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The Singularity will occur on a Tuesday

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Re: The Singularity will occur on a Tuesday

#771

Post by sp527 »

tavavex wrote: post #586
sp527 wrote: post #572

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm definitely making certain assumptions, such as: (1) democratic rule endures, (2) even absent true democratic rule, the populace can still resort to violent rebellion as a failsafe, (3) psychopathic tendencies amongst said elite are constrained enough such that mass genocide remains sufficiently psychologically unpalatable, (4) economic calamity substantially precedes the deployment of fully autonomous policing, e…

I agree. Although, looking at these assumptions, subjectively I think that all four of them are in question, and as time passes, their eventual long-term failure seems increasingly likely. Even if one of these four pillars persists, I would expect an overall worsening by default. If democratic rule persists in places, the most powerful would occupy places where it does not exist, or create fully private states, still…

The cynical pessimist in me agrees with you that the odds are somewhat bleak. The slightly irrational optimist in me says "rage against the dying of the light".

Also, there has never been a better time to learn about philosophies that get at the essence of being human and that elucidate precisely how and why our baser characteristics (acquisitiveness, status-seeking, ego, etc) hold us back from being happy. The world we're heading towards will convert desire into suffering more readily than ever before, even as our basic needs are easily met. Philosophy is the cure. And I strongly believe happiness will remain accessible to those who embrace it.

Re: The Singularity will occur on a Tuesday

#772

Post by marsten »

As we approach this pole running off to infinity, what bit of reality will intervene? An infinity in a model indicates you're missing some aspect of saturation or friction that will act to slow things down. Every exponential eventually becomes an s-curve.

Data center space? Electrical power? The amount of training data available? Society's capacity to accept rapid change?

Re: The Singularity will occur on a Tuesday

#773

Post by austinjp »

baxtr wrote: post #632
austinjp wrote: post #623

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Erm, humanity is experiencing recurring mass events right now.

Single individuals yes, but last time I checked we still had 8+ bn humans and growing on this planet. Unless you have another couple of planets to showcase there is nothing to discuss really.

Entire countries flood, entire US states experience drought. That's millions of people, as you well know.

Re: The Singularity will occur on a Tuesday

#775

Post by AlexeyBelov »

octernion wrote: post #90
atomic128 wrote: post #51

Once men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free. But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them. ... Thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of a human mind. -- Frank Herbert, Dune You won't read, except the output of your LLM. You won't write, except prompts for your LLM. Why write code or prose when the machine can write it for you? You won't think or…

do... do the "poison" people actually think that will make a difference? that's hilarious.

How would you do it better?

Re: The Singularity will occur on a Tuesday

#776

Post by [deleted] »

energy123 wrote: post #555
Nition wrote: post #195

I'm not sure about current LLM techniques leading us there. Current LLM-style systems seem like extremely powerful interpolation/search over human knowledge, but not engines of fundamentally new ideas, and it’s unclear how that turns into superintelligence. As we get closer to a perfect reproduction of everything we know, the graph so far continues to curve upward. Image models are able to produce incredible images,…

> Can a current-style LLM ever be superintelligent? I suppose obviously yes - you'd simply need to train it on a large corpus of data from another superintelligent species This is right, but we can already do that a little bit for domains with verification. AlphaZero is an example of alien-level performance due to non-human training data. Code and math is kind of in the middle. You can verify it compiles and solves t…

[deleted]

Re: The Singularity will occur on a Tuesday

#777

Post by backscratches »

awesome_dude wrote: post #755
backscratches wrote: post #640

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anonymity/untraceability was not the primary reason for using BTC towards black/grey markets. Bitcoin can be used pseudo anonymously , and the fact is you simply cannot send money to your grey market counterparty via any method but cash without it being flagged/canceled, and if you can't send cash (which has its own problems), bitcoin is the only option.

Online drug markets existed before BTC, and today there is a problem with "mules" being used (people who have legitimate bank accounts that are used to transfer money for groups that engage in illegal activities) Sending money to a "grey market counterparty" has had workarounds for some time, and continues to have workarounds. People were fooled into thinking crypto offered anonymity, and were surprised when they rea…

Your last line is incorrect (by your own earlier descrdption of BTC):

> had Epstein used BTC every single one of his clients would be known

Had Epstein used BTC And we discovered his BTC address(es) we would know what BTC addresses he sent BTC to. Simply by knowing his BTC address(es) alone we would not know anything about who he sent BTC to except the addresses he sent to. And if we know only one of Epstein's addresses and only one of the people associated with one of the recipient addresses, this would not necessarily give us any information about any of the other parties involved. With opsec BTC retains the quality of pseudoanonymity (a technical term). Epstein, who is known for laundering money, likely could have converted cash to BTC without connecting his identity to the addresses many times over.

I would be very surprised to learn that pre-BTC online black markets had equivalent volume as modern cryptocurrency markets.

Re: The Singularity will occur on a Tuesday

#778

Post by fatherwavelet »

IAmGraydon wrote: post #547
dakolli wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just say it simply, 1. LLMs only serve to reduce the value of your labor to zero over time. They don't need to even be great tools, they just need to be perceived as "equally good" to engineers for C-Suite to lay everyone off, and rehire at 50-25% of previous wages, repeating this cycle over a decade. 2. LLMs will not allow you to join the billionaire class, that wouldn't make sense, as anyone could if that's the cas…

I've recently found LLMs to be an excellent learning tool, using it hand-in-hand with a textbook to learn digital signal processing. If the book doesn't explain something well, I ask the LLM to explain it. It's not all brain wasting.

Exactly. LLMs are really just an extension of the internet. You can use the internet to expand on what you know or you can use the internet to rot your brain.

We have agency to decide and if the majority decide on brain rot I really don't care.

I have been learning things from the internet for 30 years and LLMs are just the greatest gift. If someone isn't leveraging these tools to increase what they know good luck.

Re: The Singularity will occur on a Tuesday

#779

Post by gizzlon »

blahbob wrote: post #130

It reminds me of that cartoon where a man in a torn suit tells two children sitting by a small fire in the ruins of a city: "Yes, the planet got destroyed. But for a beautiful moment in time, we created a lot of value for shareholders."

https://www.newyorker.com/cartoon/a16995

Re: The Singularity will occur on a Tuesday

#780

Post by ConceptJunkie »

nandomrumber wrote: post #469
albumen wrote: post #447

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Two options, not two choices. (Unless you have a proportional representation voting system like ireland, in which case you can vote for as many candidates as you like in descending order of preference) Anyway, there’s a third option: spoil your vote. In the recent Irish presidential election, 13% of those polled afterwards said they spoiled their votes, due to a poor selection of candidates from which to choose. http…

Please don’t encourage people to waste their vote. Encourage people to vote for the candidate they dislike the least, then try to work out ways to hold government accountable. If you’re in Australia, at least listen to what people like Tony Abbott, the IPA, and Pauline Hanson are actually saying these days.

In the U.S., I feel like the primaries are the place to vote for and work for the best candidate possible. That's the time to be idealistic and pursue the perfect candidate.

At the general election, you need to be pragmatic, and decide who is the least worst and vote for that candidate, because the nominee will probably never be someone who is your ideal choice. But in a two-party system, a vote for a third candidate at that level ends up being an effective vote for candidate you _don't_ want. That's not politics, that's game theory.

There's a lot more subtlety to it in a parliamentary system, and I can see some advantages to it, but at least here in the States where it's First Past The Post with a Two-Party system (which is mathematically inevitable with FPTP), sometimes you need to place strategy or ideals.

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