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Intelligence Is Not the Main Bottleneck

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Re: Intelligence Is Not the Main Bottleneck

#111

Post by dinfinity »

MerrimanInd wrote: post #58

Climate change is another big problem that frontier AI labs have handwaved away as being "solvable" by AGI. The premise that a pure superintelligence could hand us a plan to beat climate change that's so good and airtight that A) it would definitely work and B) people would execute it. But there have been entire books written about the fact that right now we have the technology to drastically curtail climate change a…

> But there have been entire books written about the fact that right now we have the technology to drastically curtail climate change and yet they're under utilized because of a complicated and murky set of political, social, and systemic reasons.

This is not true. That is to say: "under utilized" is a far cry from "we could solve climate change easily if only the people of the world worked together". There are huge technical issues in production capacity, lack of energy storage solutions, etc.

As for AGI solving climate change:

AGI might be able to come up with cheap, low-problem and easy to build fusion reactors or something similar. You can bet your bottom that any party that gets access to such tech would build a shitton of those if only to make a bunch of money. Just look at the proliferation of solar panels: they are simple, easy to produce, and profitable. Tons of places, including very 'anti-green' places like Texas install loads and loads of the things.

You'd still need to sequester a bunch of additional carbon to properly reverse damage done, but with practically infinite cheap energy a lot of processes to do so suddenly become viable.

Re: Intelligence Is Not the Main Bottleneck

#112

Post by drivebyhooting »

KPGv2 wrote: post #106
drivebyhooting wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my city I call a handyman to fix my dryer and guess what? He uses chatGPT to help him through the issue. $350 Beyond a basic amount of manual dexterity and familiarity with mechanical things, AI can absolutely help guide an untrained person through the job. How about medical research? Endless hours of pipetting. Does it really take a phd? It takes someone with conscientiousness and care. Both things an AI overlord…

> In my city I call a handyman to fix my dryer and guess what? He uses chatGPT to help him through the issue. $350 Well it sounds like you made a mistake calling for help when it's apparently that easy.

And changing your car oil is easy. Vacuuming and dusting the house is easy. Many easy things.

Too many for me to do all.

Re: Intelligence Is Not the Main Bottleneck

#113

Post by mncharity »

nzach wrote: post #101
mncharity wrote: post #82

> right about everything else I suggest people greatly underestimate how localized expertise is. How very rapidly someone's expertise deteriorates as you move away from some focus, from the usually-very-narrow region where that expertise is externally nurtured. A snark characterization of that region being, the issues where someone badly fears getting something wrong , and by that being embarrassed in front of the pe…

>I suggest groupthink is a critically important aspect of most human behavior. And yet somehow, we rarely manage to discuss this, and are repeatedly surprised by it. I'm unclear on why. Isn't that just a manifestation of the 'Blind spot' from Johari Window? In general it is really hard to think about the things you already internalized.

Perhaps not when it's a failure to consider groupthink in others?

I don't often see something very vaguely like "Financial folks are anticipating X, but as a community they don't have a great track record of anticipating, err, the internal politics of . So for that part we'll turn to ... , though that community's grasp off financial context has often been weak." etc. Systemic variations in the capabilities of communities, being systematically acknowledged and addressed, in the context of public analysis and discourse.

Re: Intelligence Is Not the Main Bottleneck

#114

Post by sophrosyne42 »

Veedrac wrote: post #54

Indeed. Humans and not other apes reached the moon by our great proclivity to long distance running, through our exceptional sweat glands... ah, wait. How is it possible to live in the world around us and not see, apparent and transparent, that intelligence is the lever on which everything rests? Humans are surprisingly weird animals, but it's not our hairlessness or our fairly average propensity to violence that did…

I love when tech bros think they can make up a new groundbreaking theory about a topic, in this case economics, they demonstrate zero knowledge in. You're definitely projecting on the confusion point

Re: Intelligence Is Not the Main Bottleneck

#115

Post by MerrimanInd »

signatoremo wrote: post #103
MerrimanInd wrote: post #58

Climate change is another big problem that frontier AI labs have handwaved away as being "solvable" by AGI. The premise that a pure superintelligence could hand us a plan to beat climate change that's so good and airtight that A) it would definitely work and B) people would execute it. But there have been entire books written about the fact that right now we have the technology to drastically curtail climate change a…

> AI labs have handwaved away as being "solvable" by AGI Mind sharing who at AI labs saying this?

