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The Economics of Recursive Self-Improvement [pdf]
41–50 of 103 posts
Re: The Economics of Recursive Self-Improvement [pdf]
#42Earlier quoted context omitted.
NFTs were worth more than $1 trillion so we know that they were "better" than the Ai efforts of today because “The market rewards intelligent allocation”
they never were if I sell 1 token at $1 and there are a trillion of them minted, that does not make a $1T market cap but if you want to prove a point against AI with fake data, sure
If I sell 1 token at $139.14 and 13.17 billion of them minted, that makes a $1.8T market cap.
Space data centres are the panicle of intelligent allocation.
Re: The Economics of Recursive Self-Improvement [pdf]
#43First thing I thought when reading the title was "is this about those never ending self-help books?"
What happens when self-help books read self-help books that read self-help books is what you see on linkedin.
Re: The Economics of Recursive Self-Improvement [pdf]
#44RSI isn't anything new though; computers have been used to make computers better for about 80 years now. Imagine having a secretary who could read 1 million records and give you back your answer in 100 microseconds, for just 10 cents an hour. That's Postgres. So I'd imagine that if R&D can be automated, everything becomes better and cheaper but we'd all lose our jobs, as secretaries did to postgres. UBI season
> Imagine having a secretary who could read 1 million records and give you back your answer in 100 microseconds, for just 10 cents an hour. That's Postgres. Well, that secretary can only answer very specific questions in a rather peculiar format. > [...] but we'd all lose our jobs, as secretaries did to postgres. I doubt many secretaries were replaced by postgres. However, you might like reading about https://en.wiki…
"I doubt many secretaries were replaced by postgres."
The maximal relative share of typists, secretaries, admin assistants et al. in the US workforce was 4% and this apogee was reached in 1980 after ~ 100 years of sustained growth. In 1980, the curve bent and started declining as systematically as it used to rise. Now it is less than half of that. So are other office roles.
https://forklightning.substack.com/p/the-past-present-and-fu...
(Look at the "The Rise and Fall of Office Work" graph in the middle of the page.)
Given the neat correlation with the tech revolution, I'd be surprised if there wasn't a causal relation. Maybe not exactly with Postgres, but with automation in general. Data collection and management does not involve nearly as many people as it once did.
Re: The Economics of Recursive Self-Improvement [pdf]
#45Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think humans totally oversell just how special "everything they do on the job" is. "No, you don't get it, it's me specifically who has a job that's way too special to be automated away!"
We could have coffee made today by automated coffee vending machines, but many people still prefer to go to a coffee shop. Why is that? Sometimes we don’t choose the cheaper automated product, and instead opt for the “human experience”. I don’t imagine this will change any time soon. Humans like being around humans.
Some ingredients for a good coffee still need to be fresh, like milk - refilled daily. And the machine cleaned. Might as well employ a human at this point.
Re: The Economics of Recursive Self-Improvement [pdf]
#46Earlier quoted context omitted.
If that is true, then, why is it that the "human experience" has been on decline for decades - since the very moment it became possible to start cutting down on it? If "humans like being around humans", why does human behavior say otherwise?
What are your KPIs there? Global concert attendence is pretty high these days, for example.
Estimates on the count of close friendships, amount of acquaintances, dating, sexual activity, etc - all falling.
People have fewer and fewer relationships, and even fewer close or intimate relationships. "Third places" are in decline, demand-induced - social activity takes place "in person" less and less, and more and more of it moves "online".
If your idea of "human experience" is "close relationship in person" or "group activities offline", and not something like "a friend chat group with memes and games, most of them never met in person", "social media posting", "parasocial relationship with a streamer" or "public Minecraft and Roblox servers", then "human experience" is on decline by just about any metric available.
Those aren't new trends either. They predate things like companion/roleplay AI chatbots - which seem popular with Gen Z and Gen Alpha in particular.
How that new thing shakes out is still unclear, but modern AIs are probably the closest thing to a "human experience" one can get without involving a human at all. So there's even more room for the metrics to fall now - regardless of whether "hanging out in a streamer's chat" counts as "human experience" to you.
Re: The Economics of Recursive Self-Improvement [pdf]
#47Earlier quoted context omitted.
To put it another way, the cost per advancement increases. That’s “as we advance it becomes more difficult to advance”. However, because of the prior advances, you also have more resources to throw at future advancements. So, then, the question is whether the “profits” on the last advance are enough to pay for the next one. We can define a new term, “affordability”, as what % “profit” you can expect from each advance…
You could argue that there is a capital built up - but even that is difficult as a lot of the knowledge for, eg., building LLMs can not demand rent. Everybody can build their own transformer networks. > To put it another way, the cost per advancement increases. This is not true when you don't use capital that demands rent. On the contrary, the cost per advancement is actually decreasing as we develop more knowledge.…
Whether or not it decreases the costs of advancedment would depend on what is causing advancement to have costs. Some things might be addressable by cognitive technologies, others might not.
If capital doesn't create a return evenutally, why would it invest? (Or did you mean "rent" in the narrow economics definition? But then not sure how that applies here).
Re: The Economics of Recursive Self-Improvement [pdf]
#48Earlier quoted context omitted.
What are your KPIs there? Global concert attendence is pretty high these days, for example.
Estimates on the count of close friendships, amount of acquaintances, dating, sexual activity, etc - all falling. People have fewer and fewer relationships, and even fewer close or intimate relationships. "Third places" are in decline, demand-induced - social activity takes place "in person" less and less, and more and more of it moves "online". If your idea of "human experience" is "close relationship in person" or…
But do people want fewer and fewer physical relationships, friendships, etc. ("loniless epidemic" comes to mind here, for example)?
Humans liking being around other humans doesn't preclude failure there - but that wouldn't mean that the statement isn't true. And as I said, some real life activities involving other humans are at quite high levels these days (concerts, higher end restaurants or explorations).
Re: The Economics of Recursive Self-Improvement [pdf]
#49Earlier quoted context omitted.
Estimates on the count of close friendships, amount of acquaintances, dating, sexual activity, etc - all falling. People have fewer and fewer relationships, and even fewer close or intimate relationships. "Third places" are in decline, demand-induced - social activity takes place "in person" less and less, and more and more of it moves "online". If your idea of "human experience" is "close relationship in person" or…
But do people want fewer and fewer physical relationships, friendships, etc. ("loniless epidemic" comes to mind here, for example)? Humans liking being around other humans doesn't preclude failure there - but that wouldn't mean that the statement isn't true. And as I said, some real life activities involving other humans are at quite high levels these days (concerts, higher end restaurants or explorations).
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Re: The Economics of Recursive Self-Improvement [pdf]
#50Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think humans totally oversell just how special "everything they do on the job" is. "No, you don't get it, it's me specifically who has a job that's way too special to be automated away!"
We could have coffee made today by automated coffee vending machines, but many people still prefer to go to a coffee shop. Why is that? Sometimes we don’t choose the cheaper automated product, and instead opt for the “human experience”. I don’t imagine this will change any time soon. Humans like being around humans.
Mostly because machine coffee tastes like shit, the incentives are off for it; its usually in a place where you cant get good coffee and they do not give a fuck if you like it or not, enjoy your caffeine that you are addicted to.