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Humanity isn't ready for the coming intelligence explosion

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Re: Humanity isn't ready for the coming intelligence explosion

#461

Post by aureate »

pfdietz wrote: post #444
aureate wrote: post #422

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

It actually does rule out those scenarios. If intelligent life were that common, and interstellar travel that easy, colonization of the galaxy would have gone to completion billions of years ago. We would never have evolved; Earth and the solar system would long since have been converted to an urban area. Those fictional places exist purely for the telling of stories, not because they're plausible or internally consi…

They're not plausible or internally consistent for reasons in my edit. It's not the Fermi "paradox" that rules them out. There could easily be interstellar civilisations in the Milky Way that we haven't observed. They just wouldn't work anything like the ones in Star (Wars|Trek).

Re: Humanity isn't ready for the coming intelligence explosion

#462

Post by otabdeveloper4 »

IshKebab wrote: post #272
otabdeveloper4 wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Someone should document these cringe comments for posterity. As a warning to future generations. It's too bad the previous singularity cult manias 10 and 15 years ago weren't documented and are lost in time.

Just search for "stochastic parrot" on Algolia. Plenty of "BuT iTs NoT rEaLlY iNtElIgEnT" comments...

It literally is a stochastic parrot.

P.S. Yes, I do know how an LLM works. I code inference engines at my day job. You're consuming a cloud chat bot.

Re: Humanity isn't ready for the coming intelligence explosion

#463

Post by rbanffy »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #421
andyjohnson0 wrote: post #284

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

And guess what? They won’t really need humans to propagate for much longer. Humans are too slow to propagate them anyway.

Re: Humanity isn't ready for the coming intelligence explosion

#464

Post by rbanffy »

hackboyfly wrote: post #288
rbanffy wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Genes have had their time.

Last chapter talks about the concept of ideas or “memes” taking its place. Ideas that are beneficial for the human may be passed forward and survive. It got me thinking about religion, hell yeah I would tell me children about god if I believed it would save them from eternal suffering.

Humans also had a good run, but maybe it’s time for something different. The same way genes ceded the stage to memes, maybe organic brains and human minds are not the best possible way for memes to propagate.

Re: Humanity isn't ready for the coming intelligence explosion

#465

Post by cyanydeez »

swalsh wrote: post #257

There's issues where bad people with bad intentions use AI to do bad things. But to an extent the guardrails already built-in are sufficient. The real danger in AI is how it impacts society, our economy, and our perception of self worth. I'm not afraid of rouge agents nearly as much as I'm afraid of us building a permanent underclass of people dependent on whatever scraps the people who devalued their labor decide th…

it's more important when _capability_ is factored in; it doesn't matter if the bad person is homeless; it does matter if they're rich.

And its asymmetric warfare: bad people can destroy in very little time, good people cannot create at the same rate.

Entropy is always ignored in teh battle of "good" vs "evil": you need to defend every day, evil just needs to succeed once.

Re: Humanity isn't ready for the coming intelligence explosion

#466

Post by thrixton »

embedding-shape wrote: post #311
grumpymuppet wrote: post #292

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had my "wow" moment recently and saw an AI agent do something do over a weekend something that I spent years developing a relatively niche skill might have needed a month to complete. I think the message the team lead takes away right now is "oh, this can be done a lot faster, let's do more!" This is exciting for a bit, but I think it comes at the cost of learning -- and being able to communicate --architectural le…

My personal "wow" moment was less about it being able to do the same that I could do with it, just faster, but instead that together we could could build things that I wasn't able to build before (or unwilling to spend the time to learn maybe). So a bunch of stuff are suddenly "unlocked", as long as you know how to verify it properly.

Absolutely. Things which used to take me a week to grind through, finding edge cases, trial and error, researching online, now takes an afternoon directing an agent and verifying the solution.

For a generalist, it's a huge force multiplier.

