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That's what they said about Watson and Wolfram Alpha. You only hear this nonsense on HN.

by mlycv 4y ago

refulgentis 4y ago
Demonstrably untrue, it’s taken up semi-residence in everything from oped pages to boardrooms since the New Year. Welcome to the mid singularity, my friend.
- dr_dshiv 4y ago
  You can’t say “singularity” on HN without a ton of downvotes. It’s not because people disagree (or they’d say so), but because they literally shit their pants when they think about it. Hard to blame them.
  - vbezhenar 4y ago
    I'm saving my money, so I can live enough off savings to learn a new profession. I'm not sure if that will happen, but I consider this option as likely enough to affect my life decisions. The world is changing at alarming rate. Though I think that it's more likely that I'll become shaman who talks to the spirits. Managers hate computers and they'd prefer to pay someone to deal with them.
  - suction 4y ago
    [dead]
  - Ygg2 4y ago
    Who's not disagreeing? Singularity feels like "man facing existential dread confuses saturation curve for exponential".
    - dr_dshiv 4y ago
      When I say singularity, I mean “changes the nature of human life irreversibly and to a greater degree than any prior technology through a rapid progression of self-reinforcing growth.” That rapid progression can be modeled with an exponential growth curve, like Moore’s law, even though nothing material can have a sustained exponential growth. Regardless of how the curve is modeled, the steepness is such that it serves as a step function in evolution. With that clarified, there is first the question of “is the technological progression going to level off soon?” And I think the answer is no. The second question is, “how are we going to deal?” And the answer to that question can only be addressed once we answer the question: “what kind of world do we want to live in?”
      - brookst 4y ago
        I think you just declared radio, television, the internet, the macaroon, and mobile phones to be singularities. People generally use the term to mean the point at which progress is automatic, unbounded, and instant. E.g. AIs that can produce smarter AIs themselves, in short order.
        SuoDuanDao 4y ago
        'step change' sounds less exciting than 'singularity' but in terms of the original definition there's very little distinction.
        brookst 4y ago
        Hmm. I see the singularity as a recursive step change; the last step where the average slope becomes vertical. I’m not a singularity believer (singularitist?); from the perspective of 1000 years ago we’re already at the point of infinite progress in zero time. I think individuals, the culture, and the species adapt to accelerating progress, and I intuit, maybe wrongly, that Gödel‘s theorem means that technology will never become runaway and recursive. But I think that’s what people mean, more than just a step/paradigm change like the internet.
theK 4y ago
I think everywhere except HN the expectations on Watson’s and Wolfram’s second seasons where even more inflated
travisjungroth 4y ago
Who? Crying wolf makes sense to discredit an individual but not a whole argument. Almost everything is being predicted by someone at any given time. If your criteria for predictions is “no one can have made a similar prediction and been wrong in the past”, then you’ll disbelieve all predictions. And seriously, how many people were actually saying “WolframAlpha will destroy a huge amount of programming jobs”?
dr_dshiv 4y ago
Except Watson and Alpha weren’t useful out of the box to everyone. They weren’t the fastest growing app of all time and couldn’t even remotely play that way. ChatGPT isn’t hype because it is so useful — it’s already on the “Plateau of Productivity”. But it looks like an exponentially steep climb from here. indefinitely
- photonbeam 4y ago
  They said the same thing about transistor scaling
  - pixl97 4y ago
    Being that you and I are talking to each other by forming thoughts in meat that us causing other meat to move around tells me that digital thought still has a lot of scaling room ahead of it. Maybe superintelligence isn't possible for some reason, but the fact we exist should tell you that general intelligence is not magic.
    - swexbe 4y ago
      Your brain is analog. Trying to emulate this with a digital computer is bound to come with some computational cost.
      - Filligree 4y ago
        Good thing we aren’t trying, then. GPT works in a completely different fashion.
      - pixl97 4y ago
        The world created by human thought has given us such excess means of power production that we have literal gigawatts of electricity we can use in a trade off where it doesn't take us 4 billion years to make efficient circuits.

