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The Singularity will occur on a Tuesday

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Re: The Singularity will occur on a Tuesday

#461

Post by deltaburnt »

baxtr wrote: post #436
Invictus0 wrote: post #425

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

For pretty much every single person you or I personally know, that would be the equivalent of the end of humanity.

Let’s not nitpick here. Worldwide human suffering and tragedy is equivalent to the end of humanity for most.

We can sit here and armchair while in the most prosperous, comfortable era of human history. But we also have to recognize that this era is a blip of time in history. That is a lot of data showing humanity surviving sure. But it’s also a very small amount of data showing any kind of life most would want to live in.

Re: The Singularity will occur on a Tuesday

#462

Post by stickfigure »

famouswaffles wrote: post #429
measurablefunc wrote: post #400

Earlier 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…

It sounds like you're looking for something more than the simple reality that the math is what's going on. It's a complex system that can't simply be debugged through[1], but that doesn't mean it isn't "understood".

This reminds me of Searle's insipid Chinese Room; the rebuttal (which he never had an answer for) is that "the room understands Chinese". It's just not satisfying to someone steeped in cultural traditions that see people as "souls". But the room understands Chinese; the LLM understands language. It is what it is.

[1] Since it's deterministic, it certainly can be debugged through, but you probably don't have the patience to step through trillions of operations. That's not the technology's fault.

Re: The Singularity will occur on a Tuesday

#463

Post by frotaur »

wiseowise wrote: post #406
javier_e06 wrote: post #328

I 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.

Don't be too hard on yourself. With the amount shit humans generate each day it is impossible to read every essay.

I'd venture this article is written by AI with the density of 'it isn't X, it's Y'

Re: The Singularity will occur on a Tuesday

#464

Post by hdivider »

This is a good counter in my view to the singularity argument:

https://timdettmers.com/2025/12/10/why-agi-will-not-happen/

I think if we obtain relevant-scale quantum computers, and/or other compute paradigms, we might get a limited intelligence explosion -- for a while. Because computation is physical, with all the limits thereof. The physics of pushing electrons through wires is not as nonlinear in gain as it used to be. Getting this across to people who only think in terms of the abstract digital world and not the non-digital world of actual physics is always challenging, however.

Re: The Singularity will occur on a Tuesday

#465

Post by nandomrumber »

Nevermark wrote: post #398
skissane wrote: post #341

Earlier 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.

Combined with the quirk in Australia’s preferential voting system that enable a government to form despite 65% of voters having voted 1 for something else.

As a result, Australia tends to end up with governments formed by the runner up, because no one party actually ‘won’ as such.

Re: The Singularity will occur on a Tuesday

#466

Post by pdonis »

AlexCoventry wrote: post #214
sp527 wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The likely outcome is that 99.99% of humanity lives a basic subsistence lifestyle ("UBI") and the elite and privileged few metaphorically (and somewhat literally) ascend to the heavens. Around half the planet already lives on <= $7/day. Prepare to join them.

FWIW, you'd probably be able to buy a lot of goods and services for $7/day, if robots were doing literally all the work.

> if robots were doing literally all the work

Let me know when ChatGPT can do your laundry.

Re: The Singularity will occur on a Tuesday

#467

Post by pbhjpbhj »

famouswaffles wrote: post #395
striking wrote: post #332

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's pattern matching, likely from typography texts and descriptions of umbrellas. My understanding is that the model can attempt some permutations in its thinking and eventually a permutation's tokens catch enough attention to attempt to solve, and that once it is attending to "everyday object", "arc", and "hook", it will reply with "umbrella". Why am I confident that it's not actually doing spatial reasoning? At le…

>It's pattern matching, likely from typography texts and descriptions of umbrellas. "Pattern matching" is not an explanation of anything, nor does it answer the question I posed. You basically hand waved the problem away in conveniently vague and non-descriptive phrase. Do you think you could publish that in a paper for ext ? >Why am I confident that it's not actually doing spatial reasoning? At least in the case of…

>Do you think you could publish that in a paper for ext ?

You seem to think it's not 'just' tensor arithmetic.

Have you read any of the seminal papers on neutral networks, say?

It's [complex] pattern matching as the parent said.

If you want models to draw composite shapes based on letter forms and typography then you need to train them (or at least fine-tune them) to do that.

I still get opposite (antonym) confusion occasionally in responses to inferences where I expect the training data is relatively lacking.

That said, you claim the parent is wrong. How would you describe LLM models, or generative "AI" models in the confines of a forum post, that demonstrates their error? Happy for you to make reference to academic papers that can aid understanding your position.

Re: The Singularity will occur on a Tuesday

#469

Post by nandomrumber »

albumen wrote: post #447
Nevermark wrote: post #398

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Two options, not two choices. (Unless you have a proportional representation voting system like ireland, in which case you can vote for as many candidates as you like in descending order of preference) Anyway, there’s a third option: spoil your vote. In the recent Irish presidential election, 13% of those polled afterwards said they spoiled their votes, due to a poor selection of candidates from which to choose. http…

Please don’t encourage people to waste their vote.

Encourage people to vote for the candidate they dislike the least, then try to work out ways to hold government accountable.

If you’re in Australia, at least listen to what people like Tony Abbott, the IPA, and Pauline Hanson are actually saying these days.

Re: The Singularity will occur on a Tuesday

#470

Post by foxglacier »

ActorNightly wrote: post #417
dan_mctree wrote: post #383

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>So obviously, error correction with inputs/outputs is not the way we get to intelligence. This doesn't seem to follow at all let alone obviously? Humans are able to reason through code without having to become a completely discrete computer, but probably can't reason through any length of assembly code, so why is that requirement necessary and how have you shown LLMs can't achieve human levels of competence on this…

> but probably can't reason through any length of assembly code Uh what? You can sit there step by step and execute assembly code, writing things down on a piece of paper and get the correct final result. The limits are things like attention span, which is separate from intelligence. Human brains operate continuously, with multiple parts being active at once, with weight adjustment done in real time both in the style…

Couldn't you periodically re-train it on what it's already done and use the context window for more short term memory? That's kind of what humans do - we can't learn a huge amount in short time but can accumulate a lot slowly (school, experience).

A major obstacle is that they don't learn from their users, probably because of privacy. But imagine if your context window was shared with other people, and/or all your conversations were used to train it. It would get to know individuals and perhaps treat them differently, or maybe even manipulate how they interact with each other so it becomes like a giant Jeffrey Epstein.

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