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AGI fantasy is a blocker to actual engineering

tomwphillips.co.uk

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Re: AGI fantasy is a blocker to actual engineering

#511

Post by jcgrillo »

thewebguyd wrote: post #218
Flavius wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Expecting a purely technical discussion is unrealistic because many people have significant vested interests. This includes not only those with financial stakes in AI stocks but also a large number of professionals in roles that could be transformed or replaced by this technology. For these groups, the discussion is inherently political, not just technical.

> a large number of professionals in roles that could be transformed or replaced by this technology. Right, "It is difficult get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it." I see this sort of irrationality around AI at my workplace, with the owners constantly droning on about "we must use AI everywhere." They are completely and irrationally paranoid that the business will fail…

I've heard the same breathless parroting of the marketing hype at large O(thousands ppl) cloud tech companies. A quote from leadership:

> This is existential. If we aren't early adopters of AI tools we will be left behind and will never catch up.

This company is dominant in the space they operate in. The magnitude of the delusion is profound. Ironically, this crap is actually distracting and affects quality, so it could affect competitiveness--just not how they hope.

Re: AGI fantasy is a blocker to actual engineering

#512

Post by eks391 »

MangoToupe wrote: post #489
daerogami wrote: post #479

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It just means a religion with a formal structure and leadership behind it. The term points to the institution and its influence, not the beliefs themselves. An unorganized religion is basically personal or informal practice without a central authority, like an individual or essentially a book club.

> An unorganized religion is basically personal or informal practice without a central authority, like an individual or essentially a book club. Right, but I don't know what is referred to by "practice" that is at all distinct from "worldview" or "ideology".

If the way you practice your religion is standardized by an authority across several churches, it is organized religion. For example: Catholic sects and Mormons are organized faiths. They have manuals for the priests to follow and you can go to the same one elsewhere and get mostly the same experience. Some small churches localized to a city are also organized. Islam sects in the Middle east are usually organized between Sunni and Shia. To my knowledge, Islam is not organized in the USA even though the Imam might align with a sect, because there is no authority they report to or strict standard for their patrons. Most Protestant churches are unorganized, and non-denominational are almost always unorganized because they are one-offs.

This is my informal understanding; I am not a religious scholar

Re: AGI fantasy is a blocker to actual engineering

#513

Post by heresie-dabord »

lordleft wrote: post #59

The language around AGI is proof, in my mind, that religious impulses don't die with the withering of religion. A desire for a totalizing solution to all woes still endures.

The A.I. economic bubble is a mad scramble to ride the crest of a wave of stock-pumping expectations before the inevitable collapse and dump. Trillions of dollars of "value" from bloviating promises. It's worthy of a new chapter in Mackay's Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds. [1]

> religious impulses don't die with the withering of religion

Religions have of course come and gone throughout human history. The preceding deities, temples, and artwork are called mythology by people inside today's temples of fervour.

But let's be clear, disparate local tribal practices and beliefs are only formalised by a power structure for the masked purposes of the power structure.

What springs eternal is the maintenance of control in political and tribal hierarchies.

> A desire for a totalizing solution to all woes

The fact that our species exhibits astonishing credulity is illustrated throughout history to the present day, not just in religious activities but in every context of economic scams and demagoguery.

[1] _ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extraordinary_Popular_Delusion...

Re: AGI fantasy is a blocker to actual engineering

#514

Post by dehsge »

ACCount37 wrote: post #235
zgk7iqea wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

it is an architecture problem, too. LLMs simply aren't capable of AGI

Why not? A lot of people say that, but no one, not a single person has ever pointed out a fundamental limitation that would prevent an LLM from going all the way. If LLMs have limits, we are yet to find them.

LLMs are bounded by the same bounds computers are. They run on computers so a prime example of a limitation is Rices theorem. Any ‘ai’ that writes code is unable (just like humans) to determine if the output is or is not error free.

This means a multi agent workflow without human that writes code may or may not be error free.

LLMs are also bounded by runtime complexity. Could an llm find the shortest Hamiltionian path between two cities in non polynomial time?

LLMs are bounded by in model context: Could an llm create and use a new language with no context in its model?

Re: AGI fantasy is a blocker to actual engineering

#515

Post by roywiggins »

dghlsakjg wrote: post #204
roywiggins wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm saying that if you taxed water enough for datacenters to notice, beef would probably become uneconomical to produce at all. Maybe a good idea! But the reason datacenters would keep operating and beef production wouldn't is that datacenters produce way more utility per gallon.

