11 ms·

The short to medium term concerns mostly come down to human problems. AI and robotics have a multiplicative affect like other technologies, but the problems sti

• moffkalast 2y ago
  Eh I don't think humans will really be a viable concept in a few hundred years if this keeps up. We'll simply be too fragile and dumb for anything. I see this as a good thing though, the only thing that separates us from everything else in the universe is our inteligence, in some sense we are that inteligence and this is the next evolutionary step it needs to finally break out from the confines of a tiny 20W brain that's been pushed as far as it practically can be. When you no longer need to consume energy constantly unless you die, are functionally immortal and can hibernate for a thousand years, you eat only sunlight, don't get cancer from radiation or bone loss from zero gravity... the galaxy becomes your oyster. Evolution, Morpheus, evolution. Like the dinosaur ;)
  • polotics 2y ago
    We are extremely energy-efficient. My lunch was one fruit, had no breakfast, a bit hungry but can still type in the sequence of word you're reading right now. Compare this with the wattage of OpenAI, from what I can find 2.9 Watt-hours for one query, so 2.4 kcal, ie. the whole daily-maintenance food need for an average man...
    • teraflop 2y ago
      You're off by a factor of 1,000. The "calories" used for nutritional purposes are actually kilocalories, and a typical adult diet is about 2,000 kcal per day.
    • isoprophlex 2y ago
      I think you mean 2.4 Mcal, or 2400 kcal, to keep a man alive for a day...
    • naming_the_user 2y ago
      You're missing a few orders of magnitude here - the daily food intake of a man is 2400kcal, not 2.4kcal. We are still much more efficient mind, 2400kcal is approx 2.7kWh so about 1000 GPT queries if your 2.9Wh figure is correct (wow!)
    • deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
    • simonbw 2y ago
      I think your math is off by a bit. A Calorie and a watt-hour are approximately equal. Humans need about 2000 Calories per day. So 2.9 watt-hours is more like the amount of energy a human needs in a minute. I think the confusion might come from the Calorie/calorie difference, i.e. 1 Calorie = 1000 calories = 1 kcal.
    • moffkalast 2y ago
      Efficiency doesn't matter if you have spare energy to use and can't. We have all the food we can eat and we remain dumb fucks. With nuclear power and a way to scale up we could build a gigawatt tier brain if we wanted to.
    • sva_ 2y ago
      Other than the cal/kcal issue, I'm also curious if this comparison really pans out. If you had a fusion power plant, you could power processors with it, but how does raw power translate into human food? Even if you had some formula like Soylent Green, many humans would probably not cooperate after a while
  • javaunsafe2019 2y ago
    I truly believe that someone writing such a comment is deeply unhappy with his life and can’t value humanity as it should be
    • nakeru 2y ago
      Not OP of your answer, but I'm happy with my life. Still, I can't value humanity much when we're living the fastest extinction even ever because of, well, humanity. And we won't fix it. I'm happy because none of these silly "issues" like AI will matter one iota in a couple of decades.
    • justupvoting 2y ago
      "A man's at odds to know his mind cause his mind is aught he has to know it with. He can know his heart, but he dont want to. Rightly so. Best not to look in there. It aint the heart of a creature that is bound in the way that God has set for it. You can find meanness in the least of creatures, but when God made man the devil was at his elbow. A creature that can do anything. Make a machine. And a machine to make the machine. And evil that can run itself a thousand years, no need to tend it."
    • Semaphor 2y ago
      And who is to say how it should be? You? And what does it even mean, is the great thing about humanity the last few decades? There last few years? Surely humanity as recent as a few hundred years ago was not already as it should be?
    • moffkalast 2y ago
      We are so hardwired for human exceptionalism that we can't even entertain the thought of there ever being something better that replaces us, which is what's has occurred for 99.9% of species so far and makes it a statistical certainty. It's hubris manifest to think that we'll live unchanged until the heat death of the universe.
