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The Singularity will occur on a Tuesday

campedersen.com

241–250 of 800 posts

Re: The Singularity will occur on a Tuesday

#241
post #116

"... HBR found that companies are cutting [jobs] based on AI's potential, not its performance. I don't know who needs to hear this - a lot apparently - but the following three statements are not possible to validate but have unreasonably different effects on the stock market. * We're cutting because of expected low revenue. (Negative) * We're cutting to strengthen our strategic focus and control our operational costs…

> The hype is real. Will we see drastically reduced operational costs the coming years or will it follow the same curve as we've seen in productivity since 1750?

There's a third possibility: slop driven productivity declines as people realize they took a wrong turn.

Which makes me wonder: what is the best 'huge AI bust' trade?

Re: The Singularity will occur on a Tuesday

#242

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…

Lol. Speak for yourself, AI has not diminished my thinking in any material way and has indeed accelerated my ability to learn.

Anyone predicting the "end of humanity" is playing prophet and echoing the same nonsensical prophecies we heard with the invention of the printing press, radio, TV, internet, or a number of other step-change technologies.

There's a false premise built into the assertion that humanity can even end - it's not some static thing, it's constantly evolving and changing into something else.

Re: The Singularity will occur on a Tuesday

#243
post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

This looks like a very comfortable, pleasant way of civilization suicide. Not interacting with any other human means you're the last human in your genetic line. A widespread adherence to this idea means humanity dwindling and dying out voluntarily. (This has been reproduced in mice: [1]) Not having humans as primary actors likely means that their interests become more and more neglected by the system of machines that…

Civilization suicide is the ideal

Re: The Singularity will occur on a Tuesday

#244

Great article, super fun. > In 2025, 1.1 million layoffs were announced. Only the sixth time that threshold has been breached since 1993. Over 55,000 explicitly cited AI. But HBR found that companies are cutting based on AI's potential, not its performance. The displacement is anticipatory. You have to wonder if this was coming regardless of what technological or economic event triggered it. It is baffling to me that…

Because companies made models build/stolen from other people’s work, and this has massive layoff consequences, the paradigm is shifting, layoffs are massive and law makers are too slow. Shouldn’t we shift the whole capitalist paradigm and just ask the companies to gives all their LLM work for free to the world as well ? It’s just a circle, AI is build from human knowledge and should be given back to all people for free. No companies should have all this power. If nobody learns how to code because all code is generated, what would stop the gatekeepers of AI to up the prices x1000 and lock everyone out of building things at all because it’s too expensive and too slow to do by hand ? It all should freely be made accessible to all humans for all humans to for ever be able to build things from it.

Re: The Singularity will occur on a Tuesday

#245
post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 pros…

> the state is usually a much more sloppy investor

I don’t find this to be true

The state invests in important things that have 2nd and 3rd order positive benefit but aren’t immediately profitable. Money in a food bank is a “lost” investment.

Alternatively the state plays power games and gets a little too attached to its military toys.

Re: The Singularity will occur on a Tuesday

#246

Earlier 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. Uh yes, we do. It works in precisely the same way that you can walk from "here" to "there" by taking a step towards "there", and then repeating. The cognitive dissonance comes when we conflate this way of "having a conversation" (two people converse) and assume that the fact that they produce similar outputs means t…

> It works in precisely the same way that you can walk from "here" to "there" by taking a step towards "there", and then repeating.

It's funny how, in order to explain one complex phenomenon, you took an even more complex phenomenon as if it somehow simplifies it.

Re: The Singularity will occur on a Tuesday

#248

Was this ironically written by AI? > The labor market isn't adjusting. It's snapping. > MMLU, tokens per dollar, release intervals. The actual capability and infrastructure metrics. All linear. No pole. No singularity signal.

I really hate that the first example has become a de facto tell for LLMs, because it's a perfectly fine rhetorical device.

Re: The Singularity will occur on a Tuesday

#250

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…

> prior to reforming society into one that does not predicate survival on continued employment and wages

There's no way that'll happen. The entire history of humanity is 99% reacting to things rather than proactively preventing things or adjusting in advance, especially at the societal level. You would need a pretty strong technocracy or dictatorship in charge to do otherwise.

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