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The future of everything is lies, I guess: Where do we go from here?

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Re: The future of everything is lies, I guess: Where do we go from here?

#751

Post by adjejmxbdjdn »

Animats wrote: post #445

"I could retrain, but my core skills—reading, thinking, and writing—are squarely in the blast radius of large language models." Yes. For the lifetime of almost everyone alive now, reading, thinking, and writing have been valued skills which moved one up in society's hierarchy. This is a historical anomaly. Prior to 1800 or so, those skills were not all that useful to the average farmer. There were more smart people t…

Except what will matter in the future isn’t brute strength.

It’s ownership of capital and technology.

Plumbers aren’t suddenly getting rich. At best they’re not losing jobs at the rate everyone else is, but once so many people lose jobs then they can’t afford plumbers either. So even plumbers are worse off even if they’re not as badly off as the rest of us.

And all this assumes that humanoid robots don’t develop and succeed which is a major assumption.

Re: The future of everything is lies, I guess: Where do we go from here?

#752

Post by grttwww »

adjejmxbdjdn wrote: post #751
Animats wrote: post #445

"I could retrain, but my core skills—reading, thinking, and writing—are squarely in the blast radius of large language models." Yes. For the lifetime of almost everyone alive now, reading, thinking, and writing have been valued skills which moved one up in society's hierarchy. This is a historical anomaly. Prior to 1800 or so, those skills were not all that useful to the average farmer. There were more smart people t…

Except what will matter in the future isn’t brute strength. It’s ownership of capital and technology. Plumbers aren’t suddenly getting rich. At best they’re not losing jobs at the rate everyone else is, but once so many people lose jobs then they can’t afford plumbers either. So even plumbers are worse off even if they’re not as badly off as the rest of us. And all this assumes that humanoid robots don’t develop and…

Wow what a novel thought… not.

Dude we already live in a world dominated by capital that displaced the need for brute strength. Just go to a construction site in a developed economy. For which the returns to the owners of assets drive continual reinvestment.

Posts like this expose how many here think they bring something to the table when it’s just noise.

Re: The future of everything is lies, I guess: Where do we go from here?

#753

Post by tpdly »

hibikir wrote: post #640
lukev wrote: post #17

This is a must-read series of articles, and I think Kyle is very much correct. The comparison to the adoption of automobiles is apt, and something I've thought about before as well. Just because a technology can be useful doesn't mean it will have positive effects on society. That said, I'm more open to using LLMs in constrained scenarios, in cases where they're an appropriate tool for the job and the downsides can b…

When we look at automobiles, we also see that there were many ways to adapt to them. It's true that there's many parts of the anglosphere where, without one, you are a second class citizen at best: The lived environment was built so that you could not live without them... but that's not the only choice. I spend part of the year in Spain all the time, and I might not get into a car once a month. Not because I am any k…

I think it does have some network effects. When people are sending you 800 line markdown "planning documents" and "specs", drowning you in slop, it induces demand for LLMs to re-deflate that content into something manageable.

Re: The future of everything is lies, I guess: Where do we go from here?

#754

Post by Capricorn2481 »

AuthAuth wrote: post #544
mplanchard wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My hope is that there is a sort of Cambrian explosion of small software projects built by people who have absolutely no clue what they're doing. Many such projects will go nowhere, but some percentage of them will see success and growth. My second hope is that there will always come some threshold of complexity beyond which AI cannot effectively iterate on a project without (at minimum) the prompting of an expert in…

Lots of small companies pumping out software to solve problems. What will happen is companies will switch to their software, get burnt and then never move off established large core tech similar to what we see today but far worse. These small companies will only be able to sell through basically scam marketing.

Why? That seems like a huge leap. It's not even uncommon for small companies to make better products and take customers from bigger ones. That's how a lot of companies get started.

Re: The future of everything is lies, I guess: Where do we go from here?

#755

Post by Capricorn2481 »

geremiiah wrote: post #300
layer8 wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That fact doesn’t prevent the 0.001% from continuing to control it.

Point is, if an AGI becomes powerful and capable enough of replacing 99.999% of humanity, the likes of Sam Altman and Elon Musk won't be able to control it.

Most people don't believe AGI is reachable, or that any of these tech CEOs even want to reach it. So we are discussing the more likely reality

Re: The future of everything is lies, I guess: Where do we go from here?

