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The Singularity will occur on a Tuesday

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Re: The Singularity will occur on a Tuesday

#561

Post by jibal »

XorNot wrote: post #299
awesome_dude wrote: post #264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The "Silent Majority" - Richard Nixon 1969 "Quiet Australians" - Scott Morrison 2019

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.

> We really need a rule in politics

We really need a rule against proposing unenforceable rules.

Re: The Singularity will occur on a Tuesday

#563

Post by joe_the_user »

adastra22 wrote: post #60
vcanales wrote: post #9

> The pole at ts8 isn't when machines become superintelligent. It's when humans lose the ability to make coherent collective decisions about machines. The actual capabilities are almost beside the point. The social fabric frays at the seams of attention and institutional response time, not at the frontier of model performance. Damn, good read.

We are already long past that point…

Yeah, it's easy to see the singularity as close when you see it as "when human loose collective control of machines" but any serious look at human society will see that human lost collective control of machines a while back ... to the small number of humans individually owning and controlling the machine.

Re: The Singularity will occur on a Tuesday

#564

Post by jibal »

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.

People have a choice between being rational and optimizing the alignment between the outcome and their preferences, or being irrational and doing something else, like not voting, spoiling their ballot, voting for a probabilistically infeasible candidate, voting "on principle", "sending a message", etc.

Re: The Singularity will occur on a Tuesday

#565

Post by measurablefunc »

andsoitis wrote: post #559
measurablefunc wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What percentage of work would you say deals w/ actual problems these days?

What’s an example of work that does not deal with actual problems?

Online influencers, podcasters, advertisers, social media product managers, political lobbyists, cryptocurrency protocol programmers, digital/NFT artists, most of the media production industry, those people w/ leaf blowers moving dust around, political commentators (e.g. fox & friends), super PACs, most NGOs, "professional" sports, various 3 letter agencies & their associated online "influence" campaigns, think tanks about machine consciousness, autonomous weapon manufacturers, & so on. Just a few off the top of my head but anything to do w/ shuffling numbers in databases is in that category as well. I haven't read "Bullshit Jobs" yet but it's on the list & I'll get to it eventually so I'm sure I can come up w/ a few more after reading it.

Re: The Singularity will occur on a Tuesday

#566

Post by flawn »

AndrewKemendo wrote: post #84
stego-tech wrote: post #28

This is delightfully unhinged, spending an amazing amount of time describing their model and citing their methodologies before getting to the meat of the meal many of us have been braying about for years: whether the singularity actually happens or not is irrelevant so much as whether enough people believe it will happen and act accordingly. And, yep! A lot of people absolutely believe it will and are acting accordin…

The goal is to eliminate humans as the primary actors on the planet entirely At least that’s my personal goal If we get to the point where I can go through my life and never interact with another human again, and work with a bunch of machines and robots to do science and experiments and build things to explore our world and make my life easier and safer and healthier and more sustainable, I would be absolutely thrill…

Not sure if transhumanism is the only solution to the problems you mentioned - I think it's often problematic because people like Thiel claim to have figured it out, and look for ways to force people into their "contrarian" views, although there is nothing but disregard for any other opinions other than their own.

But you are of course free to believe and enjoy the vision of such a future but this is something that should happen on a collective level. We still live in a (to some extent idealistic) but humanistic society where human rights are common sense.

Re: The Singularity will occur on a Tuesday

#567

Post by jibal »

legulere wrote: post #325
bee_rider wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This world where everybody’s very concerned with that “refined form” is annoying and exhausting. It causes discussions to become about speculative guesses about everybody else’s beliefs, not actual facts. In the end it breeds cynicism as “well yes, the belief is wrong, but everybody is stupid and believes it anyway,” becomes a stop-gap argument. I don’t know how to get away from it because ultimately coordination dep…

On the other hand talking about those believes can also lead to real changes. Slavery used to be seen widely a necessary evil, just like for instance war.

Slavery used to be seen as a good thing by those who benefited from it (or thought they did).

Re: The Singularity will occur on a Tuesday

#568

Post by stingraycharles »

rektomatic wrote: post #228

If i have to read one more "It isn't this. It's this" My head will explode. That phrase is the real singularity

I'd like to know how many comments over here are written using similar means. I can't be bothered to get enthusiastic about articles written by LLMs, and I'm surprised so many people in the comments here are delighted by the article.

Re: The Singularity will occur on a Tuesday

#569

Post by Dylan16807 »

famouswaffles wrote: post #540
Dylan16807 wrote: post #533

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unless I'm missing what you mean by a mile, this isn't true at all. We have infinitely precise models for the outcomes of LLMs because they're digital. We are also able to engineer them pretty effectively.

The ML Research world (so this isn't simply a matter of being ignorant/uninformed) was surprised by the performance of GPT-2 and utterly shocked by GPT-3. Why ? Isn't that strange ? Did the transformer architecture fundamentally change between these releases ? No, it did not at all. So why ? Because even in 2026, nevermind 18 and 19, the only way to really know exactly how a neural network will perform trained with x…

We don't have a model for how an LLM that doesn't exist will respond to a specific query. That's different from lacking insight at all. For an LLM that exists it's still hard to interpret but it's very clear what is actually happening. That's better than you often get with quantum physics when there's a bunch of particles and you can't even get a good answer for the math.

And even for potential LLMs, there are some pretty good extrapolations for overall answer quality based on the amount of data and the amount of training.

Re: The Singularity will occur on a Tuesday

#570

Post by threethirtytwo »

measurablefunc wrote: post #538
threethirtytwo wrote: post #537

Earlier quoted context omitted.

omfg the hard part of ML is proving back-propagation from first principles and that's not even that hard. Basic calculus and application of the chain rule that's it. Anyone can understand ML, not anyone can understand something like quantum physics. Anyone can understand the "learning algorithm" but the sheer complexity of the output of the "learning algorithm" is way to high such that we cannot at all characterize e…

I don't see how telling me I don't understand anything is going to fix your confusion. If you're confused then take it up w/ the people who keep telling you they don't know how anything works. I have no such problem so I recommend you stop projecting your confusion onto strangers in online forums.

The only thing that needs to be fixed here is your ignorance. Why so hostile? I'm helping you. You don't know what you're talking about and I have rectified that problem by passing the relevant information to you so next time you won't say things like that. You should thank me.
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