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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

#501

Post by bcjdjsndon »

runarberg wrote: post #425
bcjdjsndon wrote: post #402

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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

Horse and cart was used for a personal transport very rarely, by a tiny subset of the population for a minority of their trips, the vast majority of the population lived within a walking distance for the vast majority of their trips, the invention of the steam engine ruined that and suddenly people started living within a tram-ride for vast majority of their trips, and started using trains to go on longer trips they…

> and ruined the cities on a scale which the tram was previously unable to.

Industrial era London was not a utopia. Read a Dickens novel. It was a hellhole. The car also made the suburbs possible. They kill millions every year but the benefits massively outweigh it (or at least society has effectively voted for that).

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

#502

Post by reverius42 »

potatototoo99 wrote: post #281
reverius42 wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ok, how about Ladybird: https://ladybird.org/posts/adopting-rust/ > I used Claude Code and Codex for the translation. This was human-directed, not autonomous code generation. I decided what to port, in what order, and what the Rust code should look like. It was hundreds of small prompts, steering the agents where things needed to go. After the initial translation, I ran multiple passes of adversarial review, asking d…

I guess when you have 65k tests you can use an AI for transpiling, and it still seems it took an enormous amount of hand holding. That is very far from actually writing new code. But you tell me, are you a software developer? Write or have code written everyday? I am one and for me and everyone I know AI has been mostly just a (fantastic) replacement for google search.

> took an enormous amount of hand holding

There's a big difference between "not writing any code by hand" (which still might involve lots of non-manual-coding effort!), and "vibecoding", and as I understand this thread was about the former.

edit: yes, I'm a software developer, and if I have a change in mind larger than 2 lines I've been using Claude Code (with English input) rather than a text editor to do it, since about January.

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

#503

Post by edg5000 »

RandomLensman wrote: post #78
edg5000 wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The AI labs will govern, effectively if not officially. Government is anchored in power, which the labs have. We used to have the church and state rule here in Europe. In the future, A government not closely ruling with their AI labs won't have sufficient power to exist. You're unhappy about the labs; I think you're just not ready to accept their rule; you consider them nothing but scrappy startups, which they are. B…

How would the labs have power? What physical force would they command to put against any government?

If AI becomes so useful that it will be used for everything done on a computer, they'll have so much influence over everything, and be so important for society to function, that they'll have to at least work very closely with govenments. I can see that eventually evolve into de-facto ruling.

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

#504

Post by tim333 »

>the coming intelligence explosion

I don't see it. You get explosions when there's a bunch of material that can suddenly ignite or detonate.

AI progress is limited by the data centers and power supply and those are maxed out and not suddenly doubling. The intelligence gradual increase seems more likely.

I've long thought human level AI kind of inevitable, probably since Turing wrote his papers and said computers might pass his test in about 50 years. It actually took about 75 years. It's a steady and gradual process.

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

#505

Post by mynameisbilly »

pfdietz wrote: post #486
rng-concern wrote: post #481

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not just a matter of preference or proclamation. There are decades of research showing that more walkable neighborhoods are associated with higher physical activity levels, lower rates of some chronic diseases, more interaction with neighbors, and stronger feelings of community. The debate is usually about how large those effects are and whether they're worth the trade-offs, not whether the effects exist at all.

Yes, yes, totally dismiss the agency of people who inconveniently don't like what you want them to like. Their preferences mean nothing, their actions must be dictated. I'd be more angry with you if I wasn't amused at the frustration you must be feeling in failing to get traction for your dystopian vision.

Walkable neighborhoods and cities that aren't car centric being a "dystopian vision" is laughable. Thankfully, the default for car brains across much of the globe is car centric urban design.

You people never fail to be ridiculously dramatic.

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

#506

Post by mynameisbilly »

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.

Human consciousness is dictated by their material conditions, not the other way around. If the material reality of many Americans is unhealthy foods and heavily car-centric urban design, where does the "decision" to walk and take public transit come from? It is genuinely not an option for the vast majority of Americans to live in a walkable and/or public transit supported community if the infrastructure does not exist.

And this wasn't due to consumer choice, either. Decades of policy dictated the shift towards car centrism that resulted in railways and street cars being torn up, the construction of the interstate highway system and destruction of dense urban cores, zoning law mandates and parking minimums, federal subsidies for suburban mortgages, etc.

This "choice" or "decision" was manufactured by car lobbyists.

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

#507

Post by Schlagbohrer »

asdff wrote: post #446
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.

More likely is people are stripped entirely of any economic value and influence. Tribesmen struggling to survive in a mad max apocalyptic scenario while the world's money is spent and made in a business to business environment, in protected sites defended by autonomous loitering munitions that the uneducated masses attribute to god entities within a few generations of knowledge loss.

Once again Snowcrash and the Burbclaves seem prescient

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

#508

Post by Schlagbohrer »

Der_Einzige wrote: post #457
perarneng wrote: post #435

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 hund…

Does anyone else see car-collecting or yacht-collecting as an indicator that the person in question is boring as hell?

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

#509

Post by lo_zamoyski »

lukan wrote: post #491
lo_zamoyski wrote: post #485

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

I have a graduate background in philosophy. Hopefully that gives you some idea of how impressed I am by your comments.
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