5 ms·

well the good news is all that stuff comes with an expiration date, after which we will know if this is our new destiny or yet another cloud of smoke. This is

well the good news is all that stuff comes with an expiration date, after which we will know if this is our new destiny or yet another cloud of smoke. This is a good reminder: > Prominent AI figures were among the thousands of people who signed an open letter in March 2023 to urge a six-month pause in the development of large language models (LLMs) so that humanity would have time to address the social consequences of the impending revolution In 2024, ChatGPT is a weird toy, my barber demands paper cash only (no bitcoin or credit cards or any of that phone nonsense, this is Silicon Valley), I have to stand in line at USPS and DMV with mindless paper-shuffling human robots, marveling at humiliating stupidity of manual jobs, robotaxis are still almost here, just around the corner, as always. Let's check again in a "coupe of thousand days" i guess!

namaria 2y ago
I've said this before, at the root of all these technological promises lies a perpetual motion machine. They're all selling the reversal of thermodynamics. Any system complex enough to be useful has to be embedded in an ever more complex system. The age of mobile phone internet rests on the shoulders of an immense and enormously complex supply chain. LLMs are capturing low entropy from data online and distilling it for you while producing a shitton of entropy on the backend. All the water and energy dissipated at data centers, all the supply chains involved in building GPUs at the rate we are building. There will be no magical moment when it's gonna yield more low entropy than what we put in on the other side as training data, electricity and clean water. When companies sell ideas like 'AGI' or 'self driving cars' they are essentially promising you can do away with the complexity surrounding a complex solution. They are promising they can deliver low entropy on a tap without paying for it in increased entropy elsewhere. It's physically impossible. You want human intelligence to do work, you need to deal with all the complexities of psychology, economics and politics. You want complex machines to do autonomous work, you need an army of people behind it. What AGI promises is, you can replace the army of people with another more complex machine. It's a big bald faced lie. You can't do away with the complexity. Someone will have to handle it.
- ben_w 2y ago
  > It's physically impossible Your brain is proof to the contrary. AGI means different things to everyone, but a human brain definitely counts as "general intelligence", that implemented in silicon is enough to get basically all the things promised by AGI: if that's done at the 20 watts per brain that biology manages, then all of humanity can be simulated within the power envelope of the USA electrical grid… three times over.
  - namaria 2y ago
    > a human brain definitely counts as "general intelligence", that implemented in silicon is enough to get basically all the things promised by AGI: if that's done at the 20 watts per brain that biology manages, then all of humanity can be simulated within the power envelope of the USA electrical grid… three times over. So far the only thing that has been proven is we can get low entropy from all the low entropy we've published on the internet. Will it get to a point where models can give us more low entropy than what is present in the training data? Categorically: no.
    - ben_w 2y ago
      You are using "entropy" in a way I do not recognise. Whatever you mean, our brains prove it's possible to have a system that uses 20 watts to demonstrate human-level intelligence.
      - namaria 2y ago
        Whatever you mean, it took 13 billion years and the whole universe as far as we can tell to create the 20 watt human intelligence brain. And it doesn't take 20 watt of energy to maintain humans, it takes a whole ecosystem capable of sustaining a human population. And for us to operate at our current level of information processing it takes a whole planetary civilization. So no you haven't proved anything by saying that a human brain consumes only 20 watts of energy. We spread an awful lot of entropy around that has to be kept away from our delicate biological and social systems. You're positing a way to create human intelligence-like in a bottle, that's the same as speculating about the shape of a reality where we have FTL travel or teleportation or whatever else