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The turbulent AI era is here

gatesnotes.com

101–110 of 223 posts

Re: The turbulent AI era is here

#101

Does anyone else feel incredibly nostalgic for the time when Bill Gates and Warren Buffet were the richest people on earth? I remember feeling pretty good about the fact that they were trying to do so much good, and about the giving pledge. Things feel so different now.

And what did they achieve?

It was mostly PR. Gates and Buffet were (and are) rich, but their money simply does not come close to the scale needed to fix the world's problems.

Gates is worth $110 billion. Global GDP is $126 trillion.

Re: The turbulent AI era is here

#102

I feel this is merely stating the obvious. It goes back to the industrial revolution and every revolution before and after. There was a point where they thought a majority of people would be working as switchboard operators and then telephone switching came along. Horses to cars, etc. Jobs transition, new space is created, people are caught in tbe crossfire of supply and demand curves. Incan agree the bullwhip of thi…

> When the data fed into an AI model is based on real data you can get predictability. When the AI inputs start coming from the AI outputs the wobble is introduced which results inevitably into delirium.

This is asserted without evidence. There is absolutely no proof that AI requires humans in the loop to function or improve itself.

Compare it with Deepmind's go-playing program, AlphaGo, which mainly involved training a neural network on a large database of high-level human games. It defeated one of the top-ranked players in the world, Lee Sedol, but arguably it was drawing from human experience just like you described.

But it didn't stop there. After that, Deepmind developed AlphaGo Zero, a version that was trained exclusively through self-play, with no human feedback in the loop. That's what you would call "AI inputs coming from AI outputs" but it didn't have the result of “resulting in delirium”: instead, it became orders of magnitudes stronger than the original version (which it defeated in a 100 to 0 competition after 3 days of training).

This shows that AI can improve itself without having access to any human knowledge, and indeed transcend human performance by orders of magnitudes. There is absolutely nothing to suggest that general AI cannot improve itself the same way.

People who claim otherwise are engaging in wishful thinking; they just assert their conclusion, but have no rational arguments to back it up.

Re: The turbulent AI era is here

#103

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 case…

Look, either AI is going to magically solve all our problems or it isn't. If you're in the AI maximalist camp, then you better have an explanation for how AI is going to fix warlords or it's hard for me to take your singularity seriously.

Re: The turbulent AI era is here

#104

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 case…

> Homelessness on the other hand is mostly a mental health and drug addiction problem

No it's not. It's not a coincidence that homelessness only skyrocketed at the same time housing price took off to the point even professionals are spending half of their salary on rent. And if you look at the statistics you'll see addiction is a widespread issue but homelessness is not — WV and NM has some of the worst overdose deaths and the least homelessness.

Please for god's sake let's address the elephant in the room for a second. It's the housing prices.

Re: The turbulent AI era is here

#105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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 case…

> Homelessness on the other hand is mostly a mental health and drug addiction problem No it's not. It's not a coincidence that homelessness only skyrocketed at the same time housing price took off to the point even professionals are spending half of their salary on rent. And if you look at the statistics you'll see addiction is a widespread issue but homelessness is not — WV and NM has some of the worst overdose deat…

[deleted]

Re: The turbulent AI era is here

#106

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 case…

I'm strictly talking about developed countries where we have rule of law and it's trivial to house and feed people if you have free housing and free food. I'm not suggesting AI can solve warlords, I'm not suggesting anyone should even try. But you don't need to solve drug addiction or mental health to solve homelessness if you can build apartments for $1/sq.ft. and provide food for pennies per day. You don't need to put people into make-work jobs to justify their existence.

Re: The turbulent AI era is here

#107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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 case…

I'm strictly talking about developed countries where we have rule of law and it's trivial to house and feed people if you have free housing and free food. I'm not suggesting AI can solve warlords, I'm not suggesting anyone should even try. But you don't need to solve drug addiction or mental health to solve homelessness if you can build apartments for $1/sq.ft. and provide food for pennies per day. You don't need to…

Housing problem is actually NIMBY problem. People pretend that they want housing problem fixed, but at the same time they don't want to build any houses. Look at Austin TX vs other cities.

Re: The turbulent AI era is here

#109

Does anyone else feel incredibly nostalgic for the time when Bill Gates and Warren Buffet were the richest people on earth? I remember feeling pretty good about the fact that they were trying to do so much good, and about the giving pledge. Things feel so different now.

And what did they achieve? It was mostly PR. Gates and Buffet were (and are) rich, but their money simply does not come close to the scale needed to fix the world's problems. Gates is worth $110 billion. Global GDP is $126 trillion .

There was a lot of PR, but the money Gates and Buffet gave away, the foundations they created, the attention they drummed up for various charities and causes is certainly not to be scoffed at.

I'm sure they could have done more with less fanfare, but you seem to be setting the bar at "fixing the world's problems", which seems unfair. They have undoubtedly changed more lives than I'll ever manage to.

Re: The turbulent AI era is here

#110

I feel this is merely stating the obvious. It goes back to the industrial revolution and every revolution before and after. There was a point where they thought a majority of people would be working as switchboard operators and then telephone switching came along. Horses to cars, etc. Jobs transition, new space is created, people are caught in tbe crossfire of supply and demand curves. Incan agree the bullwhip of thi…

> new space is created

That seems to be the crux here. You think it will be, I (and a lot of other people) aren't sure it will. If new space for jobs are created, I am certain we'll be fine long term.

What do you think will happen if it isn't (I know you have strong evidence for and reasons to believe it will be, but just indulge the hypothetical)?

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