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AI 2040: Plan A

ai-2040.com

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Re: AI 2040: Plan A

#51

Post by 4er_transform »

joshstrange wrote: post #6

I'm sure some people will have issue with my phrasing but, honest question: Are there examples of where we have collective decided not to pursue knowledge? Successfully? I guess nuclear weapons might be the best example though research doesn't seem have to actually "stopped" as much as gone underground and we still have country trying to climb that ladder. But I don't know how relevant that is to LLMs/AI. It almost f…

While technology has empowered governments, it’s also empowered the individual, and more importantly shifted the material dynamics to better align the incentives of governments with the people. Democracy followed material change, it didn’t precede it. Democracy came about because it was optimal for a power seeking government, not out of the kindness of their heart.

A resource extraction based economy sees people as slaves. The true source of power is the resource, people are just a means to an end, so you mistreat the people as much as you can get away with in pursuit of the resource while avoiding revolt.

With stable infrastructure, the government makes far more from an educated, rich population that it can tax and use the innovation from. It’s against its own quest for power to interfere too much in the prosperity of its citizens. The incentives are aligned.

Solving the AI problem isn’t about stopping the tech or making a bunch of brittle laws. It’s always been about alignment: aligning the large AGI-like entities that are the modern state, the modern economy, representative democracy, or AGI itself, with human prosperity

Re: AI 2040: Plan A

#52

Post by po1nt »

icandoit wrote: post #32
po1nt wrote: post #14

This is whole a slippery slope. Always building on assumption of infinite exponential growth. But every exponential is at a certain point a sigmoid.

Nothing follows from this empty platitude though, right? It can't inform you choices or decisions? It's just a disempowering thought? They are buying up all the RAM today. Do you think "this is fine because in 5 years post-crash I can buy some cheap RAM"? If everyone with money is betting differently, do you have some information they don't, or is the whole economy just slipping away from you? You experience luxuries…

AI is just a tool. It will be a tool as we constantly push the requirements of what qualifies as consciousness. Therefore I'm not worried about it. Almost all the predictions about future growth of technology were incorrect. We don't have flying cars, hoverboards, fusion, the matrix and so on. The goal of each of us is to live a better life. It always be and forcing people to give up luxuries for some external agenda based on slippery slopes is cruel and selfish.

We should have been under water, hunted by AI, overpopulated, killed by terrorist, smitten by god for our sins and so on. Luckily all it took was our privacy and a lot of tax money to survive.

Re: AI 2040: Plan A

#54

Post by timmytokyo »

po1nt wrote: post #14

This is whole a slippery slope. Always building on assumption of infinite exponential growth. But every exponential is at a certain point a sigmoid.

Whenever I encounter these people I'm reminded of the meme about the baby who has doubled his weight in the three months since birth. At that growth rate, he'll weigh trillions of pounds by age 10.

Re: AI 2040: Plan A

#55

Post by gallerdude »

rayiner wrote: post #46
hollerith wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why? Is human extinction not permitted by the laws of physics?

That’s a possibility, but not the only one. The two most realistic ones are: we race ahead and maintain our status, or we slow down and open ourselves up to colonization.

I think the question “would China cooperate” needs much more investigation. Everyone online pundit seems to think “obviously not”, but they’re people too with clear positive and negative incentives. It’s possible they’ve found a very similar calculus that we have.

> “Politics is the art of the possible”

Re: AI 2040: Plan A

#57

Post by tehjoker »

4er_transform wrote: post #51
joshstrange wrote: post #6

I'm sure some people will have issue with my phrasing but, honest question: Are there examples of where we have collective decided not to pursue knowledge? Successfully? I guess nuclear weapons might be the best example though research doesn't seem have to actually "stopped" as much as gone underground and we still have country trying to climb that ladder. But I don't know how relevant that is to LLMs/AI. It almost f…

While technology has empowered governments, it’s also empowered the individual, and more importantly shifted the material dynamics to better align the incentives of governments with the people. Democracy followed material change, it didn’t precede it. Democracy came about because it was optimal for a power seeking government, not out of the kindness of their heart. A resource extraction based economy sees people as s…

This is a just so story. The main issue today is the lack of democracy in the country and the use of technology to surveil and govern a restive population as the government has less and less legitimacy. The narrative you are telling is the heroic tale of computing and the internet c. 1990-2010.

Yasha Levine wrote about how this narrative was preceded by a forgotten one where MIT students protested because the computers were going to be linked to government databases and share data on anti-Vietnam war activists. Despite protestations, activists were correct and this happened, and now it happens at huge scale.

http://yashalevine.com/surveillance-valley

Re: AI 2040: Plan A

#58

Post by tehjoker »

rayiner wrote: post #46
hollerith wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why? Is human extinction not permitted by the laws of physics?

That’s a possibility, but not the only one. The two most realistic ones are: we race ahead and maintain our status, or we slow down and open ourselves up to colonization.

Worth noting that it is the Europeans and Americans that have been colonial. Asian peoples have, with the prominent exception of the Mongols and Japanese Empire, pretty much not done that. In particular, China shut down its exploration program.

This is a settler-colonial mindset that reflects all the bad things we did onto everyone else. Notably, it's a current US ally that is most guilty of this.

Re: AI 2040: Plan A

#59

Post by nxc18 »

gallerdude wrote: post #53
kennywinker wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is chatgpt 5.6 that much smarter than chatgpt 5.0?

If you’ve done any software development at all, certainly.

Is that true or does it only feel true because they nerf the old models just before every major release?

Re: AI 2040: Plan A

#60

Post by SubiculumCode »

Sounds like another Chinese Op to me; Ensuring Chinese compliance would be incredible hard to enforce or to check.

Look, I am scared of where we are heading, but I cannot see how we can change the dilemma towards mutual cooperation unless, as humans tend to do, only react massively after something really bad happens.

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