Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The Singularity will occur on a Tuesday

campedersen.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

361–370 of 800 posts

Re: The Singularity will occur on a Tuesday

#361

Post by bdangubic »

project2501a wrote: post #267
threethirtytwo wrote: post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t think you’re rational. Part of being able to be unbiased is to see it in yourself. First of all. Nobody knows how LLMs work. Whether the singularity comes or not cannot be rationalized from what we know about LLMs because we simply don’t understand LLMs. This is unequivocal. I am not saying I don’t understand LLMs. I’m saying humanity doesn’t understand LLMs in much the same way we don’t understand the human…

> Nobody knows how LLMs work. I'm sorry, come again?

nobody can how how something that is non-deterministic works - by its pure definition

Re: The Singularity will occur on a Tuesday

#364

Post by devsda »

sixtyj wrote: post #296

The Roman Empire took 400 years to collapse, but in San Francisco they know the singularity will occur on (next) Tuesday. The answer to the meaning of life is 42, by the way :)

Was thinking what if we had 42/43 days a month. Will the singularity date end-up on 42nd of a month but sadly it doesn't.

However, it does fall on a 42nd day if we have 45/46 days per month!

Re: The Singularity will occur on a Tuesday

#365

Post by AndrewKemendo »

goatlover wrote: post #165
cgannett wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

if people believe its a threat and it is also real then what matters is timing

Which would also mean the accelerationists are potentially putting everyone at risk. I'd think a soft takeoff decades in the future would give us a much better chance of building the necessary safeguards and reorganizing society accordingly.

This is a soft takeoff

We, the people actually building it, have been discussing it for decades

I started reading Kurzweil in the early 90s

If you’re not up to speed that’s your fault

Re: The Singularity will occur on a Tuesday

#366

Post by jrflowers »

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…

The “poison fountain” is just a little script that serves data supplied by… somebody from my domain? It seems like it would be super easy for whoever maintains the poison feed to flip a switch and push some shady crypto scam or whatever.

Re: The Singularity will occur on a Tuesday

#367

Post by lysace »

jgrahamc wrote: post #48

Phew, so we won't have to deal with the Year 2038 Unix timestamp roll over after all.

Back in like 1998 there was a group purchase for a Y2038 tshirt with some clever print on some hot email list I was on. I bought one. It obviously doesn't fit me any longer.

It seemed so impossibly far away. Now it's 12 years.

Re: The Singularity will occur on a Tuesday

#368

Post by FarmerPotato »

pryce wrote: post #287
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…

> whether the singularity actually happens or not is irrelevant so much as whether enough people believe it will happen and act accordingly. We've already been here in the 1980s. The tech industry needs to cultivate people who are interested in the real capabilities and the nuance around that, and eject the set of people who am to turn the tech industry into a "you don't even need a product" warmed-over acolytes of T…

All the discussion of investment and economics can be better informed by perusing the economic data in Rise and Fall of American Growth. Robert Gordon's empirical finding is that American productivity compounded astonishingly from 1870-1970, but has been stuck at a very low growth rate since then.

It's hard to square with the computer revolution, but my take post-70s is "net creation minus creative destruction" was large but spread out over more decades. Whereas technologies like: electrification, autos, mass production, telephone, refrigeration, fertilizers, pharmaceuticals, these things produced incomparable growth over a century.

So if you were born in the 70s America, your experience of taxes, inflation, prosperity and which policies work, all that can feel heavier than what folks experienced in the prior century. Of course that's in the long run (ie a generation).

I question whether AI tools have great net positive creation minus destruction.

Re: The Singularity will occur on a Tuesday

#370

Post by marifjeren »

> I [...] fit a hyperbolic model to each one independently

^ That's your problem right there.

Assuming a hyperbolic model would definitely result in some exuberant predictions but that's no reason to think it's correct.

The blog post contains no justification for that model (besides well it's a "function that hits infinity"). I can model the growth of my bank account the same way but that doesn't make it so. Unfortunately.

Post reply on HN