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The Singularity will occur on a Tuesday

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Re: The Singularity will occur on a Tuesday

#271

Post by zahlman »

accidentallfact wrote: post #96
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…

A better approach is to make AI bullshit people on purpose.

This is essentially just that. The idea is that "poisoned" input data will cause AIs that consume it to become more likely to produce bullshit.

Re: The Singularity will occur on a Tuesday

#272

Post by jacquesm »

AndrewKemendo wrote: post #231
ghurtado wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you edit your comment to add punctuation, please let me know: I would like to read that final pile of words. I did try, I promise.

Ok here: Everything from the semiconductor through the vacuum cleaner, automobile, airplanes and steam engines was developed to give a small group an advantage over all the other groups. It has always been the case, it will always be the case. Fundamentally, at the root nature of humanity, humans do not care about the externalities, either good or bad.

Vacuum cleaner -> sell appliances -> sell electric motors

But there was a clear advantage in quality of life for a lot of people too.

Automobile -> part of industrialization of transport -> faster transport, faster world

Arguably also a big increase in quality of life but it didn't scale that well and has also reduced the quality of life. If all that money had gone into public transport then that would likely have been a lot better.

Airplanes -> yes, definitely, but they were also clearly seen as an advantage in war, in fact that was always a major driver behind inventions.

Steam engine -> the mother of all prime movers and the beginnings of the fossil fuel debacle (coal).

Definitely a quality of life change but also the cause of the bigger problems we are suffering from today.

The 'coffin corner' (one of my hobby horses) is a real danger, we have, as a society, achieved a certain velocity, if we slow down too much we will crash, if we speed up the plane will come apart. Managing these transitions is extremely delicate work and it does not look as though 'delicate' is in the vocabulary of a lot of people in the driving seats.

Re: The Singularity will occur on a Tuesday

#273

Post by tehjoker »

Forgeties79 wrote: post #80
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…

I just point to Covid lockdowns and how many people took up hobbies, how many just turned into recluses, how many broke the rules no matter the consequences real or imagined, etc. Humans need something to do. I don’t think it should be work all the time. But we need something to do or we just lose it. It’s somewhat simplistic, but I find it get the conversation rolling. Then I go “it’s great that we want to replace w…

It's true people need something to do, but I don't think the COVID shutdown (lockdowns didn't happen in the U.S. for the most part though they did in other countries) is a good comparison because the entire society was perfused with existential dread and fear of contact with another human being while the death count was rising and rising by thousands a day. It's not a situation that makes for comfortable comparisons because people were losing their damn minds and for good reason.

Re: The Singularity will occur on a Tuesday

#276

Post by arjie »

spacemark wrote: post #242
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…

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…

A large number of people read a work of fiction and conclude that what happened in the work of fiction is an inevitability. My family has a genetically-selected baby (to avoid congenital illness) and the Hacker News link to the story had these comments all over it.

> I only know seven sci-fi films and shows that have warned about how this will go badly.

and

> Pretty sure this was the prologue to Gattaca.

and

> I posted a youtube link to the Gattaca prologue in a similar post on here. It got flagged. Pretty sure it's virtually identical to the movie's premise.

I think the ironic thing in the LLM case is that these people have outsourced their reasoning to a work of fiction and now are simple deterministic parrots of pop culture. There is some measure of humor in that. One could see this as simply inter-LLM conflict with the smaller LLMs attempting to fight against the more capable reasoning models ineffectively.

Re: The Singularity will occur on a Tuesday

#277

Post by generic92034 »

oceanplexian wrote: post #154
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…

> It's not a great example though, because the US was the principal winner of WWII, the only large industrial country relatively unscathed by it. The US is also shaping up to be the principal winner in Artificial Intelligence. If, like everyone is postulating, this has the same transformative impact to Robotics as it does to software, we're probably looking at prosperity that will make the 1950s look like table stake…

Are you sure that in today's reality the fruits of the AI race will be harvested by "the people"?

Re: The Singularity will occur on a Tuesday

#278

Post by ck2 »

Does "tokens per dollar" have a "moore's law" of doubling?

Because while machine-learning is not actually "AI" an exponential increase in tokens per dollar would indeed change the world like smartphones once did

Re: The Singularity will occur on a Tuesday

#279

Post by sp527 »

AlexCoventry wrote: post #214
sp527 wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The likely outcome is that 99.99% of humanity lives a basic subsistence lifestyle ("UBI") and the elite and privileged few metaphorically (and somewhat literally) ascend to the heavens. Around half the planet already lives on <= $7/day. Prepare to join them.

FWIW, you'd probably be able to buy a lot of goods and services for $7/day, if robots were doing literally all the work.

Agreed. The quality of life bar will be higher for sure. But it will still technically be a "subsistence" lifestyle, with no prospect of improvement. Perhaps that will suffice for most people? We're going to find out.
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