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The Singularity will occur on a Tuesday

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Re: The Singularity will occur on a Tuesday

#391

Post by huslage »

ElevenLathe wrote: post #168
bee_rider wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This world where everybody’s very concerned with that “refined form” is annoying and exhausting. It causes discussions to become about speculative guesses about everybody else’s beliefs, not actual facts. In the end it breeds cynicism as “well yes, the belief is wrong, but everybody is stupid and believes it anyway,” becomes a stop-gap argument. I don’t know how to get away from it because ultimately coordination dep…

IMO this is a symptom of the falling rate of profit, especially in the developed world. If truly productivity enhancing investment is effectively dead (or, equivalently, there is so much paper wealth chasing a withering set of profitable opportunities for investment), then capital's only game is to chase high valuations backed by future profits, which means playing the Keynesian beauty contest for keeps. This in turn…

Profit is a myth of epistemic collapse at this point. Productivity gains are also mythical and probably just anecdotal in the moment.

Re: The Singularity will occur on a Tuesday

#392

Post by palmotea »

XorNot wrote: post #299
awesome_dude wrote: post #264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The "Silent Majority" - Richard Nixon 1969 "Quiet Australians" - Scott Morrison 2019

We really need a rule in politics which bans you (if you're an elected representative) from stating anything about the beliefs of the electorate without reference to a poll of the population of adequate size and quality. Yes we'd have a lot of lawsuits about it, but it would hardly be a bad use of time to litigate whether a politicians statements about the electorate's beliefs are accurate.

> We really need a rule in politics which bans you (if you're an elected representative) from stating anything about the beliefs of the electorate without reference to a poll of the population of adequate size and quality.

Except that assumes polls are a good and accurate way to learn the "beliefs of the electorate," which is not true. Not everyone takes polls, not every belief can be expressed in a multiple-choice form, little subtleties in phrasing and order can greatly bias the outcome of a poll, etc.

I don't think it's a good idea to require speech be filtered through such an expensive and imperfect technology.

Re: The Singularity will occur on a Tuesday

#393

Post by cyanydeez »

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…

Currently, everything suggests the torment nexus will happen before the singularity.

Re: The Singularity will occur on a Tuesday

#394

Post by IsTom »

PaulHoule wrote: post #101

The simple model of an "intelligence explosion" is the obscure equation dx 2 -- = x dt which has the solution 1 x = ----- C-t and is interesting in relation to the classic exponential growth equation dx -- = x dt because the rate of growth is proportional to x and represents the idea of an "intelligence explosion" AND a model of why small western towns became ghost towns, it is hard to start a new social network, etc…

All in all, because of light cones there can be no large-scale growth faster than x^3. And more like x^2 if you want to expand something more than just empty space.

Re: The Singularity will occur on a Tuesday

#395

Post by famouswaffles »

striking wrote: post #332
famouswaffles wrote: post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Even if interpretability of specific models or features within them is an open area of research, the mechanics of how LLMs work to produce results are observable and well-understood, and methods to understand their fundamental limitations are pretty solid these days as well. If you train a transformer on (only) lots and lots of addition pairs, i.e '38393 + 79628 = 118021' and nothing else, the transformer will, duri…

It's pattern matching, likely from typography texts and descriptions of umbrellas. My understanding is that the model can attempt some permutations in its thinking and eventually a permutation's tokens catch enough attention to attempt to solve, and that once it is attending to "everyday object", "arc", and "hook", it will reply with "umbrella". Why am I confident that it's not actually doing spatial reasoning? At le…

>It's pattern matching, likely from typography texts and descriptions of umbrellas.

"Pattern matching" is not an explanation of anything, nor does it answer the question I posed. You basically hand waved the problem away in conveniently vague and non-descriptive phrase. Do you think you could publish that in a paper for ext ?

>Why am I confident that it's not actually doing spatial reasoning? At least in the case of Claude Opus 4.6, it also confidently replies "umbrella" even when you tell it to put the parenthesis under the J, with a handy diagram clearly proving itself wrong

I don't know what to tell you but J with the parentheses upside down still resembles an umbrella. To think that a machine would recognize it's just a flipped umbrella and a human wouldn't is amazing, but here we are. It's doubly baffling because Claude quite clearly explains it in your transcript.

