Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Humanity isn't ready for the coming intelligence explosion

economist.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

491–500 of 524 posts

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

#491

Post by lukan »

lo_zamoyski wrote: post #485
lukan wrote: post #358

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"The only way anyone can make a blanket statement like that and put "all religions" on equal epistemic footing " All religion is based on superstitious believes, or do you have counter examples? But I am already quite familiar with the catholic church in particular and do not think they are a counter example in the slightest.

> All religion is based on superstitious believes Quite the question-begging claim. > or do you have counter examples Begin with the existence of God as self-subsisting being . This can be be shown to be a metaphysical necessity with mathematical certainty [0]; its denial leads to incoherence. Following that, one can show what analogous properties this first cause must have, for instance. Such knowledge is a matter o…

Oh, you were serious.

To be honest, I advise to go to a basi philosophy course once. I did, but won't buy such books, I had that topic covered.

There is no proof that god exists. And there is even less proof that the holy spirit came down and impregnated Mary, or that Jesus ressurected from the dead or any of the other countles examples of superstition.

The claim that god exists has the same validy, that a rock has a soul.

But .. you ain't the first of course to ridicule other religious believe systems while thinking yours is solid.

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

#492

Post by otabdeveloper4 »

nopinsight wrote: post #228
toasty228 wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are we sur eof any of that? Taxis were supposed to be all replaced when Uber promised to buy every single Tesla model S coming out of factories from 2020,they're not even self driving today... Software engineers were supposed to disappear "in 6 months" every 6 months since chat gpt was released Lots of people on this website live in insane bubbles which are completely out of sync with the reality of most workers

No one rational ever said software engineers were going to be replaced in 6 months. Some people said AI will automate 90% of coding in 6 months and they were not far off (and accurate in some contexts, e.g. startups).

Coding has been automated since the very beginning of coding.

The first two programming languages (Fortran and Cobol) were supposed to make coding obsolete because non-coders will now just make software with natural language prompts.

LLMs are a dangerous tool for coding because they are infinite technical debt generators. Ideally only experienced senior developers should be allowed to use them.

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

#493

Post by theodric »

spicyusername wrote: post #348
grumpymuppet wrote: post #292

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had my "wow" moment recently and saw an AI agent do something do over a weekend something that I spent years developing a relatively niche skill might have needed a month to complete. I think the message the team lead takes away right now is "oh, this can be done a lot faster, let's do more!" This is exciting for a bit, but I think it comes at the cost of learning -- and being able to communicate --architectural le…

Everyone is afraid about what will happen when people's skills atrophy, but the tools aren't going anywhere. If they truly can always recognize problems and communicate them in understandable ways, then people's skills won't atrophy. Everyone's skills will be enhanced. New developers will learn all of the things they need to learn through using the tool.

I think the most obvious impact (good AND bad) will be from people who didn't have (or want) skills to begin with being empowered to have a model crank out custom software to do little things to make their lives better. Can't atrophy a muscle that doesn't exist!

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

#494

Post by Fizz43 »

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.

You can see the same outcomes in cities that are walkable and interconnected. Its to complicated of a problem to point to cars as a major factor.

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

#495

Post by whizzter »

tedggh wrote: post #166

Why should we assume AI can rapidly turn into super intelligence when physical and critical resources like energy and materials remain under human control?

It's in the first paragraph of the article:

"Strikingly, this concern is being openly voiced by the very people who have the strongest incentives to project confidence rather than alarm: the founders of the largest AI laboratories."

It's amazing how a writer can write something like that and not even question the premise of someone with the "strongest incentive" to be "critical" as not being a marketing ploy.

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

#496

Post by b112 »

thrixton wrote: post #466
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.

Absolutely. Things which used to take me a week to grind through, finding edge cases, trial and error, researching online, now takes an afternoon directing an agent and verifying the solution. For a generalist, it's a huge force multiplier.

Wonderful now.

In the future, there will be no more generalists with your capabilities. At all. No one will ever develop the skill. We're at the end of our career's lifetime. We're like the horse watching more and more cars appearing.

Within a generation, the coding languages we use today will all vanish, to be replaced with direct to metal methods, assembly, etc. The only reason C exists, is for humans. PHP, rust, python is for humans. There will be no more compilers. No more human-readable languages. No more scripting with readable code.

No more open or closed source.

Imagine taking every aspect of computing which is designed for humans to understand, and removing it, because it's redundant.

Now once removed, and once humans no longer understand on their own, imagine trying to build something independently? Imagine trying to bootstrap modern compute, without all the layers which came before?

My point is that soon, perhaps 20 years, most humans will be incapable of coding, developing, or working with compute in any way outside of an end-user role. Even those previously skilled, will now be looking at an entire kernel written in assembly.

And that's before new CPUs appear, with new assembly. New assembly, once again, not designed by or for humans to understand. And yes, current assembly is designed that way.

We are not simply looking at a bit of help here. We're looking at the entire end of every single computing job, ever. We're looking at the complete loss of control, of something which is the underpinning of our entire society. Every aspect of everything we have, runs on a chip now. Personal transport, everything in health care, everything in resource extraction, everything harvesting food through to delivery to table, all of it involves some aspect of compute.

And we soon will not comprehend nor create that underlying aspect of society.

I dunno. It all seems like the answer to the fermi paradox.

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

#497

Post by hdhdhsjsbdh »

pfdietz wrote: post #456
mynameisbilly wrote: post #420

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It’s not exactly a free choice when the built environment and infrastructure is designed around a single mode of transport. I can’t just “choose to cycle” when there are no bike paths, or “choose to walk” when things are spread out and separated by impassible freeways as to make it impossible. Look up the various ways the oil and automotive lobby has influenced city planning over the years – it might become a little more obvious who has the “free choice” here, and it’s not consumers.

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

#498

Post by HappMacDonald »

bluejay2387 wrote: post #455
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!

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

I'm curious how good AI is at these.

We have plenty of them that humans even find to be pleasant to solve, such as Minesweeper :)

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

#499

Post by mathgeek »

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.

A house is a good analogy here. You can verify that a house is built to satisfy your dream. You can't likely verify that a house won't collapse in the middle of the night or during a storm/quake/etc. Once no human understands how the house is built anymore, we will need other ways to verify that or just trust it's done right.

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

#500

Post by bcjdjsndon »

cobbzilla wrote: post #482
bcjdjsndon wrote: post #332

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Turn it off at the wall, done. next doomsday scenario please

“If you turn me off, the dead-man switch kills your kid/spouse/house/etc”

I unplugged that device as well. Stupid clankers never thought to create efficient solar tech, it just makes it too easy
Post reply on HN