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The Singularity will occur on a Tuesday

campedersen.com

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Re: The Singularity will occur on a Tuesday

#111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

History paints a pretty clear picture of the tradeoff: * Profits now and violence later OR * Little bit of taxes now and accelerate easier Unfortunately we’ve developed such a myopic, “FYGM” society that it’s explicitly the former option for the time being.

Every possible example of “progress” have either an individual or a state power purpose behind it there is only one possible “egalitarian” forward looking investments that paid off for everybody I think the only exception to this is vaccines…and you saw how all that worked during Covid Everything else from the semiconductor to the vacuum cleaner the automobile airplanes steam engines I don’t care what it is you pick…

COVID has cured me (hah!) of the notion that humanity will be able to pull together when faced with a common enemy. That means global warming or the next pandemic are going to happen and we will not be able to stop it from happening because a solid percentage can't wait to jump off the ledge, and they'll push you off too.

Re: The Singularity will occur on a Tuesday

#112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

that was precisely my reaction as well. phew machines will deal with the timestamp issue and i can just sit on a beach while we singularityize or whatever.

You won't be on the beach when you get turned into paperclips. The machines will come and harvest your ass. Don't click here: https://www.decisionproblem.com/paperclips/

having played that when it came out, my conclusion was that no, i will definitely be able to be on a beach; i am too meaty and fleshy to be good paperclip

Re: The Singularity will occur on a Tuesday

#113
Everyone will define the Singularity in a different way. To me it's simply the point at which nothing makes sense anymore and this is why my personal reflection is aligned with the piece, that there is a social Singularity that is already happening. It won't help us when the real event horizon hits (if it ever does, its fundamentally uninteresting anyway because at that point all bets are off and even a slow take-off will make things really fucking weird really quickly).

The (social) Singularity is already happening in the form of a mass delusion that - especially in the abrahamic apocalyptical cultures - creates a fertile breeding ground for all sorts of insanity.

Like investing hundreds of billions of dollars in datacenters. The level of committed CAPEX of companies like Alphabet, Meta, Nvidia and TSMC is absurd. Social media is full of bots, deepfakes and psy-ops that are more or less targeted (exercise for the reader: write a bot that manages n accounts on your favorite social media site and use them to move the overton window of a single individual of your choice, what would be the total cost of doing that? If you answer is less than $10 - bingo!).

We are in the future shockwave of the hypothetical Singularity already. The question is only how insane stuff will become before we either calm down - through a bubble collapse and subsequent recession, war or some other more or less problematic event - or hit the event horizon proper.

Re: The Singularity will occur on a Tuesday

#114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Every possible example of “progress” have either an individual or a state power purpose behind it there is only one possible “egalitarian” forward looking investments that paid off for everybody I think the only exception to this is vaccines…and you saw how all that worked during Covid Everything else from the semiconductor to the vacuum cleaner the automobile airplanes steam engines I don’t care what it is you pick…

COVID has cured me (hah!) of the notion that humanity will be able to pull together when faced with a common enemy. That means global warming or the next pandemic are going to happen and we will not be able to stop it from happening because a solid percentage can't wait to jump off the ledge, and they'll push you off too.

Yeah buddy we agree

Re: The Singularity will occur on a Tuesday

#115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> “here’s why replacing or suggesting the replacement of human labor prior to reforming society into one that does not predicate survival on continued employment and wages is very bad” And there are plenty of people that take issue with that too. Unfortunately they're not the ones paying the price. And... stock options.

History paints a pretty clear picture of the tradeoff: * Profits now and violence later OR * Little bit of taxes now and accelerate easier Unfortunately we’ve developed such a myopic, “FYGM” society that it’s explicitly the former option for the time being.

Do you have a historical example of "Little bit of taxes now and accelerate easier"? I can't think of any.

Re: The Singularity will occur on a Tuesday

#116
"... HBR found that companies are cutting [jobs] based on AI's potential, not its performance.

I don't know who needs to hear this - a lot apparently - but the following three statements are not possible to validate but have unreasonably different effects on the stock market.

* We're cutting because of expected low revenue. (Negative) * We're cutting to strengthen our strategic focus and control our operational costs.(Positive) * We're cutting because of AI. (Double-plus positive)

The hype is real. Will we see drastically reduced operational costs the coming years or will it follow the same curve as we've seen in productivity since 1750?

Re: The Singularity will occur on a Tuesday

#118

This is delightfully unhinged, spending an amazing amount of time describing their model and citing their methodologies before getting to the meat of the meal many of us have been braying about for years: whether the singularity actually happens or not is irrelevant so much as whether enough people believe it will happen and act accordingly. And, yep! A lot of people absolutely believe it will and are acting accordin…

> * enough people believe it will happen and act accordingly*

Here comes my favorite notion of "epistemic takeover".

A crude form: make everybody believe that you have already won.

A refined form: make everybody believe that everybody else believes that you have already won. That is, even if one has doubts about your having won, they believe that everyone else submit to you as a winner, and must act accordingly.

Re: The Singularity will occur on a Tuesday

#119

This is delightfully unhinged, spending an amazing amount of time describing their model and citing their methodologies before getting to the meat of the meal many of us have been braying about for years: whether the singularity actually happens or not is irrelevant so much as whether enough people believe it will happen and act accordingly. And, yep! A lot of people absolutely believe it will and are acting accordin…

Just say it simply,

1. LLMs only serve to reduce the value of your labor to zero over time. They don't need to even be great tools, they just need to be perceived as "equally good" to engineers for C-Suite to lay everyone off, and rehire at 50-25% of previous wages, repeating this cycle over a decade.

2. LLMs will not allow you to join the billionaire class, that wouldn't make sense, as anyone could if that's the case. They erode the technical meritocracy these Tech CEOs worship on podcasts, and youtube, (makes you wonder what are they lying about). - Your original ideas and that Startup you think is going to save you, isn't going to be worth anything if someone with minimal skills can copy it.

3. People don't want to admit it, but heavy users of LLMs know they're losing something, and there's a deep down feeling that its not the right way to go about things. Its not dissimilar to any guilty dopaminergic crash one gets when taking shortcuts in life.

I used like 1.8bb Anthropic tokens last year, I won't be using it again, I won't be participating in this experiment. I've likely lost years of my life in "potential learning" from the social media experiment, I'm not doing that again. I want to study compilers this year, and I want to do it deeply. I wont be using LLMs.

Re: The Singularity will occur on a Tuesday

#120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Every possible example of “progress” have either an individual or a state power purpose behind it there is only one possible “egalitarian” forward looking investments that paid off for everybody I think the only exception to this is vaccines…and you saw how all that worked during Covid Everything else from the semiconductor to the vacuum cleaner the automobile airplanes steam engines I don’t care what it is you pick…

COVID has cured me (hah!) of the notion that humanity will be able to pull together when faced with a common enemy. That means global warming or the next pandemic are going to happen and we will not be able to stop it from happening because a solid percentage can't wait to jump off the ledge, and they'll push you off too.

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