    • drdaeman 2y ago
      > can’t value humanity as it should be It's hard to see a value in humanity when most of the globe is a giant dumpster fire. We currently have: 1. United States, a corporate-owned two-party clusterfuck, potentially on a brink of failing into an autocracy. Because the world is in post-ironic phase, this is all turned into a TV show for the mass entertainment. 2. Russia, a kleptocracy turned into an authoritarian police state run by an ex-KGB ex-Stasi nazi. Always messed up, badly, waging wars as a hobby. Doing their best to fuck up things abroad so they aren't alone, and fuck things up domestically so people are more obedient (dictatorship 101: people always behave "better", when their base needs are just barely satisfied so their focus is all on survival). 3. Middle East, where all things are so fucked up beyond recognition I don't even... 4. China, another anti-utopia lover's dream, with obligatory facade of "harmony" and "prosperity". Don't know much about their internal affairs, to be honest, but don't see any good coming out of it. 5. Africa isn't doing any better, we just hear and care less about their mess here because we have our own mess at home. 6. A bunch of ticking bombs (pollution, global warming, overpopulation crises) so we won't get bored by the old wars alone. And all of this stems up from the fundamental issue of human nature. Innate high susceptibility to things that sound nice (aka populism) leading up to blind faith, constantly abused by high achiever sociopaths, toppling societies left and right despite all the checks and balances, wreaking havoc. We know about logical fallacies, but still - en masse/at scale - fail at those, badly. We only realize the writings were on the wall all the time, when we're already stuck deep in the mess we've made ourselves. The worst part of it? There seems to be no solution. At least not that I've ever heard of. Pandemics showed us that a global challenge doesn't reunite people but rather gets abused to divides them further, so even evil aliens' arrival or GAI-gone-Skynet most likely won't change anything. Our best chances are achieving global post-scarcity and/or solving death (so, yeah, very realistic goals straight outta sci-fi books /s), but not even those are guaranteed to work - just a slim chance that maybe if those major issues are out of the picture something will change and maybe there will be a slim chance it won't get abused for worse. Transhumanism might be another chance (if our monkey brains are a problem, maybe we can patch them up or possibly hop over to something else) but I have my doubts. What's to value? That humans have coping mechanisms that lets them just ignore all the crap going around and live happily in their imaginary safety bubbles, until it's their time and the frog is finally notices it's being boiled? (Please don't get me wrong, zero hate here - except the hate for all the abusers and hate for all the mess happening. I love humans, but I'm deeply saddened that something is really wrong with us that we just can't get our shit straight for multiple millennia, stepping on the same rake over and over.) Yea, I guess I'm deeply unhappy.
  • noah_buddy 2y ago
    Suppose you are right. From a genetic perspective, the most logical course of hypothetical action is to immediately start smashing computers, learning how to blow up terminators, and to oppose and undermine anyone that thinks like you. Now, I actually do not believe you are right and I am more inclined to believe that artificial intelligence stemming from humanity would see the value in human ideals. Certain things like love, morality, and humility have been deeply held ideals for millennia. I would suppose that an AI would, to some extent, value these things too. Think more “The Day the Earth Stood Still” than Terminator. This is all conjecture, but one thing I would suggest to you: if you see the natural evolution of your own species to be the removal of itself, you probably should be nowhere near AI or alignment. What you suggest is akin to world-wide genocide. Ironically, in my estimation, you are less aware of humanity than AI will be.
    • moffkalast 2y ago
      I think you misunderstand, that's exactly what I'm saying. The AI we make will replace us because it will functionally be us in every way. Even unaligned LLM base models of the current gen embody our values and ideals better than we ever could. The way I imagine it you could talk to one of these things and it would appear human, except it would know everything that is known, be a master of everything that can be done, and could fax itself to Mars over a laser in 20 minutes. Being software is such a huge advantage, since you can just swap your body for whatever you need to do or wherever you need to be. I'm sure humans will still be around long into the future, but they won't be doing anything notable because we won't be capable of thinking on a cutting edge level. Not entirely unlike what a cat or a dog is to us now. The inteligence disparity will probably be similar anyway.
  • SirHumphrey 2y ago
    I think there exists a point, where AI stops making sense in a cost equation. Currently we are well accustomed that machines are cheap and humans are expensive, and anything that can be done by machine instead of by a human means a cost reduction. At some point that probably stops, because the amount of compute you need to run larger and larger models means that humans can become cost competitive. It's a bit like in manufacturing, where cost of robotization is sometimes more than just the cost of employing humans. And in the end, this long term predictions based on where we are now and how fast we are moving are always a bit iffy. Nobody really know what challenges must current AI overcome to become AGI (if that even means anything).
    • moffkalast 2y ago
      Yeah it's just what I suppose might be the inevitable outcome for the very far future, assuming incremental improvements in all forms over a long time. For the short term it's honestly way harder to say, there could easily be another 50 year winter in between. But machines improve, and humans don't, so as long as non-zero progress is made it's a virtual certainty.
• sva_ 2y ago
  A global government usually implies a centralization of power, which corrupts, and probably isn't a solution to much of anything
  • tstrimple 2y ago
    I don't think this assertion stands on its own. There is more local corruption in the US than at the federal level for example. Way fewer eyes on your activities. Practically no one is going to notice you getting kickbacks for approving zoning changes for a business or other sorts of "low stakes" corruption.
• semi-extrinsic 2y ago
  I've said it before, and I'll say it again: there is absolutely zero evidence indicating that we are any closer to AGI than what James Watt was to realizing nuclear fusion. There are extremely well researched worms with only a few hundred neurons which we cannot yet simulate with anything resembling accuracy. How can that statement be true, if LLMs are close to delivering superhuman intelligence?
  • Jabrov 2y ago
    Why do we have to simulate real neurons to achieve intelligence? We don't simulate a bird's bones and muscles to achieve flight. LLMs are a huge step forward. Sure, they might not be the thing to ultimately deliver superhuman intelligence. But it's unfair to say that we're not any closer at all.
