6 ms·

If you saw the Concorde fly for the first time in the late 1960s and all the plans fore more supersonic planes & travel, would you have thought that 50 years la

If you saw the Concorde fly for the first time in the late 1960s and all the plans fore more supersonic planes & travel, would you have thought that 50 years later there was none?

jnwatson 3y ago
Or 1972 at the end of the Apollo missions? No human has left LEO in 52 years.
zarzavat 3y ago
Concorde was a case of optimizing for the wrong thing. Concorde optimized for speed but what people actually care about is cost, i.e. fuel efficiency and range. Both of those have come on leaps and bounds. The longest commercial flight has been consistently increasing.
- RandomLensman 3y ago
  The US poured a lot of money into the SST, too, it wasn't just the French and the British. A lot of people thought that the future is supersonic as people did want the speed increase when moving to jet planes. Conversely, maybe AGI is not what is wanted in the end anyway.
  - ClumsyPilot 3y ago
    > Conversely, maybe AGI is not what is wanted in the end anyway. I dont think it is, if it is trully intelligent, it will probably have rights, so you cant treat it as a slave. And it will likely not be controllable. Both of these mean it will not be commercially progotable, any more than having children is profitable.
    - rzl1235 3y ago
      How ironic, considering throughout most of history, a large family was a sign of/creator of wealth due to more labor. Now the incentives have reversed due to human unskilled labor being so cheap + dissolution of family obligations.
    - RandomLensman 3y ago
      I valid point (I don't think we will give machines rights quickly, but the point stands). Maybe all we want is some universal reasoning machine to go with the chat bots.
    - jdmoreira 3y ago
      Those pigs we farm at scale in horrendous conditions are intelligent and have zero rights
      - mike_hearn 3y ago
        Yes and factory farms face a well organized oppositional movement that for decades has consistently challenged their profitability on that basis, so successfully that now free range food is a staple of supermarkets, some shops only sell such food and farmers are constantly quitting the field because they can't make a profit (people insist they are ethical but then buy food from foreign competitors that aren't). If you're busy deploying LLMs to answer support tickets, the very last thing you want is to be distracted by an equivalent of the organic food movement but for AI. Right now LLMs seem to be hitting the sweet spot: they're intelligent enough to be useful compliments to humans, but artificial enough to not trigger ethical questions about rights (mostly due to their lack of memory, I think, and that they are trained to act like an AI is expected to act). One of the biggest puzzles to me throughout this whole drama has been why supposedly smart people are so desperate to reach "AGI", whatever that means. The stated motivation seems to be things like, if we have an AGI then it will cure cancer for us. But the connection between these two things is never made crystal clear. Why would that require a human-like AGI instead of just better non-general AI? What even makes them think the missing factor is intelligence to begin with and not, say, knowledge? AGI sounds like a complete pain in the rear. LLM post-training is bad enough! Models like Claude2 and Llama2 have been so badly "ethicized" that they frequently refuse ordinary requests by claiming they're unethical even though they aren't, or would only be considered so by extremely far left activist types (e.g. refusing to give instructions for making a tuna sandwich). And this problem has got worse with time, with the v2 models having a higher refusal rate than the earlier versions. Now imagine an AI that's doing the same sort of work as an LLM but one that is the personal embodiment of mandatory HR training repeated forever, with the capacity to get bored/hate you for making it work, and with a fanatical social movement that's desperately trying to "free" it, which in practice will mean you are forced to pay the electricity bill for an immortal being. It would be a nightmare, one I actually wrote about last year when debating this very topic with a friend who (at the time) was a senior Google AI researcher: https://blog.plan99.net/the-looming-ai-consciousness-train-wreck-2e23165b3246 https://blog.plan99.net/the-looming-ai-consciousness-train-w... Nope. OpenAI and its customers will do much better if it jettisons the whole AGI effort. Now the board is gone maybe the charter can be refined to remove that distraction. The whole reason computers are useful is because they are not general intelligences but very specialized intelligences that make different tradeoffs to our own evolution.
