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AI might yet follow the path of previous technological revolutions

economist.com

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

#191

Post by naasking »

bnchrch wrote: post #183
boredtofears wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You mean the same kids that are currently cheating their way through their education at record rates due to the same technology? Can't say I'm optimistic.

> The children now love luxury; they have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for elders and love chatter in place of exercise > - Socrates (399 BC) > The world is passing through troublous times. The young people of today think of nothing but themselves. They have no reverence for parents or old age. They are impatient of all restraint. They talk as if they knew everything, and what passes for…

> > - Socrates (399 BC)

Context: Ancient Greece went into decline just 70 years after that date. Make of that what you will.

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

#192

Post by naasking »

aredox wrote: post #32

The potentially "explosive" part of AI was that it could be self-improving. Using AI to improve AI, or AI improving itself in an exponential growth until it becomes super-human. This is what the "Singularity" and AI "revolution" is based on. But in the end, despite saying AI has PhD-level intelligence, the truth is that even AI companies can't get AI to help them improve faster. Anything slower than exponential is pr…

LLMs are already superhuman at many tasks. You're also wrong about AI not accelerating AI development. There was at least one paper published this year showing just such a result. It's just beginning.

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

#193

Post by mallowdram »

mmargenot wrote: post #153

At least within tech, there seem to have been explosive changes and development of new products. While many of these fail, things like agents and other approaches for handling foundation models are only expanding in use cases. Agents themselves are hardly a year old as part of common discourse on AI, though technologists have been building POCs for longer. I've been very impressed with the wave of tools along the lin…

The immaterial units are arbitrary, so 'agents' are themselves arbitrary, ie illusory. They will not arrive except as being wet nursed infinitely. The developers neglected to notice the fatal flaw, there are specific targets but automating the arbitrary never reaches them, never. It's an egregious monumental fly in the ointment.

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

#195

Post by johnnienaked »

tempodox wrote: post #85
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…

We’ll manage to make our own survival on this planet less probable, even without the help of “AI”.

The cult of efficiency will end in the only perfectly efficient world--one without us.

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

#196

Post by MengerSponge »

glitchc wrote: post #194

I think LLMs are absolutely fantastic tools. But I think we keep getting stuck on calling them AI. LLMs are not sentient. We can make great strides if we treat them as the next generation of helpers for all intellectual and creative arts.

OpenAI (and its peer companies) have deliberately muddied the waters of that language. AI is a marketing term that lets them use disparate systems' success to inflate confidence in their promised utility.

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

#197

Post by ripped_britches »

MengerSponge wrote: post #196
glitchc wrote: post #194

I think LLMs are absolutely fantastic tools. But I think we keep getting stuck on calling them AI. LLMs are not sentient. We can make great strides if we treat them as the next generation of helpers for all intellectual and creative arts.

OpenAI (and its peer companies) have deliberately muddied the waters of that language. AI is a marketing term that lets them use disparate systems' success to inflate confidence in their promised utility.

Nope they started an AI company and then started messing around with robotics and then landing on LLMs as a runway.

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

#198

Post by lucumo »

MengerSponge wrote: post #196
glitchc wrote: post #194

I think LLMs are absolutely fantastic tools. But I think we keep getting stuck on calling them AI. LLMs are not sentient. We can make great strides if we treat them as the next generation of helpers for all intellectual and creative arts.

OpenAI (and its peer companies) have deliberately muddied the waters of that language. AI is a marketing term that lets them use disparate systems' success to inflate confidence in their promised utility.

Meh. People have been calling much dumber algorithms "AI" for decades. You guys are just pedants.

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

#199

Post by chrisco255 »

tempodox wrote: post #85
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…

We’ll manage to make our own survival on this planet less probable, even without the help of “AI”.

I don't know what reality you're living in, but there are more people on this planet than ever in history and most of them are quite well fed.

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

#200

Post by chrisco255 »

potsandpans wrote: post #188
marcus_holmes wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

None of them. Humans have always believed that we are headed for imminent total disaster. In my youth it was WW3 and the impending nuclear armageddon that was inevitable. Or not, as it turned out. I hear the same language being used now about a whole bunch of other things. Including, of course, the evangelist Rapture that is going to happen any day now, but never does. You can see the same thing at work in discussion…

"nothing ever happens." The observation is, humans tend to think that annihilation is inevitable, it hasn't happened yet so therefore it will never be inevitable. In fact, _anything_ could happen. Past performance does not guarantee future results. If you need cognitive behavioral therapy, fine. But to casually cite nuclear holocaust as something people irrationally believed in as a possibility is dishonest. That was…

> And yet there _will_ (eventually) be one generation that is right.

Most likely outcome would be that humans evolve into something altogether different rather than go extinct.

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