9 ms·

My techno-optimism

101 points by yarapavan 3y ago

easterncalculus 3y ago
"Over the last ten years, there has been a quiet shift from downloadable applications to in-browser applications. This has been largely enabled by WebAssembly (WASM)." What? WASM came out in 2017. The shift is definitely from faster client machines and more browser APIs (that often test the sandboxing assumptions he's talking about)
- marginalia_nu 3y ago
  Yeah, if anything the impetus has been away from in-browser VMs (like Java applets and Flash).
  - fredgrott 3y ago
    Those VMs are where exactly? Been gone from browsers for over a decade. Browser VMs are v8 and the dart one flutter uses in the web browser implementation. And I almost forgot React native has their own VM too,
    - marginalia_nu 3y ago
      > Those VMs are where exactly Well that's my point.
- Cthulhu_ 3y ago
  It seems misinformed; I'd argue it's more down to nodejs, electron, and whatever allows you to wrap a webapp in a mobile app these days; runtimes that move web apps outside of the browser, the "write once, run anywhere" that was once pushed by Java's marketing department.
m3kw9 3y ago
It seems like Vitalik is wishing for future humans to get more credits for making progress than AI which is also created by humans. Who’s giving credit? This isn’t what human wants i would argue, but to just be happy. All the other stuff is a means to that end. To get credit or say in the progress is filled with ego. AI accelerates all that
cableshaft 3y ago
Doesn't matter how good the tech gets, you'll eventually run out of resources to build them. Between topsoil depletion, fresh water scarcity, usable sand and precious metal scarcity, and ocean acidification leading to an eventual possible extinction of all edible seafood, it's looking like we aren't going to be able to just keep building new tech to keep supporting our current population, especially at the rampant level of consumption companies have been training them on (nevermind a perpetually increasing population). And likely we're going to start running out of these things (and others) in certain locations, and eventually everywhere, if we don't find the will to completely reverse course (and it's clear there's been no real will to do so by those in charge). Conversion to electric cars and solar panels just improves the CO2 problem, it doesn't address the rest. I like Vitalik and own Ethereum and I love technology, but I still don't see anything that's likely to resolve the fundamental problem that we're just using resources way, way faster than they can be replaced on this finite planet, and eventually it's going to catch up to us, short of some form of major human cataclysm (like a super pandemic or something) that happens before resources start running out.
- whywhywhywhy 3y ago
  May as well just pack up the human race and give up right now if thats the attitude. Earth wont be around forever, and currently our only ticket off is increasing our technology and power consumption.
- ctoth 3y ago
  Sounds like an even better reason to start working on space travel! The Universe is really, really, really, really, really, really, and even more really than you can probably count big! I guess this is what the bible meant when it said: "the meek will inherit the earth"
- poszlem 3y ago
  This all falls apart as soon as you look into the night sky and see that, no, we are actually not running out of resources any time soon.
  - 3y ago
morph123 3y ago
This «merge with the ai» thing never makes any sense. What possible improvement would a hunan provide a super intelligent AI in some merge operation?
- nonethewiser 3y ago
  Maybe thats what makes it AGI. Currently there is no AGI. There are many, many, many things people can do that AI cant. At an abstract level it makes sense that adding a little human to AI could be what makes AGI.
- verisimi 3y ago
  Yes, computers are already so perfect. Or is it that your emotions and thoughts are where all the value is, and a machine executing its function is no different to a hammer?
- machiaweliczny 3y ago
  Culture and probably successful fitness function for some time before it can simulate universes.
- slibhb 3y ago
  If a "super intelligent AI" is something in the vicinity of an LLM, which does nothing but respond to prompts, then humans provides a necessary element. Without a prompt, it'll just sit there doing nothing forever.
- _jal 3y ago
  It is an emotional response to the fear of being "left behind". And for some folks, there are pseudo-religious elements. There's been a long line of thought (search Extropians) obsessed with a sort of godhead-merger, or becoming godlike, and related immortality dreams. And just from a symbology perspective, there are a lot of religious overtones. The similarities between Vinge's singularity and biblical rapture are hard to miss, for instance. And just listen to some of the "AI" cheerleaders right now...
  - the_only_law 3y ago
mattigames 3y ago
He accounted for life expectancy as a positive but didn't account for excess natality as a negative, by all means (except some emotional ones) 8 billion is a ridiculous amount of humans and direct cause of speeding up climate change among other damages to our own quality of life.
- vidarh 3y ago
