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The Singularity will occur on a Tuesday

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Re: The Singularity will occur on a Tuesday

#161

Post by PaulHoule »

jpadkins wrote: post #120
jacquesm wrote: post #111

Earlier 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]

"Nazi", "Fascist", etc are words you can use to lose any debate instantly no matter what your politics are.

I think the sane version of this is that Gen Z didn't just lose its education, it lost its socialization. I know someone who works in administration of my Uni who tracks general well being of students who said they were expecting it to bounce back after the pandemic and they've found it hasn't. My son reports if you go to any kind of public event be it a sewing club or a music festival people 18-35 are completely absent. My wife didn't believe him but she went to a few events and found he was right.

You can blame screens or other trends that were going on before the pandemic, but the pandemic locked it in. At the rate we're going if Gen Z doesn't turn it around in 10 years there will not be a Gen Z+2.

So the argument that pandemic policy added a few years to elderly lives at the expensive of the young and the children that they might have had is salient in my book -- I had to block a friend of mine on Facebook who hasn't wanted to talk about anything but masks and long COVID since 2021.

Re: The Singularity will occur on a Tuesday

#162

Post by soperj »

holoduke wrote: post #139
stego-tech wrote: post #28

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…

For ages most people believed in a religion. People are just not smart and sheepy followers.

Most still do.

Re: The Singularity will occur on a Tuesday

#163

Post by vondur »

PaulHoule wrote: post #146
nine_k wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 pros…

With the odd story that we paid the price for it in the long term. This book https://www.amazon.com/Zero-Sum-Society-Distribution-Possibi... tells the compelling story that the Mellon family teamed up with the steelworker's union to use protectionism to protect the American steel industry's investments in obsolete open hearth steel furnaces that couldn't compete on a fair market with the basic oxygen furnace process…

Ha, we gutted our manufacturing base, so if we bring it back it will now be state of the art! Not sure if that will work out for us, but hey their is some precedence.

Re: The Singularity will occur on a Tuesday

#164

Post by kelseyfrog »

bee_rider wrote: post #134
nine_k wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> * 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 dep…

Or just play into the fact that it's a Keynesian Beauty Contest [1]. Find the leverage in it and exploit it.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keynesian_beauty_contest

Re: The Singularity will occur on a Tuesday

#165

Post by goatlover »

cgannett wrote: post #83
mitthrowaway2 wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> whether the singularity actually happens or not is irrelevant so much as whether enough people believe it will happen and act accordingly. I disagree. If the singularity doesn't happen, then what people do or don't believe matters a lot. If the singularity does happen, then it hardly matters what people do or don't believe (edit: about whether or not the singularity will happen).

if people believe its a threat and it is also real then what matters is timing

Which would also mean the accelerationists are potentially putting everyone at risk. I'd think a soft takeoff decades in the future would give us a much better chance of building the necessary safeguards and reorganizing society accordingly.

Re: The Singularity will occur on a Tuesday

#167

Post by api »

This really looks like it's describing a bubble, a mania. The tech is improving linearly, and most of the time such things asymptote. It'll hit a point of diminishing returns eventually. We're just not sure when.

The accelerating mania is bubble behavior. It'd be really interesting to have run this kind of model in, say, 1996, a few years before dot-com, and see if it would have predicted the dot-com collapse.

What this is predicting is a huge wave of social change associated with AI, not just because of AI itself but perhaps moreso as a result of anticipation of and fears about AI.

I find this scarier than unpredictable sentient machines, because we have data on what this will do. When humans are subjected to these kinds of pressures they have a tendency to lose their shit and freak the fuck out and elect lunatics, commit mass murder, riot, commit genocides, create religious cults, etc. Give me Skynet over that crap.

Re: The Singularity will occur on a Tuesday

#168

Post by ElevenLathe »

bee_rider wrote: post #134
nine_k wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> * 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 dep…

IMO this is a symptom of the falling rate of profit, especially in the developed world. If truly productivity enhancing investment is effectively dead (or, equivalently, there is so much paper wealth chasing a withering set of profitable opportunities for investment), then capital's only game is to chase high valuations backed by future profits, which means playing the Keynesian beauty contest for keeps. This in turn means you must make ever-escalating claims of future profitability. Now, here we are in a world where multiple brand name entrepreneurs are essentially saying that they are building the last investable technology ever, and getting people to believe it because the alternative is to earn less than inflation on Procter and Gamble stock and never getting to retire.

If outsiders could plausibly invest in China, some of this pressure could be dissipated for a while, but ultimately we need to order society on some basis that incentivizes dealing with practical problems instead of pushing paper around.

Re: The Singularity will occur on a Tuesday

#169

Post by scratchyone »

atomic128 wrote: post #51

Once men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free. But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them. ... Thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of a human mind. -- Frank Herbert, Dune You won't read, except the output of your LLM. You won't write, except prompts for your LLM. Why write code or prose when the machine can write it for you? You won't think or…

Looking through the poison you linked, how is it generated? It's interesting in that it seems very similar to real data, unlike previous (and very obvious) markov chain garbage text approaches.

Re: The Singularity will occur on a Tuesday

#170

Post by holoduke »

AndrewKemendo wrote: post #84
stego-tech wrote: post #28

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…

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…

Whereas I agree that working with machines would help dramatically in achieving science, there would be in your world no one truly understanding you. You would be alone. Can't imagine how you could prefer that.
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