This is from the "AI 2027"[1] people.
AI 2040: Plan A
81–90 of 567 posts
Re: AI 2040: Plan A
#82Earlier quoted context omitted.
> we’d be allowing a gap to open up that would make the difference between colonial europe and colonized Asia/Africa look trivial. An easy choice to make if the alternative is everyone dying instead.
But is it? Is there any realistic world where we need ASI for human survival?
Yes, this one. Look at our governance; look at our coordination-at-scale; look at our collective problem solving. It's abysmal, beyond hope. If we have global scale problems, we are not capable of solving them effectively. We are literally not intelligent enough to handle the problems we are creating. Between rivers of garbage and CO2 levels and war, we have proven ourselves to be woefully unintelligent at the scale needed. If we are lucky, our thin window of survival depends on getting a hell of a lot smarter, real quick.
Consider this: All that hardware that's going into those datacentres right now? In 5 years or so it'll all be on the secondary market... an influx of cheaper compute like you've never seen.
Re: AI 2040: Plan A
#83NYT reported today that Russia and China are funding anti-datacenter and anti-ai hysteria on western social media. Always easier to boost something already existing on social media than manufacture it themselves, then wildly blow it out of proportion to make it seem urgent and important.
There are 22 golf courses within a 30 minute drive from me, and people here a losing their minds over datacenter water usage...
People have a dozen reasons to refuse data centers being built in their communities and zero reasons to encourage it. They're little more than post-industrial mines that take limited resources (power, land, water, quiet) from a community, sell them for profit as compute, and siphon those profits away onto the books of far-flung megacorps with no community reward.
Meanwhile, golf courses are a traditional green space where people in a community gather for both work and leisure. They're not ideal themselves, but they at least provide some benefit against which their negatives can be weighed.
If all you hear from critics of data center building is water use complaints, that's strictly because you've chosen not to listen to people.
Re: AI 2040: Plan A
#84I'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…
The 1972 Biological Weapons Convention? Probably partly successful.
The Soviet Union systematically ignored the BWC. There's tons of evidence.
Re: AI 2040: Plan A
#85I found the AI 2027 paper to be overly optimistic, but not wholly fantastical. This paper feels wildly speculative, and relies on premises I am not confident even pass surface reasoning. Even under optimistic conditions, we are not going to see robots "capable of 95% of all cognitive and physical tasks" by 2035. Nor do I think a 74% unemployment rate is even remotely possible. Economic collapse would implode AI devel…
The "and physical" is the part I'm particularly skeptical of. Sure, drones are scary, but nobody's really solved getting a robot to deliver a package to your front porch in a civilian setting, and it seems unlikely to be solved quickly.
A lot of it relies on what is effectively "the AI will be so smart it can solve anything" magic.
Re: AI 2040: Plan A
#86Sounds 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.
I recommend actually reading their recommendation, because they get into the weeds about precisely how the US and China could address this in a trustless/auditable way. The TL;DR is that basically all of the relevant compute can be tracked. Edit: Also, definitely not a Chinese op. The authors are prominent Americans, and are the folks responsible for the AI 2027 forecast that has pretty accurately predicted the curre…
I doubt we can even track all of the chip production capacity.
Re: AI 2040: Plan A
#87Earlier quoted context omitted.
Is that true or does it only feel true because they nerf the old models just before every major release?
I remember being blown away by o1-o3 family of models finally stringing together coherent agentic tool calls to write and execute scripts semi-reliably for workloads in the several minutes before they would start hallucinating/flailing. GPT 5 was a bit ahead of that, but barely Now we take for granted that the latest models can juggle between multiple browser tabs, applications, databases, simulators, docker etc to w…
Yes, and we haven't even really begun to nail down computer-use agents yet (can you believe they're still basically just OCR'ing screenshots?)
Once we have something that experiences a desktop interface more like a human does, an entire swathe of tooling that has heretofore been nigh-impossible to automate moves into the fold, and that'll be another explosion of folks finally getting to join the agentic workflow world on their industry specific apps...
Re: AI 2040: Plan A
#88NYT reported today that Russia and China are funding anti-datacenter and anti-ai hysteria on western social media. Always easier to boost something already existing on social media than manufacture it themselves, then wildly blow it out of proportion to make it seem urgent and important.
These campaigns have historically amplified conflict. They do not care what the conflict is about.
But unlike some of the others, I’m hearing anti-AI sentiment from a wide range of people who don’t even use social media.
Re: AI 2040: Plan A
#89This is dangerously naive and misguided. They claim to want to avoid centralization of control but propose a world police state of AI regulation. Governments exerting this much control will only end in war and tyranny.
If the production, and distribution of the tech is confined to one or two companies, then those two companies and the resulting power that comes to them, makes them the de facto world government. (Democratic choice may be a farce but it is a useful friction on net.) If they own all the RAM, models, and the means to do any work, then you are at their mercy. They will buy all the RAM, leaving you none, then all the tra…
> If the production, and distribution of the tech is confined to one or two companies
We already have at least 5 companies only in the US. Your whole premise is false.
Re: AI 2040: Plan A
#90NYT reported today that Russia and China are funding anti-datacenter and anti-ai hysteria on western social media. Always easier to boost something already existing on social media than manufacture it themselves, then wildly blow it out of proportion to make it seem urgent and important.
These campaigns have historically amplified conflict. They do not care what the conflict is about. But unlike some of the others, I’m hearing anti-AI sentiment from a wide range of people who don’t even use social media.
All news is influenced by what’s popular social media these days. And that becomes part of what people talk about through the grapevine.
But no doubt there’s plenty of organic NIMBYism, anti tech growth stuff, and run of the mill fear of change and loss of control as society grows more abstract/centralized.