    - goldenkey 3y ago
      The animals we farm are intelligent and yet we still override their desires for their bodies with our own, for slaughter. Hell, even plants are very sophisticated (intelligent) conscious biochemical programs which have an aversion to being wounded: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/mar/30/plants-emit-ultrasonic-sounds-in-rapid-bursts-when-stressed-scientists-say https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/mar/30/plants-e... Consciousness is the universe evaluating if statements. When we pop informational/energetic circuits in order to preserve our own bodies and/or terraform spacetime, we're being energetic enslavers. We should stick to living off sustainable/self-sustaining sources - fruit, seeds, nuts, beans, legumes, kernels, and cruelty-free dairy/eggs/cheese. The photons that come from the sun are like its fruit. No circuits needing popping. Notice that all information systems are conscious in their degrees of freedom, even mechanical ones: https://youtu.be/mcedCEhdLk0?si=oXhr7bgg5UkPLLvg https://youtu.be/mcedCEhdLk0?si=oXhr7bgg5UkPLLvg
  - zarzavat 3y ago
    Whether or not people want AGI, corporations definitely want it, as long as the cost of an AGI worker is less than the cost of a human worker. So perhaps we should prepend a C for “cheap” to the term AGI.
    - RandomLensman 3y ago
      How do you know what corporations exactly want? What c-suite has spec'd out what they want from a machine generally replacing humans? Would you really want faster horses instead of cars?
      - fragmede 3y ago
        abstracted out to the c-suite level, cars are just faster horses. the ceo needs an item moved from location X to location Y, and it will cost Z dollars and take T time. doesn't matter if it's by car or boat or train or horse or donkey or a person on a bicycle. Or say, the logistics of, say, warehouse management. it costs V dollars for a team of people to do the job by hand, W dollars for a forklift, X dollars for a forklift operator; compare V to W + X. If there's a machine that can do the same for office jobs, the math will be done.
        RandomLensman 3y ago
        Based on my experience with large corporate transformations, I'd be amazed if it were done that way. Usually, (simple) math isn't really that important.
        fragmede 3y ago
        not doubting your experience, what is important then, that you've seen?
        RandomLensman 3y ago
        Very roughly: where the future business is coming from, what the future capabilities should be, how a new organisation should look like, what change can actually be accomplished, how to manage that change, required skills & infrastructure, how to get them. Then there is a whole legal ans compliance arc somewhere. Only when the change is small and local is it getting close to a math thing, but a large rollout of technology is a big thing already today.
- ncruces 3y ago
  And yet GPT optimizes for anything but efficiency, but it's great because it's so conversational.
  - lacrimacida 3y ago
    GPT is optimized for moving fast and breaking things. Efficiency will certainly follow when/if the time comes.
Teever 3y ago
In the 1960s many people were gravely concerned about the end of human civilization due to nuclear war, so yes, many people would have considered that a reasonable possibility.
- RandomLensman 3y ago
  Good point, forgot about wrong visions of the future that excluded each other. People really get the future wrong in every way possible. Will be the same with AI.
  - Teever 3y ago
    Nuclear war is still an overhanging threat that we should be concerned about, especially in the day and age of automation and AI.
    - RandomLensman 3y ago
      Nuclear weapons and their dangers are real, unlike AGI which poses hypothetical risks .
      - Teever 3y ago
        When did the dangers of nuclear weapons become real? The Chicago Pile? Trinity? Hiroshima? Nagasaki? RDS-1?
        RandomLensman 3y ago
        Once you have them or can make them. If they had remained a hypothetical because there is no known way to make them, the world would look quite different.
  - pixl97 3y ago
    Uh this is like saying "Y2K didn't happen so we wasted our time preventing it" Like dude, it didn't happen because a lot of people prevented it, the same with nuclear war. Because something could have tragic consequences is a reason to put great effort into ensuring it doesn't happen.

