6 ms·

1. AGI doesn't even exist and Sam Altman and I agree on one thing, GPTs will not get us there. Saying AGI is a risk is like saying the sun exploding is a risk.

1. AGI doesn't even exist and Sam Altman and I agree on one thing, GPTs will not get us there. Saying AGI is a risk is like saying the sun exploding is a risk. 2. Nuclear conflict is real, it's astounding Pakistan or Russia hasnt used the bomb yet but they will when the US backs them into a corner. 3. Climate change? At this point, who cares? We know it's happening and happening VERY slowly so we have PLENTY of time to get ready. Theres no real risk other than failing to move away from the cost in the next 100 years. International shipping and big ag are the largest polluters by far and those ain't stopping.

huygens6363 2y ago
Fear of AGI is not based on Altman’s latest brews. Look at the progress curve of AI in general is one way to get a feeling for it. The other one, which I prefer, is looking at existing AIs for which we thought human ingenuity was top notch and how they are beating us left and right. Strategy, creativity, cunning, all human notions that are being slaughtered. Slowly, but surely. It is “just” a matter of combining. I think it’s an “engineering problem” by now. Which is not to say that it will happen soon, just that if we set our minds to it it won’t be that big of a deal.
- blueflow 2y ago
  I'm patiently waiting for my sysadmin job to be automated away. AGI, its time to deliver! I'm waiting. Should have happened yesterday?
  - TeMPOraL 2y ago
    The only AI remotely generic enough for that exists for like 2 years. Give it a few more, you might just get your wish.
    - kylebenzle 2y ago
      Maybe.
  - Workaccount2 2y ago
    AGI by 2030 is not a reach statement at all anymore. The LLM's we have today weren't supposed to show up until 2030 at the earliest and 2050 more realistically. If you go back 10 years and read what people were writing about AI progress, you will find that they were _completely_ off the mark. It's prudent to assume a very liberal timeline for AI progress, based off whats been happening now.
    - blueflow 2y ago
      10 years ago we just had another AI hype. I want to see delivered promises & my job automated before i change my mind.
      - Workaccount2 2y ago
        Every promise has over delivered by a decade or more, so don't worry, you'll likely have your legs up 20 years faster than promised.
      - trashtester 2y ago
        We're still in the same AI hype as 10 years ago. You just stopped noticing for a while. It really hasn't stopped since AlexNet back in 2012. Personally, since I first started to learn about Neural Nets in the 90's, I've always predicted that they would bring AGI around the time they matched human brains in complexity and compute power. Back then, assuming Moore's law meant that would be between 2030-40. Now, there was always the prospect of a serious breakdown of Moore's Law, which might delay it, but since that didn't happen (compute power just moved from CPU's to GPU's), we're now approaching the final stretch. Human brain scale neural nets are already being planned, if not already being built in secret.
      - Delmololo 2y ago
        The fact that you can now ask an LLM in a chat like fashion is absolutely irrelevant to you? Not an achievement at all? Talking to an ai? Generating any image you like? Etc.?
    - short_sells_poo 2y ago
  - Delmololo 2y ago
    [flagged]
  - trashtester 2y ago
    25 years ago, I did a back-of-the envelope calculation during a party and came up with roughly 2040. I didn't know that Kurzweil had already predicted 2029. Once I heard about it, I felt Kurzweil was over-optimistic, and stuck to 2040. Recently, though, it has started to seem that AGI before 2029 is more likely than 2040 or after.
  - huygens6363 2y ago
    I don’t know what “sysadmin” is today anymore, but we don’t need AGI to get rid of that.
BirAdam 2y ago
Well, also, plastic waste getting dumped in water ways, and in the USA, steel and coal waste being dumped into the Ohio (causing a huge dead zone in the Gulf). There are serious pollution problems everywhere, and I kind of hate the climate change narrative for taking people’s eyes off of those problems.
- trashtester 2y ago
  AI is already developing enzymes that can break down plastics. Put them on bacteria, and that plastic may stop being a problem quickly.
  - kmeisthax 2y ago
    Which is great until plastics that we want to keep using start getting eaten by bacteria.
    - trashtester 2y ago
      sure. we may have to chose whether or not plastics should be biodegradable. Cant have your cake and eat it, too.
      - Filligree 2y ago
        Wood is biodegradable, but wood houses work anyway. Ditto cotton. So long as you keep things dry they don’t tend to rot.
        trashtester 2y ago
        Exactly. Plastic will be the same at some point. Natural selection would probably lead to plastic-eating bacteria anyway. DeepMind's enzymes are just a way to speed it up.
KronisLV 2y ago
Hey, aren't you the user who was trolling I'm that one thread about someone making an app? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40199670 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40199670 Oh well, some concerns around AGI might be attempts at marketing and attracting attention, though some caution probably isn't too bad to have. AGI might become a thing, it's just that there's no guarantee that it will happen in our lifetimes. On the other hand, even LLMs will put some folks out of a job. Relations between nuclear powers are anyone's guess but there's no reason why Russia couldn't be forced to back off, as opposed to "being backed into a corner". Wouldn't be the first proxy war and most likely won't be the last. I care about climate change, there are certainly others. No idea whether much of a change will be made in our current course, but there's no reason to be super dismissive. If anything, recycling, eating a bit less meat or doing lots of the other common recommendations improves my own quality of life, even if the legislature that goes after the big corporations is nowhere to be seen yet. No reason not to make the world a better place, or ar least try to, in whatever ways are viable, like donating towards planting trees or something like Wren.
duozerk 2y ago
> happening VERY slowly > failing to move away from the cost in the next 100 years Unless you're a time-traveler from the 50s who has somehow managed to post here, there is no excuse for this type of disinformation these days. Mentioning higher sea levels is also a red herring; massive agricultural yields collapse will be an issue long before (like, this century) sea levels become a major problem. More than this, we have now reached levels of atmospheric changes that put actual near-term Human extinction (not to mention that of most sea and land species) on the table.
- trashtester 2y ago
  This doesn't seem to agree with IPCC predictions. What's your source?
  - duozerk 2y ago
    Despite the IPCC being very conservative/optimistic in their scenarios, this is in fact in line with their reports; admittedly my comment above might be badly worded - when I said "near-term", I meant "in the upcoming two centuries or so". The IPCC reports say we might reach 4C, 5C or even more; based on the historical record, such a major change in such a short time - several orders of magnitude faster than previous CO2e-gases-linked mass extinction events - likely cannot be adapted to by the majority of species (there will of course also be a few evolutionary winners), resulting in potential extinction. I also quote the latest draft report from that same IPCC, leaked about two years back by concerned involved scientists to newspapers before the usual step where political stakeholders are allowed to reword the parts they deem too disturbing or against their interests: "Life on Earth can recover from a drastic climate shift by evolving into new species and creating new ecosystems," it says. "Humans cannot."
    - trashtester 2y ago
      There is lots of space on earth that would be a lot more hospitable to humans if 5C warmer. Like the central eurasian steppe.

