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The Singularity will occur on a Tuesday

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Re: The Singularity will occur on a Tuesday

#711

Post by uv-depression »

energy123 wrote: post #550
uv-depression wrote: post #308

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I think that when the singularity occurs all of the problems in physics will solve, like in a vacuum, and physics will advance centuries if not millennia in a few pico-seconds It doesn't matter how smart you are, you still need to run experiments to do physics. Experiments take nontrivial amounts of time to both run and set up (you can't tunnel a new CERN in picoseconds, again no matter how smart you are). Similarl…

The "singularity" can be decomposed into 2 mutually-supportive feedback loops - the digital and the physical. With frontier LLM agents, the digital loop is happening now to an extent (on inference code, harnesses, etc), and that extent probably grows larger (research automation) soon. Pertinent to your point, however, is the physical feedback loop of robots making better robots/factories/compute/energy. This is an as…

> With frontier LLM agents, the digital loop is happening now to an extent

I see no evidence of this, just a lot of people claiming it (very loudly, for the most part).

> that extent probably grows larger (research automation) soon

The word probably is doing a lot of work here.

> The usual constraints of physical law still apply

There are knowledge constraints, too. I can't build a quark matter processor without understanding quark matter to a vastly higher level than we do now. I can't do that without experiments on quark matter, I can't do experiments without access to a lot of energy, material, land, &c, that need to be assembled. There are a huge number of very difficult and time-consuming instrumental goals on the path to fundamentally better compute.

> A separate point: there's also deductive exploration (pure math) as distinct from empirical exploration (physics), which is not bounded by any physical constraints except for those that bound computation itself.

Sure, but physics requires math that is definitionally applied, not pure, and engineering requires physics.

Re: The Singularity will occur on a Tuesday

#712

Post by Wonderman2332 »

I guess the real question is how to prepare for it? Do you buy real assets like that car you wanted? Do you travel more? Do you spend your life in the gym like bryan johnson? Do you smoke weed everyday? If true societial upheaval is up on us and america falls into the abyss of mass unemployment and starvation, what are you all doing with your last four years? Before the real chaos begins

Re: The Singularity will occur on a Tuesday

#713

Post by dboon »

delegate wrote: post #437

It's worth remembering that this is all happening because of video games ! It is highly unlikely that the hardware which makes LLMs possible would have been developed otherwise. Isn't that amazing ? Just like internet grew because of p*rn, AI grew because of video games. Of course, that's just a funny angle. The way I see it, AI isn't accidental. Its inception has been in the first chips, the Internet, Open Source, G…

Type the word porn. Self censorship is wrong.

Re: The Singularity will occur on a Tuesday

#715

Post by breakpointalpha »

Nition wrote: post #353
jgrahamc wrote: post #48

Phew, so we won't have to deal with the Year 2038 Unix timestamp roll over after all.

January 20, 2038 Yesterday as we huddled in the cave, we thought our small remnant was surely doomed. After losing contact with the main Pevek group last week, we peered out at the drone swarm which was now visibly approaching - a dark cloud on the horizon. Then suddenly, at around 3pm by Zoya's reckoning, the entire swarm collapsed and fell out of the sky. Today we are walking outside in the sun, seemingly unobserve…

Thank you for taking the time to write this.

Re: The Singularity will occur on a Tuesday

#716

Post by jmount »

Just so I know that I took the time to say it.

The "singularity is going to be exponential" fantasy is based on assuming change simply becoming proportional to recent advances. Hence the exponential shape. Even conceding "chartism" one would need to at least propose some imaginary mechanism that goes reciprocal to pretend that sort of curve is coming.

Re: The Singularity will occur on a Tuesday

#718

Post by everyday7732 »

baxtr wrote: post #634
throwerxyz wrote: post #482

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What, you weren't alive when the last mass extinction event occurred? Why didn't you communicate or at least write the last handful down or something? Aren't you smarter than a chicken? It's funny that you think we know what happened to humans anymore than a chicken knows what happened to chickens.

Look that’s the thing: we know about mass extinction events. So we can use these to extrapolate. A 10+ kilometer wide asteroid will most likely cause global mass extinction, by blocking sunlight and collapsing ecosystems. That’s how the dinosaurs were wiped out 66 million years ago. Such events are estimated to occur roughly once every 100-200 million years. That’s not fiction that’s science. If we get hit by one of…

That's the whole point of the Turkey illusion. From the Turkey's point of view, it is safe and fed. It has never witnessed other Turkeys being killed, it has never been killed before.

If you are the turkey, it's difficult to predict your death and all the available evidence appears to support the hypothesis that you will not be suddenly slaughtered. If you are a very smart turkey, you might notice that the farmer is sharpening his knives the day before, and reach a strange hypothesis, but generally if you are the turkey, you don't know you are the turkey.

We are in a situation where we have never gone extinct before, never faced a threat like this before. It's difficult to know if we are in the same position as the turkey.

Re: The Singularity will occur on a Tuesday

#719

Post by rune-dev »

handoflixue wrote: post #609
dimitri-vs wrote: post #486

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On the other hand the average human has a context window of 2.5 petabytes that's streaming inference 24/7 while consuming the energy equivalent of a couple sandwiches per day. Oh and can actually remember things.

Citation desperately needed? Last I checked, humans could not hold the entirety of Wikipedia in working memory, and that's a mere 24 GB. Our GPU might handle "2.5 petabytes" but we're not writing all that to disc - in fact, most people have terrible memory of basically everything they see and do. A one-trick visual-processing pony is hardly proof of intelligence.

I think the idea is that we may not store 2.5 petabytes of facts like wikipedia. But we do store a ton of “data” in the form of innate knowledge, memories, etc.

I don’t think human memory/intelligence maps cleanly to computer terms though.

Re: The Singularity will occur on a Tuesday

#720

Post by toraway »

arjie wrote: post #276
spacemark wrote: post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lol. Speak for yourself, AI has not diminished my thinking in any material way and has indeed accelerated my ability to learn. Anyone predicting the "end of humanity" is playing prophet and echoing the same nonsensical prophecies we heard with the invention of the printing press, radio, TV, internet, or a number of other step-change technologies. There's a false premise built into the assertion that humanity can even…

A large number of people read a work of fiction and conclude that what happened in the work of fiction is an inevitability. My family has a genetically-selected baby (to avoid congenital illness) and the Hacker News link to the story had these comments all over it. > I only know seven sci-fi films and shows that have warned about how this will go badly. and > Pretty sure this was the prologue to Gattaca. and > I post…

Using fiction as an interpretive vehicle to explore, challenge and contrast our assumptions and perceptions about our own world isn't even in the same universe as "outsourcing their reasoning to a work of fiction".

"Haha you're basically a human LLM!" is such a weak, boringly robotic rebuttal in nearly any context given how it can be generically applied to literally anything.

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