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Most AI value will come from broad automation, not from R & D

epoch.ai

271–280 of 319 posts

Re: Most AI value will come from broad automation, not from R & D

#271
post #268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

you could. that’s the beauty of America. Or you could raise the capital by pitching investors that have money because you actually have a good idea. or you don’t have a good idea. you don’t have any money. and you want to complain. what are you asking for? that your parents were more rich? that everyone has the exact same amount of money? what are you striving for in this comment? are you pointing out that life is un…

First, and most obviously, I'm pointing out that any individual without massive wealth attempting to tackle such a thing on their own is inevitably doomed to fail. But more importantly, I'm pointing out that suggesting personal solutions to systemic problems is not only inevitably doomed to fail, but is promulgating the wrongheaded thinking that has created and sustained the crisis that brought us to this point. "I d…

i’d say likely to fail, not doomed.

if you want to have a better life for everyone then what is your solution? you do not provide one.

my solution is if enough people with the right thinking also become neofeudal overlords then we can exercise the change you’re talking about.

do you think some day everything is just going to magically snap into place and everyone will just be fair?

it has been fought for and died over for thousands of years to get where we are. and we are lucky that much less of us have to die in order to stand up for what we believe in.

now we can just make money and use that to effect change. pretty cool evolution of civilization if you ask me.

in addition, what’s wrong with solving the problem for me first? then taking care of others? that’s exactly the right approach.

others can then follow the same approach. now we have a lot of feudal overlords.

diversified micro feudalism is the term that this conversation has spurred. i like it!

Re: Most AI value will come from broad automation, not from R & D

#273

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have four books that I got from my dad - one for construction and repairs, one for electrical, one for plumbing, and one for landscaping. They’re in simple English with excellent illustrations. Using those books, I’ve been able to fix/improve pretty much everything in my house for ten years.

Could you list the titles/author of these books? I'd actually really like to get more into DIY home improvement, and having a starting reference like this would be really valuable

The electrical and plumbing books are from a series from Home Depot called "1-2-3": "Plumbing 1-2-3" and "Wiring 1-2-3". I love them but some other posters have shared books that look even better; I plan to check them out. The construction book is "Modern Carpentry" by Willis H. Wagner. I can't find the landscaping book - haven't needed that one as much - but in my stack I noticed Reader's Digest's "Home Improvements Manual" which I've also used quite a bit.

Re: Most AI value will come from broad automation, not from R & D

#274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s a “bad thing” that over half of America wants (and a majority of poorer Americans) as they cheer on two billionaires that are gutting the safety net they need the most. So they must be okay with it.

I swear I have said this like ten times on this website since the election, but once again, since apparently people still don't get this: Trump won the electoral and popular votes with 312 (58%) of the former and 77,303,568 (49.81%) of the latter, which supports saying "over half" compared to Harris' 226 (42%) of the former and 75,019,230 (48.34%) of the latter. However the population of the United States is 340.1 mi…

gerrymandering is so messed up. but speaking strictly from an outside perspective it is a gangster move.

dare i say, gangster moves back are REQUIRED.

to whoever downvoted this, you want to take the high road? when our citizens’ voting rights have been marginalized?

or are you just turned off by the word gangster?

anyway, i propose making the gerrymandering an anti—american thing. which it is.

make it the center of everything. there should be zero other issues until the ability to vote on the issues for all our people has been corrected.

i would call out every single politician that was responsible for this gerrymandering. repeatedly, over and over again until they were harassed into a retirement recluse. that is my gangster counter move proposal.

focus on the individual politicians reponsible for this and launch an all out aggressive offensive to eradicate their whole memory from America.

Re: Most AI value will come from broad automation, not from R & D

#275

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The average student loan debt is around $40K in the US. Even still, somehow, some way, the homeownership rate is the same, people aren’t going homeless and people’s needs are being met. How is that? If people are worse off meeting their Maslow hierarchy of needs?

So you ignore the literal prices of these things we're discussing. Gotcha. I'm glad that I've forced you to ignore my argument rather than addressing the elephant in the room. The average student loan debt in 1980 was zero because the vast majority of people could get by on free and public high school education btw. Especially if we assume that we're talking about the median income household. To achieve this equivale…

student loan debt is out of control. college is a money pit that will hopefully be dissolved within our lifetime. the social aspect is not worth the money.

all knowledge is on the internet. we do not need college at all. that will come to be more evident. but colleges got lots o’ money from donors to prolong their livelihoods.

Re: Most AI value will come from broad automation, not from R & D

#276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you provide references? This is the first I’ve ever heard of this.