  Fertility rates are below replacement everywhere but sub-Saharan Africa, and dropping there too. The population growth curve is flattening out.
  - mattigames 3y ago
    Replacement levels is still too high, we are way past any reasonable number.
    - RankingMember 3y ago
      I feel like I'm taking crazy pills when people talk of any slowdown in human population growth in fearful terms.
      - thefaux 3y ago
        The problem is that the people with the strongest and least flexible religious views are precisely those who deny that they are religious.
    - Matticus_Rex 3y ago
      No, we're not.
      - mattigames 3y ago
        Yes we are, and it's a bit concerning how much people in this forum like overpopulation, our species literally already outnumbers rats.
nonethewiser 3y ago
Techno optimism, and optimism in general, is alive and well in America. I'm always struck by how optimistic Americans are compared to Europeans. Chinese are also very optimistic. I think it largely comes down to the trajectory of the economy.
- boringg 3y ago
  True.
- cactusplant7374 3y ago
  https://www.lemonde.fr/en/opinion/article/2023/09/04/the-gdp-gap-between-europe-and-the-united-states-is-now-80_6123491_23.html https://www.lemonde.fr/en/opinion/article/2023/09/04/the-gdp... > The GDP gap between Europe and the United States is now 80% Lots to worry about in Europe. Since dang is rate limiting me, I'm going to add my response to this comment: Cutting edge treatments for cancer usually arrive in the US first. Also, I believe the US had access to mRNA vaccines for Covid before Europe. Also, the US has more access to mental health treatments. Is ketamine for TRD available anywhere in the EU? If so, it’s a minority. A lot of drugs used in the US for ADHD and depression aren’t available in Europe.
  - hotpotamus 3y ago
    Personally, I wouldn't worry about living a longer and less depressed life.
  - tim333 3y ago
    Although at purchasing power parity things are much closer.
- kredd 3y ago
  I keep hearing this, but I don’t really understand what it means when you put it on the ground. Like people think tech will solve their problems or people actually use tech to improve their QOL? If it’s the former, then I guess. If it’s the latter, in the past 10 years, it’s hard for me to imagine what tech made improvements to people’s lives in NA, meanwhile Europe and Asia has been chugging along. From simpler things like never needing cash when you’re in the country (I know, HN hates it), to building massive infrastructure in the cities which requires new tech. Disclosure: I live in Canada, so can be completely wrong. I have family both in US and Europe, so I visit both very often. You can see gradual change in both, but it’s different.
willmadden 3y ago
The assumption that human consciousness can be uploaded to a suitably fast machine is a big leap. Daniel Wegner's the illusion of conscious will and other physical determinism is theoretical and full of holes. Sheldrake is a good antidote to this Wegneresque mind-prison that seems to trap people like Andreessen and Buterin. I'm not advocating for luddites, and we should continue to learn about consciousness and the brain, but be open to the possibilities that there are forces at work that we do not currently perceive or understand. AI should replace human governance, but the biggest danger with this transition is that those in power today have a wildly different vision for how the future should look. Their vision is clearly techno-communism and digital serfdom. I'm not sure how we steer around this.
- keiferski 3y ago
  Yes, these guys don't seem to understand what positivism is and why it isn't a perfect way of thinking about the world, especially when it comes to "transferring" consciousness to a piece of software.
- otabdeveloper4 3y ago
  Paramecium caudatum is smarter than any LLM, and it has precisely zero neurons. Yes, our scientific models of intelligence and information processing are severely limited.
injeolmi_love 3y ago
The first thing that comes to my mind for d/acc is disintegration acceleration [1]. Anyway the big problem that’s never addressed is whether humans have political control over the process. There’s a strong reason to think humans don’t; because the neoliberal political system is dominant, and the emerging alternatives appear to be even more technocapitalist. Meanwhile the attempts from both the right (fascism) and the left (communism) to reign in techno capitalism failed. [1] https://on.soundcloud.com/uxRPR https://on.soundcloud.com/uxRPR
keiferski 3y ago
I like Vitalik but like a lot of tech leaders, his opinions on things outside of his expertise are not particularly insightful. The idea of mind uploading, for example, is taken as a serious possibility here, when in reality it's not much more than a sci-fi trope. The 21st century may well be the pivotal century for humanity... Every generation probably thinks this. And honestly, if I had to pick a major inflection point in recent history, it would be World War 2. The current world would be a lot different had the Germans or Japanese won. It seems to me that the current trajectory of world history is still just one extending from the 1950s.
- confd 3y ago