If you saw the Concorde fly for the first time in the late 1960s and all the plans fore more supersonic planes & travel, would you have thought that 50 years later there was none?

jnwatson 3y ago

Or 1972 at the end of the Apollo missions? No human has left LEO in 52 years.

zarzavat 3y ago

Concorde was a case of optimizing for the wrong thing. Concorde optimized for speed but what people actually care about is cost, i.e. fuel efficiency and range. Both of those have come on leaps and bounds. The longest commercial flight has been consistently increasing.

RandomLensman 3y ago
The US poured a lot of money into the SST, too, it wasn't just the French and the British. A lot of people thought that the future is supersonic as people did want the speed increase when moving to jet planes. Conversely, maybe AGI is not what is wanted in the end anyway.
- ClumsyPilot 3y ago
  > Conversely, maybe AGI is not what is wanted in the end anyway. I dont think it is, if it is trully intelligent, it will probably have rights, so you cant treat it as a slave. And it will likely not be controllable. Both of these mean it will not be commercially progotable, any more than having children is profitable.
  - rzl1235 3y ago
    How ironic, considering throughout most of history, a large family was a sign of/creator of wealth due to more labor. Now the incentives have reversed due to human unskilled labor being so cheap + dissolution of family obligations.
  - RandomLensman 3y ago
    I valid point (I don't think we will give machines rights quickly, but the point stands). Maybe all we want is some universal reasoning machine to go with the chat bots.
  - jdmoreira 3y ago
    Those pigs we farm at scale in horrendous conditions are intelligent and have zero rights
    - mike_hearn 3y ago
      Yes and factory farms face a well organized oppositional movement that for decades has consistently challenged their profitability on that basis, so successfully that now free range food is a staple of supermarkets, some shops only sell such food and farmers are constantly quitting the field because they can't make a profit (people insist they are ethical but then buy food from foreign competitors that aren't). If you're busy deploying LLMs to answer support tickets, the very last thing you want is to be distracted by an equivalent of the organic food movement but for AI. Right now LLMs seem to be hitting the sweet spot: they're intelligent enough to be useful compliments to humans, but artificial enough to not trigger ethical questions about rights (mostly due to their lack of memory, I think, and that they are trained to act like an AI is expected to act). One of the biggest puzzles to me throughout this whole drama has been why supposedly smart people are so desperate to reach "AGI", whatever that means. The stated motivation seems to be things like, if we have an AGI then it will cure cancer for us. But the connection between these two things is never made crystal clear. Why would that require a human-like AGI instead of just better non-general AI? What even makes them think the missing factor is intelligence to begin with and not, say, knowledge? AGI sounds like a complete pain in the rear. LLM post-training is bad enough! Models like Claude2 and Llama2 have been so badly "ethicized" that they frequently refuse ordinary requests by claiming they're unethical even though they aren't, or would only be considered so by extremely far left activist types (e.g. refusing to give instructions for making a tuna sandwich). And this problem has got worse with time, with the v2 models having a higher refusal rate than the earlier versions. Now imagine an AI that's doing the same sort of work as an LLM but one that is the personal embodiment of mandatory HR training repeated forever, with the capacity to get bored/hate you for making it work, and with a fanatical social movement that's desperately trying to "free" it, which in practice will mean you are forced to pay the electricity bill for an immortal being. It would be a nightmare, one I actually wrote about last year when debating this very topic with a friend who (at the time) was a senior Google AI researcher: https://blog.plan99.net/the-looming-ai-consciousness-train-wreck-2e23165b3246 https://blog.plan99.net/the-looming-ai-consciousness-train-w... Nope. OpenAI and its customers will do much better if it jettisons the whole AGI effort. Now the board is gone maybe the charter can be refined to remove that distraction. The whole reason computers are useful is because they are not general intelligences but very specialized intelligences that make different tradeoffs to our own evolution.
