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I have the feeling that more and more exponential tech advancements are taking place right in front of our eyes. But that the public is somehow actively looking

I have the feeling that more and more exponential tech advancements are taking place right in front of our eyes. But that the public is somehow actively looking away. Take a look at self driving. Watch some videos from 5 years ago and from last month. Take a look at GPT-3. I am pretty sure a lot of articles are already written by NNs these days. Put into the name of any stock into Google News and you will see a flood of articles "Why XYZ has risen/tanked today" and "Should you invest $100k into XYZ?" which probably are written by AI with some human curation. Nothing like this existed a few years ago. Look at how "money of the people" is now a thing via crypto. Money that can be digitally transferred and not be printed by a government. This was just a dream 10 years ago. And have you looked into DAOs? These are virtul autonomous organizations, straight out of a science fiction book. But they are provably real now. I think that these topics are always downvoted on HN is an example of "actively looking away". Change is scary.

QuadrupleA 5y ago
So a misinformation generator, staggeringly inefficient transaction databases helping ruin the planet and fund crime and ransomware, and immutable brittle smart contract "laws" to try and run society with, which cost hundreds of dollars for a tiny transaction? Humanity could be aiming a little higher.
- ArtTimeInvestor 5y ago
  That's what old people said about the internet in the 90s. "So silly personal diaries and porn? Humanity could be aiming a little higher." But young nerds loved it and understood that it would take over the world. A very similar thing is going on with AI and crypto these days.
- visarga 5y ago
  > a misinformation generator a great misinformation generator, the best, it can even tell tales about unicorns, what's not to like? do you know what was the best attempt at text generation before GPT? it was LSTM word salad - this kind of text[1]: > Once upon a time there were a man and noble princess!’ being so good- natured, and that morning, when he awoke, he found it in his hand it to the palace. The young wild hut a lived, on the bridge of two days… vs GPT-2: > In a shocking finding, scientist discovered a herd of unicorns living in a remote, previously unexplored valley, in the Andes Mountains. Even more surprising to the researchers was the fact that the unicorns spoke perfect English. [1] https://towardsdatascience.com/text-generation-gpt-2-lstm-markov-chain-9ea371820e1e#9605 https://towardsdatascience.com/text-generation-gpt-2-lstm-ma... vs GPT-3: > A robot wrote this entire article. Are you scared yet, human? https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/sep/08/robot-wrote-this-article-gpt-3 https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/sep/08/robot-...

QuadrupleA 5y ago

So a misinformation generator, staggeringly inefficient transaction databases helping ruin the planet and fund crime and ransomware, and immutable brittle smart contract "laws" to try and run society with, which cost hundreds of dollars for a tiny transaction? Humanity could be aiming a little higher.

ArtTimeInvestor 5y ago
That's what old people said about the internet in the 90s. "So silly personal diaries and porn? Humanity could be aiming a little higher." But young nerds loved it and understood that it would take over the world. A very similar thing is going on with AI and crypto these days.
visarga 5y ago
> a misinformation generator a great misinformation generator, the best, it can even tell tales about unicorns, what's not to like? do you know what was the best attempt at text generation before GPT? it was LSTM word salad - this kind of text[1]: > Once upon a time there were a man and noble princess!’ being so good- natured, and that morning, when he awoke, he found it in his hand it to the palace. The young wild hut a lived, on the bridge of two days… vs GPT-2: > In a shocking finding, scientist discovered a herd of unicorns living in a remote, previously unexplored valley, in the Andes Mountains. Even more surprising to the researchers was the fact that the unicorns spoke perfect English. [1] https://towardsdatascience.com/text-generation-gpt-2-lstm-markov-chain-9ea371820e1e#9605 https://towardsdatascience.com/text-generation-gpt-2-lstm-ma... vs GPT-3: > A robot wrote this entire article. Are you scared yet, human? https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/sep/08/robot-wrote-this-article-gpt-3 https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/sep/08/robot-...