Live data from Hacker News

The Singularity will occur on a Tuesday

campedersen.com

91–100 of 800 posts

Re: The Singularity will occur on a Tuesday

#91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> [...] prior to reforming society [...] Well, good luck. You have "only" the entire history of human kind on the other side of your argument :)

I never said it was an easy problem to solve, or one we’ve had success with before, but damnit, someone has to give a shit and try to do better.

Literally nobody’s trying because there is no solution

The fundamental unit of society …the human… is at its core fundamentally incapable of coordinating at the scale necessary to do this correctly

and so there is no solution because humans can’t plan or execute on a plan

Re: The Singularity will occur on a Tuesday

#92

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…

> whether the singularity actually happens or not is irrelevant so much as whether enough people believe it will happen and act accordingly. I disagree. If the singularity doesn't happen, then what people do or don't believe matters a lot. If the singularity does happen, then it hardly matters what people do or don't believe (edit: about whether or not the singularity will happen).

Depends on what a post singularity world looks like, with Roko's basilisk and everything.

Re: The Singularity will occur on a Tuesday

#93
Great article, super fun.

> In 2025, 1.1 million layoffs were announced. Only the sixth time that threshold has been breached since 1993. Over 55,000 explicitly cited AI. But HBR found that companies are cutting based on AI's potential, not its performance. The displacement is anticipatory.

You have to wonder if this was coming regardless of what technological or economic event triggered it. It is baffling to me that with computers, email, virtual meetings and increasingly sophisticated productivity tools, we have more middle management, administrative, bureaucratic type workers than ever before. Why do we need triple the administrative staff that was utilized in the 1960s across industries like education, healthcare, etc. Ostensibly a network connected computer can do things more efficiently than paper, phone calls and mail? It's like if we tripled the number of farmers after tractors and harvesters came out and then they had endless meetings about the farm.

It feels like AI is just shining a light on something we all knew already, a shitload of people have meaningless busy work corporate jobs.

Re: The Singularity will occur on a Tuesday

#94

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…

> whether the singularity actually happens or not is irrelevant so much as whether enough people believe it will happen and act accordingly. I disagree. If the singularity doesn't happen, then what people do or don't believe matters a lot. If the singularity does happen, then it hardly matters what people do or don't believe (edit: about whether or not the singularity will happen).

I don’t think that’s quite right. I’d say instead that if the singularity does happen, there’s no telling which beliefs will have mattered.

Re: The Singularity will occur on a Tuesday

#96

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…

A better approach is to make AI bullshit people on purpose.

Re: The Singularity will occur on a Tuesday

#97

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…

Like partial courses of antibiotics, this will only relatively-advantage thoae leading efforts best able to ignore this 'poison', accelerating what you aim to prevent.

Re: The Singularity will occur on a Tuesday

#98

This is a very interesting read, but I wonder if anyone has actually any ideas on how to stop this from going south? If the trends described continue, the world will become a much worse place in a few years time.

Frank Herbert and Samuel Butler.

Re: The Singularity will occur on a Tuesday

#99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> “here’s why replacing or suggesting the replacement of human labor prior to reforming society into one that does not predicate survival on continued employment and wages is very bad” And there are plenty of people that take issue with that too. Unfortunately they're not the ones paying the price. And... stock options.

History paints a pretty clear picture of the tradeoff: * Profits now and violence later OR * Little bit of taxes now and accelerate easier Unfortunately we’ve developed such a myopic, “FYGM” society that it’s explicitly the former option for the time being.

Every possible example of “progress” have either an individual or a state power purpose behind it

there is only one possible “egalitarian” forward looking investments that paid off for everybody

I think the only exception to this is vaccines…and you saw how all that worked during Covid

Everything else from the semiconductor to the vacuum cleaner the automobile airplanes steam engines I don’t care what it is you pick something it was developed in order to give a small group and advantage over all the other groups it is always been this case it will always be this case because fundamentally at the root nature of humanity they do not care about the externalities- good or bad

Re: The Singularity will occur on a Tuesday

#100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> [...] prior to reforming society [...] Well, good luck. You have "only" the entire history of human kind on the other side of your argument :)

I never said it was an easy problem to solve, or one we’ve had success with before, but damnit, someone has to give a shit and try to do better.

The likely outcome is that 99.99% of humanity lives a basic subsistence lifestyle ("UBI") and the elite and privileged few metaphorically (and somewhat literally) ascend to the heavens. Around half the planet already lives on <= $7/day. Prepare to join them.
Post reply on HN