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Interview with gwern

dwarkeshpatel.com

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Re: Interview with gwern

#31

Post by satvikpendem »

whiplash451 wrote: post #16
camillomiller wrote: post #13

I really don’t understand why we give credit to this pile of wishful thinking about the AI corporation with just one visionary at the top. First: actual visionary CEOs are a niche of a niche. Second: that is not how most companies work. The existence of the workforce is as important as what the company produces Third: who will buy or rent those services or products in a society where the most common economy driver (s…

Someone probably said the exact same thing when the first cars appeared. Where is the data showing that more jobs get destroyed than created by technological disruption?

> Someone probably said the exact same thing when the first cars appeared.

Without saying anything regarding the arguments for or against AI, I will address this one sentence. This quote is an example of an appeal to hypocrisy in history fallacy, a form of the tu quoque fallacy. Just because someone criticizes X and you compare it to something else (Y) from another time does not mean that the criticism of X is false. There is survivorship bias as well because we now have cars, but in reality, you could've said this same criticism against some other thing that failed, but you don't, because, well, it failed and thus we don't remember it anymore.

The core flaw in this reasoning is that just because people were wrong about one technology in the past doesn't mean current critics are wrong about a different technology now. Each technology needs to be evaluated on its own merits and risks. It's actually a form of dismissing criticism without engaging with its substance. Valid concerns about X should be evaluated based on current evidence and reasoning, not on how people historically reacted to Y or any other technology.

Re: Interview with gwern

#32

Post by kryptiskt »

camillomiller wrote: post #13

I really don’t understand why we give credit to this pile of wishful thinking about the AI corporation with just one visionary at the top. First: actual visionary CEOs are a niche of a niche. Second: that is not how most companies work. The existence of the workforce is as important as what the company produces Third: who will buy or rent those services or products in a society where the most common economy driver (s…

I don't get it, why have a human visionary CEO? Even the strongest critics of AI agree that LLMs excel at producing bold visions.

Re: Interview with gwern

#33

Post by automatic6131 »

I don't think this science fiction writer deserves the credit of someone who is studying and/or influencing the real world

> You have one Steve Jobs-type at the helm, and then maybe a whole pyramid of AIs out there executing it and bringing him new proposals

Very interesting in a short story (or a side quest in Cyberpunk 2077 - yeah that one). Not so much for a description of our future.

Re: Interview with gwern

#34

Post by sva_ »

robinhouston wrote: post #8

It's been a bumper week for interesting podcast interviews with an AI theme! In addition to this, there are Lex Fridman's series of interviews with various key people from Anthropic [0], and a long discussion between Stephen Wolfram and Eliezer Yudkowsky on the theme of AI risk [1]. 0. https://youtu.be/ugvHCXCOmm4 1. https://youtu.be/xjH2B_sE_RQ

I found the conversation between Wolfram and Yudkowsky hard to listen to. In fact, I didn't make it to the half. The arguments presented by both were sort of weak and uninteresting?

Re: Interview with gwern

#35

Post by dewey »

Interesting idea with the avatar, but I feel like just having a voice and some audio waves would be better than trying to create a talking avatar. Could just be my personal preference of not having a mental image of someone unknown I guess? Similar to reading a book after watching the movie adaptation.

Re: Interview with gwern

#36

Post by sva_ »

A_D_E_P_T wrote: post #10

www.gwern.net Something I've noticed in spending time online is that there's a "core group" of a few dozen people who seem to turn up everywhere there are interesting discussions. Gwern (who also posts here) is probably at the top of that list.

I wonder how much of that can be attributed to the limitations of the human mind as we evolved in relatively small groups/tribes and it might be difficult to see beyond that

Re: Interview with gwern

#37

Post by Philpax »

automatic6131 wrote: post #33

I don't think this science fiction writer deserves the credit of someone who is studying and/or influencing the real world > You have one Steve Jobs-type at the helm, and then maybe a whole pyramid of AIs out there executing it and bringing him new proposals Very interesting in a short story (or a side quest in Cyberpunk 2077 - yeah that one). Not so much for a description of our future.

He has studied and influenced the real world. Here's Dario Amodei, the CEO of Anthropic, one of the leading AI companies, directly referencing him in an interview from this week: https://youtu.be/ugvHCXCOmm4?t=343

Re: Interview with gwern

#38

Post by walthamstow »

bondarchuk wrote: post #29
resiros wrote: post #12

>Wait if you’re doing $900-1000/month and you’re sustaining yourself on that, that must mean you’re sustaining yourself on less than $12,000 a year. What is your lifestyle like at $12K?" >I live in the middle of nowhere. I don't travel much, or eat out, or have health insurance, or anything like that. I cook my own food. I use a free gym. There was this time when the floor of my bedroom began collapsing. It was so ol…

Many many people in the US live on that kind of money, it's not uncommon at all. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poverty_in_the_United_States "Among individuals living alone: 19.1% lived in poverty." Poverty line (max yearly income) for single households: $14,580

There's a bit in The West Wing where one of the characters finds out the US poverty thresholds are calculated based on work done in the 1950s by a woman named Mollie Orshansky, and that they can't be updated because then US would then have millions more poor people, and that's bad politics. According to your link that's still mostly true 25 years later.

Re: Interview with gwern

#39

Post by djmips »

dewey wrote: post #35

Interesting idea with the avatar, but I feel like just having a voice and some audio waves would be better than trying to create a talking avatar. Could just be my personal preference of not having a mental image of someone unknown I guess? Similar to reading a book after watching the movie adaptation.

How about just listening to the interview then?

Re: Interview with gwern

#40

Post by grues-dinner »

whiplash451 wrote: post #16
camillomiller wrote: post #13

I really don’t understand why we give credit to this pile of wishful thinking about the AI corporation with just one visionary at the top. First: actual visionary CEOs are a niche of a niche. Second: that is not how most companies work. The existence of the workforce is as important as what the company produces Third: who will buy or rent those services or products in a society where the most common economy driver (s…

Someone probably said the exact same thing when the first cars appeared. Where is the data showing that more jobs get destroyed than created by technological disruption?

Car and motor vehicles in general get you to work and help you do your work. They don't do the work. I guess that's the difference in thinking.

I'm not sure that it's acrually correct: I don't think we'll actually see "AI" actually replace work in general as a concept. Unless it can quite literally do everything and anything, there will always be something that people can do to auction their time and/or health to acquire some token of social value. It might taken generations to settle out who is the farrier who had their industry annihilated and who is the programmer who had it created. But as long as there's scarcity and ambition in the world, there'll be something there, whether it's "good work" or demeaning toil under the bootheel of a fabulously wealthy cadre of AI mill owners. And there will be scarcity as long as there's a speed of light.

Even if I'm wrong and there isn't, that's why it's called the singularity. There's no way to "see" across such an event in order to make predictions. We could equally all be in permanent infinite bliss, be tortured playthings of a mad God, extinct, or transmuted into virtually immortal energy beings or anything in between.

You might as well ask the dinosaurs whether they thought the ultimate result of the meteor would be pumpkin spice latte or an ASML machine for all the sense it makes.

Anyone claiming to be worrying over what happens after a hypothetical singularity is either engaging in intellectual self-gratification, posing or selling something somehow.

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