Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The turbulent AI era is here

gatesnotes.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

91–100 of 262 posts

Re: The turbulent AI era is here

#91

Post by mcswell »

warkdarrior wrote: post #26
lukeschlather wrote: post #15

If AI is really that powerful, shouldn't someone like Gates be able to end hunger and homelessness with a one-time capital expenditure? Somehow "give people jobs" is the primary problem he wants to solve, not ending poverty. It borderline seems like he's most worried about maintaining the working poor as a valuable societal institution.

Gates is worth about $100B, Elon Musk about $850B. Let's call it $1T altogether. That would be at most about $115 per human on Earth (~8.5B humans). Not sure that is sufficient to "end hunger and homelessness."

Your calculation only makes sense if every one of those 8.5B humans is suffering from hunger and homelessness. Somewhere around 1 in 1000 people are homeless (https://worldmetrics.org/global-homelessness-statistics/), and 1 in 12 or so has experienced "hunger" some time in the past year (https://www.fao.org/hunger/en/). Obviously the numbers depend on how you define "homelessness" and "hunger", but in any case this multiplies the $ that could be used to help individuals by those factors. Between $1000 (hunger) and $115,000 (homelessness) may not sound like a lot, but when your yearly income is around $1000, it can mean a lot.

Re: The turbulent AI era is here

#92

Post by azan_ »

Krei-se wrote: post #85
azan_ wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Literally everywhere. I'm running a scientific project where I've got to inspect large amount of whole-body MRI segmentations. The software available on market is very clunky for doing that, so I've asked Claude to write one perfectly tailored for my use case. With all the helper functions I've asked it to implement, the software sped up reviews >4x. And I couldn't write it myself.

I agree there are usecases, but image classification is not the hype. Still - that's great, can we get a link? Or let me guess it's internal, you don't want to doxx yourself? Knowing medical software requirements, which might be there for a reason, i highly doubt this will see production.

> I agree there are usecases, but image classification is not the hype. Still - that's great, can we get a link? Or let me guess it's internal, you don't want to doxx yourself?

Why would I distribute software that's tailor made for me? I don't want to deal with headaches associated with distributing it.

> Knowing medical software requirements, which might be there for a reason, i highly doubt this will see production.

It won't, the software is not a point of my work, it's just a tool for my actual project which has nothing to do with programming (very useful tool but still - not a goal on it's own).

Re: The turbulent AI era is here

#93

Post by newspaper1 »

AndrewKemendo wrote: post #90
newspaper1 wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No because Bill Gates was hanging out with Jeffery Epstein that entire time. I also feel like people forgot his insanely evil business practices from the 80s and 90s? Bill Gates has always been one of the worst people out there. Every bit as bad as Musk. It's a big club, we're just not in it.

It’s not that big of a club actually only about 100,000 people max Carlin is God but that quote doesn’t actually make a lot of sense

I think 100k people for a club is pretty big. I interpret the Carlin quote to mean: "you're seeing a lot of people connected, you're not one of them". That the "club" is big enough that these connections regularly come up, is what I think he meant.

Re: The turbulent AI era is here

#94

Post by AndrewKemendo »

newspaper1 wrote: post #93
AndrewKemendo wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s not that big of a club actually only about 100,000 people max Carlin is God but that quote doesn’t actually make a lot of sense

I think 100k people for a club is pretty big. I interpret the Carlin quote to mean: "you're seeing a lot of people connected, you're not one of them". That the "club" is big enough that these connections regularly come up, is what I think he meant.

I think it just sounds the best for the point he was making and it makes the point well, I’m being intentionally pedantic in this space

One of Carlins hallmarks was the way he fine tuned his language, almost never was something he said on stage accidental or improv funny enough

So it’s genius in the fact that it conveys the point perfectly, while being quizzical in its formation

Re: The turbulent AI era is here

#95

Post by watwut »

AndrewKemendo wrote: post #88
watwut wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No? Nuclear never had those massive valuations. Did not hyped itself this ridiculous way. Was not forced down on everyone. And the vision of nuclear power was not "make humans obsolete". We did not had nuclearmaxxing. We did not had doomtrolling from nuclear companies.

I’m not sure what to say other than you’re entirely incorrect about all of that In fact you could probably make a strong case that the US and USSR did NuclearMaxxx It’s called the nuclear arms race/cold war and was the defining characteristic of society post WWII until 9/11

Nuclear arms race and tokenmaxxing were two differrent things. Not even nearly the same.

Re: The turbulent AI era is here

#96

Post by watwut »

pibaker wrote: post #86
watwut wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No? Nuclear never had those massive valuations. Did not hyped itself this ridiculous way. Was not forced down on everyone. And the vision of nuclear power was not "make humans obsolete". We did not had nuclearmaxxing. We did not had doomtrolling from nuclear companies.

They did in fact put radioactive elements in everyday objects back when it was first discovered. Wikipedia has a whole page of "radioactive quackery." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radioactive_quackery While nuclear power is not intrinsically anti human you can't really separate the public perception of nuclear power and that of nuclear weapons. Anti nuclear sentiment is a lot easier to understand when you realize ev…

None of that is comparable to us having ai buttom on whatsapp, camera, email, jira, vacuum cleaner, everywhere. To workers being threatened with firing if they dont burn enough tokens.

Re: The turbulent AI era is here

#97

Post by dgellow »

azan_ wrote: post #78
dgellow wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s irrelevant… I’m talking about the craze, not the technology

But that doesn't make sense. How can you evaluate if craze is warranted without evaluating underlying technology?

I’m very familiar with both technologies, but it’s not what my comment was about. The crypto craze would have been the same if we would have ended with some actual use cases for cryptocurrencies. The level of frenzy was completely out of proportion, very aggressive, with that same attitude of „we will impose something on you, change the world, you will be left behind and stay poor forever for having not been a believer“

Re: The turbulent AI era is here

#99

Post by heaney-555 »

lukeschlather wrote: post #15

If AI is really that powerful, shouldn't someone like Gates be able to end hunger and homelessness with a one-time capital expenditure? Somehow "give people jobs" is the primary problem he wants to solve, not ending poverty. It borderline seems like he's most worried about maintaining the working poor as a valuable societal institution.

>end hunger and homelessness with a one-time capital expenditure?

A significant percentage of the world's hungry live under warlords, militias and dictatorships that would simply kill anyone trying to peacefully give their subjects food.

Unless you're proposing AI military interventionism, you cannot fix this.

Homelessness on the other hand is mostly a mental health and drug addiction problem. Fixing it, in many cases, would require violating the consent/wishes of the homeless person.

The world's biggest problems, unfortunately, cannot be solved by throwing money at them. A lot of rich individuals, NGOs, and nation states have tried.

Re: The turbulent AI era is here

#100

Post by atleastoptimal »

gherkinnn wrote: post #6

All of this is truly bizarre, I hope that we can make sense of this craze in the future. Maybe it will be seen similarly to the dancing crazes of the Middle Ages.

You really think that legitimate concern about AI is equivalent to mass hysteria? Do you think AI will just stop getting better?
Post reply on HN