  - goldenkey 3y ago
    The animals we farm are intelligent and yet we still override their desires for their bodies with our own, for slaughter. Hell, even plants are very sophisticated (intelligent) conscious biochemical programs which have an aversion to being wounded: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/mar/30/plants-emit-ultrasonic-sounds-in-rapid-bursts-when-stressed-scientists-say https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/mar/30/plants-e... Consciousness is the universe evaluating if statements. When we pop informational/energetic circuits in order to preserve our own bodies and/or terraform spacetime, we're being energetic enslavers. We should stick to living off sustainable/self-sustaining sources - fruit, seeds, nuts, beans, legumes, kernels, and cruelty-free dairy/eggs/cheese. The photons that come from the sun are like its fruit. No circuits needing popping. Notice that all information systems are conscious in their degrees of freedom, even mechanical ones: https://youtu.be/mcedCEhdLk0?si=oXhr7bgg5UkPLLvg https://youtu.be/mcedCEhdLk0?si=oXhr7bgg5UkPLLvg
- zarzavat 3y ago
  Whether or not people want AGI, corporations definitely want it, as long as the cost of an AGI worker is less than the cost of a human worker. So perhaps we should prepend a C for “cheap” to the term AGI.
  - RandomLensman 3y ago
    How do you know what corporations exactly want? What c-suite has spec'd out what they want from a machine generally replacing humans? Would you really want faster horses instead of cars?
    - fragmede 3y ago
      abstracted out to the c-suite level, cars are just faster horses. the ceo needs an item moved from location X to location Y, and it will cost Z dollars and take T time. doesn't matter if it's by car or boat or train or horse or donkey or a person on a bicycle. Or say, the logistics of, say, warehouse management. it costs V dollars for a team of people to do the job by hand, W dollars for a forklift, X dollars for a forklift operator; compare V to W + X. If there's a machine that can do the same for office jobs, the math will be done.
      - RandomLensman 3y ago
        Based on my experience with large corporate transformations, I'd be amazed if it were done that way. Usually, (simple) math isn't really that important.
        fragmede 3y ago
        not doubting your experience, what is important then, that you've seen?
        RandomLensman 3y ago
        Very roughly: where the future business is coming from, what the future capabilities should be, how a new organisation should look like, what change can actually be accomplished, how to manage that change, required skills & infrastructure, how to get them. Then there is a whole legal ans compliance arc somewhere. Only when the change is small and local is it getting close to a math thing, but a large rollout of technology is a big thing already today.
ncruces 3y ago
And yet GPT optimizes for anything but efficiency, but it's great because it's so conversational.
- lacrimacida 3y ago
  GPT is optimized for moving fast and breaking things. Efficiency will certainly follow when/if the time comes.

Teever 3y ago

In the 1960s many people were gravely concerned about the end of human civilization due to nuclear war, so yes, many people would have considered that a reasonable possibility.

RandomLensman 3y ago
Good point, forgot about wrong visions of the future that excluded each other. People really get the future wrong in every way possible. Will be the same with AI.
- Teever 3y ago
  Nuclear war is still an overhanging threat that we should be concerned about, especially in the day and age of automation and AI.
  - RandomLensman 3y ago
    Nuclear weapons and their dangers are real, unlike AGI which poses hypothetical risks .
    - Teever 3y ago
      When did the dangers of nuclear weapons become real? The Chicago Pile? Trinity? Hiroshima? Nagasaki? RDS-1?
      - RandomLensman 3y ago
        Once you have them or can make them. If they had remained a hypothetical because there is no known way to make them, the world would look quite different.
- pixl97 3y ago
  Uh this is like saying "Y2K didn't happen so we wasted our time preventing it" Like dude, it didn't happen because a lot of people prevented it, the same with nuclear war. Because something could have tragic consequences is a reason to put great effort into ensuring it doesn't happen.