huygens6363 2y ago

Fear of AGI is not based on Altman’s latest brews. Look at the progress curve of AI in general is one way to get a feeling for it. The other one, which I prefer, is looking at existing AIs for which we thought human ingenuity was top notch and how they are beating us left and right. Strategy, creativity, cunning, all human notions that are being slaughtered. Slowly, but surely. It is “just” a matter of combining. I think it’s an “engineering problem” by now. Which is not to say that it will happen soon, just that if we set our minds to it it won’t be that big of a deal.

blueflow 2y ago
I'm patiently waiting for my sysadmin job to be automated away. AGI, its time to deliver! I'm waiting. Should have happened yesterday?
- TeMPOraL 2y ago
  The only AI remotely generic enough for that exists for like 2 years. Give it a few more, you might just get your wish.
  - kylebenzle 2y ago
    Maybe.
- Workaccount2 2y ago
  AGI by 2030 is not a reach statement at all anymore. The LLM's we have today weren't supposed to show up until 2030 at the earliest and 2050 more realistically. If you go back 10 years and read what people were writing about AI progress, you will find that they were _completely_ off the mark. It's prudent to assume a very liberal timeline for AI progress, based off whats been happening now.
  - blueflow 2y ago
    10 years ago we just had another AI hype. I want to see delivered promises & my job automated before i change my mind.
    - Workaccount2 2y ago
      Every promise has over delivered by a decade or more, so don't worry, you'll likely have your legs up 20 years faster than promised.
    - trashtester 2y ago
      We're still in the same AI hype as 10 years ago. You just stopped noticing for a while. It really hasn't stopped since AlexNet back in 2012. Personally, since I first started to learn about Neural Nets in the 90's, I've always predicted that they would bring AGI around the time they matched human brains in complexity and compute power. Back then, assuming Moore's law meant that would be between 2030-40. Now, there was always the prospect of a serious breakdown of Moore's Law, which might delay it, but since that didn't happen (compute power just moved from CPU's to GPU's), we're now approaching the final stretch. Human brain scale neural nets are already being planned, if not already being built in secret.
    - Delmololo 2y ago
      The fact that you can now ask an LLM in a chat like fashion is absolutely irrelevant to you? Not an achievement at all? Talking to an ai? Generating any image you like? Etc.?
  - short_sells_poo 2y ago
- Delmololo 2y ago
  [flagged]
- trashtester 2y ago
  25 years ago, I did a back-of-the envelope calculation during a party and came up with roughly 2040. I didn't know that Kurzweil had already predicted 2029. Once I heard about it, I felt Kurzweil was over-optimistic, and stuck to 2040. Recently, though, it has started to seem that AGI before 2029 is more likely than 2040 or after.
- huygens6363 2y ago
  I don’t know what “sysadmin” is today anymore, but we don’t need AGI to get rid of that.