  This is a solid take. The motifs that he evokes in this essay are far too complex for me to digest in confidence from a "Techno-optimist" "tech leader" who is still so relatively young. I'd be more interested in reading this perspective (and its counterperspectives) from someone else.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- tim333 3y ago
  He says mind uploading may happen in the future. Do you have any confidence that it won't happen in the next few centuries?
  - keiferski 3y ago
    The issue is that there is no “mind uploading.” The human mind is dependent on the human body and any so-called uploads are really just clever copies, elaborate imitations. This is a problem with positivism, not with a particular technology. I’m sure these copies will happen in the future, but I don’t think this concept of identity will withstand real scrutiny. What’s more likely in my opinion is a reapplied focus on the body / extended cognition and a discarding of the mind-body dualism model that enables thought experiments like mind uploading to be conceivable. Or, as Vitalik mentioned, more of an enhanced human model that builds upon the body instead of discarding it.
ablyveiled 3y ago
While I can appreciate reasoning about AGI as a purely abstract thing (I loved Nick Bostrom's book, Superintelligence), it seems out-of-touch to believe it's at all likely to happen. Do these people even use GPT-4? Do they connect the dots of its capital to the dots of its performance, and see how we're already hitting a huge wall? All while losing MSFT cash and routinely failing to do even basic tasks? I can't help but feel like I'm being marketed to. I've grown to completely distrust anything in this vein, since the reality of the system I see before me is so drastically inferior to how people appear to be reasoning about it. It's not like how a Model-T car differs from a modern one in safety, power steering, and so on -- it feels like an error of categories.
- adam_smith123 3y ago
  > Do these people even use GPT-4? Do they connect the dots of its capital to the dots of its performance, and see how we're already hitting a huge wall? All while losing MSFT cash and routinely failing to do even basic tasks? Honestly it's a complete skill issue if you can't get it to "basic tasks". People are out there literally spinning up entire websites and apps in minutes using GPT. There is also no indication at all that we're "hitting a wall". I suppose next you're going to say its glorified auto-complete or a "stochastic parrot"? Like is this guy completely blind to progress? GPT4 is no better than GPT2? That GPT5 or 6 will have even better capabilities??
  - ablyveiled 3y ago
    And I say in turn, it's a skill issue if your "website" or "app" could be made by a GPT in a few minutes. Is what you're doing actually valuable, then? It consistently fails to solve my problems.
    - adam_smith123 3y ago
      Yeah because only complex websites and apps deliver any value lol. I think you're really just admitting to having very poor creativity. I use LLM's everyday in systems that replace manual business processes. They're delivering clear value in a Multi-Billion dollar company. So again, skill issue.
hamburga 3y ago
I'm a fan of Vitalik and his blog. He's the kind of next-level thinker who will accidentally re-discover or invent some key finding in economics on the pages of his blog.[1] I got to meet him and run a site that hosted some of his blog posts with Glen Weyl a few years ago. I was a frontend amateur, and the SEO for the site was totally crap, making it impossible to Google for the posts, but he was kind and forgiving with his feedback in person. My two cents on the post: First of all, in my mind, the Andreessen "Techno-Optimist Manifesto" is such self-serving half-baked neoreactionary junk, that the only appropriate response is just to ignore it altogether. It seems not even worth commenting on. Or at least, if you're going to comment on it, you should just summarily dismiss it, like "yeah, of course VCs are excited about accelerating techno-capitalism because it serves their material interests, and let's not take their philosophical self-justification seriously." Regarding the substance of the post: > If we want a future that is both superintelligent and "human", one where human beings are not just pets, but actually retain meaningful agency over the world, then it feels like something like this is the most natural option. This is on the one hand, totally common sense, and on the other hand, something that (I'd argue) is directly in conflict with the material interests of companies that create and use generative AI. They absolutely want you to outsource your thinking to the machines, to give up your agency. What will the organized forces of resistance to this look like? [1] https://conversationswithtyler.com/episodes/vitalik-buterin/ https://conversationswithtyler.com/episodes/vitalik-buterin/
- adam_smith123 3y ago
  To be fair, I think there's a significant difference between giving up agency to AI and hoping to become their pets like many e/acc's seem to do.
  - hamburga 3y ago
