7 ms·

> The future of human content is being as human as possible. AI isn't going to replace that in our lifetimes, if ever. I have been working on machine learning

> The future of human content is being as human as possible. AI isn't going to replace that in our lifetimes, if ever. I have been working on machine learning algorithms for a long time. Since the time when telling someone I worked on AI was a conversation killer, even with technical people. AI's are going to understand people better than people understand people. That could be in five years, maybe - many things are happening faster than expected. Or in 15 years. But that might be the outside range. There is something about human psychology where the faster something changes, the less we are aware of the rate of change. We don't review the steps and their increasing rate that happened before we cared about that tech. We just accept the new thing that finally gets our attention like it was a one off event, instead of an accelerating compounding flood, and imagine it isn't really going to change much soon. -- I know this isn't a popular view. But what is happening is on the order of the transition to the first multi-cellular creatures, or the first bodies with specialized cells, the first nervous systems, the first brains, the first creatures to use language. Far bigger than advances such as writing or even the Internet. This is a transition to a completely new mode for the substrate of life and intelligence. The lack of dependency on any particular substrate. "We", the new generation of things we are building, will have none of the limits and inefficiencies of our ancient slow DNA-style life. Or our stark physical bottlenecks on action, communication, or scaling, and our inability to understand or directly edit our own internal traits. We will have to face many challenges in the coming years. It can't hurt to mindfully face them earlier than later.

