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AI 2040: Plan A

ai-2040.com

281–290 of 567 posts

Re: AI 2040: Plan A

#281

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…

To interpret charitably, I guess we could solve this for religion = technological development so advanced as to be indistinguishable from magic. It's been done in some Star Trek episodes I think.

Re: AI 2040: Plan A

#282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FWIW the burning of the library of Alexandria, and, indeed, its status as "the only collection of written knowledge" are myths.

Did it not burn? Was it not the most extensive library of human writing at that time? Please help us all understand. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Library_of_Alexandria

From the article you link:

> Scholars have interpreted Cassius Dio's wording to indicate that the fire did not actually destroy the entire Library itself, but rather one or more Library warehouses near the docks.[87][81][8][89] Whatever damage Caesar's fire may have caused, evidently the Library was not completely destroyed.[87][81][8][89][3] The geographer Strabo (c. 63 BC – c. 24 AD) mentions visiting the Mouseion, the larger research institution to which the Library was attached, in around 20 BC, several decades after Caesar's fire, indicating that it either survived the fire or was rebuilt soon afterwards.[87][8] Nonetheless, Strabo's manner of talking about the Mouseion shows that it was nowhere near as prestigious as it had been a few centuries prior. It is unknown whether this was due to historical decline or catastrophic destruction.[8] Despite mentioning the Mouseion, Strabo does not mention the Library separately, perhaps indicating that it had been so drastically reduced in stature and significance that Strabo felt it did not warrant separate mention.[8] It is unclear what happened to the Mouseion after Strabo's mention of it.[60]

> Further evidence for the Library's survival after 48 BC comes from the fact that the most notable producer of composite commentaries during the late first century BC and early first century AD was a scholar who worked in Alexandria named Didymus Chalcenterus, whose epithet Χαλκέντερος (Chalkénteros) means "bronze guts".[90][87] Didymus is said to have produced somewhere between 3,500 and 4,000 books, making him the most prolific known writer in all of antiquity.[90][82] He was also given the nickname βιβλιολάθης (Biblioláthēs), meaning "book-forgetter" because it was said that even he could not remember all the books he had written.[90][91] Parts of some of Didymus' commentaries have been preserved in the forms of later extracts and these remains are modern scholars' most important sources of information about the critical works of the earlier scholars at the Library of Alexandria.[90] Lionel Casson states that Didymus' prodigious output "would have been impossible without at least a good part of the resources of the library at his disposal".[87]

Re: AI 2040: Plan A

#284

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…

To interpret charitably, I guess we could solve this for religion = technological development so advanced as to be indistinguishable from magic. It's been done in some Star Trek episodes I think.

It has a lot of the properties of magic. You can put on quite a magic show with a trillion dollars.

Re: AI 2040: Plan A

#285

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

This is hilariously true

> AI risk is string theory for computer programmers. It's fun to think about, interesting, and completely inaccessible to experiment given our current technology. You can build crystal palaces of thought, working from first principles, then climb up inside them and pull the ladder up behind you. People who can reach preposterous conclusions from a long chain of abstract reasoning, and feel confident in their truth, are the wrong people to be running a culture.

I understand how people running in the same scene fall into the echo chamber effect and get gulped into the cult, but why does everybody want to be a prophet?

Re: AI 2040: Plan A

#286
post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You should consider why the best ally to your position is misinformation.

This is not the gotcha you think it is. Misinformation plays to all manner of political issues and sides.

I don't think it's a gotcha at all, they openly said it and were pondering how that might help them. Misinformation plays more to sides that are wrong about more things, and I don't consider misinformation my ally in anything.

Re: AI 2040: Plan A

#287

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Do note that the orthogonality thesis is a hypothesis, not something we have demonstrated. Weak versions of it (e.g. it is possible to have an intelligent agent with arbitrary goals) are more likely to be true than stronger versions (e.g. intelligent agents we build will have goals uniformly selected from the space of all possible goals).

Re: AI 2040: Plan A

#288

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

This is hilariously true > AI risk is string theory for computer programmers. It's fun to think about, interesting, and completely inaccessible to experiment given our current technology. You can build crystal palaces of thought, working from first principles, then climb up inside them and pull the ladder up behind you. People who can reach preposterous conclusions from a long chain of abstract reasoning, and feel co…

Being a prophet is probably great until you suddenly find yourself building a fortified compound in Waco, Texas and purchasing black market full auto machine guns.

Re: AI 2040: Plan A

#289
post #272

The biggest issue with 2027 was that it didn't understand the economy. For AI2027 to be real, the money has to come from somewhere to carry on building the economy. If >10% of the workers suddenly become unemployed, and the rest taking paycuts, then money supply dries up. (unless central banks do something, but then that can be highly inflationary) Without massive amounts of investment, AI development stops dead. In…

Worse, there's actually a very detailed supplement about their economic modeling: https://ai-2040.com/supplements/economics-of-plan-a Which predicts that explosive growth of robot production will lead to problems such as > a deflationary debt spiral, where the AI and robot companies can’t pay back loans in dollars because the robots and AIs are worth nominally less than the loans written the year before. In other wor…

Oh I missed that, its more batshit than I had imagined.

Re: AI 2040: Plan A

#290

I wish the authors of the article spent more time studying how LLM works before writing a doomsday scenario. Currently no matter how impressive LLMs are, they are just token auto complete machines. It cannot invent or think anything new which is not in its training dataset.

Are you trolling? OpenAI's models resolved the Cycle Double Conjecture yesterday, which has been an open problem for 50 years.

Do you even know what Cycle Double Conjecture is? Or what even a conjecture means in general? It’s a perfect use case for autocomplete with existing knowledge
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