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AI 2040: Plan A

ai-2040.com

261–270 of 567 posts

Re: AI 2040: Plan A

#261

I would not like to be dismissive, but to me this article feels like an exercise in creative writing rather than a report to be taken seriously. The entire experience feels like a choose your own adventure game, seems like their stylistic intent. I am not sure if alternative reality fiction is the best way to approach real and serious AI risks. I am also not sure, with the amount of emdashes and the style of prose, t…

> Because AI represents the distillation of the very best human knowledge and expertise. You say it like it's a fact, but in reality everyone sees the phenomenon of AI slop. P.S. Information search and retrieval if the best and most direct way to use LLMs.

> everyone sees the phenomenon of AI slop

Just purely organic YouTube Comments circa early '20s alone surely outslop any "AI" by a giant margin.

Everyone sees the markers, and it's a hot topic. There are maybe a thousand from-scratch trained models, and just few mainstream ones produce most of human-targeted content. In today's world, no surprise everyone knows the common patterns of those. That sloppy landscape is not just load-bearing em-dashes — it's a humble testament to their reinforcement learning.

Humans produce tons of texts, with all sorts of nonsense in it, without thinking it through. Our slop is just a lot more diverse. And mostly just spoken out loud.

> P.S. Information search and retrieval if the best and most direct way to use LLMs.

Yes, but not directly, if they don't know something they tend to hallucinate like mad, even today. YMMV, but in my experience they work best as actual "cheap" reasoning for building queries and checking out search engine results. Even if they misinterpret some result, more and more results will still steer it towards correct conclusions and it can point at some results that relate well enough to be useful.

Re: AI 2040: Plan A

#262
Here's my prediction. Plot the publication dates of Daniel et al.'s two existing works and future ones against the years in the titles, and you'll get a hockey stick curve.

Fascinating reads, Daniel! Keep 'em coming!

Re: AI 2040: Plan A

#263

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…

> shifted the material dynamics to better align the incentives of governments with the people

... recently, as in the last 10 years?

Re: AI 2040: Plan A

#264

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…

If you read the scenario, you'll see that the regulations are mostly about what people can do with giant compute clusters, and not about the ideas themselves. The ideas themselves are required to be totally transparent to the public. As for historic precedents: Human cloning, human genome editing, and mirror life seem like one precedent; nuclear weapons and nuclear energy another; come to think of it I think drone de…

Human cloning and genetic editing isn't stalled because we agreed it's unethical. It's not pursued because at the current level of advancements, it's pretty useless. The things we can do there are niche. It's easy to ban something that's not very useful.

If we had a way to make gene edited humans a lot smarter, a lot stronger or live a lot longer? Or a way to quick-grow human bodies to adulthood in a couple years? Capabilities that private actors or countries may want, ethics be damned? That would be closer to what we have with AI right now.

Re: AI 2040: Plan A

#265
Remember people. We didn’t die form the 2k bug. We didn’t die when the Maya calendar ran out. We didn’t die from that asteroid or the other. Spreading fear is a very old pastime. How is to say AI won’t hit a wall in 6 months and we’re left with barley passable code parrots forever?

Re: AI 2040: Plan A

#266

It's telling that even Plan A describes a world I don't want to live in. One where humans are increasingly pushed to the periphery to make room for data centers and the human population is subsumed by robots. Who is this future serving? Not me. Fuck this.

I’m not a booster by any stretch but I had a more positive read. To me it seems to describe a post scarcity society where ultimately the data centres are in e.g. the middle of the ocean and the robots’ labour replaces ours while still leaving us with the rewards.

I am extremely skeptical about whether this is even possible and even less convinced it’s a likely scenario but it seems like a good path.

Re: AI 2040: Plan A

#267
This is religious fervor folks, as AI 2027 was.

I grew up in evangelical christianity, and to them the end of the world is just around the corner, the same way it has been since I was a small child and likely will be when we are all gone. This isn't science. This isn't hypothesis experiment record results. This is very expensive astrology, shiny rock collecting, ritualistic meaning-making and self-justification.

Yall, with your incredible wealth and resources you could do real good in this world and make society better, healthier, better educated, and the whole world more equal, just, and reduce the desperation and suffering. Reject the false and self-serving narratives that empathy doesn't matter, that altruism isn't "effective". You can change a person's whole life in a moment.

Re: AI 2040: Plan A

#268

This is religious fervor folks, as AI 2027 was. I grew up in evangelical christianity, and to them the end of the world is just around the corner, the same way it has been since I was a small child and likely will be when we are all gone. This isn't science. This isn't hypothesis experiment record results. This is very expensive astrology, shiny rock collecting, ritualistic meaning-making and self-justification. Yall…

It's nuts how well "Superintelligence: The Idea That Eats Smart People"[0] aged. That talk is a decade old by now and still hits just as hard as it did back then, despite the incredible advances made in AI in the meantime.

[0] https://idlewords.com/talks/superintelligence.htm

Re: AI 2040: Plan A

#270
post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What about it is not coherent?

It's not clear that "super intelligence" is a meaningful concept. This presumes that our concept of intelligence can continue to grow beyond human capacity as opposed to asymptotically approaching what humans recognize as "very intelligent". Perhaps, for instance, how we evaluate intelligence is bounded not by some quantitative capacity but rather our inability to agree on basic concepts/values. And do we even have t…

The Orthogonality Thesis (by Nick Bostrom) says that intelligence and ultimate goals are independent. Those non-instrumental goals can’t be stupid nor right or wrong. Increasing intelligence will not change the goals only the capability to reach them.
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