7 ms·

I feel like I can now see the event horizon of commoditized intelligence. No idea what society (is "society" even the right word? Who knows) is going to look li

I feel like I can now see the event horizon of commoditized intelligence. No idea what society (is "society" even the right word? Who knows) is going to look like on the other side of it, but it is going to be wildly different. Perhaps a brief period where everyone is using an AI to do their job, uh, I mean, assist their work, but beyond that it's unknowable. Moreover, this looks like it is going to be happening sooner rather than later.

forgetfulness 4y ago
We were perhaps a bit too enamored with the idea that it was intellect that made us unique, and thus knowledge workers would be the last to be replaced. Pouring our brains out by the Petabytes for neural networks to pick them up made the economics just work for an AI industrial revolution to start from there.
- mdp2021 4y ago
  No, we were enamored with the idea that intelligence was well distributed between people, as if following Descartes' massive incipit "Good sense must be the best distributed thing in the world, given that nobody seems to be asking for more". Inability to recognize intelligence is and will be devastating.
  - forgetfulness 4y ago
    > Inability to recognize intelligence is and will be devastating. It's a pop-culture quote from a movie that was no masterpiece, I know, but "I, Robot" presented in two sentences an argument for having more sober expectations on what machine intelligence could be capable of, and of our own > Detective Del Spooner: "Can a robot write a symphony? Can a robot turn a… canvas into a beautiful masterpiece?" > Sonny: "Can you?" We're discrediting the capabilities of current machine learning models for being unable of producing the thoughts that many, many people are unable to either. Alright, so the models are not at the level that us HN philosopher kings hold ourselves to be, and they won't be Senior Architects of distributed systems or what have you very soon, but what does it say about Average Joe, slightly-above-Average Joe, and their economic prospects? Specially since in the West and much of the developing world, we were taking solace in the idea that a service economy comprised of knowledge workers would provide plenty of opportunities on a political and economic landscape where manufacture was gone, or had never arrived.
    - wrycoder 4y ago
      "Learn to code" isn't such valuable advice for the Average Joe anymore, is it?
    - mdp2021 4y ago
      -- Pseudo Detective Del Spooner: "Can a robot lift that object?" -- Pseudo Sonny: "Can you?" -- Pseudo Detective Del Spooner: "Ha-ha. So what the #!@! is a robot doing there, not doing what is required? I cannot, and I do not stand there clueless" What is being engineered, toys for the satisfaction of some idle decadent sympathy urge? Have cats disappeared from the world? > We're discrediting We are shocked that an overly large number of individuals expect stones to bleed, and intelligence to pour out of machines that do not have intelligence coded inside, and that instead have unintelligence - acritical repetition - coded inside. > what does it say about Average Joe That he should catch up with his nature, if he shows the critical capacities of a simulacrum that has none. > not at the level No, no, no: it is not a matter of quantity but of quality: if you do not implement it or its origin, it will not be there. > [Asimov] Asimov is relevant. For example, I remember his idea that the State comes from Agriculture (~10000 BC), in the need to plan irrigation, or that the Abel vs Cain story could be a parallel of the political consequences of lands denied to pastors. Now: those seem to be good ideas, and their production can be an interesting goal. But there is something /before/ "creativity", or "advanced pattern recognition": it is /intelligence/, meaning that Asimov, after having spawned those hypoteses, has /vetted/ them as a required duly activity before confirming them in his set of founded hypotheses. You have to use intelligence, you have to have intelligence, and if you want to do AGI, you have to implement intelligence!!!
      - forgetfulness 4y ago
        And many among the Average Joes will not measure up to this ideal man of science and art. In truth you'll see that I'm not advocating for the rights of as-of-yet non-sapient computer programs, but to think of what this means about people. If we're setting the bar of personhood or dignity to being exceptional researchers and engineers, it doesn't bode well for the masses that aren't and won't be. Maybe this will result in a society of leisure where everyone can be that! I wouldn't bet on it, there's already more PhDs in the sciences and humanities than society can fit, and humans may just not work that way. You're already dismissing concerns about the welfare of the merely average, for being unfit when competing with the Machine Learning models we may have in the near future.
- mikepurvis 4y ago