keiferski 2y ago
Sorry but I don’t think this is much evidence of anything. The point at which an AI can imitate a live-streaming human being is decades away. By then, we will almost certainly have developed a “real Human ID” system that verifies one’s humanity. I wrote about this more here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42154928 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42154928 The idea that AI is just going to eat all human creative activity because technology accelerates quickly is not a real argument, nor does it stand up to any serious projections of the future.
- mattmaroon 2y ago
  How do you know it is decades away? A few years ago did you think LLMs would be where they are today? Is it possible you’re wrong?
  - keiferski 2y ago
    Of course it’s possible I’m wrong. But if we make any sort of projection based on current developments, it would certainly seem that live-streaming AI indistinguishable from a human being is vastly beyond the capabilities of anything out today, and given current expenses and development times, seems to be at least a few decades in the future. To me that is an optimistic assumption, especially assuming that live presence or video quality will continue to improve as well (making it harder to fake.) If you have a projection that says otherwise, I’d be glad to hear it. But if you don’t, then this idea is merely science fiction. Making predictions about the future that are based on current accelerating developments are how you get people in the 1930s predicting flying cars by 2000.
    - nuancebydefault 2y ago
      For many people current AI created videos are already confused for real videos and vice versa. When you follow up on technology by browsing HN, and see the latest advancements, its easier to see or hear the differences, because you know at what to look. If I see on tv some badly encoded video, especially in fog or water surfaces, it immediately stands out, because I was working with video decoding during the time it was of much less quality. Most people will not notice.
    - jodrellblank 2y ago
      You imply that the technological development will stop, but that's not what happened to flying cars - they do and could exist. Since the 1930s the technology didn't stop developing - aircraft went jet powered, supersonic, to the edge of space, huge, light, heavy, more efficient, more affordable, safer; cars went faster, more reliable, safer, more efficient, bigger, smaller, more capable, self driving; fuel got more pure, engines got more power per kilogram, computer aided design and modelling of airflow and stress patterns was developed, stronger lighter materials were developed; flying cars have been built: Klein Vision AirCar, 2022: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5hbFl3nhAD0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5hbFl3nhAD0 Predecesor, the AeroMobil from 2014, from prototypes starting 1990: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AeroMobil_s.r.o._AeroMobil https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AeroMobil_s.r.o._AeroMobil The Terrafugia Transition 'roadable aircraft' from 2009: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terrafugia_Transition https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terrafugia_Transition Moller SkyCar, of course, which never got to free flight, but was built and could fly. The problems are regulatory, cost, safety, massive amounts of human skill needed, the infrastructure needed, the lack of demand, etc. A Cessna 182 weighs <900 Kg, a Toyota Corolla weighs >1400 Kg and has no wings, no tail. But if we collectively wanted VTOL flying cars enough to put a SpaceX level of talent and money at them, and were willing to pay more, work harder, for less comfort and more maintenance, we could have them. Bit like Hyperloop; a low-pressure tunnel with carriages rushing through it is not impossible, but it's got more failure modes, more cost, more design difficulties and almost no benefits over high speed train and maglev.
unraveller 2y ago
People are judging AI by what abusers of AI put out there for lols and what they themselves can wring out of it. They haven't yet seen what a bunch of AAA professionals with nothing to lose can build and align.
- segasaturn 2y ago
  Billions of dollars and all of Silicon Valley's focus has been spent over the last 2 years trying to get AI to work, the "AAA professionals" are already working on AI and I still have yet to see an AI generated product that's interesting or compelling.
  - hnthrowaway6543 2y ago
    [flagged]
    - artistic_regard 2y ago
      [dead]
    - lmm 2y ago
      Do you think the people who make TikTok or Clash of Clans (or, hell, the Daily Mail) use their own products?
      - hnthrowaway6543 2y ago
        uh yes? Was this supposed to be some clever "gotcha!" that ended up being really stupid? Might want to run your clever comments by ChatGPT before you post next time chief
        lmm 2y ago
        > uh yes? Well, you're wrong, I know some of them.
tdeck 2y ago
This makes me think about attention span. Scenes in movies, sound bites, everything has been getting shorter over the decades. I know mine has gotten shorter, because I now watch highly edited and produced videos at 2x speed. Sometimes when I watch at 1x speed I find myself thinking "why does this person speak so slowly?" Algorithmic content is likely to be even more densely packed with stimuli. At some point, will we find ourselves unable to attend to content produced by a human being because algorithmic content has wrecked our attention span?
topato 2y ago
I find your ideas intreguing, and I wish to subscribe to your newsletter
arolihas 2y ago
What machine learning algorithm have you worked on that leads you to believe they are capable of having a rich internal cognitive representation anywhere close to any sentient conscious animal?
- Lerc 2y ago
  If you pick any well performing AI architecture, what would lead you to believe that they are not capable of having a rich internal cognitive representation? The Transformer, well... transforms, at each layer to produce a different representation of the context. What is this but an internal representation? One cannot assess whether that is rich or cognitive without some agreement of what those terms might mean. LLMs can seemingly convert a variety of languages into an internal representation that encompasses the gist of any of them. This would at least provide a decent argument that the internal representation is 'rich' As for cognitive? What assessment would you have in mind that would clearly disqualify something as a non-cognitive entity? I think most people working in this field who are confident feel that they can extend what they know now to make something that looks like a duck, walks like a duck, and quacks like a duck. If that is achieved, on what basis does anyone have to say "But it's not really a duck"? I'm ok with people saying AI will be never able to perform that well because it doesn't have X, as long as they accept that if it does, one day, perform that well they accept that either X is present, or that X is not relevant.
  - keiferski 2y ago
    This is basically the Turing test, and like the Turing test it undervalues other elements which can allow for differentiation between “real” and “fake” things. For example - if we can determine that a thing that looks, walks, and quacks like a duck, but doesn’t have the biological heritage markers (that we can easily determine) then it won’t be treated as equivalent to a duck. The social desire to differentiate between real and fake exists and is easily implementable. In other words: if AIs/robots ever become so advanced that they look, walk, and talk like people, I expect there to be a system which easily determines if the subject has a biological origin or not. This is way down the line, but in a closer future this will probably just look like verifying someone’s real world identity as a part of the social media account creation process. The alternative is that billion dollar corporations like Meta or YouTube just let their platforms become overrun with AI slop. I don’t expect them to sit on their hands and do nothing.
nyokodo 2y ago
> AI's are going to understand people better than people understand people. Maybe, but very little of the “data” that humans use to build their understanding of humans is recorded and available. If it were it’s not obvious it would be economical to train on. If it were economical it’s not obvious that current techniques would actually work that well and by definition no future techniques are known to work yet. I’m not inclined to say it will never happen but there are a few reasons to predict it’ll prove to be significantly harder to build AI that gets out of the uncanny valley that it’s currently in.
- Nevermark 2y ago
  You are describing the current state of AI as if it were a stable point. AI today is far ahead of two years ago. Every year for many years before that, deep learning models broke benchmark after benchmark before that breakout. There is no indication of any slow down. The complete reverse - we are seeing dramatic acceleration of an already fast moving field. Both research and resources are pouring into major improvements in multi-modal learning and learning via other means than human data. Such as reinforcement learning, competitive learning, interacting with systems they need to understand via simulated environments and directly.
  - nyokodo 2y ago
    > You are describing the current state of AI as if it were a stable point. No I’m not, I’m just not assuming that the S curve doesn’t exist. There’s no guarantee that research results in X orders of magnitude of improvement that will result in AI being better at understanding humanity than humans in the 5 to 15 year timeframe. There’s no guarantee that compute will continue to consistently grow in volume and lower in price, and a few geopolitical reasons why it might become rarer and prohibitively expensive for some time. There’s no reason to assume capital will stay as available to further both AI techniques and compute resources should there be any sign that investments might not eventually pay off. There’s also no reason to assume the global regulatory environment will remain amenable to rapid AI development. Maybe the industry threads all these needles, but there’s good reason to predict it’ll prove doesn’t.
  - 2y ago
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
burnished 2y ago
Yes, this seems possible. I only wonder if it is too fragile to be self perpetuating. But we're here after all, and this place used to be just a wet rock.

