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AI 2040: Plan A

ai-2040.com

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Re: AI 2040: Plan A

#461

Post by johnfn »

romanhounds wrote: post #368
MichaelDickens wrote: post #366

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would rather see you engage with the substance of the article rather than skipping right to insulting the authors. I don't think this sort of comment is up to the standard I have come to expect from HN.

> I intend to donate (at least) 20% of my lifetime income to effective charities. I publish my donations on my Donations page. From your bio I suspect you're already in the cult.

When your best counter-argument is “you donate money to charity” you have to start wondering if you’re on the bad side and not the good side.

Re: AI 2040: Plan A

#462

Post by themgt »

notahacker wrote: post #440
themgt wrote: post #391

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It doesn't seem at all strange to me that a chatbot trained by true believers in an AI singularity and the importance of safety guardrails will give more satisfying answers to true believers in an AI singularity and the importance of safety guardrails than talking to humans who might ask questions they're not prepared to answer (or might say nasty sceptical things or just not seem interested) As for "updating priors"…

OK. Anyhow ... if there's a cognitive task you are personally superior to Fable at, let us know.

Re: AI 2040: Plan A

#463

Post by MaybiusStrip »

bwanab wrote: post #456
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…

The other thing about this article is that it contains falsifiable claims that are, well, false. Consider the following direct quote: "The 2028 election cycle is heated, as usual. AI is the biggest topic." No poll of the American public has AI as one of the top concerns except in polls where the question is specifically about AI. The general polls show topics like healthcare costs, inflation/affordability, government…

The current year is 2026. I think it's quite likely AI will make the top 3 by then. Putting this on my calendar.

Re: AI 2040: Plan A

#464

Post by coffeefirst »

munificent wrote: post #129
coffeefirst wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Everyone lives in a world deeply affected by social media. Even if you've never looked at a screen your entire life, you have spent thousands of hours talking to and being informed by people who did.

World, yes, as people around you including politicians and businessmen have had their brains pickled.

But I doubt the influence. I’ve been free for years, and I can always spot who’s spends a lot of time in TikTok/Twitter/Instagram—it’s like talking to someone from another planet. It mostly sounds weird and sad, more apt to annoy and alienate their friends than inform or influence them.

Re: AI 2040: Plan A

#465

Post by offnominal »

bwanab wrote: post #456
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…

The other thing about this article is that it contains falsifiable claims that are, well, false. Consider the following direct quote: "The 2028 election cycle is heated, as usual. AI is the biggest topic." No poll of the American public has AI as one of the top concerns except in polls where the question is specifically about AI. The general polls show topics like healthcare costs, inflation/affordability, government…

> falsifiable claims that are, well, false

Oh, I didn't realize it was 2028 already!

Re: AI 2040: Plan A

#466

Post by MaybiusStrip »

romanhounds wrote: post #383
fwipsy wrote: post #381

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I remember thinking exactly the same thing around 5-7 years ago, in the GPT-2/GPT-3 era. "Oh sure they can produce semi-coherent output, but truly intelligent behavior is still far away. This isn't science fiction, they're just falling prey to Pascal's Mugging same as my religious friends did." Now I'm not so sure. I give the AI safety subculture as a whole a lot of credit for putting it on my radar back when it was…

>Given that you apparently share their goals (a better world,) isn't it worth at least hearing them out on their methods? Their methods are about convincing others that things that enrich and empower themselves at the expense of others is "improving the world". This isn't the stance of serious people who want to improve the world.

Which one of the authors of the website are you referring to?

Re: AI 2040: Plan A

#467

Post by jsnider3 »

The time for an AI pause has passed. Asking people not to race to the finish line is reasonable when the finish line is very far away and people don't know where it is, but not when it's the obvious next step on their current path.

Re: AI 2040: Plan A

#468

Post by ACCount37 »

fragmede wrote: post #298
ACCount37 wrote: post #264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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? Ca…

It's not useless. We know enough about DNA to be able to make better humans, but people get real squickly real fast when you talk about that. It has stalled because of that. If we go in and just check the DNA for Downs or Parkinson's, we can't have a conversation on aborting the foetus without religious beliefs coming into play. Designer children aren't a thing, despite the ability to edit DNA to do specific things.…

Marginally better humans. And IVF paired with embryo selection is very competitive in that niche.

Now, we're getting better at predicting polygenic traits, and we're getting beefy multi-edit pipelines that might provide a meaningful advantage over embryo selection working in multiple animals. But as of yet, the advantage of genetic editing in humans over just doing aggressive IVF and dredging the embryos for desirable traits is minor.

Bit of a chicken and egg problem there. Can't advance the tech fast without actively using it, can't actively use the tech until it's advanced enough for the benefits to override ethical concerns. So it's getting there, but at a glacial pace.

Re: AI 2040: Plan A

#469

Post by 27183 »

sudb wrote: post #451
27183 wrote: post #437

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To say that LLMs' existence is evidence for emergent phenomena in LLMs is tautological. I'm merely suggesting if you want to make a claim about emergence it would be best, especially in absence of a convincing theory, to demonstrate it experimentally. Otherwise probably better not to claim it's actually happening.

> To say that LLMs' existence is evidence for emergent phenomena in LLMs is tautological. This is not at all what I was saying. I think you've already conceded that LLMs demonstrate emergent behaviour but you dismissed it as a "close enough facsimile to intelligence". I was saying that the emergent behaviour is reliably replicable, in response to your following statement: > Figure out how to make it happen reliably a…

> I think you've already conceded that LLMs demonstrate emergent behaviour

No. Please don't put words in my mouth. What I said is that an LLM compresses a bunch of information into a semantic embedding space and then does sort of a stochastic search in that embedding space. Any similarity to "intelligence" is accidental. You may look at the results of that process and "see" thinking or reasoning or something, but it ain't there.

> "intelligence" ... agentic ... usefulness

I don't think LLMs need to be intelligent to be (at least narrowly) useful. No more than random forests or genetic algorithms do at least.

[edit] Look, this has devolved to the point where it's no longer productive to continue. If you're going to state things like this as fact, there's really nothing more I can do here:

> emergent behaviour is reliably replicable

Go collect your Nobel prize then! This is no longer a discussion grounded in reality.

Re: AI 2040: Plan A

#470

Post by bwanab »

MaybiusStrip wrote: post #463
bwanab wrote: post #456

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The other thing about this article is that it contains falsifiable claims that are, well, false. Consider the following direct quote: "The 2028 election cycle is heated, as usual. AI is the biggest topic." No poll of the American public has AI as one of the top concerns except in polls where the question is specifically about AI. The general polls show topics like healthcare costs, inflation/affordability, government…

The current year is 2026. I think it's quite likely AI will make the top 3 by then. Putting this on my calendar.

Yes, I can't predict the future, but if it were a bet on Kalshi I'd be willing to put my money on the AI won't make the list side.
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