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Horses: AI progress is steady. Human equivalence is sudden

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Re: Horses: AI progress is steady. Human equivalence is sudden

#451

Post by netsharc »

abixb wrote: post #443
netsharc wrote: post #360

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think, like the Bill Gates haters who interpret him talking about reducing the rate of birth in Africa as wanting to kill Africans, you're interpreting it wrong. The graph says horse ownership per person. People probably stopped buying horses, they let theirs retire (well, to be honest, probably also sent to the glue factory), and when they stopped buying new horses, horse breeding programs slowed down.

One could argue that the quality of life per horse went up, even if the total number of horses went down. Lots more horses now get raised in farms and are trained to participate in events like dressage and other equestrian sports.

Someone said during the hype of "self-driving cars is the future!" that ICE/driver-driven cars will go the way of the horse: they'll be well-cared, kept in stables, and taken out in the weekends for recreation, on circuits but not on public roads..

Re: Horses: AI progress is steady. Human equivalence is sudden

#452

Post by cubefox »

danw1979 wrote: post #387
cubefox wrote: post #381

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'm still waiting for something that can learn and adapt itself to new tasks as well as humans can That's highly irrelevant because if it were otherwise, we would already be replaced. The article was talking about the future.

The article was speculating about the future.

It was doing both.

Re: Horses: AI progress is steady. Human equivalence is sudden

#454

Post by aiisjustanif »

entropyneur wrote: post #421
maciejzj wrote: post #353

I may have developed some kind of paranoia reading HN recently, but the AI atmosphere is absolutely nuts to me. Have you ever thought that you would see a chart showing how population of horses was decimated by the mass introduction of efficient engines accompanied by an implication that there is a parallel to human population? And the article is not written in any kind of cautionary humanitarian approach, but rather…

My experience so far has been that the knowledge of what should and shouldn't be, while important, bears no predictive power whatsoever as to what actually ends up happening. In this instance, in particular, I wouldn't expect our preferences to bear any relevance.

> knowledge of what should and shouldn't be, while important, bears no predictive power whatsoever as to what actually ends up happening.

I don’t know if you are intentionally being vague and existential here. However, context matters, and the predictive power is zero sounds unreasonable in the face of history.

I think humans learning that diseases were affecting us and thus leading to solutions like antibiotics and vaccines. It was not guaranteed, but I’m skeptical of the predictive power being zero.

Re: Horses: AI progress is steady. Human equivalence is sudden

#455

Post by everdrive »

netsharc wrote: post #448
everdrive wrote: post #436

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Bill Gates haters who interpret him talking about reducing the rate of birth in Africa I'm not up to speed here -- is Bill Gates doing work to reduce the birth rates in Africa?

For example, interview from 2018: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0MMifQvuN08 When the Covid-truther geniuses "figured out" that "Bill Gates was behind Covid", they pulled out things like this as "proof" that his master plan is to reduce the world's population. Not to reduce the rate of increase, but to kill them (because of course these geniuses don't understand derivatives)...

Ah, got it. This sounds like more of a "repugnant conclusion" sort of problem where if you care about the well being of people who exist, then it is possible to have too large of a population.

Re: Horses: AI progress is steady. Human equivalence is sudden

#456

Post by empiricus »

jakewins wrote: post #402
empiricus wrote: post #380

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree that the current models are far from perfect. But I am curious how you see the future. Do you really think/feel they will stop here?

I mean, I'm just some guy, but in my mind: - They are not making progress, currently. The elephant-in-the-room problem of hallucinations is exactly the same or, as I said above, worse as it was 3 years ago - It's clearly possible to solve this, since we humans exist and our brains don't have this problem There's then two possible paths: Either the hallucinations are fundamental to the current architecture of LLMs, an…

Thanks, that's a reasonable argument. Some critique: based on this argument it is very surprising that LLM work so well, or at all. The fact that even small LLM do something suggests that the human substrate is quite inefficient for thinking. Compared to LLMs, it seems to me that 1. some humans are more aware of what they know; 2. humans have very tight feedback loops to regulate and correct. So I imagine we do not need much more scaling, just slightly better AI architectures. I guess we will see how it goes.

