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The Software Revolution

blog.samaltman.com

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Re: The Software Revolution

#281

Post by vorg »

nostrademons wrote: post #237
alexqgb wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One of the most notable differences between the Industrial and Information revolutions is that wealth from the former was underwritten by a surge in energy. Wealth from the latter depends on extracting greater value from (more or less) existing supplies. In other words, it's largely about the sudden redistribution of output, as opposed to a change in the underlying supply. (Relatively) enlightened governing philosoph…

No, the two revolutions are a lot more similar than you think. The industrial revolution was fueled largely by the technology to harness huge quantities of fossil fuels to power modern machinery. The underlying supply of energy didn't change - those fossil fuel reserves had been built up over hundreds of millions of years, as we're now learning (to our chagrin) a hundred years later. What did change is our ability to…

People from the future will likely consider the industrial and information revolutions to be the same revolution, just like people today generally consider the agricultural revolution to be one event instead of its two separate stages.

We could say the industrial revolution ended in 1945 with the Manhattan project and the information revolution began in the 1940's with the Enigma code cracking so the timelines flow into each other, and, as you say, they both had the effect of releasing vast amounts of energy. The agricultural revolution began about 10,000 yrs ago independently in 5 or 10 places around the world with plant seed selection and animal husbandry, but in only two places, North China and Mesopotamia, did they make the separate step of transplanting it all on a large scale to a river valley, perhaps even thousands of years later. (I'm presuming here Egypt and the Indus Valley copied Mesopotamia.)

I suspect the real third big revolution will be inter-stellar travel in perhaps another 10,000 years.

Re: The Software Revolution

#282

Post by eli_gottlieb »

markbnj wrote: post #24

I don't necessarily buy the "AI can end humanity" thing. As a cliche that's become very easy to repeat, but I've yet to see a postulated mechanism by which it could actually happen that isn't pure SF. The ending of human life would not be so easy for computers to accomplish. But on the subject of concentration of power and the wide-scale elimination of low- and middle-range jobs I think he is dead on. I fear that the…

>As a cliche that's become very easy to repeat, but I've yet to see a postulated mechanism by which it could actually happen that isn't pure SF.

Destroy the available (cheap) supplies of fossil fuels, and then trick humans into fighting each-other over the remaining food and fuel. Nasty weapons get unleashed, war over, the machine won.

Re: The Software Revolution

#283

Post by tptacek »

Micaiah_Chang wrote: post #274
tptacek wrote: post #262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I sort of am questioning that factor, yes. Stipulate, I don't know, several orders of magnitude of intellectual superiority. Stipulate that human intelligence can be captured in silico , so that when we talk about "intelligence", we are using the most charitable possible definition for the "fear AI" argument. What precise vectors would be available for this system to manipulate the world to harm humans?

A typical example, which I don't really like, is that once it gains some insight into biology that we don't have (a much faster way of figuring out how protein folding works). It can mail a letter to some lab, instructing a lab tech to make some mixture which would create either a deadly virus or a bootstrapping nanomachine factory. Another one is that perhaps the internet of things is in place by the time such an AI…

Isn't that a little circular? Should we be concerned about insufficient controls on bio labs? Yes. I am very concerned about that. Should we be concerned about proliferation of insecure networked computing devices? Yes. I am very concerned about that. Should we be concerned about allowable inputs into missile launch systems? Yes. I am very concerned about that.

But I am right now not very concerned about super-AI. I assume, when I read smart people worrying about it, that there's some subtlety I must be missing, because it's hard for me to imagine that, even if we stipulated the impossibility of real AI, we'd not be existentially concerned about laboratory pathogen manipulation.

Re: The Software Revolution

#284

Post by yellowapple »

fragsworth wrote: post #241
aceperry wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wouldn't blame India for its condition due to having a jobs program. They started off far down the hole when they became a nation after securing their freedom from colonization. They have progressed in many ways, including some of the best schools in the world (IIT), some of the best entrepreneurs and engineers, and some the most advanced technologies (nuclear weapons, modern military, space program). But there is…

> I wouldn't blame India for its condition due to having a jobs program. Sure, the jobs program alone probably can't do that much harm, but it is indicative of a bigger problem - that their people don't understand economics and vote in favor of things that are economically good.

I think it's a symptom of a different bigger problem: that vestiges of the caste systems once pervasive in India (and indeed much of the world) for the last several millennia are still very present. The belief that "those darn workers exist to do manual labor, so we should come to expect that they'll always want to do manual labor and - therefore - we should provide such opportunities" is a rather clear manifestation of that vestige.

In this context, I don't think such a jobs program is in any way, shape, or form intended with genuine altruism. Perhaps that's what India as a whole has convinced itself of in order to rationalize its societal behavior, but it's not something that should fool anyone with the slightest understanding of south-central Asian history.

Basically, I'd argue that the reluctance to automate away manual labor stems not from a desire to empower laborers, but rather to keep them subjugated and prevent them from climbing their way into any semblance of a middle class.

