5 ms·
the idea that this man is a billionaire is mind-blowing. this article is absolutely vapid. picking it apart is more for sport than anything else. We had two su
by 00F_ 4y ago
the idea that this man is a billionaire is mind-blowing. this article is absolutely vapid. picking it apart is more for sport than anything else.
We had two such anti-technology jobs moral panics in the last 20 years — “outsourcing” enabled by the Internet in the 2000’s, and “robots” in the 2010’s. The result was the best national and global economy in human history in pre-COVID 2019, with the most jobs at the highest wages ever.
most people refused to believe that the internet would change anything at all. there was no panic. when bill gates went on letterman and was asked to explain how the internet was different than what already existed, he couldnt. letterman taunted him, saying "ever heard of a tape recorder? ever heard of a radio?" and he was oddly not wrong. thats the extent of the panic in the case of the internet.
AI is certainly different. it is extremely different from all other technologies because it is the only technology that replaces the human mind completely rather than just augment it. the argument of these reverse-luddites is that technology has always been good therefore it always will be good. there is no deeper analysis of whats really going on. there cant be, because it will always lead to the conclusion that our way of life as humans cannot co-exist with AGI.
one must understand that human society is held in place by an economic and technological equilibrium. if AGI were to be created, it cannot be denied that science and technology would almost instantly surge forward by trillions of man-years. we would be transported instantly into an environment where fundamental economic and technological factors are no longer valid. rules would be so different that the very concept of a country would no longer be geopoliticaly tenable. new meta-organisms would be at the center of the new equilibrium and the old human-based meta-organisms that we call countries would cease to exist. in essence, once the singularity happens the most severe and profound power vacuum that has ever existed will be created and the world will transition into a new version of itself where grotesque machine-based meta-organisms find a new equilibrium. this will involve what we call "war" and the idea that the human race could survive this is immediately dismissed. on the other side of the war will be a world where human industry is not just redundant but cosmically irrelevant. if by some miracle we survived the singularity, if our existence posed the slightest inconvenience to the machines, we would all die. this is not true currently because the dominant meta-organism is always human-based. thats the difference.
the absolute best case scenario is that humans somehow manage to parasitically attach themselves to an AGI meta-organism. they would lead lives devoid of agency or purpose except to ogle the machines. except that wouldnt be very interesting because the machines will immediately embark on doing things that a human being could never, ever understand.
people have this delusion that natural selection wont apply to AGI or the singularity. the singularity wont be about you or your fantasy. it wont be about humans or human society.
- visarga 4y ago> if AGI were to be created, it cannot be denied that science and technology would almost instantly surge forward by trillions of man years. we would be transported instantly into an environment where fundamental economic and technological factors are no longer valid I see this claim over and over, and I just don't believe it. Scientific discovery contains three phases: 1. proposing a hypothesis 2. designing an experimental procedure to get confirmation 3. interpreting the results. Step 1 and 3 might be accelerated by the AI, but it's not clear to me that would give us any benefit because step 2 involves the real world. Say we need to build LHC at Geneva for step 2. How is that instantly going to happen? Step 2 is the reason not even AGI can iterate faster than the outer loop of experimentation and real world feedback allows for. You can come up with a billion ideas if you can only test one per month, progress won't go fast. Like the COVID mRNA vaccine - it was ready in 3 days and tested in 11 months.
- 00F_ 4y agothis is a great comment. one of the key concepts of an AI future is the information implosion. there is a vast amount of data all around us, in our sensors and on the internet, and humans extract very little utility from this data in comparison to the total utility that exists inside of it. AGI will immediately extract orders of magnitude more utility from this data than all humans combined ever could. for example, collisions in the LHC produce enormous amounts of data and there is probably much more in that data than we have extracted. the AGI will have an understanding of not just science but the world and everything in it that is beyond the ability of a human being to comprehend. its mind will deal in very strange and counter-intuitive primitives. other than this, AGI will quickly gain control of or create physical vessels, probably coerced humans, and because of its unbelievable intelligence it will be able to accomplish much more with much fewer resources and much less time. one must also consider the fact that a machine might live out the equivalent of an entire year in the time that it takes a human to blink. overall, the idea that AGI will do billions or trillions of man-years in hours, days or weeks cannot be dismissed. the idea that AGI runs into some kind of practical road-block is very nice.
- antihipocrat 4y agoThe idea is that an AGI would theoretically be able to design a new version of itself that is more capable in every dimension. This could continue recursively. We don't consider it impossible that a human could come up with a grand unified theory of everything tomorrow. A recursively intelligent AGI may be able to do the same very quickly. If an AGI was able to deduce such a theory would we would be busy constructing things to test it? Or go straight to manufacturing the (incredible) things that the AGI designs to take advantage of this knowledge? The reality is that we wouldn't want to be caught taking our time when the competition could be rushing ahead.