> "Although it will happen incrementally, astounding triumphs – fixing the climate, establishing a space colony, and the discovery of all of physics – will eventually become commonplace."

https://ia.samaltman.com/

Re: Intelligence Is Not the Main Bottleneck

#116

Post by sgt101 »

14u2c wrote: post #110
sgt101 wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As far as I know humans with the same sort of brains as your brain and my brain have existed for 100,000's of years, perhaps as long as 2 million years. They did not go to the moon. They did not make mechanisms, they did not make pottery, they did not smelt iron, they did not press shapes onto clay and leave it in houses that burned down, they did not have houses. All of that has come in the last 12,000 years. I thin…

>So if they were so smart, why didn't they go to the moon? Because the requisite amount of iterations for their/our level of intelligence had not yet occurred. After a 100 billion lifetimes or so we got there. Presumably entities with greater intelligence would require fewer iterations.

In what way do you mean iterations - what's your model for iteration as a mechanism for iterating intelligence? Do you mean that intelligence improves with every generation?

Re: Intelligence Is Not the Main Bottleneck

#117

Post by Lutger »

bitwize wrote: post #80
Lutger wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Robots being able to perform any task a human can do, physically, doesn't seem that far off. They would be powered by AI of course. The question is: do we still have to work? If not, who will take all the wealth? We thought the washing machine would have giving us so much free time, because it used to take a full day a week. Instead, we only got more frantic it seems and started putting in more labor. But what will h…

Appliances like the washing machine literally killed the market for "hired help" in the anglosphere. In-house servants used to be relatively common among the middle and upper classes; with the aid of electrical appliances, the time/money costs of doing the laundry, dishes, and so forth went down so far that only the very rich care to hire servants as a mark of status.

Yes, but that didn't translate to 'lots of free time'. We went on to do other stuff, like fast food, advertisement, entertainment, financial work, etc.

Re: Intelligence Is Not the Main Bottleneck

#118

Post by bsenftner »

bsenftner wrote: post #48

Well, let me just throw in it is our communication skills, or lack of them, that is our main bottleneck. That goes for pretty much everything humans do, and everything we fail trying to do: it is the quality of those engaged and their communications that is the critical aspect determining success or failure.

And this is why humanity is so filled with failure, the skill of effective communication is not recognized nor respected. It is literally providing the information for others to follow one, and that necessity is unrecognized?

Re: Intelligence Is Not the Main Bottleneck

#119

Post by bluGill »

RandomLensman wrote: post #53
bluGill wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I could build a house. With zero experience you can find a job in house building as they will pay you to learn on the job (depending on the economy you might or might not be able to find such a job today, in good years they will hire anyone who isn't disabled - but there are bad years). Many people who have never had a construction job build their own house (only a tiny %, but that is still a lot of people) I suppose…

Not sure how easy it is to create a connection to the main power grid without the required credentials.

Too late to edit, but I remembered overnight. The rule everyplace where I've been is the meter box and all the wires coming out of the box are owned by the customer. The meter and all the wires leading into the meter are the utilities. Creating the connection is easy in the best case: you hook up the wires from the meter box to what ever on your end, then call the utility to do their end.

That is the best case. Every place I've ever lived requires an inspection in between. A few places the law won't allow me to do any of this work because I don't have credentials (even though I've done it all in other places and passed inspection - I'm not even allowed to try)

Re: Intelligence Is Not the Main Bottleneck

#120

Post by 14u2c »

sgt101 wrote: post #116
14u2c wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>So if they were so smart, why didn't they go to the moon? Because the requisite amount of iterations for their/our level of intelligence had not yet occurred. After a 100 billion lifetimes or so we got there. Presumably entities with greater intelligence would require fewer iterations.

In what way do you mean iterations - what's your model for iteration as a mechanism for iterating intelligence? Do you mean that intelligence improves with every generation?

I mean iterating to build the technology required to visit the moon, starting way back with fire and a stick. No different than an LLM iterating to build software. As you said human fluid intelligence has likely not changed significantly.
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