321–330 of 506 posts
Not AGI related but this has always bothered me. I know he’s super talented but I always wonder how many other equally talented software engineers never get noticed and toil away at crappy jobs. What’s the trick to becoming a celebrity if you’re talented?
> Well, you can tie that into a lot of questions, like, ‘Is human population a good thing?’ ‘Is immigration a good thing, where we seem to have been able to take advantage of new sources of humanity that are willing to engage in economic activities and be directed by the markets?’ > The world is a hugely better place with our 8 billion people than it was when there were 50 million people kind of like living in caves…
The problem with Carmack and many like him, is that they
think of themselves as purely rational beings operating
within scientific frameworks and based purely on scientific
results, but whenever they step outside the technical fields
in which they work, they are ignorant and dogmatic.
The problems arise when folks start to present themselves as experts and try to hold sway over others in areas in which they have no clue. That's not what I see here.
> Now, the smart money still says it’s done by a team of researchers, and it’s cobbled together over all that. But my reasoning on this is: If you take your entire DNA, it’s less than a gigabyte of information. So even your entire human body is not all that much in the instructions, and the brain is this tiny slice of it —like 40 megabytes, and it’s not tightly coded. So, we have our existence proof of humanity: What…
That's only the code describing the molecular hardware which is mostly just a description of a neuron. We don't as yet know how the neurons decide to specialize and organize themselves into a brain but one guess is that they are exploiting the physical principals that govern atomic and molecular interactions so the "code" for this might not even be present in the DNA itself it would be the physics of "a group of mole…
Unpopular idea, but I hope it's only a matter of time before we declare involving with AGI a criminal endeavor, just as it is playing with biological weapons. Because we can't all be wrong: in almost every forecast, we see AGIs taking over our dignity as a bad thing. And we know that this is not any longer a sci-fi hypothetical scenario: the current generation of AI models is taking jobs from illustrators and copy wr…
It does not need to be that way. In an ideal world, human beings should be free to spend their time doing what they wish, work should be purely in the realm of hobby. No one should have to do work that they would not voluntarily choose to do for enjoyment.
The only way we get there is through AI and the automation of everything. I don't even think it's avoidable -- provided civilization does not collapse, we will 100% reach a point where everything required to sustain a civilization is performed by machines.
We shouldn't let fear keep us in a status quo that, while better than it has ever been historically, is still highly flawed.
I can't wait to become completely useless and to finish my life under a bridge begging for food. On a more technical point of few I'm always surprised to read these articles and never read the work reasoning
That seems like an unlikely future reality. Productivity will be off the charts, goods and services will be nearly free. Why would the average person be poor in such a future?
Not AGI related but this has always bothered me. I know he’s super talented but I always wonder how many other equally talented software engineers never get noticed and toil away at crappy jobs. What’s the trick to becoming a celebrity if you’re talented?
Do something so extraordinary that the entire world will remember you.
> Now, the smart money still says it’s done by a team of researchers, and it’s cobbled together over all that. But my reasoning on this is: If you take your entire DNA, it’s less than a gigabyte of information. So even your entire human body is not all that much in the instructions, and the brain is this tiny slice of it —like 40 megabytes, and it’s not tightly coded. So, we have our existence proof of humanity: What…
I have a tongue-in-cheek assertion that a single human can be smart — perhaps even intelligent. But, what we're experiencing in our society, right now, is an emergent superintelligence that is the culmination of the interaction of 8 billion "merely smart" monkeys. When I'm feeling especially dark, I just assume that most humans aren't even conscious or usefully sapient most of the time, and that continuity of conscio…
This paragraph took me aback: But if I just look at it and say, if 10 years from now, we have ‘universal remote employees’ that are artificial general intelligences, run on clouds, and people can just dial up and say, ‘I want five Franks today and 10 Amys, and we’re going to deploy them on these jobs,’ and you could just spin up like you can cloud-access computing resources, if you could cloud-access essentially arti…
Wouldn’t this be literal slavery? AGI = a person Instantiating people for work and ending their existence afterward seems like the virtual hell that Iain M Banks and Harlan Ellison wrote about. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Have_No_Mouth,_and_I_Must_Sc...
This paragraph took me aback: But if I just look at it and say, if 10 years from now, we have ‘universal remote employees’ that are artificial general intelligences, run on clouds, and people can just dial up and say, ‘I want five Franks today and 10 Amys, and we’re going to deploy them on these jobs,’ and you could just spin up like you can cloud-access computing resources, if you could cloud-access essentially arti…
Ideally, everyone can afford to rent a Frank or Amy to do work for them.
Carmack is clearly a brilliant guy, but it feels like he's fallen into the trap of overfitting on his previous successes and believing they generalise into other domains. No doubt his experience and innovations in computer graphics gives him a good insight into problems in vision, etc. but I don't see anything particularly original or orthogonal in what he's saying with regards to "general AI".