  I feel a bit like this with the whole firestorm around AI artwork as well— it's been a big wakeup call to people who have been creating using technology-assisted workflows for decades, but still felt in their gut that they were bringing something unique to the table and were therefore "safe" from being completely automated away. That hitting the button for magic eraser or magic lasso or magic color correction was someone okay in a way that the AI itself sitting in the driver's seat was not. Now that's been reduced to pointing out minor flaws that the next generation of AI artists will trivially resolve, and sharing memes beseeching other humans to participate in a boycott. There's real pain and angst there, and I don't want to be callous about it with a comparison to buggy-whip manufacturers or something. But I wish the participants in these types of discussions were able to zoom out a bit and see that there's a larger societal issue here around automation, and that the real solution is going to be rethinking the basic economics of how we distribute wealth in a time of extraordinary machine-driven productivity— productivity that is no longer just about assembly lines and primary industries, but now also includes an increasing bite out of realms previously classified as "knowledge work".
  - forgetfulness 4y ago
    Hard to tell, other knowledge workers and people in creative industries were already squeezed, designers for instance have had a tough time for a very long time. Will things change, politically, because now marketers and Software developers join those ranks, for instance? Programming was an outlet, if not a gold rush, for many people as the basic technical skills to create Software with the already sophisticated tooling available today presented an economic opportunity, but if "describe your problem, get crappy app" becomes viable, it may squeeze the market for junior developers. For as long as it has existed, Software has been subject to the Jevons Paradox [1], and every advancement in making its development cheaper and its supply more abundant has only made it so more activities become powered by Software and Software developers, but it's hard to tell how this will impact the job market, especially if Software was absorbing people who didn't find more opportunities in the broader service sector. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox
    - 4y ago
Aperocky 4y ago
GPT has no reasoning ability, it has billions of parameters that make it pretend it has it, purely going off of previously digested material. As long as it comes across some reasoning process that have not been seen before in the training wordset, which can be as easy as a middle school math question, it fails. Because it has no ability to extrapolate logic. If it manages to pass Bar test, that says more about the Bar test than it says about GPT.
- ok123456 4y ago
  Most people's reasoning ability functions at this level.
  - mdp2021 4y ago
    And in fact we want them to act outside a professional capacity in which they will be dangerous liabilities. ...Is not this piece about "Bar Exams"?
  - etangent 4y ago
    I would argue that it does not matter. The AI could even be "smarter" on pure IQ/reasoning, but in terms of practical reasoning that humans need that depends on exposure to real world, the AIs will still take decades to catch up. The radiology AIs are technically more accurate than radiologists on any sufficiently large dataset, and yet they still have not replaced radiologists (or even are anywhere close to).
    - joshspankit 4y ago
      There’s an interesting sideroad here: A lot of medical jobs are there because of legal culpability: If someone fails the blame can be placed on them and not on the hospital who hired them. It might be a long time before they get to have that same protection with AI (probably miles and miles of contracts negotiated with a 3rd party who owns and operates the AI that’s used).
  - ragebol 4y ago
    Which should be worrying. It's also why most people don't pass (nor try) the bar exam.
BitwiseFool 4y ago
I feel like there is a difference between being able to pass a bar exam and being a "good" lawyer. I suspect AI tools would enhance the jobs of clerks rather than attorneys, mostly because clerks spend a great deal of time going over case law, text, and doing research.
- mdp2021 4y ago
  > enhance the jobs of clerks We already did, it is called "Case Based Reasoning" within Decision Support Systems.
- xiphias2 4y ago
  While it won't be a good lawyer, it can replace lots of bad lawyers when people just want to send some legal papers or ask some legal advice.
tazjin 4y ago
