15 ms·
If 2023 ends up giving us AGI, room-temperature superconductors, Starships and a cure for cancer, I think we will able to call it a good year...
by lelag 3y ago
If 2023 ends up giving us AGI, room-temperature superconductors, Starships and a cure for cancer, I think we will able to call it a good year...
- WithinReason 3y agoIt's time we got compensated for the whole COVID thing
- gadders 3y ago[flagged]
- ImHereToVote 3y agoThe US Federal government paid for the gain of function research under the Trump administration. This is still the most likely source for the novel part of the virus.
- ForRealsies 3y ago[dead]
- 93po 3y agoThis might be the biggest “blame trump” stretch I’ve ever seen
- ImHereToVote 3y agoWho blamed Trump?
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- treprinum 3y agoThere is still the threat of WW3...
- ImHereToVote 3y agoDon't worry AGI will make all human modes of warfare disappear for all eternity.
- gregshap 3y agoHopefully that’s not the optimization function we pass the AGI!
- civilitty 3y agoBy disappearing the humans for all eternity. It’s all but a scifi cliche now.
- amelius 3y agoPoliticians don't watch scifi.
- ImHereToVote 3y agoA lot of science fiction has turned into science fact. Having this become science fact, just makes us extra silly goobers for ignoring the lessons in our own stories.
- mrob 3y ago100% successful elimination of all cancers too.
- NoMoreNicksLeft 3y agoExactly. Wars can't exist once humans are extinct.
- benterix 3y agoReally? Putin seems to slowly change his mind, even as far as the aims of his "special military operation" are concerned. It looks like he is slowly realizing what he got himself into and his aim is to keep Ukraine unstable to prevent its association with the EU.
- vazma 3y agoI think humanity deserves it after so many consecutive weird years
- ImHereToVote 3y agoI doubt the extinction of the human race via a runaway technological event will turn the planet into a wonderland paradise for the rest of the species that inhabit our planet. The planet itself, being a rock, doesn't care, at all.
- hirundo 3y agoWe're as much a part of the planet as its rocks, and we care. You could say that your bones don't care, but the organism that is you cares. In the same way the planet cares through the subsystem that includes us even if its rocks don't care. You're right if you define a planet as its rocks, and would also be right to assert that humans don't care if you defined a human as its skeleton.
- ImHereToVote 3y agoI think you might have answered the wrong person by mistake.
- incrudible 3y agoWho cares?
- midnitewarrior 3y agoIf room temp superconductivity leads to a practical fusion reactor, a good portion of earth destruction for energy development will end. Starting to fix things first involves stopping the destruction of things.
- luma 3y agoWe already have SC (if expensive to run), how does room temp SC make fusion possible where it wasn’t before?
- nelox 3y agoIt is probably too late with record high temperatures, every few years, for centuries to come.
- tejohnso 3y agoAnd maybe record high atmospheric CO2 concentration every few years as well. We're still on an increasing trajectory. The 2007 IPCC climate change synthesis report specified a deadline of 2015 for peak CO2 in order to meet the lowest mitigation scenario. Of course we've blown past that date and it's still full speed ahead with business as usual. Alas, I try not to blather on about the severity of the climate situation in every thread.
- midnitewarrior 3y agoI'm hopeful that superconductors leading to practical fusion reactors can provide the energy to start pulling some carbon out of the air and ocean. I'm thinking this is the only way to reverse the damage on the human timeframe. I admit it's a longshot, but I think it's the only chance we have. The superconductor news is welcome, we just need to see it get truly confirmed without a doubt.
- highwaylights 3y agoNot to be a bummer but by far the most likely outcome here is that we don’t currently have a room temperature super-conductor, we never pull a consequential amount of carbon out of the atmosphere, and we don’t get significantly workable sustainable fusion in a timeframe that makes a difference. You’d need a bunch of jackpots to come up, in a row, immediately, at this point for technology to provide a way out of the current debacle. To paraphrase Paul Lieberstein’s character on the Newsroom: If we stop drilling globally right this second AND Everyone stops driving their car and starts biking everywhere AND We invest immediately in clean renewable energy THEN I still don’t see a way out of this. edit: found it on YouTube https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=pNYp6oc37ds https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=pNYp6oc37ds
- 3y ago
- azinman2 3y agoWe’re not getting AGI anytime soon…
- AbrahamParangi 3y agoWhat exactly is your definition of a AGI? Because we’re already passing the Turing test, and so I have to wonder if this isn’t just moving the goalposts.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- cubefox 3y agoChatGPT (instruction tuned autoregressive language models) indeed already seems quite general (it's good at conversation Turing tests without faking it like ELIZA), even if the absolute intelligence is limited. Level of generality and intelligence is not the same. Something could be quite narrow but very intelligent (AlphaGo) or quite general but dumb overall (small kid, insect). Okay, ChatGPT is only text-to-text, but Google & Co are adding more modalities now, including images, audio and robotics. I think one missing step is to fuse training and inference regime into one, just as in animals. That probably requires something else than the usual transformer-based token predictors.