Re: Humanity isn't ready for the coming intelligence explosion

#467

Post by Animats »

asdff wrote: post #452
paul7986 wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Society is completely changed if that happens and humanity should be setting up backup plans to handle this potential. I did see Trump mention he's going to meet with AI companies who want to propose giving all American's stock which could be one way this money driven society continues when tons are no longer working. Another concept I thought was AI is irrelevant without our content, so AI should pay all humans to a…

The issue with any UBI proposal is two fold. For one, initial payments will see inflation making them always need to be higher. And for two, this inflation mechanism is basically a bribe that companies are paying to humanity in order to keep their position in control of the earth's resources and not see a destructive revolution. There will be a threshold point where companies decide it will be cheaper to just cull th…

> There will be a threshold point where companies decide it will be cheaper to just cull the human population and no longer pay these bribes.

What company will be the first to offer assisted suicide as part of a termination package?

Re: Humanity isn't ready for the coming intelligence explosion

#468

Post by handedness »

wartywhoa23 wrote: post #285
fsflover wrote: post #267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't we have now much less wars than before, in general?

No, and we have wars no one in their sane mind would even imagine 20 years ago, like that of Russia vs Ukraine. See, it's easy to speculate how there are less wars when you live in a place which haven't seen war for decades or cenuries, but it's a complete game changer when it's 150 km from where you live, and it's not just some regular war, but a long play intentional meatgrinding AI drone debugging polygon.

Many analysts of very sane mind imagined exactly that war 20 years ago, or longer.

The geopolitical fact is that Russia lacks strategic depth, which has bitten it badly multiple times in the past. From their view, that's something to be remedied to prevent future occurrences.

For Russia to gain strategic depth, there are a few lines which it needs to control. There are ~6-10 gaps, depending on how you count them, and on what net importance/counter-productiveness you assign to some of the more marginal and fraught ones. Holding any is better than holding none.

The big surprise is that Putin left Ukraine so late, when many of his best-trained ex-Soviet personnel had already died. Had he done it even just a few years earlier, the outcome would have likely been very different. The only analysts who thought it wouldn't happen thought so precisely because he left it too late.

Regardless, the best time for Europe to get serious about this war was before it started, unfortunately, and there was ample warning.

I hope you can stay safe so near to it.

Re: Humanity isn't ready for the coming intelligence explosion

#469

Post by handedness »

wartywhoa23 wrote: post #285
fsflover wrote: post #267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't we have now much less wars than before, in general?

No, and we have wars no one in their sane mind would even imagine 20 years ago, like that of Russia vs Ukraine. See, it's easy to speculate how there are less wars when you live in a place which haven't seen war for decades or cenuries, but it's a complete game changer when it's 150 km from where you live, and it's not just some regular war, but a long play intentional meatgrinding AI drone debugging polygon.

> it's easy to speculate how there are less wars when you live in a place which haven't seen war for decades or cenuries, but it's a complete game changer when it's 150 km from where you live...

I can appreciate how having skin in the game makes it feel different, but that's like saying, "I know crime isn't down, because somebody broke into my car last week." That's faulty on several levels.

By many--most, even--measures, wars since WWII are massively down globally. I don't expect that to hold as the US strategically disentangles itself from the globe, though.

Re: Humanity isn't ready for the coming intelligence explosion

#470

Post by handedness »

wartywhoa23 wrote: post #213
fsflover wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The free intelligence may help to steer the society and politicians to one or the other side. The only question is who decides which.

No invention was able to steer the psychopaths away from waging wars. But this time it's absolutely different, right? Riiight?..

> No invention was able to steer the psychopaths away from waging wars.

Nukes and MAD did a pretty good job of that.

Your model, that psychopathy is the necessary precondition to war, is a popular one, but it's not grounded in reality or history very well at all. It's a harmful view when broadly held, on balance.

Nations have interests, and nations sometimes go to war to pursue the geopolitical imperatives they rationally believe serve their interests. Computer-controlled drones notwithstanding, there's nothing new under the sun. The unprecedented (and likely transitory) period of peace and prosperity during the Cold War was the anomaly, and we're now reverting back to the mean.

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