I think we're very close to Saturday from Clippy[0]. By this I don't mean an AI as in the story acting by itself with its own motivations, I'm only talking about the subversion of established verification & communication methods used by it by humans with malicious purposes. Essentially, if you do anything security related, we might only be O(months) away from you needing to stop using basically any electronic communication for your purposes. Companies can't have online meetings anymore in which decisions are made, everything will have to be more analog, more in-person. Look at the kind of access the Russian comedians Vovan & Lexus [1] have gotten. Without advanced AI, just a little social engineering, they got heads of state on the phone. Now combine this with the kind of text/audio/video synthesis we're not too far away from, and you have an absolute recipe for disaster ... [0]: https://www.gwern.net/fiction/Clippy#saturday https://www.gwern.net/fiction/Clippy#saturday [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vovan_and_Lexus https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vovan_and_Lexus
belter 4y ago
Only that there is no intelligence being commoditized...Yet. And that is obvious, if you ask one of these models, a meta question like for example: "If a person says I am lying, are they lying or saying the truth?" You will see these models will spit a canned elegant response, talking how a question could possibly be true or false, some persons not being able to attest if another one is truthful or not...But no mention of the Liar Paradox. So we are not yet ready to say: "Your Honor its not fair! My Lawyer is version 2.2.3 with SP1 while the Prosecution is version 4.0 with an additional Cloud Based Elastic Inference! "
- addisonl 4y ago
  >It is impossible to determine whether a person is lying or telling the truth when they make a statement like "I am lying." The statement is self-contradictory, as it asserts that the person is both lying and telling the truth at the same time. This creates a paradox, as it is impossible for the statement to be both true and false at the same time. The Liar Paradox has been the subject of philosophical and logical study for centuries, and there is no universally agreed upon resolution to it. ChatGPT's response to me asking "If a person says I am lying, are they lying or saying the truth?"
  - belter 4y ago
    That is pretty good :-) I tried several times as I have been investigating sending some of the "meta" questions to these models. I just tried again and this is what I got: "If a person says "I am lying," it could mean either that they are telling the truth about the fact that they are lying, or it could be a lie itself. It is important to consider the context in which the statement was made and to try to assess the credibility of the person making the statement. It is also important to remember that people may not always be honest or sincere, and it is always a good idea to verify information before accepting it as true." I could never make it mention the Liar Paradox. Is that all that you sent?
wrycoder 4y ago
Kurzweil's "Singularity" is upon us, but he's now being cagey about it. He says it's still years away. His interview with Lex Fridman[0] was pretty tame - I didn't learn much new from it. Kurzweil deflected the Singularity segment to be a discussion about the history of computer power. Remember that Kurzweil is Director of Engineering[1] at Google, with the mandate to "bring natural language understanding to Google"[2]. He started there in 2012, just after publishing his book, "How to Create a Mind"[3], and that's exactly what he and his team have been doing for ten years. Publication of his new book, "The Singularity is Nearer"[4] is now pushed out to mid 2023. Maybe he'll change the title to "Here" by then. (It's hard to believe that OpenAI is actually ahead of Google.) Fridman made the point that maybe we won't realize at the time that the Singularity is passing, and only understand later that it did. Kurzweil didn't disagree. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ykY69lSpDdo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ykY69lSpDdo [1] https://archive.is/vVEBv https://archive.is/vVEBv [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ray_Kurzweil https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ray_Kurzweil [3] https://www.amazon.com/How-Create-Mind-Thought-Revealed-ebook/dp/B007V65UUG https://www.amazon.com/How-Create-Mind-Thought-Revealed-eboo... [4] https://www.amazon.com/s?k=kurzweil+singularity+is+nearer https://www.amazon.com/s?k=kurzweil+singularity+is+nearer
- oidar 4y ago
  >It's hard to believe that OpenAI is actually ahead of Google. Are Google's LLMs available for us to test out? From what I've gleaned, they've locked them up - I'd love to compare GPT vs Google's LLMs.
  - Workaccount2 4y ago
    Google really doesn't share much publicly except for papers and preset tech demos. However we know they have been working on AI longer than OpenAI, with better datasets than anyone, with top shelf talent, essentially infinite funding, custom hardware, and what we do see publicly is incredible. It's a pretty safe bet that Google is ahead of the pack, perhaps even with some distance, but it's not yet clear what they intend to do long term with their projects. What is clear is that they don't want or need the public playing with it.

