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The Singularity will occur on a Tuesday

campedersen.com

511–520 of 800 posts

Re: The Singularity will occur on a Tuesday

#511

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

I don’t recall the circumstances under which Morrison ended up Prime Minister. 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 coul…

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Re: The Singularity will occur on a Tuesday

#513

I just realized the inverse of Pascal’s wager applies to negative AI hype. - If you believe it and it’s wrong, you lose. - If you believe it and it’s right, you spent your final days in a panic. - If you don’t believe it and it’s right, you spent your final days in blissful ignorance. - If you don’t believe it and it’s wrong, you can go on living.

Of course this is subject to a similar rebuttal to Pascal's Wager (Consider a universe in which the deity punishes all believers):

What if a capricious super-intelligence takes over that punishes everyone who didn't buy into the hype?

Re: The Singularity will occur on a Tuesday

#514
post #496
post #18

"It had been a slow Tuesday night. A few hundred new products had run their course on the markets. There had been a score of dramatic hits, three-minute and five-minute capsule dramas, and several of the six-minute long-play affairs. Night Street Nine—a solidly sordid offering—seemed to be in as the drama of the night unless there should be a late hit." – 'SLOW TUESDAY NIGHT', a 2600 word sci-fi short story about lif…

Three-minute dramas?! That sounds like an eternity. Most content on Tik Tok is under a minute.

Drama implies something with a story.

Re: The Singularity will occur on a Tuesday

#516
post #394

The simple model of an "intelligence explosion" is the obscure equation dx 2 -- = x dt which has the solution 1 x = ----- C-t and is interesting in relation to the classic exponential growth equation dx -- = x dt because the rate of growth is proportional to x and represents the idea of an "intelligence explosion" AND a model of why small western towns became ghost towns, it is hard to start a new social network, etc…

All in all, because of light cones there can be no large-scale growth faster than x^3. And more like x^2 if you want to expand something more than just empty space.

Depends on what the curvature of the universe is. If it's negative then it supports exponential growth.

Re: The Singularity will occur on a Tuesday

#517
post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I never said it was an easy problem to solve, or one we’ve had success with before, but damnit, someone has to give a shit and try to do better.

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.

I don't understand. In this hypothesis, in the elite's view, what is the purpose of the rest of society? If everyone has little to no productive output, why would they support us with a UBI? They could just hire whatever human skeleton crew they'd need to sustain their activities (if needed). The rest of humanity could be either mercifully left alone with absolutely nothing, or annihilated.

Re: The Singularity will occur on a Tuesday

#519

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also those old open hearth furnaces are long gone, see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BHnJp0oyOxs There are people making top quality steel in the US today by modern methods but it wasn't like the new replaced the old, the old mostly disappeared and we got a little bit of the new.

Yes, I should have been more clear there: they could catch up in volume but it will require a different mindset if they want to become a net exporter of such items.

To add a meta contribution to yours using anecdotes:

US pipeline for metallurgical R&D broken (by financial/cultural incentives)

This guy studied metallurgy in Carleton U, Canada, switched to CS, founded YC, emotionalized the decision

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39600555

Who knows, he might have become John Carmack's John Carmack, building rockets better than Carmack or Elon

Re: The Singularity will occur on a Tuesday

#520

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think they meant "Nobody knows why LLMs work."

Because they encode statistical properties of the training corpus. You might not know why they work but plenty of people know why they work & understand the mechanics of approximating probability distributions w/ parametrized functions to sell it as a panacea for stupidity & the path to an automated & luxurious communist utopia.

No this is false. No one understands. Using big words doesn’t change the fact that you cannot explain for any given input output pair how the LLM arrived at the answer.

Every single academic expert who knows what they are talking about can confirm that we do not understand LLMs. We understand atoms and we know the human brain is made 100 percent out of atoms.we may know how atoms interact and bond and how a neuron works but none of this allows us to understand the brain. In the same way we do not understand LLMs.

Characterizing ML as some statistical approximation or best fit curve is just using an analogy to cover up something we don’t understand. Heck the human brain can practically be characterized by the same analogies. We. Do. Not. Understand. LLMs. Stop pretending that you do.

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