#756

Post by sillyfluke »

the_af wrote: post #732
munksbeer wrote: post #673

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It sounds like a failure of imagination. I see it as the opposite. Doomerism is the easy path. It takes no imagination to repeat doomer memes and sci-fi dystopian tropes, without articulating exactly how we get there. I think what is far more likely is that as these tools proliferate, we continue on the path we've always done, some discomfort, probably negatively impacting some, but ultimately a better life when me…

> Doomerism is the easy path. It takes no imagination to repeat doomer memes and sci-fi dystopian tropes, without articulating exactly how we get there. It's not "doomerism" because there is a call to action, impractical as it may seem. TFA is stating one possible, if flawed course of action. There may be others. Doomerism just cries "the comet is coming, end your lives now!". Also, if you're honest, there is some ar…

Like you said, it is a failure of imagination. When someone says, "the billionaires and trillionaires won't need anyone else," the dystopian scenerio is not neccesarily "therefore other people won't exist or will eventually become extinct or killed" it's that other people will be straight out enslaved. With all the torture and suffering that entails. You know, the dystopian scenario that is more in line with centuries of recorded human history...The point is the rich won't need to listen to anyone else.

Re: The future of everything is lies, I guess: Where do we go from here?

#757

Post by biztos »

Saline9515 wrote: post #675
marxisttemp wrote: post #541

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Primogeniture in any form is discriminatory precisely since birth order is an immutable, permanent, unchosen characteristic assigned randomly at birth, just like race or sex.

Primogeniture makes sense in a world where odds that you arrive at the adult age are rather low, due to the high risk of death from illness and injuries. The oldest child is the most likely to survive. It is a rational and fair rule in such context.

Is the oldest child the most likely to survive, or is the winner simply the oldest surviving child?

Re: The future of everything is lies, I guess: Where do we go from here?

#758

Post by aphyr »

wackget wrote: post #743
catcowcostume wrote: post #603

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You say it as if the author made it not available, rather than your own government. If anything, it proves the author's point.

The author did make it unavailable. Nobody forced him to. He's kneecapping his own content and intentionally excluding UK users unnecessarily. Some random developer blog is absolutely not the target of the Online Safety Act. The OSA applies to "services with a significant number of UK users or where UK users are a target market". Anyone arguing that point is doing so in bad faith, probably to prove some agenda.

I've put considerable time into this, including speaking with Ofcom directly. The guidance Ofcom issued for small site operators last year was that they did intend to target "one-man bands", and that there would be no guidance on specific numbers that constituted the "significant number" of UK visitors which triggers Part 3 and 5 provider restrictions.

Re: The future of everything is lies, I guess: Where do we go from here?

#759

Post by miyoji »

suburban_strike wrote: post #668
pjc50 wrote: post #496

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Physical robustness. Strength, perhaps brutality. Competence in physical tasks. Honesty. Parentage. Birth order (see primogeniture.) Those matter in per-technological societies, and they matter in failed societies now. Those are perhaps humanity's core values. This is really bleak to me. We can do better than primogeniture, and of course the gender discrimination that goes along with it. You might as well write tha…

[flagged]

> If you want to continue defending women or have any say in your own fate you're going to have to bulk up to do it.

You seem to have forgotten that firearms have been invented.

Re: The future of everything is lies, I guess: Where do we go from here?

#760

Post by munksbeer »

sillyfluke wrote: post #756
the_af wrote: post #732

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Doomerism is the easy path. It takes no imagination to repeat doomer memes and sci-fi dystopian tropes, without articulating exactly how we get there. It's not "doomerism" because there is a call to action, impractical as it may seem. TFA is stating one possible, if flawed course of action. There may be others. Doomerism just cries "the comet is coming, end your lives now!". Also, if you're honest, there is some ar…

Like you said, it is a failure of imagination. When someone says, "the billionaires and trillionaires won't need anyone else," the dystopian scenerio is not neccesarily "therefore other people won't exist or will eventually become extinct or killed" it's that other people will be straight out enslaved. With all the torture and suffering that entails. You know, the dystopian scenario that is more in line with centurie…

Why on earth would billionaires want to do this?!

It is complete dystopian fantasy.

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