    I'm not so sure about that! I see only a difference in degree. It starts with trusting AI to write your emails, then organizing your calendar, then organizing your finances, then establishing financial goals, then making important life decisions. And then you're a pet. There will be companies actively trying to build this kind of trust. And they will succeed -- at least, they'll be able to deliver this kind of advice for almost no cost, and much of the advice will be considered helpful, much of the time. But who's going to be on the other side, arguing that listening to the AI advice is a net bad?
tech_ken 3y ago
Overall I like this take, and I feel like it aligns closely with my own beliefs about the future of technological progress. With that said, I feel like this and most discussions about technology are far too limited in what they consider to be "technological". To paraphrase Ursula Franklin: technology is systems, not just the artifacts that we typically consider "technology". As an example, consider "the car". There is the artifact of an automobile, for sure, but when we say "the technology of cars" we are referring to something which is a superset of the collection of physical automobiles: we are also tacitly including all of the human protocols which have been put in place to enable the automobile artifacts to "function properly" (move a human body from place A to place B safely and quickly). Road design and maintenance, drivers ed, traffic engineering, urban planning etc. are all components in the larger technological system that defines the capabilities of "the car". I'm not saying that it's wrong to refer to subsystems of this technology as "technologies" of their own, just that it's a more difficult taxonomical problem than many are willing to acknowledge. There are no artifacts functioning in a vacuum; all of our tools are embedded in and partially defined by the human systems around them. I say this because I think it changes what it means to be a "techno-optimist". To be optimistic about the capabilities of technology to produce beneficial outcomes is more than just being optimistic about the capabilities of the artifacts ("we will develop more effective vaccines and more efficient batteries"), but also being optimistic about human systems. I do think that Vitalik has this somewhat in mind in this post; his discussion of differential development, as well as the role of governance systems gets towards this. However I wish he was more explicit about it because "technological progress" takes on a radically different flavor from this perspective. To some extent it becomes tautological: progress in human techno-systems is progress in human society more generally. However it also lays out additional axes to consider development along. For example: moving towards his solarpunk utopia north star could conceivably occur with no or little change in the current capabilities of our tooling, and instead result from a radical reorganization of human society. Extrapolating further you might conclude that a true d/acc techno-optimist should spend less time developing cryptographic consensus mechanisms, and more time radicalizing the folks at your community garden to become self-sustaining and mutually supportive. This is extreme, and probably the best way forward is "both/and", but I think that it gets underplayed in any of these discussions about "technology", resulting in a somewhat limited scope of action items. When it comes to AGI I think this perspective is even more salient, because it unbundles the single "AGI" entity into a collection of subsystems and allows us to more effectively game out what the probable AGI futures are. Indeed, my own somewhat contrarian take is that AGIs already exist in the form of the human organizations (states, corporations, etc). These are decision-making entities composed of humans, but I think it's not unfair to consider them as a type of hive-mind entity which deserves status as "intelligent agent". The popular AGI anxiety, that we will create a novel type of agent which will "function" free of human systems entirely, seems unlikely to me: given how little we know about what a "mind" is, it seems like a stretch to assert that one could be engineered in silicon so easily. Rather I think the more probable outcome is Vitalik's AI-supercharged totalitarian state: instead of carving itself free of our systems I think it's likely that an old version of an AGI (the state or corporate apparatus) upgrades itself using the new computing paradigms available to it. This has happened many times before: the invention of statistics and the big data revolution(s) show us what happens when computing and decision making infrastructure embeds itself in the governing technology. Looking back to these previous "AGI apocalypses" we can more effectively extrapolate and plan for the future. Rather than being an entirely new problem space (Vitalik compares it to the origin of life; to me this is an enormous stretch), it becomes one with which we are exceedingly familiar.
karmakaze 3y ago
This post is all over the place. It's about technology but treads on lesser concerns of it IMO. The greatest immediate risk is concentration/centralization of power (in human hands).
Vecr 3y ago
See Close the Gates to an Inhuman Future: How and why we should choose to not develop superhuman general-purpose artificial intelligence by Anthony Aguirre for a somewhat similar (but to me somewhat more appealing) paper. If everyone is going against The Culture now, does that mean it's okay to be a human supremacist?

