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AI 2040: Plan A

ai-2040.com

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Re: AI 2040: Plan A

#391

Post by themgt »

beepbooptheory wrote: post #371
themgt wrote: post #339

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's strange to me about these comments is they're timeless. They could have been written in 2026 or 2016 or 1966. Like, afaict, for many on HN going from ELIZA->Fable 5 just didn't cause any update to priors regarding this whole philosophical question. The argument against has remained unchanged. I don't see any point in arguing about it, I just find it very strange.

Unpack this a little bit. Why is it strange or interesting to you? What specific priors need to be updated for us here? What is the philosophical questions at play for you?

To meta-unpack a little bit ... it is strange to me that Fable is far more capable of discussing these questions than apparently 99% of humans. Along with being more capable at quite a lot else than most humans.

Re: AI 2040: Plan A

#392

Post by bluefirebrand »

trollbridge wrote: post #344
bluefirebrand wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don't really think the mass loss of green spaces and third spaces is necessarily a good thing Maybe we could make them public green spaces and third spaces, instead of exclusive clubs? Many golf courses are really expensive. Golf itself is dying like you said, because it's a very expensive sport Idk. There's something like 35 golf courses where I live in Calgary and it's a city of less than 2 million people. That…

There are also 132 Tim Horton's, which aren't "necessary" either, but people like having leisure activities. One golf course per 55,000 people doesn't seem that excessive either.

If you'll indulge me some armchair research and math

According to google AI, the average square footage of a Tim Hortons generally between 1000-2300 square feet, with some older locations taking up 2500 or more.

So let's assume every one of the 132 is an older location taking up 2500 square feet. That's 330,000 square feet, or 7.57 acres

According to the same AI, the smallest golf course in Calgary is:

Lakeview Golf Course: The city's smallest 9-hole executive course covers approximately 60 acres and features mostly par-3 and par-4 holes

60 acres!

Unless my numbers or math are wrong, Literally all of the Tim Hortons in the city can fit into the footprint of the city's SMALLEST golf course

These things aren't equivalent. Come on. We can use the space for golf courses for better things. :/

Edit: That's not even accounting for the fact that a single tim hortons probably serves more people in a couple of hours than many golf courses do in the course of an entire day.

Re: AI 2040: Plan A

#393

Post by mattwiese »

Loic wrote: post #253
aarondong wrote: post #212

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…

I love to model and simulate. As the dead economy theory[0] (discussion [1]) was submitted here, I decided to simulate it. It was really hard to figure out a path "good for the humanity", in the sense of a balanced system, not a winner take all situation, etc. I think this is the reason why you have the tendency to propose some freeze-all policies, full control or similar. If you want to find the equilibrium, you nee…

Thanks for the links, I had missed those. Also:

> Our democratic systems, laws, etc. are not built to do that, they are built on the idea of intrinsic stability of our world where incremental improvements do not need cutting through what was decided before.

Without totally derailing the thread, this is also obviously why climate and biosphere collapse is not (and likely will continue not) to be addressed, e.g. Timothy Morton's Hyperobjects

Re: AI 2040: Plan A

#394

Post by 27183 »

sudb wrote: post #388
27183 wrote: post #361

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Is an implication of this that models are incapable of producing entirely novel code? No, it does not imply that at all. Google "temperature in LLMs". > what do you posit is special about what is happening when humans think? I don't. And IIUC nobody knows, but I'm not a brain scientist. There have been some wild theories over the years (recall Penrose's). I don't really have a dog in the hunt, except that probably…

> Google "temperature in LLMs". No need to condescend, I'm very aware of what temperature is for LLMs. But I'm going to push back - if you're claiming all LLMs simply do is a stochastic _search_, how can that produce novelty, in the conceptual sense? (I'm not, for example, talking about novel rearrangement of existing ideas and code) > We know enough about what an LLM does, and what a brain does, to be quite certain…

> if you're claiming all LLMs simply do is a stochastic _search_, how can that produce novelty, in the conceptual sense?

By reaching into the voids of its embedding space and returning tokens related to nonexistent semantics. Or, if you like, "hallucinating". The hallucinations which are useful we might call "novel".

> _whatever LLMs seem to be doing_ produces end results that were previously only possible through the application of human intelligence, so there must be some axis of however you define human intelligence that LLMs currently seem to display as an emergent behaviour.

I don't think that has earned its therefore. Another perfectly reasonable explanation is that LLM's output is a close enough facsimile to intelligence that if you allow yourself you can easily be fooled into thinking its intelligent. That's not the same category of thing. It's not an incremental step away from intelligence. It's a whole different animal.