BirAdam 2y ago

Well, also, plastic waste getting dumped in water ways, and in the USA, steel and coal waste being dumped into the Ohio (causing a huge dead zone in the Gulf). There are serious pollution problems everywhere, and I kind of hate the climate change narrative for taking people’s eyes off of those problems.

trashtester 2y ago
AI is already developing enzymes that can break down plastics. Put them on bacteria, and that plastic may stop being a problem quickly.
- kmeisthax 2y ago
  Which is great until plastics that we want to keep using start getting eaten by bacteria.
  - trashtester 2y ago
    sure. we may have to chose whether or not plastics should be biodegradable. Cant have your cake and eat it, too.
    - Filligree 2y ago
      Wood is biodegradable, but wood houses work anyway. Ditto cotton. So long as you keep things dry they don’t tend to rot.
      - trashtester 2y ago
        Exactly. Plastic will be the same at some point. Natural selection would probably lead to plastic-eating bacteria anyway. DeepMind's enzymes are just a way to speed it up.

KronisLV 2y ago

Hey, aren't you the user who was trolling I'm that one thread about someone making an app? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40199670 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40199670 Oh well, some concerns around AGI might be attempts at marketing and attracting attention, though some caution probably isn't too bad to have. AGI might become a thing, it's just that there's no guarantee that it will happen in our lifetimes. On the other hand, even LLMs will put some folks out of a job. Relations between nuclear powers are anyone's guess but there's no reason why Russia couldn't be forced to back off, as opposed to "being backed into a corner". Wouldn't be the first proxy war and most likely won't be the last. I care about climate change, there are certainly others. No idea whether much of a change will be made in our current course, but there's no reason to be super dismissive. If anything, recycling, eating a bit less meat or doing lots of the other common recommendations improves my own quality of life, even if the legislature that goes after the big corporations is nowhere to be seen yet. No reason not to make the world a better place, or ar least try to, in whatever ways are viable, like donating towards planting trees or something like Wren.

duozerk 2y ago

> happening VERY slowly > failing to move away from the cost in the next 100 years Unless you're a time-traveler from the 50s who has somehow managed to post here, there is no excuse for this type of disinformation these days. Mentioning higher sea levels is also a red herring; massive agricultural yields collapse will be an issue long before (like, this century) sea levels become a major problem. More than this, we have now reached levels of atmospheric changes that put actual near-term Human extinction (not to mention that of most sea and land species) on the table.

trashtester 2y ago
This doesn't seem to agree with IPCC predictions. What's your source?
- duozerk 2y ago
  Despite the IPCC being very conservative/optimistic in their scenarios, this is in fact in line with their reports; admittedly my comment above might be badly worded - when I said "near-term", I meant "in the upcoming two centuries or so". The IPCC reports say we might reach 4C, 5C or even more; based on the historical record, such a major change in such a short time - several orders of magnitude faster than previous CO2e-gases-linked mass extinction events - likely cannot be adapted to by the majority of species (there will of course also be a few evolutionary winners), resulting in potential extinction. I also quote the latest draft report from that same IPCC, leaked about two years back by concerned involved scientists to newspapers before the usual step where political stakeholders are allowed to reword the parts they deem too disturbing or against their interests: "Life on Earth can recover from a drastic climate shift by evolving into new species and creating new ecosystems," it says. "Humans cannot."
  - trashtester 2y ago
    There is lots of space on earth that would be a lot more hospitable to humans if 5C warmer. Like the central eurasian steppe.