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AI 2027

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371–380 of 641 posts

Re: AI 2027

#371

Though I think it is probably mostly science-fiction, this is one of the more chillingly thorough descriptions of potential AGI takeoff scenarios that I've seen. I think part of the problem is that the world you get if you go with the "Slowdown"/somewhat more aligned world is still pretty rough for humans: What's the point of our existence if we have no way to meaningfully contribute to our own world? I hope we're wr…

> Slowdown"/somewhat more aligned world is still pretty rough for humans: What's the point of our existence if we have no way to meaningfully contribute to our own world? We spend the best 40 years of our lives working 40-50 hours a week to enrich the top 0.1% while living in completely artificial cities. People should wonder what is the point of our current system instead of worrying about Terminator tier sci fi sys…

Well said. I keep reading these fearmongering articles and looking around wondering where all of these deep meaning and human agency is today.

I’m led to believe that we see this stuff because the tiny subset of humanity that has the wealth and luxury to sit around thinking about thinking about themselves are worried that AI may disrupt the navel-gazing industry.

Re: AI 2027

#372

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The risk is a quantifiable 0.0%? I find that hard to believe. I think the current trends suggest there is a risk that continued environmental destruction could annihilate society.

Risk can never be zero, just like certainty can never be 100%. There is a non-zero chance that the ineffable quantum foam will cause a mature hippopotamus to materialize above your bed tonight, and you’ll be crushed. It is incredibly, amazingly, limits-of-math unlikely. Still a non-zero risk. Better to think of “no risk” as meaning “negligible risk”. But I’m with you that climate change is not a negligible risk; mayb…

Lol, I've always loved that about physics. Some boltzmann brain type stuff.

Re: AI 2027

#373

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think LLM or no LLM the emergence of intelligence appears to be closely related to the number of synapses in a network whether a biological or a digital one. If my hypothesis is roughly true it means we are several orders of magnitude away from AGI. At least the kind of AGI that can be embodied in a fully functional robot with the sensory apparatus that rivals the human body. In order to build circuits of this dens…

I think generally the expectation is that there are around 100T synapses in the brain, and of course it's probably not a 1:1 correspondence with neural networks, but it doesn't seem infeasible at all to me that a dense-equivalent 100T parameter model would be able to rival the best humans if trained properly. If basically a transformer, that means it needs at inference time ~200T flops per token. The paper assumes hu…

Excellent back of napkin math and it feels intuitively right.

And I think training is similar — training is capital intensive therefore centralized, but if 100m people are paying $6k for their inference hardware, add on $100/year as a training tax (er, subscription) and you’ve got $10B/year for training operations.

Re: AI 2027

#374

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What's the point of our existence if we have no way to meaningfully contribute to our own world? You may find this to be insightful: https://meltingasphalt.com/a-nihilists-guide-to-meaning/ In short, "meaning" is a contextual perception, not a discrete quality, though the author suggests it can be quantified based on the number of contextual connections to other things with meaning. The more densely connected somet…

Please don't be offended by my opinion, I mean it in good humour to share some strong disagreements - Im going to give my take after reading your comment and the article which both seem completely OTT ( contextwise regarding my opinions ). >meaning behind them is not dependent upon the perspective of an external observer. (Yes brother like cmon) Regarding the author, I get the impression he grew up without a strong f…

To use a counter example, consider Catholic priests who do not marry or raise children. It would be quite the argument indeed to suggest their lives are without meaning or purpose.

Aha, you might say, but they hold leadership roles! They have positions of authority! Of course they have meaning, as they wield spiritual responsibility to their community as a fine substitute for the family life they will not have.

To that, I suggest looking deeper, at the nuns and monks. To a cynical non-believer, they surely are wanting for a point to their existence, but to them, what they do is a step beyond Maslow's self actualization, for they live in communion with God and the saints. Their medications and good works in the community are all expressions of that purpose, not the other way around. In short, though their "graph of contextual meaning" doesn't spread as far, it is very densely packed indeed.

Two final thoughts:

1) I am both aware of and deeply amused by the use of priests and nuns and monks to defend the arguments of a nihilist's search for meaning.

2) I didn't bring this up so much to take the conversation off topic, so much as to hone in on the very heart of what troubled the person I originally responded to. The question of purpose, the point of existence, in the face of superhuman AI is in fact unchanged. The sense of meaning and purpose one finds in life is found not in the eyes of an unfeeling observer, whether the observers are robots or humans. It must come from within.

Re: AI 2027

#375

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What's the point of our existence if we have no way to meaningfully contribute to our own world? For a sizable number of humans, we're already there. The vast majority of hacker news users are spending their time trying to make advertisements tempt people into spending money on stuff they don't need. That's an active societal harm. It doesn't contribute in any positive way to the world. And yet, people are fine to…

Targeted advertising is about determining and giving people exactly what they need. If successful, this increases consumption and grows the productivity of the economy. It's an extremely meaningful job as it allows for precise, effective distribution of resources.

In practice you're just selling shittier or unnecessary stuff. Advertising makes society objectively worse.

Re: AI 2027

#376

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mostly latency. But even if a single robot could be driven by a data centre consider the energy and hardware investment requirements to make such a creature practical.

1ms latency is more than fast enough, you probably have bigger latency than that between the cpu and the gpu.

We've got 10ms of latency between our brains and our hands along our nerve fibers and we function all right.

Re: AI 2027

#377

It’s good science fiction, I’ll give it that. I think getting lost in the weeds over technicalities ignores the crux of the narrative: even if this doesn’t lead to AGI, at the very least it’s likely the final “warning shot” we’ll get before it’s suddenly and irreversibly here. The problems it raises - alignment, geopolitics, lack of societal safeguards - are all real, and happening now (just replace “AGI” with “corpo…

The most amusing thing about is the unshakable belief that any part of humanity will be able to build a single nuclear reactor by 2027 to power datacenters, let alone a network of them.

Re: AI 2027

#378
post #312

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does a fighter jet count as "heavy machinery"? https://apnews.com/article/artificial-intelligence-fighter-j...

Yes, when they send unmanned jets to combat.

It's already starting with the drones: https://www.csis.org/analysis/ukraines-future-vision-and-cur...

Re: AI 2027

#379
post #329
post #310

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exponential growth means the first order of magnitude comes slowly and the last one runs past you unexpectedly.

Exponential growth generally means that the time between each order of magnitude is roughly the same.

At the risk of pedantry, is that true? Something that doubles annually sure seems like exponential growth to me, but the orders of magnitude are not at all the same rate. Orders of magnitude are a base-10 construct but IMO exponents don’t have to be 10.

EDIT: holy crap I just discovered a commonly known thing about exponents and log. Leaving comment here but it is wrong, or at least naive.

Re: AI 2027

#380
post #182

> AI has started to take jobs, but has also created new ones. Yeah nah, theres a key thing missing here, the number of jobs created needs to be more than the ones it's destroyed, and they need to be better paying and happen in time. History says that actually when this happens, an entire generation is yeeted on to the streets (see powered looms, Jacquard machine, steam powered machine tools) All of that cheap labour…

>History says that actually when this happens, an entire generation is yeeted on to the streets History hasnt had to contend with a birth rate of 0.7-1.6. It's kind of interesting that the elite capitalist media (economist, bloomberg, forbes, etc) is projecting a future crisis of both not enough workers and not enough jobs simultaneously.

> History hasnt had to contend with a birth rate of 0.7-1.6.

I think thats just not true: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peasants%27_Revolt

A large number of revolutions/rebellions are caused by mass unemployment or famine.

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