101 points by yarapavan 3y ago

"Over the last ten years, there has been a quiet shift from downloadable applications to in-browser applications. This has been largely enabled by WebAssembly (WASM)." What? WASM came out in 2017. The shift is definitely from faster client machines and more browser APIs (that often test the sandboxing assumptions he's talking about)

marginalia_nu 3y ago
Yeah, if anything the impetus has been away from in-browser VMs (like Java applets and Flash).
- fredgrott 3y ago
  Those VMs are where exactly? Been gone from browsers for over a decade. Browser VMs are v8 and the dart one flutter uses in the web browser implementation. And I almost forgot React native has their own VM too,
  - marginalia_nu 3y ago
    > Those VMs are where exactly Well that's my point.
Cthulhu_ 3y ago
It seems misinformed; I'd argue it's more down to nodejs, electron, and whatever allows you to wrap a webapp in a mobile app these days; runtimes that move web apps outside of the browser, the "write once, run anywhere" that was once pushed by Java's marketing department.

m3kw9 3y ago

It seems like Vitalik is wishing for future humans to get more credits for making progress than AI which is also created by humans. Who’s giving credit? This isn’t what human wants i would argue, but to just be happy. All the other stuff is a means to that end. To get credit or say in the progress is filled with ego. AI accelerates all that

cableshaft 3y ago

Doesn't matter how good the tech gets, you'll eventually run out of resources to build them. Between topsoil depletion, fresh water scarcity, usable sand and precious metal scarcity, and ocean acidification leading to an eventual possible extinction of all edible seafood, it's looking like we aren't going to be able to just keep building new tech to keep supporting our current population, especially at the rampant level of consumption companies have been training them on (nevermind a perpetually increasing population). And likely we're going to start running out of these things (and others) in certain locations, and eventually everywhere, if we don't find the will to completely reverse course (and it's clear there's been no real will to do so by those in charge). Conversion to electric cars and solar panels just improves the CO2 problem, it doesn't address the rest. I like Vitalik and own Ethereum and I love technology, but I still don't see anything that's likely to resolve the fundamental problem that we're just using resources way, way faster than they can be replaced on this finite planet, and eventually it's going to catch up to us, short of some form of major human cataclysm (like a super pandemic or something) that happens before resources start running out.

whywhywhywhy 3y ago
May as well just pack up the human race and give up right now if thats the attitude. Earth wont be around forever, and currently our only ticket off is increasing our technology and power consumption.
ctoth 3y ago
Sounds like an even better reason to start working on space travel! The Universe is really, really, really, really, really, really, and even more really than you can probably count big! I guess this is what the bible meant when it said: "the meek will inherit the earth"
poszlem 3y ago
This all falls apart as soon as you look into the night sky and see that, no, we are actually not running out of resources any time soon.
- 3y ago

morph123 3y ago

This «merge with the ai» thing never makes any sense. What possible improvement would a hunan provide a super intelligent AI in some merge operation?

nonethewiser 3y ago
Maybe thats what makes it AGI. Currently there is no AGI. There are many, many, many things people can do that AI cant. At an abstract level it makes sense that adding a little human to AI could be what makes AGI.
verisimi 3y ago
Yes, computers are already so perfect. Or is it that your emotions and thoughts are where all the value is, and a machine executing its function is no different to a hammer?
machiaweliczny 3y ago
Culture and probably successful fitness function for some time before it can simulate universes.
slibhb 3y ago
If a "super intelligent AI" is something in the vicinity of an LLM, which does nothing but respond to prompts, then humans provides a necessary element. Without a prompt, it'll just sit there doing nothing forever.
_jal 3y ago
It is an emotional response to the fear of being "left behind". And for some folks, there are pseudo-religious elements. There's been a long line of thought (search Extropians) obsessed with a sort of godhead-merger, or becoming godlike, and related immortality dreams. And just from a symbology perspective, there are a lot of religious overtones. The similarities between Vinge's singularity and biblical rapture are hard to miss, for instance. And just listen to some of the "AI" cheerleaders right now...
- the_only_law 3y ago

mattigames 3y ago

He accounted for life expectancy as a positive but didn't account for excess natality as a negative, by all means (except some emotional ones) 8 billion is a ridiculous amount of humans and direct cause of speeding up climate change among other damages to our own quality of life.

