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There are entire subreddits of people who believe that ‘AI’ is by definition infallible. I feel myself getting sucked in and going slightly crazy just spending

There are entire subreddits of people who believe that ‘AI’ is by definition infallible. I feel myself getting sucked in and going slightly crazy just spending a few minutes reading it. Those places seem to mostly be populated by disenfranchised people who are desperate for some ‘crazy alien tech’ to come along and overturn whatever systems they feel led them to their current (miserable) lives. “Anyone who doesn’t think that in two years’ time AGI will have ushered in a new age where we all live on UBI and are free to explore our passions isn’t paying attention/has no idea what’s about to happen”, etc. etc. Needless to say, none of this stuff has anything remotely to do with, you know… empirical evidence or theory. But reading endless reams of it for hours a day can certainly make you think it does.

ben_w 3y ago
> “Anyone who doesn’t think that in two years’ time AGI will have ushered in a new age where we all live on UBI and are free to explore our passions isn’t paying attention/has no idea what’s about to happen”, etc. etc. I'd be surprised if it takes less than 6 to fully generalise over all domains (what I expect to be hard is "learning from as few examples as a human"), and I'm not convinced there's the political will to roll out UBI fast enough, not even if AI that is sufficiently powerful as to require UBI to avoid economic collapse and popular revolution takes 20 years. But AI may well break a lot of things in 2 years even without being either of those. Radical economic disruption doesn't need to replace all humans, even 5% would be huge, and it doesn't need to be as evidence-efficient as a human if there's lots of humans doing the same thing that the evidence-inefficient AI can learn from. On the other hand I have just described the trucking industry, and yet even despite the ability to collect all that training data from all those drivers, Tesla has still not fully solved self-driving vehicle AI. And also, I do mean "replacing humans" rather than just doing specific tasks that are currently done by humans: if those same humans can "just learn a different job", then so long as they can retrain faster than AI can learn the same jobs by watching humans collectively, this isn't so bad. > empirical evidence or theory Theory, I'd agree. But then, we don't really have any theory suitable to this task. Empirical evidence? That's a weird take, to me. What it can already do, even despite the mistakes of the current generation, has me wondering how long I'm going to be economically relevant for — and hoping this is a repeat of Clever Hans.

ben_w 3y ago

> “Anyone who doesn’t think that in two years’ time AGI will have ushered in a new age where we all live on UBI and are free to explore our passions isn’t paying attention/has no idea what’s about to happen”, etc. etc. I'd be surprised if it takes less than 6 to fully generalise over all domains (what I expect to be hard is "learning from as few examples as a human"), and I'm not convinced there's the political will to roll out UBI fast enough, not even if AI that is sufficiently powerful as to require UBI to avoid economic collapse and popular revolution takes 20 years. But AI may well break a lot of things in 2 years even without being either of those. Radical economic disruption doesn't need to replace all humans, even 5% would be huge, and it doesn't need to be as evidence-efficient as a human if there's lots of humans doing the same thing that the evidence-inefficient AI can learn from. On the other hand I have just described the trucking industry, and yet even despite the ability to collect all that training data from all those drivers, Tesla has still not fully solved self-driving vehicle AI. And also, I do mean "replacing humans" rather than just doing specific tasks that are currently done by humans: if those same humans can "just learn a different job", then so long as they can retrain faster than AI can learn the same jobs by watching humans collectively, this isn't so bad. > empirical evidence or theory Theory, I'd agree. But then, we don't really have any theory suitable to this task. Empirical evidence? That's a weird take, to me. What it can already do, even despite the mistakes of the current generation, has me wondering how long I'm going to be economically relevant for — and hoping this is a repeat of Clever Hans.