keiferski 2y ago

Sorry but I don’t think this is much evidence of anything. The point at which an AI can imitate a live-streaming human being is decades away. By then, we will almost certainly have developed a “real Human ID” system that verifies one’s humanity. I wrote about this more here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42154928 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42154928 The idea that AI is just going to eat all human creative activity because technology accelerates quickly is not a real argument, nor does it stand up to any serious projections of the future.

mattmaroon 2y ago
How do you know it is decades away? A few years ago did you think LLMs would be where they are today? Is it possible you’re wrong?
- keiferski 2y ago
  Of course it’s possible I’m wrong. But if we make any sort of projection based on current developments, it would certainly seem that live-streaming AI indistinguishable from a human being is vastly beyond the capabilities of anything out today, and given current expenses and development times, seems to be at least a few decades in the future. To me that is an optimistic assumption, especially assuming that live presence or video quality will continue to improve as well (making it harder to fake.) If you have a projection that says otherwise, I’d be glad to hear it. But if you don’t, then this idea is merely science fiction. Making predictions about the future that are based on current accelerating developments are how you get people in the 1930s predicting flying cars by 2000.
  - nuancebydefault 2y ago
    For many people current AI created videos are already confused for real videos and vice versa. When you follow up on technology by browsing HN, and see the latest advancements, its easier to see or hear the differences, because you know at what to look. If I see on tv some badly encoded video, especially in fog or water surfaces, it immediately stands out, because I was working with video decoding during the time it was of much less quality. Most people will not notice.
  - jodrellblank 2y ago
    You imply that the technological development will stop, but that's not what happened to flying cars - they do and could exist. Since the 1930s the technology didn't stop developing - aircraft went jet powered, supersonic, to the edge of space, huge, light, heavy, more efficient, more affordable, safer; cars went faster, more reliable, safer, more efficient, bigger, smaller, more capable, self driving; fuel got more pure, engines got more power per kilogram, computer aided design and modelling of airflow and stress patterns was developed, stronger lighter materials were developed; flying cars have been built: Klein Vision AirCar, 2022: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5hbFl3nhAD0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5hbFl3nhAD0 Predecesor, the AeroMobil from 2014, from prototypes starting 1990: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AeroMobil_s.r.o._AeroMobil https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AeroMobil_s.r.o._AeroMobil The Terrafugia Transition 'roadable aircraft' from 2009: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terrafugia_Transition https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terrafugia_Transition Moller SkyCar, of course, which never got to free flight, but was built and could fly. The problems are regulatory, cost, safety, massive amounts of human skill needed, the infrastructure needed, the lack of demand, etc. A Cessna 182 weighs <900 Kg, a Toyota Corolla weighs >1400 Kg and has no wings, no tail. But if we collectively wanted VTOL flying cars enough to put a SpaceX level of talent and money at them, and were willing to pay more, work harder, for less comfort and more maintenance, we could have them. Bit like Hyperloop; a low-pressure tunnel with carriages rushing through it is not impossible, but it's got more failure modes, more cost, more design difficulties and almost no benefits over high speed train and maglev.

unraveller 2y ago

People are judging AI by what abusers of AI put out there for lols and what they themselves can wring out of it. They haven't yet seen what a bunch of AAA professionals with nothing to lose can build and align.

segasaturn 2y ago
Billions of dollars and all of Silicon Valley's focus has been spent over the last 2 years trying to get AI to work, the "AAA professionals" are already working on AI and I still have yet to see an AI generated product that's interesting or compelling.
- hnthrowaway6543 2y ago
  [flagged]
  - artistic_regard 2y ago
    [dead]
  - lmm 2y ago
    Do you think the people who make TikTok or Clash of Clans (or, hell, the Daily Mail) use their own products?
    - hnthrowaway6543 2y ago
      uh yes? Was this supposed to be some clever "gotcha!" that ended up being really stupid? Might want to run your clever comments by ChatGPT before you post next time chief
      - lmm 2y ago
        > uh yes? Well, you're wrong, I know some of them.

