Once men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free. But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them. ... Thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of a human mind. -- Frank Herbert, Dune You won't read, except the output of your LLM. You won't write, except prompts for your LLM. Why write code or prose when the machine can write it for you? You won't think or…
The Singularity will occur on a Tuesday
451–460 of 800 posts
Re: The Singularity will occur on a Tuesday
#452It'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, G…
Re: The Singularity will occur on a Tuesday
#453Earlier quoted context omitted.
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
#454Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I think that when the singularity occurs all of the problems in physics will solve, like in a vacuum, and physics will advance centuries if not millennia in a few pico-seconds It doesn't matter how smart you are, you still need to run experiments to do physics. Experiments take nontrivial amounts of time to both run and set up (you can't tunnel a new CERN in picoseconds, again no matter how smart you are). Similarl…
Kind of, I mean you have to verify things experimentally but thought can go a very long way, no? And we're not talking about humans thinking about things, we're talking about an agent with internet access existing in a digital space, so what experiments it would do within that space are hard for us to imagine. Of course my post isn't meant to be taken seriously, it's more of a fun sci-fi idea. Also I'm implying not n…
The only thing you could do in a "digital space" (a.k.a. on a computer) is a simulation. Simulations are extremely useful and help significantly with designing and choosing experiments, but they cannot _replace_ real experiments.
> Like, the time window from the discovery of fire to the discoveries of Quantum Mechanics but in a flash.
And my point is that there's no good reason to think this is possible and many to think it isn't.
> it's more of a fun sci-fi idea
It's being presented as extremely serious possibility by people who stand to gain a _lot_ of money if other people think it's serious... that's the point of the linked post. Unfortunately, these AI boosters make it very difficult to discuss these ideas, even in a fun sci-fi way, without aggravating the social harms those people are causing.
Re: The Singularity will occur on a Tuesday
#455Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Because the US has a “hard” two party system - third party candidates have very little hope, especially at the national level; voting for a third party is indistinguishable from staying home, as far as the outcome goes, with some rather occasional exceptions
But Australia is different - Australia has a “soft” two party system - two-and-a-half major parties (I say “and-a-half” because our centre-right is a semipermanent coalition of two parties, one representing rural/regional conservatives, the other more urban in its support base). But third parties and independents are a real political force in our parliament, and sometimes even determine the outcome of national elections
This is largely due to (1) we use what Americans call instant-runoff in our federal House of Representatives, and a variation on single-transferable vote in our federal Senate; (2) the parliamentary system-in which the executive is indirectly elected by the legislature-means the choice of executive is less of a simplistic binary, and coalition negotiations involving third party/independent legislators in the lower house can be decisive in determining that outcome in close elections; (3) twelve senators per a state, six elected at a time in an ordinary election, gives more opportunities for minor parties to get into our Senate - of course, 12 senators per a state is feasible when you only have six states (plus four more to represent our two self-governing territories), with 50 states it would produce 600 Senators
Re: The Singularity will occur on a Tuesday
#456Re: The Singularity will occur on a Tuesday
#457Once men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free. But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them. ... Thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of a human mind. -- Frank Herbert, Dune You won't read, except the output of your LLM. You won't write, except prompts for your LLM. Why write code or prose when the machine can write it for you? You won't think or…
I can't see it. We have LLMs now and none of that applies to me. I find them quite handy as a sort of enhanced Google search though.
Re: The Singularity will occur on a Tuesday
#458Re: The Singularity will occur on a Tuesday
#459Earlier 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
Like most Australians, I’m in denial any of that episode ever happened.
But, using the current circumstances as an example, Australia has a voting system that enables a party to form government even though 65% of voting Australia’s didn’t vote for that party as their first preference.
If the other party and some of the smaller parties could have got their shit together Australia could have a slightly different flavour of complete fucking disaster of a Government, rather than whatever the fuck Anthony Albanese thinks he’s trying to be.
Then there’s Susan Ley. The least preferred leader of the two major parties in a generation.
Susan Ley is Anthony Albanese in a skirt.
I would have preferred Potato Head, to be honest.
Re: The Singularity will occur on a Tuesday
#460It'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, G…
I think it's a bit hard to say that this is definitively true: people have always been interested in running linear algebra on computers. In the absence of NVIDIA some other company would likely have found a different industry and sold linear algebra processing hardware to them!