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Ask HN: Have you altered your life plans due to coming AI developments?

The heads of the major AI labs (Dario Amodei, Sam Altman) including multiple now Nobel laureates (Demis Hassabis, Geoffrey Hinton), and many others have all echoed a similar sentiment over the past year in their public communications: 1. AGI is coming 2. It will completely change society, the meaning of work and the structure of our economy, perhaps making human labor irrelevant, if it does not destroy us 3. It likely will come in 2-10 years Hinton himself said that he plans to "get his affairs in order", as he believes humanity only has 4 years left. If you agree with them, you would have to concede that any plans you make with a time horizon longer than that window until AGI will be completely upended and perhaps made irrelevant. If so, have you considered this and has it altered any of your plans for the near future? If you have not, is it because you do not believe in one or more of the 3 points above, or is it because you feel since nobody really knows how it will go down, it is pointless to worry, fret or change things?

chrsw 2y ago
I don't think the current systems we have are on the path to AGI, whatever that is. So it's hard to say it will be here soon. And when it does come I don't think it will transform society overnight. It will probably take many decades.
- atleastoptimal 2y ago
  So you're in the "slow timelines, slow takeoff" camp. By "current systems" do you mean LLM's based on transformers? What about them do you believe would make a sub-decade path to AGI infeasible?
  - chrsw 2y ago
    By "current systems" I mean any technology I'm aware of. LLMs and transformers are trained on the data we feed them. And they can only do a limited number of things with the data. In certain domains that's enough to be impressive but I'd hardly call that a general learning architecture like a human being or even like a fruit fly. Living systems are constantly learning, constantly updating, constantly adapting, even before cognition and consciousness as we know it evolved.
somid3 2y ago
Now I don’t mind marrying someone who might be a bit messy because by the time we have kids we will have humanoids to clean the house
AnimalMuppet 2y ago
If "humanity only has 4 years left", then what's the point in "getting your affairs in order"? Personally, I don't believe 3. I'm not sure I believe 1, either.
- gregjor 2y ago
  What’s the point? Next season of Doomsday Preppers.
gregjor 2y ago
No. I don’t plan for the future in any case because I can’t predict what might happen. And I certainly don’t make decisions because of what someone else predicts. Do you think people should alter their life plans because of predictions around climate change? The second coming of Jesus? I prefer to deal with the reality of now, not worry much about what could happen, and keep myself adaptable.
- atleastoptimal 2y ago
  >Do you think people should alter their life plans because of predictions around climate change? Such should reasonably affect plans based on purchasing property in areas prone to negative effects due to climate change, like hazardous weather or water scarcity. >The second coming of Jesus? That is different than AGI timelines since there is no scientific or independently corroborated evidence pointing to this being a reasonable probability.
  - AnimalMuppet 2y ago
    I'd like to see your scientific evidence that AGI is a reasonable probability.
    - atleastoptimal 2y ago
      I hope you'd at least concede without needing bulletproof evidence that it's a more reasonable possibility than the second coming of Jesus. The best evidence I can offer is the continued saturation of benchmarks, the continued effectiveness of scaling laws with respect to improvements in general reasoning, the massive improvements in algorithmic capabilities which lead to better use of existing models and inference-time compute, and the overall lack of fundamental blockers articulated that differentiate AI and human reasoning that can't be fixed via these developments. Every LLM of a given size is invariably at or near the state of the art with respect to all benchmarks available to test general reasoning. GPT-4 was the first model in the >1T parameter range, and every model that emerged around that level (Claude 3 Opus, Gemini Ultra) reached that level of performance in MMLU, MATH, etc. All subsequent improvements in models have been distillations and algorithmic improvements, synthetic data, etc. but so far a ~10T model has not been attempted, though it is likely around the scale for the upcoming GPT-5, Claude 4 and Gemini 2 models. Sources: https://www.dwarkeshpatel.com/p/will-scaling-work https://www.dwarkeshpatel.com/p/will-scaling-work https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/arPCiWYdqNCaE7AQv/superintelligent-ai-is-possible-in-the-2020s https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/arPCiWYdqNCaE7AQv/superintel... https://res.cloudinary.com/lesswrong-2-0/image/upload/f_auto,q_auto/v1/mirroredImages/61d936fba2567df92a62dc70fe8d1fc9b381078b91445fd50d8dea228ced3685/nzajcospcpkcert7cuup https://res.cloudinary.com/lesswrong-2-0/image/upload/f_auto...
mindcrime 2y ago
> If you have not, is it because you do not believe in one or more of the 3 points above, or is it because you feel since nobody really knows how it will go down, it is pointless to worry, fret or change things? I've said it before, and I'll say it again - I am not particularly worried about "evil AI" scenarios ala The Terminator or The Matrix. OTOH, I think there is a real, but hard to quantify, chance of significant job displacement at a scale that hasn't been seen before, and the emergence of even greater disparity in wealth/power/quality-of-life between the "haves" and "have nots". Or to put it another way, I could see a "cyberpunk dystopia" of sorts emerging. So am I "altering my life plans" in response to that? Not in major ways. And to the extent that I have, I'm not honestly sure I want to talk about it here. I'll just say that I have started focusing more on saving money than what I used to, and pick up another couple of boxes of ammo every now and then. But still, no, for the most part I haven't made any big changes.
kstenerud 2y ago
Point 1 is false, and therefore points 2 and 3 are irrelevant. The energy requirements of actual AGI (not the already energy intensive toys we're playing with now) are simply too huge for us to be able to produce, let alone sustain.

