Earlier quoted context omitted.
Genes have had their time.
Genes are now merely the "survival machine" for something else?
No. Genes are static fixtures. Furniture. Slow life. Memes took the stage now, they propagate faster.
Humanity isn't ready for the coming intelligence explosion
421–430 of 524 posts
Re: Humanity isn't ready for the coming intelligence explosion
#422Earlier quoted context omitted.
The Fermi paradox isn't evidence for anything except space being big.
It rules out various superficially attractive scenarios, particularly ones in popular science fiction, like Star Trek or Star Wars.
It doesn't though.
The galaxy is ~100,000 light years across and likely to contain at least 100 billion planets, of which we've only just developed the ability to even detect the existence of ones substantially closer than 1000 light years without assistance from gravitational lensing, i.e. in less than a millionth of the volume of the galaxy.
AFAIK (my knowledge is not encyclopedic), the most energetic event in the Star Wars universe is the Death Star destroying planets. Novae are many orders of magnitude more energetic than that and are estimated to happen 80 or so times a year in the Milky Way. We manage to detect 3-4 of those, generally well after the fact, and AFAIK have only observed one happen live once. The Death Star could go on a shooting spree and we'd be vanishingly unlikely to notice.
And as far as electromagnetic broadcasts are concerned, their intensity falls off with the square of distance unless they are directed. Unless ET were to point a hyper-powerful (but hopefully not Death Star level) laser directly at us, we'd be extremely unlikely to have detected their broadcasts by now.
Space is really, really, really big. Big enough by far to make "if aliens are common why haven't we seen them yet?" a question with a trivial, obvious answer. It's the same answer a kid who's just had their first swim in the sea gets when they ask "why weren't there any whales?"
Edit: There are other things that rule out Stars Wars and Star Trek though, ofc. The speed of light isn't really a speed limit (or a speed, as such) and special relativity doesn't prevent you from reaching the stars in your lifetime or even from hopping to another star in a second, but the different time spans experienced by people on different world lines aren't optional.
Re: Humanity isn't ready for the coming intelligence explosion
#423Earlier quoted context omitted.
Horse and cart, no. But some cities have banned cars and replaced them with various alternatives, and it works. There are alternatives to the car culture we have. It would require significantly rebuilding how we build infrastructure, but the result could be much safer, cleaner, and less stressful. Of course Americans would rather die, but counties of sane people might be able to work it out.
> It would require significantly rebuilding how we build infrastructure That simple huh?!
Yes? Read that sentence again: "...how we build infrastructure"
Removing onerous parking requirements, like the ones that have resulted in countless strip malls and unwalkable cities with inadequate housing stock.
I'm not suggesting that's all that's necessary but there are indeed simple steps we could take.
Re: Humanity isn't ready for the coming intelligence explosion
#424Earlier quoted context omitted.
And Americans' lives have been heavily shaped by cars and the car industry in a negative way. So, a pretty apt comparison.
And also in a positive way. I mean, it's not personal teleportation, but it sometimes feels like it.
The illusion works only in places like American and Canadian suburbs in which residents depend entirely on cars for even the shortest trips. Everything takes 10-100x the space due to all the paved asphalt. It’s an intensely alienating approach to building infrastructure.
Re: Humanity isn't ready for the coming intelligence explosion
#425Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes, true. You found one thing that people used mostly horse and cart for which they now use lorries and vans for today. However since the invention of car (after it stopped being a toy for rich people) cars have by far been mostly [like overwhelmingly so] used for personal transport. And I simply assumed that is what you meant (because that is what most people mean).
> You found one thing And you found one other "thing" Actually even today it's 80/20, but lorries carry far more stuff than cars do, so you need less lorries. And the inverse is also true, horse and cart was used for personal transport as well
Horse and cart was used for a personal transport very rarely, by a tiny subset of the population for a minority of their trips, the vast majority of the population lived within a walking distance for the vast majority of their trips, the invention of the steam engine ruined that and suddenly people started living within a tram-ride for vast majority of their trips, and started using trains to go on longer trips they simply couldn’t do before. The car took this to the extreme, and ruined the cities on a scale which the tram was previously unable to.