forgetfulness 4y ago

We were perhaps a bit too enamored with the idea that it was intellect that made us unique, and thus knowledge workers would be the last to be replaced. Pouring our brains out by the Petabytes for neural networks to pick them up made the economics just work for an AI industrial revolution to start from there.

mdp2021 4y ago
No, we were enamored with the idea that intelligence was well distributed between people, as if following Descartes' massive incipit "Good sense must be the best distributed thing in the world, given that nobody seems to be asking for more". Inability to recognize intelligence is and will be devastating.
- forgetfulness 4y ago
  > Inability to recognize intelligence is and will be devastating. It's a pop-culture quote from a movie that was no masterpiece, I know, but "I, Robot" presented in two sentences an argument for having more sober expectations on what machine intelligence could be capable of, and of our own > Detective Del Spooner: "Can a robot write a symphony? Can a robot turn a… canvas into a beautiful masterpiece?" > Sonny: "Can you?" We're discrediting the capabilities of current machine learning models for being unable of producing the thoughts that many, many people are unable to either. Alright, so the models are not at the level that us HN philosopher kings hold ourselves to be, and they won't be Senior Architects of distributed systems or what have you very soon, but what does it say about Average Joe, slightly-above-Average Joe, and their economic prospects? Specially since in the West and much of the developing world, we were taking solace in the idea that a service economy comprised of knowledge workers would provide plenty of opportunities on a political and economic landscape where manufacture was gone, or had never arrived.
  - wrycoder 4y ago
    "Learn to code" isn't such valuable advice for the Average Joe anymore, is it?
  - mdp2021 4y ago
    -- Pseudo Detective Del Spooner: "Can a robot lift that object?" -- Pseudo Sonny: "Can you?" -- Pseudo Detective Del Spooner: "Ha-ha. So what the #!@! is a robot doing there, not doing what is required? I cannot, and I do not stand there clueless" What is being engineered, toys for the satisfaction of some idle decadent sympathy urge? Have cats disappeared from the world? > We're discrediting We are shocked that an overly large number of individuals expect stones to bleed, and intelligence to pour out of machines that do not have intelligence coded inside, and that instead have unintelligence - acritical repetition - coded inside. > what does it say about Average Joe That he should catch up with his nature, if he shows the critical capacities of a simulacrum that has none. > not at the level No, no, no: it is not a matter of quantity but of quality: if you do not implement it or its origin, it will not be there. > [Asimov] Asimov is relevant. For example, I remember his idea that the State comes from Agriculture (~10000 BC), in the need to plan irrigation, or that the Abel vs Cain story could be a parallel of the political consequences of lands denied to pastors. Now: those seem to be good ideas, and their production can be an interesting goal. But there is something /before/ "creativity", or "advanced pattern recognition": it is /intelligence/, meaning that Asimov, after having spawned those hypoteses, has /vetted/ them as a required duly activity before confirming them in his set of founded hypotheses. You have to use intelligence, you have to have intelligence, and if you want to do AGI, you have to implement intelligence!!!
    - forgetfulness 4y ago
      And many among the Average Joes will not measure up to this ideal man of science and art. In truth you'll see that I'm not advocating for the rights of as-of-yet non-sapient computer programs, but to think of what this means about people. If we're setting the bar of personhood or dignity to being exceptional researchers and engineers, it doesn't bode well for the masses that aren't and won't be. Maybe this will result in a society of leisure where everyone can be that! I wouldn't bet on it, there's already more PhDs in the sciences and humanities than society can fit, and humans may just not work that way. You're already dismissing concerns about the welfare of the merely average, for being unfit when competing with the Machine Learning models we may have in the near future.
mikepurvis 4y ago
I feel a bit like this with the whole firestorm around AI artwork as well— it's been a big wakeup call to people who have been creating using technology-assisted workflows for decades, but still felt in their gut that they were bringing something unique to the table and were therefore "safe" from being completely automated away. That hitting the button for magic eraser or magic lasso or magic color correction was someone okay in a way that the AI itself sitting in the driver's seat was not. Now that's been reduced to pointing out minor flaws that the next generation of AI artists will trivially resolve, and sharing memes beseeching other humans to participate in a boycott. There's real pain and angst there, and I don't want to be callous about it with a comparison to buggy-whip manufacturers or something. But I wish the participants in these types of discussions were able to zoom out a bit and see that there's a larger societal issue here around automation, and that the real solution is going to be rethinking the basic economics of how we distribute wealth in a time of extraordinary machine-driven productivity— productivity that is no longer just about assembly lines and primary industries, but now also includes an increasing bite out of realms previously classified as "knowledge work".
- forgetfulness 4y ago
  Hard to tell, other knowledge workers and people in creative industries were already squeezed, designers for instance have had a tough time for a very long time. Will things change, politically, because now marketers and Software developers join those ranks, for instance? Programming was an outlet, if not a gold rush, for many people as the basic technical skills to create Software with the already sophisticated tooling available today presented an economic opportunity, but if "describe your problem, get crappy app" becomes viable, it may squeeze the market for junior developers. For as long as it has existed, Software has been subject to the Jevons Paradox [1], and every advancement in making its development cheaper and its supply more abundant has only made it so more activities become powered by Software and Software developers, but it's hard to tell how this will impact the job market, especially if Software was absorbing people who didn't find more opportunities in the broader service sector. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox
  - 4y ago

