This was such a terrible piece of work back when it came out, it hasn't aged any better. By the way, it was responded to by MIRI: https://intelligence.org/2017/01/13/response-to-ceglowski-on...
Superintelligence: The Idea That Eats Smart People (2016)
161–170 of 253 posts
Re: Superintelligence: The Idea That Eats Smart People (2016)
#162Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Cheetahs are very fast, but humans have way more endurance. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Man_versus_Horse_Marathon > The Man versus Horse Marathon is an annual race over 21 miles (34 km), where runners compete against riders on horseback through a mix of road, trail and mountainous terrain. The race, which is a shorter distance than an official marathon road race, takes place in the Welsh town of Llanwrtyd Wells e…
Wow, seems surprisingly balanced. I would guess that if it was 50% longer distance than humans would win reliably, and 50% shorter would allow the horses to win?
The weather conditions also impact it significantly.
https://www.outsideonline.com/health/training-performance/hu...
> Lobb’s victory came on a hot day, as did Florian Holzinger’s subsequent victory in 2007—a significant detail, according to a new study in the journal Experimental Physiology from Lewis Halsey of the University of Roehampton in Britain and Caleb Bryce of the Botswana Predator Conservation Trust. Halsey and Bryce gathered historical data from three endurance races that pit humans against horses, including the Man Versus Horse Marathon, to test the idea that humans are uniquely adapted to run for long distances in hot weather.
> This idea has been around since the 1980s, and it gained prominence when Harvard anthropologist Daniel Lieberman and University of Utah biologist Dennis Bramble published a 2004 Nature paper hypothesizing that running had “substantially shaped human evolution.” They argued that our ability to keep running at a moderate pace even on hot days allowed us to run prey like kudu to exhaustion or outcompete other animals in the race to scavenge carcasses left by other large predators.
There's a plot with the analysis of the Old Dominion with weather stations in there that show a steeper negative slope for horses compared to the humans.
> Overall, for every increase of 1 degree Celsius (1.8 degrees Fahrenheit), the horses slowed down by about 1 percent—or 0.07 miles per hour, to be precise. The humans, on the other hand, slowed down by just 0.04 miles per hour for each extra degree of heat. That 36 percent advantage for the humans was statistically significant.
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For the Man vs Horse, the weather conditions ("Hot", "Rain/sun/windy" - not exact values)... the entry for 2022 was the human winning by 1:51 on a warm day, and 2023 was a human wining by 9:44 on a sweltering day.
Re: Superintelligence: The Idea That Eats Smart People (2016)
#163Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah I think on say, a proper road the horse would win at any distance.
the road adds some infrastructure - i think at that point the person should get a bike?
1990: For a few joyous years there was the Man v Horse v Bike competition in Mid-Wales - https://youtu.be/vFlglZUIKO8
Re: Superintelligence: The Idea That Eats Smart People (2016)
#164Has anyone played SOMA? Spoiler warning. It explores this idea of, what if there's an AI in charge of ensuring mankind survives at all costs. What would it be willing to do, to keep us alive? Would we even recognize the result as human? It's a horror game and it explores all kinds of fascinating and disturbing scenarios. Simulations of human minds. Artificial worlds. Human minds in robot bodies. Genetically modified…
I enjoyed the game but I think its exploration of the topics was pretty shallow. It might be better received if it's someone's first dive into such topics, though. I still enjoy ice cream the nth+1 time eating it, so I can't complain too much about games or anime or books that cater to parts of my interests, even if they fumble some things.
Someday I'd like to play a game that plays with the ideas from Robin Hanson's Age of Em book. One of those is just the multiplicity of artificial minds, so many mind-upload stories revolve too much around one or perhaps at most two (and boring debates over "who is the copy") instances, unless it's a parallel worlds colliding thing which is pretty different. We've seen some of the multiplicity stuff play out in the real world with our non-human AI "agents". Spin up a bunch of artificial minds to work in parallel on some task, let them make notes that stay behind, but then they're all shut down except perhaps one that continues guiding the overall project and making decisions when to spin up more or not.
