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The Economics of Recursive Self-Improvement [pdf]
31–40 of 103 posts
Re: The Economics of Recursive Self-Improvement [pdf]
#32Earlier quoted context omitted.
> As we advance it becomes more difficult to advance I don't think this follows. We have advanced tremendously over the past 200 years, and we are likely going into a time with rapid advancement again. With advancement, we also develop tools (eg. Llms) that assist advancing.
To put it another way, the cost per advancement increases. That’s “as we advance it becomes more difficult to advance”. However, because of the prior advances, you also have more resources to throw at future advancements. So, then, the question is whether the “profits” on the last advance are enough to pay for the next one. We can define a new term, “affordability”, as what % “profit” you can expect from each advance…
You could argue that there is a capital built up - but even that is difficult as a lot of the knowledge for, eg., building LLMs can not demand rent. Everybody can build their own transformer networks.
> To put it another way, the cost per advancement increases.
This is not true when you don't use capital that demands rent. On the contrary, the cost per advancement is actually decreasing as we develop more knowledge.
LLMs are a cognitive technology (as contrasted to a communication technology). And it will help us tremendously manage knowledge such that you can utilize it better decreasing the cost of advancement.
Re: The Economics of Recursive Self-Improvement [pdf]
#33> But our models make it clear that such an [intelligence] explosion may not follow if there are diminishing returns (“ideas become harder to find”) or if feedback loops become bottlenecked. How is this not obvious to everyone? As we advance it becomes more difficult to advance. You obviously make most advancements around the things that are easiest to improve. Then all the easy things are done. So you go onto the ne…
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Re: The Economics of Recursive Self-Improvement [pdf]
#34Earlier quoted context omitted.
We could have coffee made today by automated coffee vending machines, but many people still prefer to go to a coffee shop. Why is that? Sometimes we don’t choose the cheaper automated product, and instead opt for the “human experience”. I don’t imagine this will change any time soon. Humans like being around humans.
If that is true, then, why is it that the "human experience" has been on decline for decades - since the very moment it became possible to start cutting down on it? If "humans like being around humans", why does human behavior say otherwise?
What are your KPIs there? Global concert attendence is pretty high these days, for example.
Re: The Economics of Recursive Self-Improvement [pdf]
#35I love that Sci-Fi fan-fiction is having a moment <3
Re: The Economics of Recursive Self-Improvement [pdf]
#36> But our models make it clear that such an [intelligence] explosion may not follow if there are diminishing returns (“ideas become harder to find”) or if feedback loops become bottlenecked. How is this not obvious to everyone? As we advance it becomes more difficult to advance. You obviously make most advancements around the things that are easiest to improve. Then all the easy things are done. So you go onto the ne…
>How is this not obvious to everyone?
because people have other ideas https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technological_singularity
Re: The Economics of Recursive Self-Improvement [pdf]
#37> But our models make it clear that such an [intelligence] explosion may not follow if there are diminishing returns (“ideas become harder to find”) or if feedback loops become bottlenecked. How is this not obvious to everyone? As we advance it becomes more difficult to advance. You obviously make most advancements around the things that are easiest to improve. Then all the easy things are done. So you go onto the ne…
>How is this not obvious to everyone? because people have other ideas https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technological_singularity
People have other dreams, and have written about them in science fiction. But science fiction can just handwave away resource problems that exist in real life so that the plot can happen.
Just as the popular "grey goo" nanomachine disaster can easily be shown to be impossible due to resource imbalances and energy shortages, AI recursive self improvements rapidly slows down due to problems with complexity, training data and compute availability (whether due to actual processors or just due to energy demands).
Re: The Economics of Recursive Self-Improvement [pdf]
#38NB this is about AI, not about improving your self
Re: The Economics of Recursive Self-Improvement [pdf]
#39Earlier quoted context omitted.
That would be a failure of imagination when it comes to everything secretaries actually do. Which is a problem with the idea that AI is coming for all our jobs anytime soon. It totally undersells everything humans do on the job.
I think humans totally oversell just how special "everything they do on the job" is. "No, you don't get it, it's me specifically who has a job that's way too special to be automated away!"
Nobody has a job that can be fully automated away. Instead, they might lose their job to automation when some non-automatable parts can be done by fewer people and the remaining non-automatable parts can be made optional and the resulting cost savings are enough to pay for a machine to do the automatable parts.
Lots of tasks that could be automated with current technology aren't, simply because there's a non-automatable task that requires a baseline labor force (e.g. widget maker gets jammed once in a while, need someone nearby to remove the jammed widget and restart the machine) which then becomes essentially free when used for ancillary tasks (e.g. sealing boxes full of widgets, which also draws attention to drops in widget output volume). And sometimes humans are simply the cheaper option.
No doubt many people will lose their jobs to AI, and others will have to accept wage cuts to compete with the falling cost of automation, but that doesn't necessarily mean the AI is doing the humans' job now, or that none of the original workforce stays.
Re: The Economics of Recursive Self-Improvement [pdf]
#40Earlier quoted context omitted.
How do the markets know it's intelligent allocation before RSI is actually a thing? What makes those companies immune to failure?
them having an actual product with huge demand makes them immune Just like Tesla was immune from all the naysayers which were saying its a highly unprofitable company which will 100% go bankrupt because its economics dont make any sense, and they lost huge amounts of money shorting the stock
Tesla is profitable, but income per share has been very low relative to share price. People who were short Tesla weren't necessarily betting on a bankruptcy, just that shareholders wouldn't put up with the low ROI for much longer. And depending on exactly when they shorted it, they might've actually made a profit.
In contrast, AI companies that are actually unprofitable are dependent on continuously raising additional money to sustain their operations, so a sudden drop in market confidence could become a self-fulfilling prophecy as it makes it more difficult to raise money which makes the business more risky which decreases market confidence in a downward spiral.
An actual product with huge demand is not enough to avert bankruptcy, you also need to serve that demand profitably (like Tesla does).