But what does Opus 4.6 say about this?
The Singularity will occur on a Tuesday
431–440 of 800 posts
Re: The Singularity will occur on a Tuesday
#432I had to ask duck.ai to summarize the article in plain English. It said that the article claims that is not necessarily that AI is getting smarter but that people might be getting too stupid to understand what are they getting into. Can confirm.
That's not really what he article said at all. More like "Singularity is when the computers are changing faster than humans can keep track of the changes."
The article didn't claim that humans were getting dumber, or that AI wasn't getting smarter.
Re: The Singularity will occur on a Tuesday
#433Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Honestly, you are just confused. With LLMs, The "knowing" you're describing is trivial and doesn't really constitute knowing at all. It's just the physics of the substrate. When people say LLMs are a black box, they aren't talking about the hardware or the fact that it's "math all the way down." They are talking about interpretability. If I hand you a 175-billion parameter tensor, your 'knowledge' of logic gates does…
No one relies on "interpretability" in quantum mechanics. It is famously uninterpretable. In any case, I don't think any further engagement is going to be productive for anyone here so I'm dropping out of this thread. Good luck.
Re: The Singularity will occur on a Tuesday
#434Earlier quoted context omitted.
Russell's chicken (or turkey) would like a word. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turkey_illusion
I love that you brought this up. Chickens are killed ALL the time. It’s a recurring mass event. If you were a smart chicken you could see that pattern and put it into a formula. In contrast, the end of Humanity would be a singular event. It’s even in the name… And that is fiction / speculation in comparison. It’s not backed by any data. Human survival over 300,000 years by contrast is. I mean it’s fine to dream thing…
On the other hand, species go extinct with increasing regularity.
Re: The Singularity will occur on a Tuesday
#435Why is knowledge doubling no longer used as a metric to converge on the limit of the singularity? If we go back to Buckminster Fuller identifying the the "Knowledge Doubling Curve", by observing that until 1900, human knowledge doubled approximately every century. By the end of World War II, it was doubling every 25 years. In his 1981 book "Critical Path", he used a conceptual metric he called the "Knowledge Unit." To make his calculations work, he set a baseline:
- He designated the total sum of all human knowledge accumulated from the beginning of recorded history up to the year 1 CE as one "unit."
- He then tracked how long it took for the world to reach two units (which he estimated took about 1,500 years, until the Renaissance).
Ray Kurzweil took Fuller’s doubling concept and applied it to computer processing power via "The Law of Accelerating Returns". The definition of the singularity in this approach is the limit in time where human knowledge doubles instantly.
Why do present day ideas of the singularity not take this approach and instead say "the singularity is a hypothetical event in which technological growth accelerates beyond human control, producing unpredictable changes in human civilization." - Wikipedia
Re: The Singularity will occur on a Tuesday
#436Earlier quoted context omitted.
I love that you brought this up. Chickens are killed ALL the time. It’s a recurring mass event. If you were a smart chicken you could see that pattern and put it into a formula. In contrast, the end of Humanity would be a singular event. It’s even in the name… And that is fiction / speculation in comparison. It’s not backed by any data. Human survival over 300,000 years by contrast is. I mean it’s fine to dream thing…
298,000 of those years didn't have toilet paper. It was utterly impossible for a single person to "end humanity" even 200 years ago; now, the president can do it in minutes by launching a salvo of nukes. Comparing the present moment to the hunter/gatherer days is preposterous.
It’s absurd and not scientific to claim that "a salvo of nukes" will kill humanity.
We don’t know how this will play out. It never happened before. Same with the chicken above.
Re: The Singularity will occur on a Tuesday
#437It's worth remembering that this is all happening because of video games !
It is highly unlikely that the hardware which makes LLMs possible would have been developed otherwise.
Isn't that amazing ?
Just like internet grew because of p*rn, AI grew because of video games. Of course, that's just a funny angle.
The way I see it, AI isn't accidental. Its inception has been in the first chips, the Internet, Open Source, Github, ... AI is not just the neural networks - it's also the data used to train it, the OSes, APIs, the Cloud computing, the data centers, the scalable architectures.. everything we've been working on over the last decades was inevitably leading us to this. And even before the chips, it was the maths, the physics ..
Singularity it seems, is inevitable and it was inevitable for longer than we can remember.
Re: The Singularity will occur on a Tuesday
#438Earlier quoted context omitted.
Violence was a moderating factor when people on each side were equally armed, and number was a deciding factor. Nowadays you could squash an uprising with a few operators piloting drones remotely.
Flying a drone around is easy. Identifying who is on the in group and out group and then moving them is the hard part. I’m not sure you have really thought out what the drone part is meant to do. Militaries gave outgunned populaces for decades at this point. You don’t need drones to kill civilians.
It's actually quite easy. Whoever isn't in the bunker is the outgroup. You only needed to tell people apart when you needed some meatware to man the factories and work the fields.
Militaries can side with the crowd, or more likely decide to keep the power for themselves.
Re: The Singularity will occur on a Tuesday
#439Earlier 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…
> I'm curious though, why is US metallurgy consistently top-notch if the processes are inferior?
I really wonder what you're comparing with.
Try some quality surgical steel from Sweden, Japan or Germany and you'll come away impressed. China is still not quite there but they are improving rapidly, Korea is already there and poised to improve further.
Metal buyers all over the globe are turning away from the US because of the effects of the silly tariffs but they were not going there because the quality, but because of the price.
The US could easily catch up if they wanted to but the domestic market just isn't large enough.
And as for actual metallurgy knowledge I think russia still has an edge, they always were good when it came down to materials science, though they're sacrificing all of that now for very little gain.
Re: The Singularity will occur on a Tuesday
#440This 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…
The goal is to eliminate humans as the primary actors on the planet entirely At least that’s my personal goal If we get to the point where I can go through my life and never interact with another human again, and work with a bunch of machines and robots to do science and experiments and build things to explore our world and make my life easier and safer and healthier and more sustainable, I would be absolutely thrill…
I don't see a credible path where the machines and robots help you...
> "eliminate humans as the primary actors on the planet entirely"
...so they can work with you. The hole in your plan might be bigger than your plan.