Re: The Software Revolution

#285

Post by makeitsuckless »

> Trying to hold on to worthless jobs is a terrible but popular idea.

Labeling jobs as "worthless" makes me want to throw up. We are in many cases talking about jobs people find quite fulfilling, and human services many people would love to keep using.

The only way we're going to be able to handle what's coming is to disconnect the economic value of jobs from their social value.

Re: The Software Revolution

#286

Post by eli_gottlieb »

aaronem wrote: post #86
mrec wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sidetrack, but I'm curious. What do you mean by "a postulated mechanism by which it could actually happen that isn't pure SF"? It reads as if you're asking for a mechanism for a future technological event explained purely in terms of present technology. The whole "existential risk" concerns aren't about what present systems can do, they're about what future self-improving system might do. If we postulate this hypothe…

Not OP, but I agree with the point you question, and my rationale for so doing is that I've yet to see a compelling argument that a self-improving system is other than the software version of a perpetual-motion machine. Those seemed plausible enough, too, when thermodynamics was as ill-understood as information dynamics is now.

This one's tough to answer, actually. The truly optimal learner would have to use an incomputable procedure; even time-and-space bounded versions of this procedure have additive constants larger than the Solar System.

However, it's more-or-less a matter of compression, which, by some of the basics of Kolmogorov Complexity, tells us we face a nasty question: it's undecidable/incomputable/unprovable whether a given compression algorithm is the best compressor for the data you're giving it. So it's incomputable in general whether or not you've got the best learning algorithm for your sense-data: whether it compresses your observations optimally. You really won't know you could self-improve with a better compressor until you actually find the better compressor, if you ever do at all.

An agent bounded in terms of both compute-time and sample complexity (the amount of sense-data it can learn from before being required to make a prediction) will probably face something like a sigmoid curve, where the initial self-improvements are much easier and more useful while the later ones have diminishing marginal return in terms of how much they can reduce their prediction error versus how much CPU time they have to invest to both find and run the improved algorithm.

Re: The Software Revolution

#287

Post by nradov »

peapicker wrote: post #58

"Trying to hold on to worthless jobs is a terrible but popular idea." I'm not sure I agree with this proposition. When I was in India, I noticed a large amount of roadwork was being done by men with shovels and other fairly low tech. I asked about it, and was told, to paraphrase, "Sure, we could do it better and faster with machines, but it is better for society to provide employment to those who would otherwise be u…

Let's assume that as a society we're not going to let people starve to death or die of exposure. So that means we're going to have to use tax money to provide everyone with at least some minimal level of income whether we call it welfare, dole, or basic income. So let's turn the government into an employer of last resort. Even if people have no skills they can pick up litter or do basic landscaping in public areas for 30 hours per week. Since we're going to be paying them anyway I for one would at least like to get some value for my tax money.

The point isn't whether robots could someday do those tasks more efficiently. Robots will always cost >0. Whereas the people will essentially be "free" since we we'll have to pay them anyway.

Re: The Software Revolution

#288

Post by Phlarp »

powertower wrote: post #219

> We can—and we will—redistribute wealth ... Please, someone explain to me how wealth can be re-distributed? I know how money can be re-distributed (and in-turn made less effective - i.e., more is required to purchase less), but how exactly do you either a) create "wealth" (via government policy or law) or b) take someone else's wealth , split it up into smaller peaces, and make the end-recipients more "wealthy"? The…

Perhaps all these wealth creators you speak of will abscond from the fundamentally broken world the rest of us live in and be together in peace and harmony with John Galt.

Re: The Software Revolution

#289

Post by salvadors »

rayiner wrote: post #260
yellowapple wrote: post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> software can do 90% of what those folks do, but shit the bed when faced with the other 10% So let software handle the 90% and refactor the current jobs to handle the other 10%. > Software generally isn't reliable, predictable, or robust in the face of unusual circumstances Not yet , at least. I agree with you, though, and they're the same reasons why I'm personally paranoid about self-driving cars. Yeah, the occasi…

> So let software handle the 90% and refactor the current jobs to handle the other 10%. If the jobs could be so refactored in a cost-efficient way, they would be.

They are being so. It's an ongoing process.

Re: The Software Revolution

#290

Post by mkempe »

There are so many things wrong with this essay -- it combines a Marxist-inspired call for redistribution of wealth in the name of egalitarianism (are there specific individuals who will control how much we are allowed to own?), fear of change in what people do for a living (are people too exploited and too stupid to adapt?), and fear of technological progress in private hands (does the State, or some other supra-collective, have a magic wand and omniscient mantle of benevolence?).

The worst parts are the claim that (forced) redistribution is inevitable and that regulation will somehow prevent "bad privately-done things" from happening -- as if regulation is a perfect solution to any problem one confesses to fear or claims to dislike.

In principle, government intervention hinders technological progress, derails economic progress, and ultimately destroys the economy. Maybe people who have made a lot of money with one wave of progress should leave future generations alone and let them free to do the same -- instead of strangulating them by intervention and regulation that the now-wealthy did not have to suffer.

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