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This article is absolutely pointless. The statement was from 2009. Back then, neither side had any real evidence in favour of their argument. Deep learning and

This article is absolutely pointless. The statement was from 2009. Back then, neither side had any real evidence in favour of their argument. Deep learning and AI were still purely academic experiments, with zero practicality. And it had been like this for half a century. Back then, even the best models couldn't tell cats from dogs. Today every high schooler with a laptop can solve that problem thanks to abundant hardware and libraries. So both sides were just making up random numbers. This should be a lesson about people, despite their expertise, talking out of their ass instead of reminiscing famous quotes like "horses are better than cars." That statement is also funnily wrong in today's world, but at the time (i.e. without gas stations and roads and infrastructure everywhere), it too was rather reasonable.

T-A 3y ago
> This article is absolutely pointless. Not at all, but maybe you didn't read far enough to get to it. > The statement was from 2009. Back then, neither side had any real evidence in favour of their argument. Deep learning and AI were still purely academic experiments, with zero practicality. That's exactly what the article says: I was explaining that there was no trend you could knowably, reliably project into the future such that you’d end up with human-level AI. And in a sense, I was right. and then it explicitly states the point: The trouble, with hindsight, was that I placed the burden of proof only on those saying a dramatic change would happen, not on those saying it wouldn’t. Note that this is the exact same mistake most of the world made with COVID in early 2020. I would sum up the lesson thus: one must never use radical ignorance as an excuse to default, in practice, to the guess that everything will stay basically the same.
- sigmoid10 3y ago
  >maybe you didn't read far enough to get to it. Perhaps you didn't read my comment far enough to get it. The point is - essentially - you can't trust experts in any field when they start arguing beliefs instead of science. It has nothing to do with confidence in technological pacing or lack thereof. It seems the author has learned nothing of his real mistake and would be prone to repeating it in the future.
fragmede 3y ago
If people keep bringing up something you wrote in 2009 and called you a dumbass for saying what you said 14 years ago, wouldn't you put out a statement saying they're being dumbasses today?
- sigmoid10 3y ago
  That's the thing people are not getting: The author was a dumbass. As was his counterpart. But not for the reasons that were outlined.
karmakaze 3y ago
The only worthwhile thing it mentions is Ray Kurzweil, then discards it out of hand without actually considering the methodology because it must be unsound to be so precise: > The few who did predict what ended up happening, notably Ray Kurzweil, made lots of other confident predictions (e.g., the Singularity around 2045) that seemed so absurdly precise as to rule out the possibility that they were using any sound methodology. The methodology (ignoring all other detailed knowledge) is roughly our progress with computers and software being exponential for its entire history. What lay people don't get about literal exponential growth[0] is how slow it is (vs linear, polynomial) before it 'hockey sticks'. I assume everyone here knows that and the Wikipedia link is only for the pictured graph as reference. If each unit on the x-axis is a decade of computer hardware and software advancements, we may very well be only two ticks away from the singularity. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exponential_growth https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exponential_growth
- tim333 3y ago
  Kurzweil's best arguments are really quite simple. If you plot computer per dollar on a log graph it forms a fairly smooth line like: https://lh6.googleusercontent.com/SPIkvg3D8tlFQvQJ8OEjFpTRdVjZr9PUCYUuyHfEyZGEe9LJHm2hipFm4SnuNShKeoi3j-UMfc99RXpVUonmw94IE75MLIvsO5Ef81LJT5YTWxtAYN_Tw6TgldY-bN1-BfJnDLeZ5SJa-jUj7Q https://lh6.googleusercontent.com/SPIkvg3D8tlFQvQJ8OEjFpTRdV... And you can get out pen and project it into the future. The line is actually a bit faster increasing than exponential so curves up. You can then compare that to human capabilities to get rough dates for stuff https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Kurzweils-8-71-chart-of-exponential-growth-of-computing_fig1_333518196 https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Kurzweils-8-71-chart-of-... and that's pretty much all there is to it. It's held up quite well so far and has a good chance of doing so in the future. It's not really that the increases were slow in the old days but that your old pc going faster didn't really mean much to people whereas overtaking human capabilities may be more of a thing.

T-A 3y ago

> This article is absolutely pointless. Not at all, but maybe you didn't read far enough to get to it. > The statement was from 2009. Back then, neither side had any real evidence in favour of their argument. Deep learning and AI were still purely academic experiments, with zero practicality. That's exactly what the article says: I was explaining that there was no trend you could knowably, reliably project into the future such that you’d end up with human-level AI. And in a sense, I was right. and then it explicitly states the point: The trouble, with hindsight, was that I placed the burden of proof only on those saying a dramatic change would happen, not on those saying it wouldn’t. Note that this is the exact same mistake most of the world made with COVID in early 2020. I would sum up the lesson thus: one must never use radical ignorance as an excuse to default, in practice, to the guess that everything will stay basically the same.

sigmoid10 3y ago
>maybe you didn't read far enough to get to it. Perhaps you didn't read my comment far enough to get it. The point is - essentially - you can't trust experts in any field when they start arguing beliefs instead of science. It has nothing to do with confidence in technological pacing or lack thereof. It seems the author has learned nothing of his real mistake and would be prone to repeating it in the future.

fragmede 3y ago

If people keep bringing up something you wrote in 2009 and called you a dumbass for saying what you said 14 years ago, wouldn't you put out a statement saying they're being dumbasses today?

sigmoid10 3y ago
That's the thing people are not getting: The author was a dumbass. As was his counterpart. But not for the reasons that were outlined.

karmakaze 3y ago

The only worthwhile thing it mentions is Ray Kurzweil, then discards it out of hand without actually considering the methodology because it must be unsound to be so precise: > The few who did predict what ended up happening, notably Ray Kurzweil, made lots of other confident predictions (e.g., the Singularity around 2045) that seemed so absurdly precise as to rule out the possibility that they were using any sound methodology. The methodology (ignoring all other detailed knowledge) is roughly our progress with computers and software being exponential for its entire history. What lay people don't get about literal exponential growth[0] is how slow it is (vs linear, polynomial) before it 'hockey sticks'. I assume everyone here knows that and the Wikipedia link is only for the pictured graph as reference. If each unit on the x-axis is a decade of computer hardware and software advancements, we may very well be only two ticks away from the singularity. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exponential_growth https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exponential_growth

tim333 3y ago
Kurzweil's best arguments are really quite simple. If you plot computer per dollar on a log graph it forms a fairly smooth line like: https://lh6.googleusercontent.com/SPIkvg3D8tlFQvQJ8OEjFpTRdVjZr9PUCYUuyHfEyZGEe9LJHm2hipFm4SnuNShKeoi3j-UMfc99RXpVUonmw94IE75MLIvsO5Ef81LJT5YTWxtAYN_Tw6TgldY-bN1-BfJnDLeZ5SJa-jUj7Q https://lh6.googleusercontent.com/SPIkvg3D8tlFQvQJ8OEjFpTRdV... And you can get out pen and project it into the future. The line is actually a bit faster increasing than exponential so curves up. You can then compare that to human capabilities to get rough dates for stuff https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Kurzweils-8-71-chart-of-exponential-growth-of-computing_fig1_333518196 https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Kurzweils-8-71-chart-of-... and that's pretty much all there is to it. It's held up quite well so far and has a good chance of doing so in the future. It's not really that the increases were slow in the old days but that your old pc going faster didn't really mean much to people whereas overtaking human capabilities may be more of a thing.