Aperocky 4y ago

GPT has no reasoning ability, it has billions of parameters that make it pretend it has it, purely going off of previously digested material. As long as it comes across some reasoning process that have not been seen before in the training wordset, which can be as easy as a middle school math question, it fails. Because it has no ability to extrapolate logic. If it manages to pass Bar test, that says more about the Bar test than it says about GPT.

ok123456 4y ago
Most people's reasoning ability functions at this level.
- mdp2021 4y ago
  And in fact we want them to act outside a professional capacity in which they will be dangerous liabilities. ...Is not this piece about "Bar Exams"?
- etangent 4y ago
  I would argue that it does not matter. The AI could even be "smarter" on pure IQ/reasoning, but in terms of practical reasoning that humans need that depends on exposure to real world, the AIs will still take decades to catch up. The radiology AIs are technically more accurate than radiologists on any sufficiently large dataset, and yet they still have not replaced radiologists (or even are anywhere close to).
  - joshspankit 4y ago
    There’s an interesting sideroad here: A lot of medical jobs are there because of legal culpability: If someone fails the blame can be placed on them and not on the hospital who hired them. It might be a long time before they get to have that same protection with AI (probably miles and miles of contracts negotiated with a 3rd party who owns and operates the AI that’s used).
- ragebol 4y ago
  Which should be worrying. It's also why most people don't pass (nor try) the bar exam.

BitwiseFool 4y ago

I feel like there is a difference between being able to pass a bar exam and being a "good" lawyer. I suspect AI tools would enhance the jobs of clerks rather than attorneys, mostly because clerks spend a great deal of time going over case law, text, and doing research.

mdp2021 4y ago
> enhance the jobs of clerks We already did, it is called "Case Based Reasoning" within Decision Support Systems.
xiphias2 4y ago
While it won't be a good lawyer, it can replace lots of bad lawyers when people just want to send some legal papers or ask some legal advice.