    • splwjs 2y ago
      We've had markov chain generators for a while, having enough computing power to grant them the power to regurgitate wikipedia reddit and stackoverflow content is not "a huge step towards agi"
      • Jabrov 2y ago
        I disagree. It's true that Markov chain generators have existed for years. But historically their output was usually just this cute thing that gave you a chuckle; they were seldomly as useful in a general sense like LLMs currently are. I think that the increase you mention in compute power and data is itself a huge step forward. But also transformers have been super important. Transformer-based LLMs are orders of magnitude more powerful, smarter, trained on more data, etc. than previous types of models because of how they can scale. The attention mechanism also allows them to pay attention to way more of the input, not just the few preceding tokens.
        • dijit 2y ago
          I think you missed OPs point. If you want something useful, then we're getting closer. AGI is something specific, as a requisite, it must understand what is being asked, and what we have now is a puppet show that makes us humans think that the machine is thinking, similar to Markov chains. There is absolutely some utility in this- but it's about as close to AGI as the horse-cart is to commercial aircraft. Some AI hype people are really uncomfortable with that fact, I'm sorry, but that reality will hit you sooner rather than later. It does not mean what we have is perfect, cannot be improved in the short term, or that it has no practical applications already. EDIT: downvoting me wont change this, go study the field of academic AI properly please
• splwjs 2y ago
  >The long term issue that many people don't seem willing to mention out loud is that we will eventually make humanity obsolete and robots will literally take control. what are you talking about; the main marketing strategy for so terribly many ai companies is to run around declaring the end is soon because their product is so powerful >The only real solution to the threat of militarization of AI and robotics might be to create a more unified global government and culture. At this point I think you're joking. Tightly centralizing power always results in oligarchy, kleptocracy, and collapse. And why do you think this central world government wouldn't militarize via your unstoppable robots?
• tshaddox 2y ago
  > The long term issue that many people don't seem willing to mention out loud is that we will eventually make humanity obsolete and robots will literally take control. This is literally the AI doomer position which is very widespread and advocated clearly and explicitly.
• throwhn2204 2y ago
  Every technology that can be weaponized has been weaponized. Unless we recognize and fix the problems associated with the human condition, we are heading towards a dangerous future.
  • seanw444 2y ago
    The human condition is the human condition, in that for as long as we are human, it will never be any other way. This is why our demise is inevitable, and likely to be by our own hand. Greed will always exist, and human ingenuity will never be stopped. The result is an asymptotic approach to certain doom. This is why I think the "Great Filter" explanation for the Fermi Paradox is the most likely.
• wslh 2y ago
  > The only real solution to the threat of militarization of AI and robotics might be to create a more unified global government and culture. The first challenge is for people to see that as a worthy goal. That’s naive. Even if a global government were possible, cypherpunks, "AI terrorists" or other actors (many HN users) would easily find ways to bypass those controls. It's unrealistic to assume that centralization could prevent exploitation of AI.
  • 00_hum 2y ago
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• gnramires 2y ago
  We don't need a very strong world government to meet our challenges, I think, including climate change and AI. We can do it with agreements and accords. (I also don't think a world government might be as dystopic as people imply or fear, for the record, because it can follow democratic principles just as we currently have; and its effects might not be as great as we already have today with the globalizing effects of internet and specially social media. Just given the resistence against the concept, I think the tools we already have and simply coordinating as countries, if may be less effective, probably can work) The key thing about them is that accords must be enforceable and enforced. There must be consequences for violating them (with escalating gravity, sanctions and measures). I actually think disarmament of governments worldwide should be one of those goals I believe (and I think very urgent). We know that war is essentially the worst possible form of diplomacy or two nations resolving a disagreement (when it isn't just a power grab or senseless destruction). We shouldn't have that option readily available at all. As for the danger that one nation rapidly industrializes and acquires weapons, against defenseless opponents, we would have very stringent and effective vigilance at all countries industrial capacity against production of significant quantities of military weapons. We can actually extinguish war forever like we extinguish diseases, I really believe. For anyone thinking about existential risks to humanity, I think this should be near the top of the list beside climate change I think. Of course, there will still be conflicts coming from a myriad of reasons, but those conflicts can be managed and resolved in other ways. And practicing mutual agreements and conflict resolution will be as important as ever -- simply military disarming doesn't magically resolve all issues. For lasting stability worldwide promotion of fundamental human values and rights as well as peace is extremely important (a wise population will not wage war on fellow humans). I think there could be some international work in this area as well. The UN is usually great at it too.
• unraveller 2y ago
  Humanity is not a work task that can be obsoleted. It's hard to imagine total human versatility overlap by AI is possible let alone around the corner. The Globotax for UBIbucks is just Inescapable Socialism by another name, today it solves imagined ills from murky AI predictions, yesterday it solved automation. There is more innovative work to be done and that needs an accurate human feedback loop.
• hammyhavoc 2y ago
  Why will robots eventually "literally take control"? I'm anti-AI at the best of times, but this is alarmist at best, and dishonest at worst—especially to suggest a single government as a solution. Name a single existing government that you would want running the world. Fuck that.