101–110 of 118 posts
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When did killing someone else's livelihood stop being sociopathic?
It never was... tools and automation have been central to humanity's progress.
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When did killing someone else's livelihood stop being sociopathic?
"Computer" used to be a job title for a human. Was it sociopathic to introduce mechanical calculators because it made those jobs unnecessary?
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I've been thinking about this quote a lot: > [...] we are living in a society [that is out] virtually to satisfy and gratify each and every human need, except for one need, the most basic and fundamental need operant in man, the need for meaning. https://youtu.be/GTbliwS0gS4?t=153 Maybe the Amish had it right, after all.
I reject the premise that we need to go back to some old ways of living to find meaning. My life is full of meaning, but it would probably look like meaningless abundance to someone who was toiling on a farm 18 hours a day or being chased by saber-toothed tigers. The next paradigm will be similar. It might seem meaningless to us. For example, most of our identity is tied to our jobs in our current society. This will…
“Man’s search for meaning” is arguably the most visceral human framed definition of meaning. Let’s just say it’s not about attention and the Metaverse.
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> I suspect we just have different beliefs about how close we are to RSI. I don't have any belief on the matter, but my scepticism isn't necessarily about RSI itself, but about how much it would matter even if it does happen soon. Too many things are limited by lack of resources that no brain in a jar can obtain. And if such a brain in a jar itself is very expensive to operate, it may not be easy for it to justify it…
This makes sense. Interacting with the world is hard and poses real bottlenecks. I think that resource acquisition is a solvable problem for such a system, robots seem mainly limited by software. I concede that I am too certain about the linearity of it. But like, cmon man, in the limit entropy ensures that everything ends. The world could still get very weird very fast. I think that's what original comment was tryin…
First, I don't think so. Second, some resources would take even robots decades or centuries to collect. Even something as fundamental as energy production takes a lot of time and money to build. The question of where we'll get the energy to run the robots is not a simple one, and it's one of the simplest questions involved.
> I think that's what original comment was trying to argue, and I think it's possible within the limits you've laid out.
Possible isn't the same as likely, and the reason we don't extrapolate is that different extrapolations lead to very different results.
But regardless of what happens and when, I think that we, people educated in computer science, should remember that many questions are simply not answerable in a short amount of time, and we know with absolute certainty that answering them is not a question of intelligence but of computational power and time. We no that no human or machine, however intelligent, can predict or control the nonlinear systems that are all around us because they are computationally intractable.
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> they laughed in derision It's crazy how defensive (offensive) people can get when you're into programming/math/whatever. Almost like "I don't understand your world, I don't want to, and I hate it and hope you fail". https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/what-its-like
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I just don't understand why people are incapable of extrapolating. AI can't do this blah blah, my brother in spaghetti monster, have you seen the curve? ChatGPT launched in November, 2022. Opus in December last year. Do you see where this is going? AI may be a tool and add 50 IQ points to a 100 IQ person today but what happens when its adding 10000 IQ points. The 100 base doesn't quite matter as much does it? What do…
Or extrapolate the curve for self driving cars once they were only "two years away".
Catch is, tech progress is not one curve. It's overlapping S curves, stair steps of progress and stagnation, with the next iteration starting off worse than the current one, until crossing it as the current one tops out.
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> they laughed in derision It's crazy how defensive (offensive) people can get when you're into programming/math/whatever. Almost like "I don't understand your world, I don't want to, and I hate it and hope you fail". https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/what-its-like
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I just don't understand why people are incapable of extrapolating. AI can't do this blah blah, my brother in spaghetti monster, have you seen the curve? ChatGPT launched in November, 2022. Opus in December last year. Do you see where this is going? AI may be a tool and add 50 IQ points to a 100 IQ person today but what happens when its adding 10000 IQ points. The 100 base doesn't quite matter as much does it? What do…
> I just don't understand why people are incapable of extrapolating. I guess it's a matter of education. People with a mathematics or computer science background know that unless the dynamics of a process are known to be linear, extrapolation is usually wrong. Since we don't know that the dynamics here are linear and have every reason to believe they aren't, extrpolation is unlikely to teach us anything valuable.
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> and have every reason to believe they aren't What reason? To me recursive self improvement seems credible, it's just a question of when. It seems obvious that given RSI, trend lines will be at least linear. The disagreement could just be about if RSI is currently meaningfully happening, but that seems very difficult to tell given the lack of public data.
Because most systems in nature and society, including technological progress, aren't linear. It's certainly plausible that improvements will continue, but the pace is completely unpredictable. It's also plausible that the training material is polluted and progress will not continue. I'm just saying that predicting the rate of technological progress is not easy, and historically, it's rarely been smooth in the long ru…