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The Adolescence of Technology

darioamodei.com

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Re: The Adolescence of Technology

#141

Post by ACCount37 »

2001zhaozhao wrote: post #58

It'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 -…

In the AI scene, everyone knows everyone.

It used to be a small group of people who mostly just believed that AI is a very important technology overlooked by most. Now, they're vindicated, the importance of AI is widely understood, and the headcount in the industry is up x100. But those people who were on the ground floor are still there, they all know each other, and many keep in touch. And many who entered the field during the boom were those already on the periphery of the same core group.

Which is how you get various researchers and executives who don't see eye to eye anymore but still agree on many of the fundamentals - or even things that appear to an outsider as extreme views. They may have agreed on them back in year 2010.

"AGI is possible, powerful, dangerous" is a fringe view in the public opinion - but in the AI scene, it's the mainstream view. They argue the specifics, not the premise.

Re: The Adolescence of Technology

#142

Post by TheOtherHobbes »

stoneforger wrote: post #122
atq2119 wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the large, ideas can have a massive influence on what happens. This inevitability that you're expressing is itself one of those ideas. Shifts of dominant ideas can only come about through discussions. And sure, individuals can't control what happens. That's unrealistic in a world of billions. But each of us is invariably putting a little but of pressure in some direction. Ironically, you are doing that with your c…

How will this pressure add up and bubble to the sociopaths which we collectively allow to control most of the world's resources? It would need for all these billions to collectively understand the problem and align towards a common goal. I don't think this was a design feature, but globalising the economy created hard dependencies and the internet global village created a common mind share. It's now harder than ever…

To be clear - the sociopaths and the culture of resource domination that generates and enables them is the real problem.

AI on its own is chaotic neutral.

Re: The Adolescence of Technology

#143

Post by stego-tech »

igor47 wrote: post #106
j33dd wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep. Man can we just get this hype phase over with? Its very obvious to anyone who truly has "general intelligence" in understanding the nature of the economy and the present labour market and its job classes that LLMs are not going to cause job destruction nor immense leaps in productivity. To put it another way - who cares if you can write more lines of code - if your taste for project selection lacks? Google has a…

I'm not sure what the rhetorical gamble of "anyone with sense agrees with me" is called, but it's lazy. Maybe a no true Scotsman? I believe I have general intelligence and it's not at all obvious to me. Putting your hopes on taste is cope. At best AI will just let you brute force 1000 projects to discover the delicious ones.

You’re trying to analytically argue away an emotion (depression), which means you’ve automatically lost.

Seriously, read the fucking room (and comment thread) before charging in with a holier-than-thou argumentative attitude.

Re: The Adolescence of Technology

#145

Post by Lerc »

majormajor wrote: post #103
Lerc wrote: post #12

One 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…

>How do we get from there to a utopia?

How to get there:

1. Define the utopia in more detail.

2. Make the case that this is a preferable state. Make people want it.

3. Make the case that it is sustainable once achieved.

4. Identify specific differences between the preferred destination and where we are now.

5. Avoiding short term and temporary effects, work towards changing the differences to what the destination has. Even if that is only proclaiming that these changes are what you want

6. Show how those changes make us closer to the destination that people want.

Some of these are hard problems, I don't think any are intractable. I think they don't get done because they are hard, and opposing something is easier. Rather than building something you want, you can knock down something you don't like. Sure, that might get you closer to your desired state if you consider nothingness to be better than undesired, but without building you will never get there.

If you want everyone to live in a castle, build a castle and invite everybody over. If you start by destroying huts you will just be making adversaries. The converse is true also, if you want everyone to live in huts, build more huts and invite everyone over. If they don't come it's because you haven't made the case that it is a preferable state. Knocking down the castle is not going to convince them of that.

Re: The Adolescence of Technology

#146

Post by ACCount37 »

azath92 wrote: post #140

I am continually surprised by the reference to "voluntary actions taken by companies" being brought up in discussion of the risks of AI, without some nuance given to why they would do that. The paragraph on surgical action goes in to about 5-10 times more detail on the potential issues with gov't regulation, implying to me that voluntary action is better. Even for someone at anthropic, i would hope that they would di…

Major incentives currently in play are "PR fuckups are bad" and "if we don't curb our shit regulators will". Which often leads to things like "AI safety is when our AI doesn't generate porn when asked and refuses to say anything the media would be able to latch on to".

The rest is up to the companies themselves.

Anthropic seems to walk the talk, and has supported some AI regulation in the past. OpenAI and xAI don't want regulation to exist and aren't shy about it. OpenAI tunes very aggressively against PR risks, xAI barely cares, Google and Anthropic are much more balanced, although they lean towards heavy-handed and loose respectively.

China is its own basket case of "alignment is when what AI says is aligned to the party line", which is somehow even worse than the US side of things.

Re: The Adolescence of Technology

#147

Post by anthonypasq »

mwcampbell wrote: post #54

This is obviously bullshit. If he were really worried about the things he says he is, he'd put the brakes on his company, or would never have started it in the first place.

hes addressed this a multitude of times. he wants to slow down but the chinese will not, therefore you cannot cede the frontier to authoritarians. its a nuclear arms race.

Re: The Adolescence of Technology

#148

Post by waffletower »

There is too much hand waving with respect to AI and their possible interactions in the physical world. Dario is definitely guilty of this. We currently discuss the economics of datacenters and gpu production, understanding very clearly the supply chain constraints, the bottlenecks, and the huge capital expenses representing them. On the other hand, we have entirely separate dialogues about AI risks which pretend none of these constraints exist. AI risk in the networked digital realm is a serious concern. However, I don't believe coordinated datacenters filled with autonomous AI pose a near-term physical expansionist threat. While they may be able to further optimize our supply chains, and usher in a similarly exponential growth in robotics -- people would have to hand hold and help instrument that physicality. I strongly believe such growth would be separate and significantly delayed from the LLM based intelligence gains we are currently experiencing and is likely decades away.

Re: The Adolescence of Technology

#149

Post by reducesuffering »

zesterer wrote: post #137
techblueberry wrote: post #87

Earlier 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…

(they are all wrong) A fun property of S-curves is that they look exactly like exponential curves until the midpoint. Projecting exponentials is definitionally absurd because exponential growth is impossible in the long term. It is far more important to study the carrying capacity limits that curtail exponential growth.

Covid was also an S curve...

Re: The Adolescence of Technology

#150

Post by allreduce »

welferkj wrote: post #130
Lerc wrote: post #12

One 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…

Where we want to end up? Normies are still talking about the upcoming AI bubble pop in terms of tech basically reverting to 2022. It's wishful thinking all the way down.

Reverting to a world without deployed AI is in fact where "normies", that is most people without capital, want to end up.

The current AI promise for them goes something like: "Oops this chittering machine will soon be able to do all you're good at and derive meaning from. But hey, at least you will end up homeless and part of a permanent underclass."

And the people building it are (rightfully) worried about it killing humanity. So why do we have to continue on this course again? An advanced society would at this point decide to pause what they are doing and reconsider.

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