> If things are accelerating (and they measurably are) the interesting question isn't whether. It's when.
I can't decide if a singularitist AI fanatic who doesn't get sigmoids is ironic or stereotypical.
The Singularity will occur on a Tuesday
131–140 of 800 posts
Re: The Singularity will occur on a Tuesday
#132Earlier 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.
Do you have a historical example of "Little bit of taxes now and accelerate easier"? I can't think of any.
If you replace "taxes" with more general "investment", it's everywhere. A good example is Amazon that has reworked itself from an online bookstore into a global supplier of everything by ruthlessly reinvesting the profits.
Taxes don't usually work as efficiently because the state is usually a much more sloppy investor. But it's far from hopeless, see DARPA.
If you're looking for periods of high taxes and growing prosperity, 1950s in the US is a popular example. It's not a great example though, because the US was the principal winner of WWII, the only large industrial country relatively unscathed by it.
Re: The Singularity will occur on a Tuesday
#133Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
[flagged]
Great zinger buddy, you really showed off your wit.
Re: The Singularity will occur on a Tuesday
#134This 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.
This world where everybody’s very concerned with that “refined form” is annoying and exhausting. It causes discussions to become about speculative guesses about everybody else’s beliefs, not actual facts. In the end it breeds cynicism as “well yes, the belief is wrong, but everybody is stupid and believes it anyway,” becomes a stop-gap argument.
I don’t know how to get away from it because ultimately coordination depends on understanding what everybody believes, but I wish it would go away.
Re: The Singularity will occur on a Tuesday
#135[deleted]
Re: The Singularity will occur on a Tuesday
#136This 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 cas…
I've said it simply, much like you, and it comes off as unhinged lunacy. Inviting them to learn themselves has been so much more successful than directed lectures, at least in my own experiments with discourse and teaching.
A lot of us have fallen into the many, many toxic traps of technology these past few decades. We know social media is deliberately engineered to be addictive (like cigarettes and tobacco products before it), we know AI hinders our learning process and shortens our attention spans (like excess sugar intake, or short-form content deluges), and we know that just because something is newer or faster does not mean it's automatically better.
You're on the right path, I think. I wish you good fortune and immense enjoyment in studying compilers.
Re: The Singularity will occur on a Tuesday
#137Earlier quoted context omitted.
> here’s how LLMs actually work But how is that useful in any way? For all we know, LLMs are black boxes. We really have no idea how did ability to have a conversation emerge from predicting the next token.
> We really have no idea how did ability to have a conversation emerge from predicting the next token. Maybe you don't. To be clear, this is benefiting massively from hindsight, just as how if I didn't know that combustion engines worked, I probably wouldn't have dreamed up how to make one, but the emergent conversational capabilities from LLMs are pretty obvious. In a massive dataset of human writing, the answer to…
>In a massive dataset of human writing, the answer to a question is by far the most common thing to follow a question.
No it isn't. Type a question into a base model, one that hasn't been finetuned into being a chatbot, and the predicted continuation will be all sorts of crap, but very often another question, or a framing that positions the original question as rhetorical in order to make a point. Untuned raw language models have an incredible flair for suddenly and unexpectedly shifting context - it might output an answer to your question, then suddenly decide that the entire thing is part of some internet flamewar and generate a completely contradictory answer, complete with insults to the first poster. It's less like talking with an AI and more like opening random pages in Borge's infinite library.
To get a base language model to behave reliably like a chatbot, you have to explicitly feed it "a transcript of a dialogue between a human and an AI chatbot", and allow the language model to imagine what a helpful chatbot would say (and take control during the human parts). The fact that this works - that a mere statistical predictive language model bootstraps into a whole persona merely because you declared that it should, in natural English - well, I still see that as a pretty "magic" trick.
Re: The Singularity will occur on a Tuesday
#138This 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…
The goal is to eliminate humans as the primary actors on the planet entirely At least that’s my personal goal If we get to the point where I can go through my life and never interact with another human again, and work with a bunch of machines and robots to do science and experiments and build things to explore our world and make my life easier and safer and healthier and more sustainable, I would be absolutely thrill…
Why would the machines want to work with you or any other human?
Re: The Singularity will occur on a Tuesday
#139This 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…
For ages most people believed in a religion. People are just not smart and sheepy followers.
Re: The Singularity will occur on a Tuesday
#140"It had been a slow Tuesday night. A few hundred new products had run their course on the markets. There had been a score of dramatic hits, three-minute and five-minute capsule dramas, and several of the six-minute long-play affairs. Night Street Nine—a solidly sordid offering—seemed to be in as the drama of the night unless there should be a late hit." – 'SLOW TUESDAY NIGHT', a 2600 word sci-fi short story about lif…
This is incredible.
> A thoughtful-man named Maxwell Mouser had just produced a work of actinic philosophy. It took him seven minutes to write it. To write works of philosophy one used the flexible outlines and the idea indexes; one set the activator for such a wordage in each subsection; an adept would use the paradox, feed-in, and the striking-analogy blender; one calibrated the particular-slant and the personality-signature. It had to come out a good work, for excellence had become the automatic minimum for such productions. “I will scatter a few nuts on the frosting,” said Maxwell, and he pushed the lever for that. This sifted handfuls of words like chthonic and heuristic and prozymeides through the thing so that nobody could doubt it was a work of philosophy.
Sounds exactly like someone twiddling the knobs of an LLM.