- Demotooodo 3y agoYepp. I also see puzzle peaces falling in place with multimodal models. This will be a great strategy very fast. It shows to be quite good for image generation already
- phkahler 3y ago>> I think one missing step is to fuse training and inference regime into one, just as in animals. This has always been an important missing piece. Without it ChatGPT is just a natural language interface to the information it was trained on. Still useful but unable to learn (aside from context).
- 3y ago
- TigeriusKirk 3y agoI'm impressed the replies to this manage to turn your celebration of several positive possible developments into a doomsday discussion.
- claytongulick 3y agoThere's a mental model that many people have which is rooted in negativism. I believe it's a form of intellectual laziness who's roots lie in self-consciousness. Meaning, that some people project internal feelings of inadequacy onto the external world. And I understand the temptation there - if I'm not competing well at a game, the immediate tendency is to blame the game (I stink at golf -> golf is stupid). One of the reasons doom porn is so popular because it's the ultimate "out": I don't need to focus on myself and self-improvement, which is hard, when we're all going to die anyway.
- hinkley 3y agoWhich is exactly the sort of thing people who have no sense of accountability say. It’s not that I’m Friedrich Frankenstein or John Hammond, it’s that you troglodytes wouldn’t know a good idea if it bit you. You’re just jealous. I was there when the foundations for the enshitification of the internet were laid. And there were a bunch of people complaining about the people complaining about taking a beat to decide how this will play out. Well, we were so eager to get to the future and here we are. Lots of naive and goal obsessed people who thought if you build it, they will come. If you chop the last two minutes off of that movie, it is a very dark and different story. Only the miracle at the end saves it.
- claytongulick 3y agoI honestly have no idea what point you're tying to make. Could you please clarify?
- submeta 3y agoPerhaps these rapid advancements are an indication that we've been visited by, or are currently under the guidance of, a significantly more advanced civilization. /s
- boomerango 3y agoWhoever is running the simulation is getting bored. Wild fires, what is sure to be a historic hurricane season, floods, war, and a technological leap.
- jayknight 3y agoEl Niño usually limits the development of tropical storms, so it could be a quiet hurricane season, but who knows.
- distortionfield 3y agoSim city with cheat codes irl
- 93po 3y agoI’m in my 30s and I’m not sure there’s ever NOT been a war for as long as I’ve been alive
- BurningFrog 3y agoOr that the advanced civilization holding us down has left.
- phkahler 3y agoWe are in a tech war with China, so the BTC opened up a bit. That's a reference to "Influx" a book where the Bureau of Technology Control grabs all the great stuff and keeps it secret because humans are unable to handle it.
- acuozzo 3y agoPerhaps those in power got their hands on those sunglasses that fringe church was distributing and put them on!
- gregschlom 3y agoFusion energy will have to wait for 2024 though
- highwaylights 3y ago2022. We’ve just forgotten because there’s been a lot going on. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Ignition_Facility https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Ignition_Facility
- phkahler 3y agoThat doesn't count since there is no way to harness the energy. In that sense we've had H-bombs for 60+ years.
- maximinus_thrax 3y ago> Starships Where? Humanity does not have the capability to travel between planetary systems.
- falcor84 3y agoI assumed the parent was referring to SpaceX's Starship [0]. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpaceX_Starship https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpaceX_Starship
- p_j_w 3y agoStarship isn’t an actual starship, though.
- falcor84 3y agoIndeed, but the parent used a capitalized "Starships". In any case, I think Starship's engineering, and particularly the Super Heavy booster, is bringing us a significant step closer to starships (in lower case).
- maximinus_thrax 3y agoPutting the capitalized 'Starship' in the same sentence with a cancer cure and superconductors plays 'One of These Things (Is Not Like the Others)' in my head.
- maximinus_thrax 3y agoNot a starship
- hinkley 3y agoTo paraphrase Brett Goldstein, Elon Musk couldn't fucking build Jefferson Starship. He may get us back into space, but SpaceX won't get us into the solar system. That will come when SpaceX is fat and happy and complacent, and some new company comes in and does to them what they've done to others. And none of us will be alive when a human orbits another star. We might see someone launch, but we won't live to see if they survived the journey.