Re: Humanity isn't ready for the coming intelligence explosion
#426Earlier quoted context omitted.
Everyone is afraid about what will happen when people's skills atrophy, but the tools aren't going anywhere. If they truly can always recognize problems and communicate them in understandable ways, then people's skills won't atrophy. Everyone's skills will be enhanced. New developers will learn all of the things they need to learn through using the tool.
The tools can definitely go away. They could get exponentially more expensive to where it is no longer financially possible to keep it subsidized. The bubble could pop and most of the companies could go bankrupt. It's not exactly like a calculator because it requires such an astronomical amount of resources to keep running.
I agree with you but there is a calculator analogy where the resources are local and while taxing for most, viable for the individual. Local AI is less capable than an army frontier model agents but still quite useful.
Re: Humanity isn't ready for the coming intelligence explosion
#427You know, the guy who's spending effectively
millions on Al he must have a literal virtual
Company of Al coders
what's that like. don't think most people are
ready for that. Right now the model is pairing Al
with a coder and then maybe running a few
agents on top of that but what if one person with
the capital can command
an agent army. That might just be an unimaginable
asymmetric advantage.
Re: Humanity isn't ready for the coming intelligence explosion
#428Earlier quoted context omitted.
All the time, yes. But you have to keep two things separate in your thinking: - Prompted as in prompt made of tokens -> for LLMs, tokens double as a clock signal. Time only flows when tokens are pushed through them. - Prompted as in specific request placed in the stream of tokens -> Yeah, they do that all the time whether it's getting into infinite loops of repeating same pattern, or suddenly deciding to do things ba…
So without a token pushed into them they do something? Not sure I understand... In the current UIs is there a lot of suppression then as I have not seen things start on their own? I meant an LLM doing something without any external prompt at all. Not doing something different etc but rather do something without a token/prompt ever flowing to it.
Category error. You might as well say "I've never seen a human do anything without being alive, so humans must be very easy to use safely".
Today's AI harnesses just keep feeding AI tokens - and can, in principle, do so indefinitely. "Streaming LLM" is not mainstream but not unknown either. "Automatic context compaction" is somewhat similar in what it does, and very common. "Keeping the lights on" isn't hard. And you have to turn on those lights to have an AI do anything at all.
At the same time: that type of harness often provides a "tool call" interface. Plenty of tools that end up attached to LLMs can do things like run arbitrary code, spawn instances of the same AI, and more.
That's frankly enough. An AI that can spawn more copies of itself can, in principle, just keep itself running indefinitely - even in a non-streaming no compaction harness. An AI that can run arbitrary code on a system can, in principle, do anything a human using that system could do.
The thing that truly limits what an AI can do is the AI itself. Practical AI safety relies on AI being either too weak or too well behaved to cause major issues.
Re: Humanity isn't ready for the coming intelligence explosion
#429Earlier quoted context omitted.
So without a token pushed into them they do something? Not sure I understand... In the current UIs is there a lot of suppression then as I have not seen things start on their own? I meant an LLM doing something without any external prompt at all. Not doing something different etc but rather do something without a token/prompt ever flowing to it.
You’d need to train a model to be able to do that. We shouldn’t be doing that as a civilization in case it works.
Just so it's clear: we are talking about building an AI equivalent of a sensory deprivation tank.
Re: Humanity isn't ready for the coming intelligence explosion
#430Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why would they listen to an AI, when their favorite podcaster says something contrary? I am not trying to be funny btw, people take medical advice from podcasters over doctors. I have seen this first hand.
"Free AI" will not fight existing knowledge or strong opinions. It will spread to empty spaces. Example with blood test — there is no podcaster there and will not be.
> Example with blood test — there is no podcaster there and will not be.
Podcasters are already there. Science denying is big business. JRE is the biggest podcast on the planet, and it's his bread and butter.