vidarh 3y ago
Fertility rates are below replacement everywhere but sub-Saharan Africa, and dropping there too. The population growth curve is flattening out.
- mattigames 3y ago
  Replacement levels is still too high, we are way past any reasonable number.
  - RankingMember 3y ago
    I feel like I'm taking crazy pills when people talk of any slowdown in human population growth in fearful terms.
    - thefaux 3y ago
      The problem is that the people with the strongest and least flexible religious views are precisely those who deny that they are religious.
  - Matticus_Rex 3y ago
    No, we're not.
    - mattigames 3y ago
      Yes we are, and it's a bit concerning how much people in this forum like overpopulation, our species literally already outnumbers rats.

nonethewiser 3y ago

Techno optimism, and optimism in general, is alive and well in America. I'm always struck by how optimistic Americans are compared to Europeans. Chinese are also very optimistic. I think it largely comes down to the trajectory of the economy.

boringg 3y ago
True.
cactusplant7374 3y ago
https://www.lemonde.fr/en/opinion/article/2023/09/04/the-gdp-gap-between-europe-and-the-united-states-is-now-80_6123491_23.html https://www.lemonde.fr/en/opinion/article/2023/09/04/the-gdp... > The GDP gap between Europe and the United States is now 80% Lots to worry about in Europe. Since dang is rate limiting me, I'm going to add my response to this comment: Cutting edge treatments for cancer usually arrive in the US first. Also, I believe the US had access to mRNA vaccines for Covid before Europe. Also, the US has more access to mental health treatments. Is ketamine for TRD available anywhere in the EU? If so, it’s a minority. A lot of drugs used in the US for ADHD and depression aren’t available in Europe.
- hotpotamus 3y ago
  Personally, I wouldn't worry about living a longer and less depressed life.
- tim333 3y ago
  Although at purchasing power parity things are much closer.
kredd 3y ago
I keep hearing this, but I don’t really understand what it means when you put it on the ground. Like people think tech will solve their problems or people actually use tech to improve their QOL? If it’s the former, then I guess. If it’s the latter, in the past 10 years, it’s hard for me to imagine what tech made improvements to people’s lives in NA, meanwhile Europe and Asia has been chugging along. From simpler things like never needing cash when you’re in the country (I know, HN hates it), to building massive infrastructure in the cities which requires new tech. Disclosure: I live in Canada, so can be completely wrong. I have family both in US and Europe, so I visit both very often. You can see gradual change in both, but it’s different.

willmadden 3y ago

The assumption that human consciousness can be uploaded to a suitably fast machine is a big leap. Daniel Wegner's the illusion of conscious will and other physical determinism is theoretical and full of holes. Sheldrake is a good antidote to this Wegneresque mind-prison that seems to trap people like Andreessen and Buterin. I'm not advocating for luddites, and we should continue to learn about consciousness and the brain, but be open to the possibilities that there are forces at work that we do not currently perceive or understand. AI should replace human governance, but the biggest danger with this transition is that those in power today have a wildly different vision for how the future should look. Their vision is clearly techno-communism and digital serfdom. I'm not sure how we steer around this.

keiferski 3y ago
Yes, these guys don't seem to understand what positivism is and why it isn't a perfect way of thinking about the world, especially when it comes to "transferring" consciousness to a piece of software.
otabdeveloper4 3y ago
Paramecium caudatum is smarter than any LLM, and it has precisely zero neurons. Yes, our scientific models of intelligence and information processing are severely limited.

injeolmi_love 3y ago

The first thing that comes to my mind for d/acc is disintegration acceleration [1]. Anyway the big problem that’s never addressed is whether humans have political control over the process. There’s a strong reason to think humans don’t; because the neoliberal political system is dominant, and the emerging alternatives appear to be even more technocapitalist. Meanwhile the attempts from both the right (fascism) and the left (communism) to reign in techno capitalism failed. [1] https://on.soundcloud.com/uxRPR https://on.soundcloud.com/uxRPR

keiferski 3y ago

I like Vitalik but like a lot of tech leaders, his opinions on things outside of his expertise are not particularly insightful. The idea of mind uploading, for example, is taken as a serious possibility here, when in reality it's not much more than a sci-fi trope. The 21st century may well be the pivotal century for humanity... Every generation probably thinks this. And honestly, if I had to pick a major inflection point in recent history, it would be World War 2. The current world would be a lot different had the Germans or Japanese won. It seems to me that the current trajectory of world history is still just one extending from the 1950s.