For example, Murray Rothbard argued in America’s Great Depression (1963) that both Herbert Hoover and FDR worsened the economic downturn through interventionist policies. He believed FDR’s price and wage controls, massive public spending, and business regulations stifled economic recovery. My point is not that the person I was replying to is definitely wrong about FDR's policies, but rather that the effects of FDR's…

Thanks for the reference. I generally agree that, from a very high-altitude, it's difficult to know whether New Deal policies shortened the depression given that WWII shook up the US so much. However, there are many things introduced during that time that have had a visceral effect on the average American's quality of life, saved lives, and would be terrible to abandon: the FDIC, the construction of a massive amount of infrastructure, social security, etc.

Re: Most AI value will come from broad automation, not from R & D

#277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Technical progress would be fantastic if the benefits didn't go mainly to the top. I am pretty sure in the not too far future we will have enough technology that you can live off the land somewhere with the help of some robots. Or have them do all your housework. In principle, this is great, but our society is not set up for a lot of people not working while the technology is progressed by a relatively small number o…

> I am pretty sure in the not too far future we will have enough technology that you can live off the land somewhere with the help of some robots. If John Deere can help it, those Deerebots will be sealed shut, TPM'd & DRM'd to hell. You'd pay a subscription and have to take them into a service center to get them serviced and have the firmware updated. They basic subscription tier will only work with genuine Monsanto…

From what I've seen, the small low-HP tractors without particulate filters have a minimum of electronics. It's the computerized emissions controls where they start creeping in. And I assume the big farmers put up with digital restrictions because they want to have their shiny new gear serviced by professionals anyway, whereas homesteads there is going to be a lot more DIY.

The real problem is that farming is fucking hard. I bought a vertical tiller somewhat as a hedge against societal collapse from the political movement to destroy America, but I'm under no illusions of that being a straightforward food supply. The main aim is to be able to do food plots for neighbors in trade.

Honestly I've got to wonder if we're going this far, why do you even need to live off the land? As in, why turn soil just to get free sun and water? Why not just indoor hydroponics? Or even still using soil, but inside in a much more controlled fashion.

Re: Most AI value will come from broad automation, not from R & D

#278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let's start with just agreeing that the wage gap and wealth inequality is a bad thing. Which is all I wanted to say in the root post. I'm not gonna get gish galloped off topic any further.

It’s a “bad thing” that over half of America wants (and a majority of poorer Americans) as they cheer on two billionaires that are gutting the safety net they need the most. So they must be okay with it.

Sure sure.

But that doesn't change the argument or the truth about what is, or isn't bad for people. I recognize the political disadvantage I'm at here, but lets just stick with the truth of the matter before we get into the politics.

As I said before, I'm happy if you could just agree with me that wealth gap is a problem worth tackling.

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I'm not one to tackle entire problems all at once. Lets focus on things one step at a time. Lets first agree what the problems are in America. And then once we all agree on that, then we can work on them.

Re: Most AI value will come from broad automation, not from R & D

#279

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You need more to maintain a house, drywaller, gardener, carpenter, painter. The most important robotic help though will be cleaner and nurse. As our population ages and shrinks home help will become scarce and we'll desperately need an alternative to take care of ourselves as we age.

Perhaps in response housing will become even more homogenized so that AI has an easier time maintaining it in a standardized way?

But is your house iHouse compatible, or only OpenHouse compatible?

Re: Most AI value will come from broad automation, not from R & D

#280
post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Advocate or not, it’s here to stay. And if you’re not adjusting to it, you’re doing yourself a disservice. Last week I did the amount of work that would’ve taken me give or take a month. A significant part of it was writing an API client for a system I needed to use. Pretty run of the mill stuff. Doing this ‘by hand’ just takes time. Go look at the docs, type out your data structures, wire things up for the new call,…

You have to balance this time savings with all the times the LLM is just making shit up. I can't the number of times I ask "how do I do X?", and says "call function Y" or "Use command line argument Z". Turns out Y doesn't exist and CLI doesn't take argument "Z". The frustration from that lying is immense. I'd rather take a little longer on some tasks and never deal with this lying.

I see what you mean. The way I approach this is that I think of it as a very (very, very) elaborate auto-complete. Something that takes some text, and continues with the most likely continuation. Which is what it basically is, right?

But that means that whatever rather impressive internal representation of knowledge it has encoded, that knowledge itself can’t be trusted on a “factual” basis.

This is where you have stopped, but you shouldn’t. Because you’re missing what it’s great at. And it’s great at “continuing” text in a longer context. So just use it with a longer context. Use the Search functionality in ChatGPT when asking it things such that you see where it got it from. Use it in a codebase context where you point it to the relevant parts. Give it examples it should follow, etc.

For every task I have I try using AI in some way and form first. Because the downside is limited - I waste 5-7 minutes figuring out that it’s not going to work, and this is something I definitely need to do myself. But the upside is unlimited - the task is done in minutes.

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