com/who-owns-the-most-yachts/

Right now they're going on ~5-10 superyachets each. I could see them buying 100 in the future after they're 100x as rich. I think 5-10 which are 100x larger would also count for these purposes.

For car collection people will keep going well into the hundreds. Hell Jay Leno just did a video with Joe Biden yet again and his corvette, but Jay Leno famously has hundreds of cars.

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

#458

Post by Der_Einzige »

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.

The Brave Little Toaster does a great job of literally making you think about living side-by-side with a toaster. There's also a very angry toaster in Fallout New Vegas's Old World Blues DLC.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iAaabmic2pw

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ibOkPx_Ej30

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

#459

Post by falcor84 »

toasty228 wrote: post #440
falcor84 wrote: post #391

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Pretending to care about AI gives you unlimited investors fund to burn

But that's circular - assuming that large investors are rational, and I do think they generally are, why wouldn't they strategically invest in anti-AI businesses?

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

#460

Post by moezd »

Intelligence explosion won't happen if we keep on investing big cloud LLMs and people who are in the business of being in busines (cough Musk cough). It will arrive when AI penetrates so much deep into our lives that we consider quality local models like having electricity at home, thus we rethink what it means to truly integrate AI into everything.
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