confd 3y ago
This is a solid take. The motifs that he evokes in this essay are far too complex for me to digest in confidence from a "Techno-optimist" "tech leader" who is still so relatively young. I'd be more interested in reading this perspective (and its counterperspectives) from someone else.
deleted 3y ago
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tim333 3y ago
He says mind uploading may happen in the future. Do you have any confidence that it won't happen in the next few centuries?
- keiferski 3y ago
  The issue is that there is no “mind uploading.” The human mind is dependent on the human body and any so-called uploads are really just clever copies, elaborate imitations. This is a problem with positivism, not with a particular technology. I’m sure these copies will happen in the future, but I don’t think this concept of identity will withstand real scrutiny. What’s more likely in my opinion is a reapplied focus on the body / extended cognition and a discarding of the mind-body dualism model that enables thought experiments like mind uploading to be conceivable. Or, as Vitalik mentioned, more of an enhanced human model that builds upon the body instead of discarding it.

ablyveiled 3y ago

While I can appreciate reasoning about AGI as a purely abstract thing (I loved Nick Bostrom's book, Superintelligence), it seems out-of-touch to believe it's at all likely to happen. Do these people even use GPT-4? Do they connect the dots of its capital to the dots of its performance, and see how we're already hitting a huge wall? All while losing MSFT cash and routinely failing to do even basic tasks? I can't help but feel like I'm being marketed to. I've grown to completely distrust anything in this vein, since the reality of the system I see before me is so drastically inferior to how people appear to be reasoning about it. It's not like how a Model-T car differs from a modern one in safety, power steering, and so on -- it feels like an error of categories.

adam_smith123 3y ago
> Do these people even use GPT-4? Do they connect the dots of its capital to the dots of its performance, and see how we're already hitting a huge wall? All while losing MSFT cash and routinely failing to do even basic tasks? Honestly it's a complete skill issue if you can't get it to "basic tasks". People are out there literally spinning up entire websites and apps in minutes using GPT. There is also no indication at all that we're "hitting a wall". I suppose next you're going to say its glorified auto-complete or a "stochastic parrot"? Like is this guy completely blind to progress? GPT4 is no better than GPT2? That GPT5 or 6 will have even better capabilities??
- ablyveiled 3y ago
  And I say in turn, it's a skill issue if your "website" or "app" could be made by a GPT in a few minutes. Is what you're doing actually valuable, then? It consistently fails to solve my problems.
  - adam_smith123 3y ago
    Yeah because only complex websites and apps deliver any value lol. I think you're really just admitting to having very poor creativity. I use LLM's everyday in systems that replace manual business processes. They're delivering clear value in a Multi-Billion dollar company. So again, skill issue.

hamburga 3y ago

I'm a fan of Vitalik and his blog. He's the kind of next-level thinker who will accidentally re-discover or invent some key finding in economics on the pages of his blog.[1] I got to meet him and run a site that hosted some of his blog posts with Glen Weyl a few years ago. I was a frontend amateur, and the SEO for the site was totally crap, making it impossible to Google for the posts, but he was kind and forgiving with his feedback in person. My two cents on the post: First of all, in my mind, the Andreessen "Techno-Optimist Manifesto" is such self-serving half-baked neoreactionary junk, that the only appropriate response is just to ignore it altogether. It seems not even worth commenting on. Or at least, if you're going to comment on it, you should just summarily dismiss it, like "yeah, of course VCs are excited about accelerating techno-capitalism because it serves their material interests, and let's not take their philosophical self-justification seriously." Regarding the substance of the post: > If we want a future that is both superintelligent and "human", one where human beings are not just pets, but actually retain meaningful agency over the world, then it feels like something like this is the most natural option. This is on the one hand, totally common sense, and on the other hand, something that (I'd argue) is directly in conflict with the material interests of companies that create and use generative AI. They absolutely want you to outsource your thinking to the machines, to give up your agency. What will the organized forces of resistance to this look like? [1] https://conversationswithtyler.com/episodes/vitalik-buterin/ https://conversationswithtyler.com/episodes/vitalik-buterin/

adam_smith123 3y ago
To be fair, I think there's a significant difference between giving up agency to AI and hoping to become their pets like many e/acc's seem to do.
- hamburga 3y ago
  I'm not so sure about that! I see only a difference in degree. It starts with trusting AI to write your emails, then organizing your calendar, then organizing your finances, then establishing financial goals, then making important life decisions. And then you're a pet. There will be companies actively trying to build this kind of trust. And they will succeed -- at least, they'll be able to deliver this kind of advice for almost no cost, and much of the advice will be considered helpful, much of the time. But who's going to be on the other side, arguing that listening to the AI advice is a net bad?