you fancy. If we're talking about what current ML/AI can do, they can extract patterns from training data and than apply those patterns to other inputs. This can give us great automation, but it won't give us anything better than the training data, solve physics, global warming, poverty or give us human intelligence in a chip. Whatever quantity Q of entropy in the training data, the total output will be more Q all accounted for. That's true for humans and machines. No shape of possible AGI will give us any output with less Q than the combination of inputs had. The dream that a machine will solve all problems that humanity can't hinges on negating that, which goes against thermodynamics. As it stands, the planet cannot cope with all the entropy we're spreading around. It will eventually collapse civilization/the ecosystem, whatever buckles first, from the excess entropy. Because global warming, poverty, or ignorance is just entropy. Disorder. Things not being just so as we need them to be.
dagw 2y ago
barber demands paper cash only...I have to stand in line at USPS and DMV Surely this is just a case of the future not being evenly distributed. All of these 'problems' are already solved and the solution is implemented somewhere, just not where you happen to be.
- twelve40 2y ago
  You're probably right. I'll wait until it gets better distributed. It's just that personally, it's been hard to reconcile the grandiose talk with what's actually around me, that's all.
  - ben_w 2y ago
    The weird distribution was something I experienced when I last visited California in 2018 and couldn't use my card in most places, despite having been to Kenya a few years before that and seeing M-Pesa all over the place.
simonw 2y ago
“robotaxis are still almost here, just around the corner, as always” We have them in San Francisco now (and Los Angeles and Phoenix, and Austin soon.)
- aithrowawaycomm 2y ago
  By "robotaxi" I think they meant loosely "personal self driving car," not an automated taxi service. Waymo's overstated[1] success has let self-driving advocates do an especially pernicious bit of goalpost-shifting. I have been a self-driving skeptic since 2010, but if you had told me in 2010 that in 10-15 years we have robotaxis that were closely overseen by remote operators who can fill in the gaps I would have thought that was much more plausible than fully autonomous vehicles. And the human operators are truly critical, even more so than a skeptic like me assumed: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2024/09/03/technology/zoox-self-driving-cars-remote-control.html?unlocked_article_code=1.P04.amn5.5Q5BRfZBr4dA&smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare&sgrp=c-cb&ngrp=mnp https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2024/09/03/technology/zo... (sadly the interactive is necessary here and archives don't work, this is a gift link) I still think fully autonomous vehicles on standard roads is 50+ years out. The argument was always that ~95% of driving is addressable by deep learning but the remaining ~5% involves difficult problem-solving that cannot be solved by data because the data does not exist. It will require human oversight or an AI architecture which is capable of deterministic reasoning (not transformers), say at least at the level of a lizard. Since we have no clue how to make an AI as smart as a lizard, that 5% problem remains utterly intractable. [1] I have complained for years that Waymo's statisticians are comparing their cars to all human drivers when they should be comparing it to lawful human drivers whose vehicles are well-maintained. Tesla FSD proves that self-driving companies will respond to consumer demand for vehicles that speed and run red lights.
  - ben_w 2y ago
    While I broadly agree that AI metrics have a "lies, damn lies, and statistics" problem that makes it hard to even agree how competent they are, if someone says "robotaxi" then I have no reason to expect they mean anything more nor less than "a taxi with no human driver". I would be shocked if we're really 50 years away from that level of AI. 50 years is a long time in computing — late 70s computers were still using punched tape: https://commons.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:NSA_Punch_Verification_and_Print_system.jpg https://commons.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:NSA_Punch_Verifica...
iamsrp 2y ago
> robotaxis are still almost here, just around the corner, as always. You can walk to where they're waiting for you.