>I feel like I have a pretty good intuition of what's happening here based on my understanding of the underlying mathematical mechanics.

Yes I realize that. I'm telling you that you're wrong.

Re: The Singularity will occur on a Tuesday

#396

Post by bodge5000 »

nine_k wrote: post #118
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…

> * enough people believe it will happen and act accordingly* Here comes my favorite notion of "epistemic takeover". A crude form: make everybody believe that you have already won. A refined form: make everybody believe that everybody else believes that you have already won. That is, even if one has doubts about your having won, they believe that everyone else submit to you as a winner, and must act accordingly.

Its the classic interrogation technique; "we're not here to debate whether your guilty or innocent, we have all the evidence we need to prove your guilt, we just want to know why". Not sure if it makes it any different though that the interrogator knows they are lying

Re: The Singularity will occur on a Tuesday

#397

Post by nine_k »

hansvm wrote: post #382
PaulHoule wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With the odd story that we paid the price for it in the long term. This book https://www.amazon.com/Zero-Sum-Society-Distribution-Possibi... tells the compelling story that the Mellon family teamed up with the steelworker's union to use protectionism to protect the American steel industry's investments in obsolete open hearth steel furnaces that couldn't compete on a fair market with the basic oxygen furnace process…

I'll take a look at that story later. I'm curious though, why is US metallurgy consistently top-notch if the processes are inferior? When I use wrenches, bicycle frames, etc from most other countries I have no end of troubles with weld delamination, stress fractures compounding into catastrophic failures, and whatnot, even including enormous wrenches just snapping in half with forces far below what something a tenth…

Which are these other countries? Have you tried something actually made in Japan, or in Germany, for instance?

What you describe seems like very cheap Chinese imports fraudulently imitating something else.

Re: The Singularity will occur on a Tuesday

#398

Post by Nevermark »

skissane wrote: post #341
XorNot wrote: post #299

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We really need a rule in politics which bans you (if you're an elected representative) from stating anything about the beliefs of the electorate without reference to a poll of the population of adequate size and quality. Yes we'd have a lot of lawsuits about it, but it would hardly be a bad use of time to litigate whether a politicians statements about the electorate's beliefs are accurate.

The thing is... on both the cited occasions (Nixon in 1968, Morrison in 2019), the politicians claiming the average voter agreed with them actually won that election So, obviously their claims were at least partially true – because if they'd completely misjudged the average voter, they wouldn't have won

People vote for people they don't agree with.

When there are only two choices, and infinite issues, voters only have two choices: Vote for someone you don't agree with less, or vote for someone you quite hilariously imagine agrees with you.

EDIT: Not being cynical about voters. But about the centralization of parties, in number and operationally, as a steep barrier for voter choice.

Re: The Singularity will occur on a Tuesday

#399

Post by MichaelZuo »

arjie wrote: post #276
spacemark wrote: post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 post…

Now that you mention it, it is pretty strange to see HN users parroting other people’s thinking (sci-fi writers) like literal sub-sapient parrots, while simultaneously decrying the danger of machines turning people into sub-sapient parrots…

Following that logic… the closest problem would be literally inbetween their ears.

Re: The Singularity will occur on a Tuesday

#400

Post by measurablefunc »

stickfigure wrote: post #352
measurablefunc wrote: post #311

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your response is a common enough fallacy to have a name: straw man.

I think the fallacy at hand is more along the lines of "no true scotsman". You can define understanding to require such detail that nobody can claim it; you can define understanding to be so trivial that everyone can claim it. "Why does the sun rise?" Is it enough to understand that the Earth revolves around the sun, or do you need to understand quantum gravity?

Good point. OP was saying "no one knows" when in fact plenty of people do know but people also often conflate knowing & understanding w/o realizing that's what they're doing. People who have studied programming, electrical engineering, ultraviolet lithography, quantum mechanics, & so on know what is going on inside the computer but that's different from saying they understand billions of transistors b/c no one really understands billions of transistors even though a single transistor is understood well enough to be manufactured in large enough quantities that almost anyone who wants to can have the equivalent of a supercomputer in their pocket for less than $1k: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MiUHjLxm3V0.

Somewhere along the way from one transistor to a few billion human understanding stops but we still know how it was all assembled together to perform boolean arithmetic operations.

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