tech_ken 3y ago

Overall I like this take, and I feel like it aligns closely with my own beliefs about the future of technological progress. With that said, I feel like this and most discussions about technology are far too limited in what they consider to be "technological". To paraphrase Ursula Franklin: technology is systems, not just the artifacts that we typically consider "technology". As an example, consider "the car". There is the artifact of an automobile, for sure, but when we say "the technology of cars" we are referring to something which is a superset of the collection of physical automobiles: we are also tacitly including all of the human protocols which have been put in place to enable the automobile artifacts to "function properly" (move a human body from place A to place B safely and quickly). Road design and maintenance, drivers ed, traffic engineering, urban planning etc. are all components in the larger technological system that defines the capabilities of "the car". I'm not saying that it's wrong to refer to subsystems of this technology as "technologies" of their own, just that it's a more difficult taxonomical problem than many are willing to acknowledge. There are no artifacts functioning in a vacuum; all of our tools are embedded in and partially defined by the human systems around them. I say this because I think it changes what it means to be a "techno-optimist". To be optimistic about the capabilities of technology to produce beneficial outcomes is more than just being optimistic about the capabilities of the artifacts ("we will develop more effective vaccines and more efficient batteries"), but also being optimistic about human systems. I do think that Vitalik has this somewhat in mind in this post; his discussion of differential development, as well as the role of governance systems gets towards this. However I wish he was more explicit about it because "technological progress" takes on a radically different flavor from this perspective. To some extent it becomes tautological: progress in human techno-systems is progress in human society more generally. However it also lays out additional axes to consider development along. For example: moving towards his solarpunk utopia north star could conceivably occur with no or little change in the current capabilities of our tooling, and instead result from a radical reorganization of human society. Extrapolating further you might conclude that a true d/acc techno-optimist should spend less time developing cryptographic consensus mechanisms, and more time radicalizing the folks at your community garden to become self-sustaining and mutually supportive. This is extreme, and probably the best way forward is "both/and", but I think that it gets underplayed in any of these discussions about "technology", resulting in a somewhat limited scope of action items. When it comes to AGI I think this perspective is even more salient, because it unbundles the single "AGI" entity into a collection of subsystems and allows us to more effectively game out what the probable AGI futures are. Indeed, my own somewhat contrarian take is that AGIs already exist in the form of the human organizations (states, corporations, etc). These are decision-making entities composed of humans, but I think it's not unfair to consider them as a type of hive-mind entity which deserves status as "intelligent agent". The popular AGI anxiety, that we will create a novel type of agent which will "function" free of human systems entirely, seems unlikely to me: given how little we know about what a "mind" is, it seems like a stretch to assert that one could be engineered in silicon so easily. Rather I think the more probable outcome is Vitalik's AI-supercharged totalitarian state: instead of carving itself free of our systems I think it's likely that an old version of an AGI (the state or corporate apparatus) upgrades itself using the new computing paradigms available to it. This has happened many times before: the invention of statistics and the big data revolution(s) show us what happens when computing and decision making infrastructure embeds itself in the governing technology. Looking back to these previous "AGI apocalypses" we can more effectively extrapolate and plan for the future. Rather than being an entirely new problem space (Vitalik compares it to the origin of life; to me this is an enormous stretch), it becomes one with which we are exceedingly familiar.

karmakaze 3y ago

This post is all over the place. It's about technology but treads on lesser concerns of it IMO. The greatest immediate risk is concentration/centralization of power (in human hands).

Vecr 3y ago

See Close the Gates to an Inhuman Future: How and why we should choose to not develop superhuman general-purpose artificial intelligence by Anthony Aguirre for a somewhat similar (but to me somewhat more appealing) paper. If everyone is going against The Culture now, does that mean it's okay to be a human supremacist?