That's what they said about Watson and Wolfram Alpha. You only hear this nonsense on HN.

by mlycv 4y ago

That's what they said about Watson and Wolfram Alpha. You only hear this nonsense on HN.

Demonstrably untrue, it’s taken up semi-residence in everything from oped pages to boardrooms since the New Year. Welcome to the mid singularity, my friend.

dr_dshiv 4y ago
You can’t say “singularity” on HN without a ton of downvotes. It’s not because people disagree (or they’d say so), but because they literally shit their pants when they think about it. Hard to blame them.
- vbezhenar 4y ago
  I'm saving my money, so I can live enough off savings to learn a new profession. I'm not sure if that will happen, but I consider this option as likely enough to affect my life decisions. The world is changing at alarming rate. Though I think that it's more likely that I'll become shaman who talks to the spirits. Managers hate computers and they'd prefer to pay someone to deal with them.
- suction 4y ago
  [dead]
- Ygg2 4y ago
  Who's not disagreeing? Singularity feels like "man facing existential dread confuses saturation curve for exponential".
  - dr_dshiv 4y ago
    When I say singularity, I mean “changes the nature of human life irreversibly and to a greater degree than any prior technology through a rapid progression of self-reinforcing growth.” That rapid progression can be modeled with an exponential growth curve, like Moore’s law, even though nothing material can have a sustained exponential growth. Regardless of how the curve is modeled, the steepness is such that it serves as a step function in evolution. With that clarified, there is first the question of “is the technological progression going to level off soon?” And I think the answer is no. The second question is, “how are we going to deal?” And the answer to that question can only be addressed once we answer the question: “what kind of world do we want to live in?”
    - brookst 4y ago
      I think you just declared radio, television, the internet, the macaroon, and mobile phones to be singularities. People generally use the term to mean the point at which progress is automatic, unbounded, and instant. E.g. AIs that can produce smarter AIs themselves, in short order.
      - SuoDuanDao 4y ago
        'step change' sounds less exciting than 'singularity' but in terms of the original definition there's very little distinction.
        brookst 4y ago
        Hmm. I see the singularity as a recursive step change; the last step where the average slope becomes vertical. I’m not a singularity believer (singularitist?); from the perspective of 1000 years ago we’re already at the point of infinite progress in zero time. I think individuals, the culture, and the species adapt to accelerating progress, and I intuit, maybe wrongly, that Gödel‘s theorem means that technology will never become runaway and recursive. But I think that’s what people mean, more than just a step/paradigm change like the internet.

theK 4y ago

I think everywhere except HN the expectations on Watson’s and Wolfram’s second seasons where even more inflated

travisjungroth 4y ago

Who? Crying wolf makes sense to discredit an individual but not a whole argument. Almost everything is being predicted by someone at any given time. If your criteria for predictions is “no one can have made a similar prediction and been wrong in the past”, then you’ll disbelieve all predictions. And seriously, how many people were actually saying “WolframAlpha will destroy a huge amount of programming jobs”?

dr_dshiv 4y ago

Except Watson and Alpha weren’t useful out of the box to everyone. They weren’t the fastest growing app of all time and couldn’t even remotely play that way. ChatGPT isn’t hype because it is so useful — it’s already on the “Plateau of Productivity”. But it looks like an exponentially steep climb from here. indefinitely

photonbeam 4y ago
They said the same thing about transistor scaling
- pixl97 4y ago
  Being that you and I are talking to each other by forming thoughts in meat that us causing other meat to move around tells me that digital thought still has a lot of scaling room ahead of it. Maybe superintelligence isn't possible for some reason, but the fact we exist should tell you that general intelligence is not magic.
  - swexbe 4y ago
    Your brain is analog. Trying to emulate this with a digital computer is bound to come with some computational cost.
    - Filligree 4y ago
      Good thing we aren’t trying, then. GPT works in a completely different fashion.
    - pixl97 4y ago
      The world created by human thought has given us such excess means of power production that we have literal gigawatts of electricity we can use in a trade off where it doesn't take us 4 billion years to make efficient circuits.