Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

AI might yet follow the path of previous technological revolutions

economist.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

131–140 of 309 posts

Re: AI might yet follow the path of previous technological revolutions

#131

Post by hermitcrab »

utyop22 wrote: post #114
hermitcrab wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Aircraft don't fly like birds, submarines don't swim like fish and AIs aren't going to think like a human.

Do these comparisons actually make sense though? Aircraft and submarines belong to a different category and of the same category, than AI.

I am just trying to make the point that the machines that we make tend to end up rather different to their natural analogues. The effective ones anyway. Ornithopters were not successful. And I suspect that articifial intelligences will end up very different to human intelligence.

Re: AI might yet follow the path of previous technological revolutions

#132

Post by measurablefunc »

jrave wrote: post #128
measurablefunc wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The sources are in the report. Gemini provides actual references for all the claims made. You'd know that if you actually looked but lack of intellectual rigor is expected when people are afraid of actually scrutinizing their beliefs of non-constructive inevitability.

maybe you misread the post you‘re answering to here or are you suspecting sarcasm? the poster commended your usage of the footnote with the gemini convo as far as i can tell?

Laid it on a little too thick to be sincere & more generally I don't comment on internet forums to be complimented on my response style. Address the substance of my arguments or just save yourself the keystrokes.

Re: AI might yet follow the path of previous technological revolutions

#133

Post by tintor »

sfpotter wrote: post #15
redwood wrote: post #7

I think the "calculator for words" analogy is a good one. It's imperfect since words are inherently ambiguous but then again so is certain forms of digital numbers (floating point anyone?). Through this lens it's way more normal

Floating point numbers aren't ambiguous in the least. They behave by perfectly deterministic and reliable rules and follow a careful specification.

In theory, yes.

In practice, outcome of floating point computation depends on compiler optimizations, order of operations, and rounding used.

Re: AI might yet follow the path of previous technological revolutions

#134

Post by fragmede »

csours wrote: post #130

If you make something cheap, then it will be cheap. LLMs may set a record for time between specialized/luxury goods and commodity. There may be a price floor, but it's not very high. In My Opinion. --- Ever think about why restaurants pay someone to wash the dishes? In my house, I have a machine that does that. In a restaurant, the machine is too slow, and not compatible with the rest of the system of the restaurant.…

Restaurants have machines for washing dishes. They do pay people to do the dish washing, but commercial dishwashing machines exist, and they work differently than home machines. They're large stainless steel monsters, some with a conveyor belt, others operate vertically. They usually use high temp water rather than soap to do the cleaning.

eg https://youtu.be/Nk_0j936_DY

Re: AI might yet follow the path of previous technological revolutions

#135

Post by m_fayer »

kamikazeturtles wrote: post #88
jaredklewis wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This comment reminds me of the forever present HN comments that take a form like "HN is so hypocritical. In this thread commenters are saying they love X, when just last week in a thready about Y, commenters were saying that they hated X."

All articles published by the Economist are reviewed by its editorial team. Also, the Economist publishes all articles anonymously so the individual author isn't known. As far as I know, they do this so we take all articles and opinions as the perspective of the Economist publication itself.

I’m pretty sure the “what if” in that article was meant in earnest. That article was playing out a scenario, in a nod to the ai maximalists. I don’t think it was making any sort of prediction or actually agreeing with those maximalists.

Re: AI might yet follow the path of previous technological revolutions

#136

Post by jcranmer »

m_fayer wrote: post #135
kamikazeturtles wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All articles published by the Economist are reviewed by its editorial team. Also, the Economist publishes all articles anonymously so the individual author isn't known. As far as I know, they do this so we take all articles and opinions as the perspective of the Economist publication itself.

I’m pretty sure the “what if” in that article was meant in earnest. That article was playing out a scenario, in a nod to the ai maximalists. I don’t think it was making any sort of prediction or actually agreeing with those maximalists.

It was the central article of the issue, the one that dictated the headline and image on the cover for the week, and came with a small coterie of other articles discussing the repercussions of such an AI.

If it was disagreeing with AI maximalists, it was primarily in terms of the timeline, not in terms of the outcomes or inevitability of the scenario.

Re: AI might yet follow the path of previous technological revolutions

#137

Post by lordhumphrey »

CuriouslyC wrote: post #119
jrm4 wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This isn't likely to happen for roughly the same reason Hypercard didn't become the universal way for novices to create apps.

I probably spend 80% of my time in front of a computer driving agents, challenge accepted :)

Marshall McLuhan called, he said to ask yourself, who's driving who?

Re: AI might yet follow the path of previous technological revolutions

#138

Post by lordhumphrey »

J_McQuade wrote: post #42
1c2adbc4 wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you have a suggestion for a better name? I care more about the utility of a thing, rather than playing endless word games with AI, AGI, ASI, whatever. Call it what you will, it is what it is.

Broadly Uneconomical Large Language Systems Holding Investors in Thrall.

Excellent name! BULLSHIT really captures the spirit of the whole thing.

Re: AI might yet follow the path of previous technological revolutions

#139

Post by aaron695 »

wvbdmp wrote: post #4

Okay, so AI isn’t exceptional, but I’m also not exceptional. I run on the same tech base as any old chimpanzee, but at one point our differences in degree turned into one of us remaining “normal” and the other burning the entire planet. Whether the particular current AI tech is it or not, I have yet to be convinced that the singularity is practically impossible, and as long as things develop in the opposite direction…

[dead]

Re: AI might yet follow the path of previous technological revolutions

#140

Post by chpatrick »

elbasti wrote: post #115
chpatrick wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[citation needed] People constantly assert that LLMs don't think in some magic way that humans do think, when we don't even have any idea how that works.

It's not some "magical way"--the ways in which a human thinks that an LLM doesn't are pretty obvious, and I dare say self-evidently part of what we think constitutes human intelligence: - We have a sense of time (ie, ask an LLM to follow up in 2 minutes) - We can follow negative instructions ("don't hallucinate, if you don't know the answer, say so")

I think plenty of people have problems with the second one but you wouldn't say that means they can't think.
Post reply on HN