tazjin 4y ago

I think we're very close to Saturday from Clippy[0]. By this I don't mean an AI as in the story acting by itself with its own motivations, I'm only talking about the subversion of established verification & communication methods used by it by humans with malicious purposes. Essentially, if you do anything security related, we might only be O(months) away from you needing to stop using basically any electronic communication for your purposes. Companies can't have online meetings anymore in which decisions are made, everything will have to be more analog, more in-person. Look at the kind of access the Russian comedians Vovan & Lexus [1] have gotten. Without advanced AI, just a little social engineering, they got heads of state on the phone. Now combine this with the kind of text/audio/video synthesis we're not too far away from, and you have an absolute recipe for disaster ... [0]: https://www.gwern.net/fiction/Clippy#saturday https://www.gwern.net/fiction/Clippy#saturday [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vovan_and_Lexus https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vovan_and_Lexus

belter 4y ago

Only that there is no intelligence being commoditized...Yet. And that is obvious, if you ask one of these models, a meta question like for example: "If a person says I am lying, are they lying or saying the truth?" You will see these models will spit a canned elegant response, talking how a question could possibly be true or false, some persons not being able to attest if another one is truthful or not...But no mention of the Liar Paradox. So we are not yet ready to say: "Your Honor its not fair! My Lawyer is version 2.2.3 with SP1 while the Prosecution is version 4.0 with an additional Cloud Based Elastic Inference! "

addisonl 4y ago
>It is impossible to determine whether a person is lying or telling the truth when they make a statement like "I am lying." The statement is self-contradictory, as it asserts that the person is both lying and telling the truth at the same time. This creates a paradox, as it is impossible for the statement to be both true and false at the same time. The Liar Paradox has been the subject of philosophical and logical study for centuries, and there is no universally agreed upon resolution to it. ChatGPT's response to me asking "If a person says I am lying, are they lying or saying the truth?"
- belter 4y ago
  That is pretty good :-) I tried several times as I have been investigating sending some of the "meta" questions to these models. I just tried again and this is what I got: "If a person says "I am lying," it could mean either that they are telling the truth about the fact that they are lying, or it could be a lie itself. It is important to consider the context in which the statement was made and to try to assess the credibility of the person making the statement. It is also important to remember that people may not always be honest or sincere, and it is always a good idea to verify information before accepting it as true." I could never make it mention the Liar Paradox. Is that all that you sent?

wrycoder 4y ago

Kurzweil's "Singularity" is upon us, but he's now being cagey about it. He says it's still years away. His interview with Lex Fridman[0] was pretty tame - I didn't learn much new from it. Kurzweil deflected the Singularity segment to be a discussion about the history of computer power. Remember that Kurzweil is Director of Engineering[1] at Google, with the mandate to "bring natural language understanding to Google"[2]. He started there in 2012, just after publishing his book, "How to Create a Mind"[3], and that's exactly what he and his team have been doing for ten years. Publication of his new book, "The Singularity is Nearer"[4] is now pushed out to mid 2023. Maybe he'll change the title to "Here" by then. (It's hard to believe that OpenAI is actually ahead of Google.) Fridman made the point that maybe we won't realize at the time that the Singularity is passing, and only understand later that it did. Kurzweil didn't disagree. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ykY69lSpDdo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ykY69lSpDdo [1] https://archive.is/vVEBv https://archive.is/vVEBv [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ray_Kurzweil https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ray_Kurzweil [3] https://www.amazon.com/How-Create-Mind-Thought-Revealed-ebook/dp/B007V65UUG https://www.amazon.com/How-Create-Mind-Thought-Revealed-eboo... [4] https://www.amazon.com/s?k=kurzweil+singularity+is+nearer https://www.amazon.com/s?k=kurzweil+singularity+is+nearer

oidar 4y ago
>It's hard to believe that OpenAI is actually ahead of Google. Are Google's LLMs available for us to test out? From what I've gleaned, they've locked them up - I'd love to compare GPT vs Google's LLMs.
- Workaccount2 4y ago
  Google really doesn't share much publicly except for papers and preset tech demos. However we know they have been working on AI longer than OpenAI, with better datasets than anyone, with top shelf talent, essentially infinite funding, custom hardware, and what we do see publicly is incredible. It's a pretty safe bet that Google is ahead of the pack, perhaps even with some distance, but it's not yet clear what they intend to do long term with their projects. What is clear is that they don't want or need the public playing with it.