Re: Horses: AI progress is steady. Human equivalence is sudden

#457

Post by vidarh »

tokioyoyo wrote: post #435
UncleMeat wrote: post #388

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have been completely shocked by the number of people in the tech industry who seem to genuinely place no value on humanity and so many of its outputs. I see it in the writing of leaders within VC firms and AI companies but I also see it in ordinary conversations on the caltrain or in coffee shops. Friendship, love, sex, art, even faith and childrearing are opportunities for substitution with AI. Ask an AI to create…

If you want another side data point, most people I know both in Japan and Canada use some sort of an AI as a replacement for any kind of query. Almost nobody in my circles are in tech or tech-adjacent circles. So yeah, it’s just everyone collectively devaluing human interaction.

I love AI, but I'm exasperated by the extent to which my fiancee uses Claude instead of search, and for everything...

Re: Horses: AI progress is steady. Human equivalence is sudden

#458

Post by tuyiown »

maciejzj wrote: post #353

I may have developed some kind of paranoia reading HN recently, but the AI atmosphere is absolutely nuts to me. Have you ever thought that you would see a chart showing how population of horses was decimated by the mass introduction of efficient engines accompanied by an implication that there is a parallel to human population? And the article is not written in any kind of cautionary humanitarian approach, but rather…

> I may have developed some kind of paranoia reading HN recently

My comments being downvoted, pretty rare lately, were about never discussed but legitimate points about AI that I validated IRL. I have no resonance about the way AI is discussed on HN and IRL, to the point that I can't rule out more or less subtle manipulation on the discussions.

Re: Horses: AI progress is steady. Human equivalence is sudden

#459

Post by maciejzj »

cryptonector wrote: post #444
maciejzj wrote: post #353

I may have developed some kind of paranoia reading HN recently, but the AI atmosphere is absolutely nuts to me. Have you ever thought that you would see a chart showing how population of horses was decimated by the mass introduction of efficient engines accompanied by an implication that there is a parallel to human population? And the article is not written in any kind of cautionary humanitarian approach, but rather…

> Have you ever thought that you would see a chart showing [...] Yes, actually, because this has been a deep vein of writing for the past 100 or more years. There's The Phools, by Stanislav Lem. There's the novels written by Boris Johnson's father that are all about depopulation. There's Aldous Huxley's Brave New World. How about Logan's Run? There has been so much writing about the automation / technology apocalypse…

Yeah, I am familiar with these works of art and probably most people are. However, they were mostly speculative. Now we are facing some of their premises in the real world. And the guys who push the technology in a reckless way seem to notice this, but just nod their heads and carry on.

At long last, we have created the Torment Nexus from classic sci-fi novel Don't Create The Torment Nexus.

Re: Horses: AI progress is steady. Human equivalence is sudden

#460

Post by maciejzj »

tuyiown wrote: post #458
maciejzj wrote: post #353

I may have developed some kind of paranoia reading HN recently, but the AI atmosphere is absolutely nuts to me. Have you ever thought that you would see a chart showing how population of horses was decimated by the mass introduction of efficient engines accompanied by an implication that there is a parallel to human population? And the article is not written in any kind of cautionary humanitarian approach, but rather…

> I may have developed some kind of paranoia reading HN recently My comments being downvoted, pretty rare lately, were about never discussed but legitimate points about AI that I validated IRL. I have no resonance about the way AI is discussed on HN and IRL, to the point that I can't rule out more or less subtle manipulation on the discussions.

I don't think that bots have taken over HN. I meant that the frontier of the tech research brags about their recklessness here and the rest of us have become bystanders to this process. Gives me goosebumps.
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