Re: Superintelligence: The Idea That Eats Smart People (2016)
#165Earlier quoted context omitted.
Claims of AGI imply that LLM's have intelligence. They don't, they are fancy probability machines. They don't THINK the way we do, they just do 200 matrix multiplications until their training data is massaged into what you need. They don't dream, they don't remember what you tell them. Even if you write one sentence, 'attention' means they will ignore half of what you say and key in on the wrong thing. This just happ…
Do you think your brain doesn't do a type of gradient descent, trying to fit its little predictive algorithms to its senses? Do you think you aren't a fancy probability machine with overinflated self-esteem? An average LLM of today has better reading comprehension than an average human, and the gap only grows release to release. "Understand the human mind" turned out to be a distractor. The bitter lesson won: you can…
I mean I can write a non-llm program that "has better reading comprehension than an average human" depending on what you think reading comprehension means. Today I went to ask an LLM some very simple questions, stuff you can google and "do these lines have X word in it" and it failed to answer pretty spectacularly several times in a row, so I'm just not feeling the LLMs are superior intellgence today.
Re: Superintelligence: The Idea That Eats Smart People (2016)
#166Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Cheetahs are very fast, but humans have way more endurance. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Man_versus_Horse_Marathon > The Man versus Horse Marathon is an annual race over 21 miles (34 km), where runners compete against riders on horseback through a mix of road, trail and mountainous terrain. The race, which is a shorter distance than an official marathon road race, takes place in the Welsh town of Llanwrtyd Wells e…
There was a great radiolab episode about it a few years ago but I remember it being in Utah not UK
https://radiolab.org/podcast/man-against-horse
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Man_versus_Horse_Marathon
> ... There are other Man versus Horse races — in Scotland based at Dores, near Loch Ness, in Central North Island, New Zealand and in the U.S. city of Prescott, Arizona.
And the Arizona race page: https://managainsthorse.com
Re: Superintelligence: The Idea That Eats Smart People (2016)
#167Earlier quoted context omitted.
the road adds some infrastructure - i think at that point the person should get a bike?
1990: For a few joyous years there was the Man v Horse v Bike competition in Mid-Wales - https://youtu.be/vFlglZUIKO8
Well that’s just not fair. Even the fastest human on earth can’t be expected to keep up with a horse riding a bike.
Re: Superintelligence: The Idea That Eats Smart People (2016)
#168Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't think we can stop it, but the people saying "this is happening and we should probably figure out what to do about it" are doing their best to accelerate it, which gives us less time to figure out what to do about it.
The people saying this is happening are competing with each other for resources, so there's no way for one of them to hold back without losing out to the others. We see this with people dropping Claude subscriptions in favor of ChatGPT because codex 5.5 > Claude Opus 4.6/7/8. Anthropic is losing money by not releasing Mythos.
You are proposing that going from N companies chasing AGI to N-1 companies chasing AGI will have zero effect on when AGI happens?
Re: Superintelligence: The Idea That Eats Smart People (2016)
#169Has anyone played SOMA? Spoiler warning. It explores this idea of, what if there's an AI in charge of ensuring mankind survives at all costs. What would it be willing to do, to keep us alive? Would we even recognize the result as human? It's a horror game and it explores all kinds of fascinating and disturbing scenarios. Simulations of human minds. Artificial worlds. Human minds in robot bodies. Genetically modified…
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Re: Superintelligence: The Idea That Eats Smart People (2016)
#170The "Einstein can't get a cat into a carrier even though he is smarter" is just a hilariously bad argument. All cat owners can get their cats into a carrier! And most cats don't want to get in, because they hate the vet! And it's almost entirely because the humans are smarter! You can even get a literal tiger into a carrier, even though it can kill you easily. You just drug its food and wait till it passes out. This…
There is a meme going around of a screenshot of a vet textbook: "Do not fight the cat. It has sharper claws, faster, and no code of ethics. Use your brain. Use drugs"