Re: AI 2040: Plan A

#395

Post by yeasku »

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…

[dead]

Re: AI 2040: Plan A

#396

Post by kalkin »

taurath wrote: post #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…

> Reject the false and self-serving narratives that empathy doesn't matter, that altruism isn't "effective"

Who is this supposed to be arguing with? It sort of reads like it's trying to disparage "effective altruism", but I'm not sure.

Setting aside any of the AI stuff, I've started to find it pretty grating when people seem to imply that transferring millions of dollars from wealthy people in California and the UK to impoverished Kenyans and Rwandans, or buying malaria bednets which can save a child's life for the cost of a fancy new gaming rig, is "self-serving" or something because weirdos are doing it, while true caring for other people involves [unspecified thing that doesn't appear to ask any material sacrifice comparable to donating a large percentage of income].

Re: AI 2040: Plan A

#397

Post by dheera »

pibaker wrote: post #312
taurath wrote: post #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…

When I learned that this website is by the same people who gave us AI 2027, I immediately thought about the Wikipedia page on doomsday predictions. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_dates_predicted_for_ap... Notice the many times when a prediction failed and the so called prophet would come back in a few years and give you a new date. And they would tell you, well, this time it's real. I do find it ironic that ma…

... and then there are the actual planet-threatening astronomical events that humanity should think about ways to mitigate but I'm worried that human lifespans and capitalism prevent us from working towards mitigations. Everyone will just say "meh, 1 million years is a long time, I won't be around" and a million years will go by.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the_far_future

Re: AI 2040: Plan A

#398

Post by sudb »

27183 wrote: post #394
sudb wrote: post #388

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Google "temperature in LLMs". No need to condescend, I'm very aware of what temperature is for LLMs. But I'm going to push back - if you're claiming all LLMs simply do is a stochastic _search_, how can that produce novelty, in the conceptual sense? (I'm not, for example, talking about novel rearrangement of existing ideas and code) > We know enough about what an LLM does, and what a brain does, to be quite certain…

> if you're claiming all LLMs simply do is a stochastic _search_, how can that produce novelty, in the conceptual sense? By reaching into the voids of its embedding space and returning tokens related to nonexistent semantics. Or, if you like, "hallucinating". The hallucinations which are useful we might call "novel". > _whatever LLMs seem to be doing_ produces end results that were previously only possible through th…

> By reaching into the voids of its embedding space and returning tokens related to nonexistent semantics. Or, if you like, "hallucinating". The hallucinations which are useful we might call "novel".

This sounds to me like an admission that LLMs are not just doing a stochastic search, then.

> close enough facsimile to intelligence

What's the distinguishing criteria then? How can you tell the difference?

Re: AI 2040: Plan A

#399

Post by techpression »

derektank wrote: post #360
27183 wrote: post #336

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I used the example of 1G constant acceleration space flight in another thread which got downvoted to oblivion, but I think it's a good one. That's a technology we know how to build. We just need superconducting electronics and miniaturized fusion reactors, or a ship which is built like Project Orion to use nuclear bombs for propulsion. Now write down a blueprint for superintelligence. So I've given you two impossible…

As early as the late 19th century, Louis Pasteur’s work had inspired a belief in the scientific community that it must, in principle be possible to selectively exterminate bacteria. The German physician Paul Ehrlich expounded on this in greatest detail in 1907 when he described his “magic bullet” (or Zauberkugel) theory for effectively targeting pathogens without harming the human host, similar to the immune system.…

And now we’re desperately trying to ”upgrade” penicillin (and friends) because it doesn’t work any more in many cases. Do you think we can repeat the process or do we need something completely different?

This is why biological comparisons are weak, we talk about a few agents verifying and checking LLMs, meanwhile the world consists of almost an infinite number of the same, just operating on different time scales. I agree that with we don’t know the timescale, and we definitely don’t know if long term it will continue to work ”adding more of the same”. Throwing more penicillin at the problem sure as hell didn’t, but it looked great initially. And I’m obviously not arguing the human benefits of penicillin, just that what we thought would work forever quickly didn’t.

Re: AI 2040: Plan A

#400

Post by ewild »

gabriel-uribe wrote: post #144
Timwi wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you think humans experience desktop interfaces? “Basically just OCR'ing screenshots” is exactly what humans do.

I was also under the impression modern AI agents have moved on from just OCR'ing screenshots to leveraging native vision model capabilities.

They do. They all use ViTs and have for quite a while.
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