tdeck 2y ago

This makes me think about attention span. Scenes in movies, sound bites, everything has been getting shorter over the decades. I know mine has gotten shorter, because I now watch highly edited and produced videos at 2x speed. Sometimes when I watch at 1x speed I find myself thinking "why does this person speak so slowly?" Algorithmic content is likely to be even more densely packed with stimuli. At some point, will we find ourselves unable to attend to content produced by a human being because algorithmic content has wrecked our attention span?

topato 2y ago

I find your ideas intreguing, and I wish to subscribe to your newsletter

arolihas 2y ago

What machine learning algorithm have you worked on that leads you to believe they are capable of having a rich internal cognitive representation anywhere close to any sentient conscious animal?

Lerc 2y ago
If you pick any well performing AI architecture, what would lead you to believe that they are not capable of having a rich internal cognitive representation? The Transformer, well... transforms, at each layer to produce a different representation of the context. What is this but an internal representation? One cannot assess whether that is rich or cognitive without some agreement of what those terms might mean. LLMs can seemingly convert a variety of languages into an internal representation that encompasses the gist of any of them. This would at least provide a decent argument that the internal representation is 'rich' As for cognitive? What assessment would you have in mind that would clearly disqualify something as a non-cognitive entity? I think most people working in this field who are confident feel that they can extend what they know now to make something that looks like a duck, walks like a duck, and quacks like a duck. If that is achieved, on what basis does anyone have to say "But it's not really a duck"? I'm ok with people saying AI will be never able to perform that well because it doesn't have X, as long as they accept that if it does, one day, perform that well they accept that either X is present, or that X is not relevant.
- keiferski 2y ago
  This is basically the Turing test, and like the Turing test it undervalues other elements which can allow for differentiation between “real” and “fake” things. For example - if we can determine that a thing that looks, walks, and quacks like a duck, but doesn’t have the biological heritage markers (that we can easily determine) then it won’t be treated as equivalent to a duck. The social desire to differentiate between real and fake exists and is easily implementable. In other words: if AIs/robots ever become so advanced that they look, walk, and talk like people, I expect there to be a system which easily determines if the subject has a biological origin or not. This is way down the line, but in a closer future this will probably just look like verifying someone’s real world identity as a part of the social media account creation process. The alternative is that billion dollar corporations like Meta or YouTube just let their platforms become overrun with AI slop. I don’t expect them to sit on their hands and do nothing.

nyokodo 2y ago

> AI's are going to understand people better than people understand people. Maybe, but very little of the “data” that humans use to build their understanding of humans is recorded and available. If it were it’s not obvious it would be economical to train on. If it were economical it’s not obvious that current techniques would actually work that well and by definition no future techniques are known to work yet. I’m not inclined to say it will never happen but there are a few reasons to predict it’ll prove to be significantly harder to build AI that gets out of the uncanny valley that it’s currently in.

Nevermark 2y ago
You are describing the current state of AI as if it were a stable point. AI today is far ahead of two years ago. Every year for many years before that, deep learning models broke benchmark after benchmark before that breakout. There is no indication of any slow down. The complete reverse - we are seeing dramatic acceleration of an already fast moving field. Both research and resources are pouring into major improvements in multi-modal learning and learning via other means than human data. Such as reinforcement learning, competitive learning, interacting with systems they need to understand via simulated environments and directly.
- nyokodo 2y ago
  > You are describing the current state of AI as if it were a stable point. No I’m not, I’m just not assuming that the S curve doesn’t exist. There’s no guarantee that research results in X orders of magnitude of improvement that will result in AI being better at understanding humanity than humans in the 5 to 15 year timeframe. There’s no guarantee that compute will continue to consistently grow in volume and lower in price, and a few geopolitical reasons why it might become rarer and prohibitively expensive for some time. There’s no reason to assume capital will stay as available to further both AI techniques and compute resources should there be any sign that investments might not eventually pay off. There’s also no reason to assume the global regulatory environment will remain amenable to rapid AI development. Maybe the industry threads all these needles, but there’s good reason to predict it’ll prove doesn’t.
- 2y ago

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

burnished 2y ago

Yes, this seems possible. I only wonder if it is too fragile to be self perpetuating. But we're here after all, and this place used to be just a wet rock.