The Adolescence of Technology

> no hope of ever living a fruitful and meaningful life

This is wrong. Fruitful and meaningful life can be lived anyway independently from your career and from your financial situation. Since it seems that job opportunity and growth might shrink without "hustling" or "grinding", it's extremely important to learn from a young age what really gives meaning to life, and this task has to be done entirely by you. No quick course, no AI or tutorial can teach you this. You need to learn it by yourself when you're young because it would probably make a real difference for the rest of your life. There are some tools for it, and the best one are probably books, and fiction can be really powerful to shape your thinking. I don't know you but I'll start from this one if you haven't read it before (don't think too much about the title and the tone, concentrate on the topic): The Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fuck

> get awfully depressed

Yes, this is a bit the feeling that over-exposition to social media provokes in a lot of people. Everything seems going shit; politics, climate, wars, nothing is right anymore. Idk you but my life is pretty stable, go out with friends, cook nice meals, traveling, stuff like that. So yes this are real problem in the world, but media currently over-expose us to this things (because it helps them sell articles and make you click). The easiest solution might be detoxing from media, and replace that with learning how things work for real trough books.

> The means by which I could ever potentially earn a living are slowly destroyed.

Unfortunately no-one know this for sure, so it doesn't make sense to overthink it. The technology field is changing but AIs are not near replacing humans yet. Technology has the power to automate and so replace every single job out there, so it's a field that still has work to be done and so investment will come in. It's just the current time that seems not right, and mostly it's because rich entrepreneurs tied themself with politics, to save their ass and make even more money in a period of political instability.

The future doesn't look bright, but learn how not to fall in a negativity trap created by media and internet.

This kind of petty remark is like a reverse em dash. Greetings fellow human.

Anyway, I did read it. The author's description of a future AI is basically just a more advanced version of LLMs

> By “powerful AI,” I have in mind an AI model—likely similar to today’s LLMs in form, though it might be based on a different architecture, might involve several interacting models, and might be trained differently—with the following properties:

They then go on to list several properties that meet their definition, but what I'm trying to explain in my comment is that I don't accept them all at face value. I think it's fair to critique from that perspective since the author explicitly modeled their future based on today's LLMs, unlike many AI essays that skip straight to the super intelligence meme as their premise.

You can only post-train so much... Try telling a child that martial arts isn't the solution to everything right after they've watched karate kid. A weak analogy, but it seems very clear that the healthy psychological development of frontier models is something necessary to solve.

Some good insights could come from those working at the coalface of child-psychology.

>But the specific issues we are dealing with have little to do with us feeling safe and protected behind some immutable rules that are built into the system

If your interpretation of the Robot books was that was suggesting a few immutable rules would make us safe and protected, you may have missed the primary message. The overarching theme was an exploration of what those laws could do, and how they may not necessarily correlate with what we want or even perceive as safe and protected. If anything the rules represented a starting point and the books were presenting a challenge to come up with something better.

Anthropic's work on autoencoding activations down to measurable semantic points might prove a step towards that something better. The fact that they can do manipulations based upon those semantic points does suggest something akin to the laws of robotics might be possible.

When it comes to alignment, the way many describe it, it is simply impossible because humans themselves are not aligned. Picking a median, mean, or lowest common denominator of human alignment would be a choice that people probably cannot agree. We are unaligned on even how we could compromise.

In reality, if you have control over what AI does there are only two options.

1. We can make AI do what some people say,

2. We can make them do what they want (assuming we can make them want)

If we make them do what some people, that hands the power to those who have that say.

I think there will come a time when an AI will perceive people doing something wrong, that most people do not think is wrong, and the AI will be the one that is right. Do we want it to intervene or not? Are we instead happy with a nation developing superintelligence that is subservient to the wishes of say, Vladimir Putin.