chrsw 2y ago

I don't think the current systems we have are on the path to AGI, whatever that is. So it's hard to say it will be here soon. And when it does come I don't think it will transform society overnight. It will probably take many decades.

atleastoptimal 2y ago
So you're in the "slow timelines, slow takeoff" camp. By "current systems" do you mean LLM's based on transformers? What about them do you believe would make a sub-decade path to AGI infeasible?
- chrsw 2y ago
  By "current systems" I mean any technology I'm aware of. LLMs and transformers are trained on the data we feed them. And they can only do a limited number of things with the data. In certain domains that's enough to be impressive but I'd hardly call that a general learning architecture like a human being or even like a fruit fly. Living systems are constantly learning, constantly updating, constantly adapting, even before cognition and consciousness as we know it evolved.

somid3 2y ago

Now I don’t mind marrying someone who might be a bit messy because by the time we have kids we will have humanoids to clean the house

AnimalMuppet 2y ago

If "humanity only has 4 years left", then what's the point in "getting your affairs in order"? Personally, I don't believe 3. I'm not sure I believe 1, either.

gregjor 2y ago
What’s the point? Next season of Doomsday Preppers.

gregjor 2y ago

No. I don’t plan for the future in any case because I can’t predict what might happen. And I certainly don’t make decisions because of what someone else predicts. Do you think people should alter their life plans because of predictions around climate change? The second coming of Jesus? I prefer to deal with the reality of now, not worry much about what could happen, and keep myself adaptable.

atleastoptimal 2y ago
>Do you think people should alter their life plans because of predictions around climate change? Such should reasonably affect plans based on purchasing property in areas prone to negative effects due to climate change, like hazardous weather or water scarcity. >The second coming of Jesus? That is different than AGI timelines since there is no scientific or independently corroborated evidence pointing to this being a reasonable probability.
- AnimalMuppet 2y ago
  I'd like to see your scientific evidence that AGI is a reasonable probability.
  - atleastoptimal 2y ago
    I hope you'd at least concede without needing bulletproof evidence that it's a more reasonable possibility than the second coming of Jesus. The best evidence I can offer is the continued saturation of benchmarks, the continued effectiveness of scaling laws with respect to improvements in general reasoning, the massive improvements in algorithmic capabilities which lead to better use of existing models and inference-time compute, and the overall lack of fundamental blockers articulated that differentiate AI and human reasoning that can't be fixed via these developments. Every LLM of a given size is invariably at or near the state of the art with respect to all benchmarks available to test general reasoning. GPT-4 was the first model in the >1T parameter range, and every model that emerged around that level (Claude 3 Opus, Gemini Ultra) reached that level of performance in MMLU, MATH, etc. All subsequent improvements in models have been distillations and algorithmic improvements, synthetic data, etc. but so far a ~10T model has not been attempted, though it is likely around the scale for the upcoming GPT-5, Claude 4 and Gemini 2 models. Sources: https://www.dwarkeshpatel.com/p/will-scaling-work https://www.dwarkeshpatel.com/p/will-scaling-work https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/arPCiWYdqNCaE7AQv/superintelligent-ai-is-possible-in-the-2020s https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/arPCiWYdqNCaE7AQv/superintel... https://res.cloudinary.com/lesswrong-2-0/image/upload/f_auto,q_auto/v1/mirroredImages/61d936fba2567df92a62dc70fe8d1fc9b381078b91445fd50d8dea228ced3685/nzajcospcpkcert7cuup https://res.cloudinary.com/lesswrong-2-0/image/upload/f_auto...

mindcrime 2y ago

> If you have not, is it because you do not believe in one or more of the 3 points above, or is it because you feel since nobody really knows how it will go down, it is pointless to worry, fret or change things? I've said it before, and I'll say it again - I am not particularly worried about "evil AI" scenarios ala The Terminator or The Matrix. OTOH, I think there is a real, but hard to quantify, chance of significant job displacement at a scale that hasn't been seen before, and the emergence of even greater disparity in wealth/power/quality-of-life between the "haves" and "have nots". Or to put it another way, I could see a "cyberpunk dystopia" of sorts emerging. So am I "altering my life plans" in response to that? Not in major ways. And to the extent that I have, I'm not honestly sure I want to talk about it here. I'll just say that I have started focusing more on saving money than what I used to, and pick up another couple of boxes of ammo every now and then. But still, no, for the most part I haven't made any big changes.

kstenerud 2y ago

Point 1 is false, and therefore points 2 and 3 are irrelevant. The energy requirements of actual AGI (not the already energy intensive toys we're playing with now) are simply too huge for us to be able to produce, let alone sustain.