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The Adolescence of Technology
111–120 of 159 posts
Re: The Adolescence of Technology
#112One of my formative impressions of AI came from the depiction of the Colligatarch from Alan Dean Foster's The I Inside. The AI in the book is almost feels like it is the main message masquerading as a subplot. Asimov knew the risks, and I had assumed until fairly recently that the lessons and explorations that he had imparted into the Robot books had provided a level of cultural knowledge of what we were about to fac…
We've had many decades of technology since Asimov started writing about robots, and we've seen almost all of it used to make the day-to-day experience of the average worker-bee worse. More tracking. More work after hours. More demands to do more with less. Fewer other humans to help you with those things. We aren't working 4 hour days because we no longer have to spend half the day waiting on things that were slower…
To highlight that this isn't exaggeration.
"U.S workers just took home their smallest share of capital since 1947"
https://fortune.com/2026/01/13/us-workers-smallest-labor-sha...
Re: The Adolescence of Technology
#113The framing of AI risk as a "rite of passage" resonates with me. The "autonomy risks" section is what I think about most. We've seen our agents do unexpected things when given too much latitude. Not dangerous, just wrong in ways we didn't anticipate. The gap between "works in testing" and "works in production" is bigger than most people realize. I'm less worried about the "power seizure" scenario than the economic di…
What makes you think that they will just keep improving? It's not obvious at all, we might soon hit a ceiling, if we haven not already - time will tell. There are lots of technologies that have been 99% done for decades; it might be the same here.
This is a really good question.
What convinces me is this: I live in SF and have friends at various top labs, and even ignoring architecture improvements the common theme is this: any time researchers have spent time to improve understanding on some specific part of a domain (whether via SFT or RL or whatever), its always worked. Not superhuman, but measurable, repeatable improvements. In the words of sutskever, "these models.. they just wanna learn".
Inb4 all natural trends are sigmoidal or whatever, but so far, the trend is roughly linear, and we havent seen seen a trace of a plateau.
Theres the common argument that "Ghipiti 3 vs 4 was a much bigger step change" but its not if you consider the progression from much before, i.e. BERT and such, then it looks fairly linear /w a side of noise (fries).
Re: The Adolescence of Technology
#114It's interesting just how many opinions Amodei shares with AI 2027's authors despite coming from a pretty different context. - Prediction of exponential AI research feedback loops (AI coding speeding up AI R&D) which Amodei says is already starting today - AI being a race between democracies and autocracies with winner-takes-all dynamics, with compute being crucial in this race and global slowdown being infeasible -…
It's because few realize how downstream most of this AI industry is of Thiel, Eliezer Yudkowsky and LessWrong.com. Early "rationalist" community was concerned with AI in this way 20 years ago. Eliezer inspired and introduced the founders of Google DeepMind to Peter Thiel to get their funding. Altman acknowledged how influential Eliezer was by saying how he is most deserving of a Nobel Peace prize when AGI goes well (…
> Anthropic was a more X-risk concerned fork of OpenAI.
What is XRisk? I would have inductively thought adult but that doesn't sound right.
Re: The Adolescence of Technology
#115Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's because few realize how downstream most of this AI industry is of Thiel, Eliezer Yudkowsky and LessWrong.com. Early "rationalist" community was concerned with AI in this way 20 years ago. Eliezer inspired and introduced the founders of Google DeepMind to Peter Thiel to get their funding. Altman acknowledged how influential Eliezer was by saying how he is most deserving of a Nobel Peace prize when AGI goes well (…
It is very weird to wonder, what if they're all wrong. Sam Bankman-Fried was clearly as committed to these ideas, and crashed his company into the ground. But clearly if out of context someone said something like this: "Clearly, the most obvious effect will be to greatly increase economic growth. The pace of advances in scientific research, biomedical innovation, manufacturing, supply chains, the efficiency of the fi…
> I'd say that they were a snake oil salesman.
I don't know if "snake oil" is quite demonstrable yet, but you're not wrong to question this. There are phrases in the article which are so grandiose, they're on my list of "no serious CEO should ever actually say this about their own company's products/industry" (even if they might suspect or hope it). For example:
> "I believe we are entering a rite of passage, both turbulent and inevitable, which will test who we are as a species. Humanity is about to be handed almost unimaginable power"
LLMs can certainly be very useful and I think that utility will grow but Dario's making a lot of 'foom-ish' assumptions about things which have not happened and may not happen anytime soon. And even if/when they do happen, the world may have changed and adapted enough that the expected impacts, both positive and negative, are less disruptive than either the accelerationists hope or the doomers fear. Another Sagan quote that's relevant here is "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence."
Re: The Adolescence of Technology
#116Before we can survive "powerful AI", which we haven't even the faintest idea how to create, we have to survive the present era of mega-billionaires, Facebook, Twitter, and the propaganda capture of thereof. I want to know the answer to that question.
Re: The Adolescence of Technology
#117Earlier quoted context omitted.
It is very weird to wonder, what if they're all wrong. Sam Bankman-Fried was clearly as committed to these ideas, and crashed his company into the ground. But clearly if out of context someone said something like this: "Clearly, the most obvious effect will be to greatly increase economic growth. The pace of advances in scientific research, biomedical innovation, manufacturing, supply chains, the efficiency of the fi…
"In Machines of Loving Grace, I suggest that a 10–20% sustained annual GDP growth rate may be possible."" Absolutely comical. Do you realise how much that is in absolute terms? These guys are making up as they go along. Cant believe people buy this nonsense.
Why not? If they increase white color productivity by 25%, and that accounts for 50% of the economy, you'd get such a result.
Re: The Adolescence of Technology
#118Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's because few realize how downstream most of this AI industry is of Thiel, Eliezer Yudkowsky and LessWrong.com. Early "rationalist" community was concerned with AI in this way 20 years ago. Eliezer inspired and introduced the founders of Google DeepMind to Peter Thiel to get their funding. Altman acknowledged how influential Eliezer was by saying how he is most deserving of a Nobel Peace prize when AGI goes well (…
> Anthropic was a more X-risk concerned fork of OpenAI. What is XRisk? I would have inductively thought adult but that doesn't sound right.
Existential
Re: The Adolescence of Technology
#119Some people say that human jobs will move to the physical world, which avoids the whole category of “cognitive labor” where AI is progressing so rapidly. I am not sure how safe this is, either. A lot of physical labor is already being done by machines (e.g., manufacturing) or will soon be done by machines (e.g., driving). Also, sufficiently powerful AI will be able to accelerate the development of robots, and then co…
One thing that I've not quite been able to sort of get my head around about the whole AI and future of work thing ss the view around work in the physical world being safe. I don't particularly buy the rationale and not from the position of robots are going to do the work. I don't know much about robots really but from what I've seen from the more viral stuff that breaks through to mainstream internet from time to time, it still feels that we're some way out.
But that feels like the least of the worries to me. There seems to be an implicit assumption that those physical lines of work don't get eroded by the higher proportion of able bodied people who are suddenly unemployable. Yes there is some training required etc. but the barriers to entry aren't so high that in the shortish to medium term you don’t see more people gravitating to those industries and competing wages further down to not make then sustainable employment long term. I'd even think that having LLMs that can recognise photos or understand fuzzily explain questions about some blue collar skills many have forgotten actually reduces the barrier even more
Re: The Adolescence of Technology
#120Historically, oppression was attention-limited. The spies and goons couldn't monitor everybody. Now, they can.
So can companies. Amazon, Google and Visa can make someone an unperson by dropping them. Look what happened to the head of the International Criminal Court.
The "alignment" issue has been turned around. Grok is being given Musk's biases, on purpose.