namaria 2y ago

I've said this before, at the root of all these technological promises lies a perpetual motion machine. They're all selling the reversal of thermodynamics. Any system complex enough to be useful has to be embedded in an ever more complex system. The age of mobile phone internet rests on the shoulders of an immense and enormously complex supply chain. LLMs are capturing low entropy from data online and distilling it for you while producing a shitton of entropy on the backend. All the water and energy dissipated at data centers, all the supply chains involved in building GPUs at the rate we are building. There will be no magical moment when it's gonna yield more low entropy than what we put in on the other side as training data, electricity and clean water. When companies sell ideas like 'AGI' or 'self driving cars' they are essentially promising you can do away with the complexity surrounding a complex solution. They are promising they can deliver low entropy on a tap without paying for it in increased entropy elsewhere. It's physically impossible. You want human intelligence to do work, you need to deal with all the complexities of psychology, economics and politics. You want complex machines to do autonomous work, you need an army of people behind it. What AGI promises is, you can replace the army of people with another more complex machine. It's a big bald faced lie. You can't do away with the complexity. Someone will have to handle it.

ben_w 2y ago
> It's physically impossible Your brain is proof to the contrary. AGI means different things to everyone, but a human brain definitely counts as "general intelligence", that implemented in silicon is enough to get basically all the things promised by AGI: if that's done at the 20 watts per brain that biology manages, then all of humanity can be simulated within the power envelope of the USA electrical grid… three times over.
- namaria 2y ago
  > a human brain definitely counts as "general intelligence", that implemented in silicon is enough to get basically all the things promised by AGI: if that's done at the 20 watts per brain that biology manages, then all of humanity can be simulated within the power envelope of the USA electrical grid… three times over. So far the only thing that has been proven is we can get low entropy from all the low entropy we've published on the internet. Will it get to a point where models can give us more low entropy than what is present in the training data? Categorically: no.
  - ben_w 2y ago
    You are using "entropy" in a way I do not recognise. Whatever you mean, our brains prove it's possible to have a system that uses 20 watts to demonstrate human-level intelligence.
    - namaria 2y ago
      Whatever you mean, it took 13 billion years and the whole universe as far as we can tell to create the 20 watt human intelligence brain. And it doesn't take 20 watt of energy to maintain humans, it takes a whole ecosystem capable of sustaining a human population. And for us to operate at our current level of information processing it takes a whole planetary civilization. So no you haven't proved anything by saying that a human brain consumes only 20 watts of energy. We spread an awful lot of entropy around that has to be kept away from our delicate biological and social systems. You're positing a way to create human intelligence-like in a bottle, that's the same as speculating about the shape of a reality where we have FTL travel or teleportation or whatever else you fancy. If we're talking about what current ML/AI can do, they can extract patterns from training data and than apply those patterns to other inputs. This can give us great automation, but it won't give us anything better than the training data, solve physics, global warming, poverty or give us human intelligence in a chip. Whatever quantity Q of entropy in the training data, the total output will be more Q all accounted for. That's true for humans and machines. No shape of possible AGI will give us any output with less Q than the combination of inputs had. The dream that a machine will solve all problems that humanity can't hinges on negating that, which goes against thermodynamics. As it stands, the planet cannot cope with all the entropy we're spreading around. It will eventually collapse civilization/the ecosystem, whatever buckles first, from the excess entropy. Because global warming, poverty, or ignorance is just entropy. Disorder. Things not being just so as we need them to be.

dagw 2y ago

barber demands paper cash only...I have to stand in line at USPS and DMV Surely this is just a case of the future not being evenly distributed. All of these 'problems' are already solved and the solution is implemented somewhere, just not where you happen to be.

twelve40 2y ago
You're probably right. I'll wait until it gets better distributed. It's just that personally, it's been hard to reconcile the grandiose talk with what's actually around me, that's all.
- ben_w 2y ago
  The weird distribution was something I experienced when I last visited California in 2018 and couldn't use my card in most places, despite having been to Kenya a few years before that and seeing M-Pesa all over the place.

simonw 2y ago

“robotaxis are still almost here, just around the corner, as always” We have them in San Francisco now (and Los Angeles and Phoenix, and Austin soon.)

aithrowawaycomm 2y ago
By "robotaxi" I think they meant loosely "personal self driving car," not an automated taxi service. Waymo's overstated[1] success has let self-driving advocates do an especially pernicious bit of goalpost-shifting. I have been a self-driving skeptic since 2010, but if you had told me in 2010 that in 10-15 years we have robotaxis that were closely overseen by remote operators who can fill in the gaps I would have thought that was much more plausible than fully autonomous vehicles. And the human operators are truly critical, even more so than a skeptic like me assumed: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2024/09/03/technology/zoox-self-driving-cars-remote-control.html?unlocked_article_code=1.P04.amn5.5Q5BRfZBr4dA&smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare&sgrp=c-cb&ngrp=mnp https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2024/09/03/technology/zo... (sadly the interactive is necessary here and archives don't work, this is a gift link) I still think fully autonomous vehicles on standard roads is 50+ years out. The argument was always that ~95% of driving is addressable by deep learning but the remaining ~5% involves difficult problem-solving that cannot be solved by data because the data does not exist. It will require human oversight or an AI architecture which is capable of deterministic reasoning (not transformers), say at least at the level of a lizard. Since we have no clue how to make an AI as smart as a lizard, that 5% problem remains utterly intractable. [1] I have complained for years that Waymo's statisticians are comparing their cars to all human drivers when they should be comparing it to lawful human drivers whose vehicles are well-maintained. Tesla FSD proves that self-driving companies will respond to consumer demand for vehicles that speed and run red lights.
- ben_w 2y ago
  While I broadly agree that AI metrics have a "lies, damn lies, and statistics" problem that makes it hard to even agree how competent they are, if someone says "robotaxi" then I have no reason to expect they mean anything more nor less than "a taxi with no human driver". I would be shocked if we're really 50 years away from that level of AI. 50 years is a long time in computing — late 70s computers were still using punched tape: https://commons.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:NSA_Punch_Verification_and_Print_system.jpg https://commons.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:NSA_Punch_Verifica...

iamsrp 2y ago

> robotaxis are still almost here, just around the corner, as always. You can walk to where they're waiting for you.