Taxes can have nuance. You can easily write a law that looks like this: There is now a water usage tax. It applies only to water used for data-centers. It does not apply to residential use, agricultural use, or any other industrial use. We do preferential pricing and taxing all the time. My home's power rate through the state owned utility is very different than if I consumed the exact same amount of power, but was a…

Yes, if you don't like datacenters, tax datacenters. If you want to do it via a tax on the water they use then I guess that works.

But the environment doesn't really care whether the water is being used by a datacenter or something else. My point is just that data centers are actually more efficient users of water compared to many less-controversial users.

Re: AGI fantasy is a blocker to actual engineering

#516

Post by skinnymuch »

thewebguyd wrote: post #240
slightwinder wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The problem is more one of scale: I think the source is the bigger problem. If they take the water from sources which are already scarce, the impact will be harsh. There probably wouldn't be any complaints if they would use sewerage or saltwater from the ocean. > Also, it's pretty easy to recycle the data center water, since it just has to cool Cooling and returning the water is not always that simple. I don't know…

> If they take the water from sources which are already scarce, the impact will be harsh. Surprised I had to scroll down this far to see this mentioned. The water use argument is highly local and depends on where we are building these data centers. Are you building in the great lakes region with plenty of fresh water and no water scarcity issues (yet)? Ok fine. But we aren't building there. We're building in Arizona,…

> don't build it until you've figured out how to make it efficient enough to where it is profitable.

This goes against American freedom

Re: AGI fantasy is a blocker to actual engineering

#517

Post by lfkjfliejlfijal »

simonw wrote: post #12

Tip for AI skeptics: skip the data center water usage argument. At this point I think it harms your credibility - numbers like "millions of liters of water annually" (from the linked article) sound scary when presented without context, but if you compare data centers to farmland or even golf courses they're minuscule. Other energy usage figures, air pollution, gas turbines, CO2 emissions etc are fine - but if you com…

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Re: AGI fantasy is a blocker to actual engineering

#518

Post by kalkin »

wmf wrote: post #503
kalkin wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right. Nobody makes a Pascal's wager-style argument in _favor_ of investing in AGI. People have sometimes made one against building AGI, on existential risk grounds. The OP author is about as confused on this as the water usage point... But the appetite for arguments against AI (which has legitimate motivations!) is so high that people are willing to drop any critical thinking.

People have definitely made the argument that every day AGI is delayed, people are dying from things AGI could have cured etc.

That's not Pascal's Wager unless they're saying AGI has infinitesimal probability but infinite payoff, or something like that. If they think AGI is likely, they may be wrong but it's just technological optimism.

Re: AGI fantasy is a blocker to actual engineering

#519

Post by t43562 »

hamdingers wrote: post #463
diamond559 wrote: post #444

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, we've used it, you are creating a strawman argument assuming "AI skeptics" are illiterate and/or incapable of understanding. You ironically are the one refusing to accept the possibility that you are wrong.

> No, we've used it, you are creating a strawman argument There exists a class of "ai-skeptic" who proudly proclaim they have never and will never use AI. Examples are not hard to find, though I see them more on reddit/instagram/bluesky than I do on HN. If that does not describe you then my comment is not about you.

The strawman side of it is that one can pick on some extremist and "beat them up" publicly as if that settled something but it doesn't.

Re: AGI fantasy is a blocker to actual engineering

#520

Post by dasil003 »

asdfman123 wrote: post #331
tomwphillips wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hey Simon, author here (and reader of your blog!). I used to share your view, but what changed my mind was reading Hao's book. I don't have it to hand, but if my memory serves, she writes about a community in Chile opposing Google building a data centre in their city. The city already suffers from drought, and the data centre, acccording to Google's own assessment, would abstract ~169 litres of water a second from lo…

I'm conflicted. Zooming out, the problem isn't with AI specifically but economic development in general. Everything has a side effect. For decades we've been told we shouldn't develop urban centers because of how it development affects local communities, but really it just benefited another class of elites (anonymous foreign investors), and now housing prices are impoverishing younger generations and driving homeless…

Not just the poor, how about the bottom 99%? This is what's so frustrating to me about the culture wars and identity politics. Regardless of ones views on the hot button cultural issue du jour, at best they are a distraction, and at worst actively exploited by moneyed interests as a political smokescreen to prevent changes that would be obvious wins for super majorities of the population if analyzed and viewed through a more sober and objective lens of the net effects.
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