6 ms·

It sucks that I would love to be excited about this... but I mostly feel anxiety and sadness.

xvector 2y ago
Humanity is about to enter an even steeper hockey stick growth curve. Progressing along the Kardashev scale feels all but inevitable. We will live to see Longevity Escape Velocity. I'm fucking pumped and feel thrilled and excited and proud of our species. Sure, there will be growing pains, friction, etc. Who cares? There always is with world-changing tech. Always.
- drcode 2y ago
  longevity for the AIs
- tokioyoyo 2y ago
  My job should be secure for a while, but why would an average person give a damn about humanity when they might lose their jobs and comfort levels? If I had kids, I would absolutely hate this uncertainty as well. “Oh well, I guess I can’t give the opportunities to my kid that I wanted, but at least humanity is growing rapidly!”
  - xvector 2y ago
    > when they might lose their jobs and comfort levels? Everyone has always worried about this for every major technology throughout history IMO AGI will dramatically increase comfort levels, lower your chance of dying, death, disease, etc.
    - tokioyoyo 2y ago
      Again, sure, but it doesn’t matter to an average person. That’s too much focus on the hypothetical future. People care about the current times. In the short term it will suck for a good chunk of people, and whether the sacrifice is worth it will depend on who you are. People aren’t really on uproar yet, because implementations haven’t affected the job market of the masses. Afterwards? Tume will show.
      - xvector 2y ago
        Yes, people tend to focus on current times. It's an incredibly shortsighted mentality that selfishly puts oneself over tens of billions of future lives being improved. https://pessimistsarchive.org https://pessimistsarchive.org
        tokioyoyo 2y ago
        Do you have any dependents, like parents or kids, by any chance? Imagine not being able to provide for them. Think how’d you feel in such circumstances. Like in general I totally agree with you, but I also understand why a person would care about their loved ones and themselves first.
        xvector 2y ago
        Yes, I have dependents, and them not dying is far more important to me than me being the one providing for them.
        realce 2y ago
        Eventually you draw the black ball, it is inevitable.
    - MVissers 2y ago
      We've almost wiped ourselves out in a nuclear war in the 70ies. If that would have happened, would it have been worth it? Probably not. Beyond immediate increase in inequality, which I agree could be worth it in the long run if this was the only problem, we're playing a dangerous game. The smartest and most capable species on the planet that dominates it for exactly this reason, is creating something even smarter and more capable than itself in the hope it'd help make its life easier. Hmm.
- croemer 2y ago
  Longevity Escape Velocity? Even if you had orders of magnitude more people working on medical research, it's not a given that prolonging life indefinitely is even possible.
  - soheil 2y ago
    Of course it's a given unless you want to invoke supernatural causes the human brain is a collection of cells with electro-chemical connections that if fully reconstructed either physically or virtually would necessarily need to represent the original person's brain. Therefore with sufficient intelligence it would be possible to engineer technology that would be able to do that reconstruction without even having to go to the atomic level, which we also have a near full understanding of already.
- lewhoo 2y ago
  > Sure, there will be growing pains, friction, etc. Who cares? That's right. Who cares about pains of others and why they even should are absolutely words to live by.
  - xvector 2y ago
    Yeah, with this mentality, we wouldn't have electricity today. You will never make transition to new technology painless, no matter what you do. (See: https://pessimistsarchive.org https://pessimistsarchive.org) What you are likely doing, though, is making many more future humans pay a cost in suffering. Every day we delay longevity escape velocity is another 150k people dead.
    - lewhoo 2y ago
      There was a time when in the name of progress people were killed for whatever resources they possessed, others were enslaved etc. and I was under the impression that the measure of our civilization is that we actually DID care and just how much. It seems to me that you are very eager to put up altars of sacrifice without even thinking that the problems you probably have in mind are perfectly solvable without them.
    - smokedetector1 2y ago
      By far the greatest issue facing humanity today is wealth inequality.
      - xvector 2y ago
        Nah, it's death. People objectively are doing better than ever despite wealth inequality. By all metrics - poverty, quality of life, homelessness, wealth, purchasing power. I'd rather just... not die. Not unless I want to. Same for my loved ones. That's far more important than "wealth inequality."
        esafak 2y ago
        You don't mind living in a country with a population of billions [sic], piled on top of one another? You don't mind living a country ruled by gerontocracy and probably autocracy, because that's what you'll eventually get without death to flush them out. Senescence is an adaptation.
- asdf6969 2y ago
  I would rather follow in the steps of uncle Ted than let AI turn me in a homeless person. It’s no consolation that my tent will have a nice view of a lunar colony
- objektif 2y ago
  You sound like a rich person.
- soheil 2y ago
  I agree, save invoking supernatural causes, the human brain is a collection of cells with electro-chemical connections that if fully reconstructed either physically or virtually would necessarily need to represent the original person's brain. Therefore with sufficient intelligence it would be possible to engineer technology that would be able to do that reconstruction without even having to go to the atomic level, which we also have a near full understanding of already.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- achierius 2y ago
  https://www.transformernews.ai/p/richard-ngo-openai-resign-safety https://www.transformernews.ai/p/richard-ngo-openai-resign-s... >But while the “making AGI” part of the mission seems well on track, it feels like I (and others) have gradually realized how much harder it is to contribute in a robustly positive way to the “succeeding” part of the mission, especially when it comes to preventing existential risks to humanity. Almost every single one of the people OpenAI had hired to work on AI safety have left the firm with similar messages. Perhaps you should at least consider the thinking of experts? You and I will likely not live to see much of anything past AGI.
- goatlover 2y ago
  > Sure, there will be growing pains, friction, etc. Who cares? The people experiencing the growing pains, friction, etc.
pupppet 2y ago
We’re enabling a huge swath of humanity being put out of work so a handful of billionaires can become trillionaires.
- abiraja 2y ago
  And also the solving of hundreds of diseases that ail us.
  - hartator 2y ago
    It doesn’t matter. Statists rather be poor, sick, and dead than risking trillionaires.
    - thrance 2y ago
      You should read about workers right in the gilded age, and see how good laissez-faire capitalism was. What do you think will happen when the only thing you can trade with the trillionaires, your labor, becomes worthless?
  - lewhoo 2y ago
    One of the biggest factors in risk of death right now is poverty. Also what is being chased right now is "human level on most economically viable tasks" because the automated research for solving physics etc. even now seems far-fetched.
  - thrance 2y ago
    You need to solve diseases and make the cure available. Millions die of curable diseases every year, simply because they are not deemed useful enough. What happens when your labor becomes worthless?
  - asdf6969 2y ago
    Why do you think you’ll be able to afford healthcare? The new medicine is for the AI owners
- distortionfield 2y ago
gom_jabbar 2y ago
Anxiety and sadness are actually mild emotional responses to the dissolution of human culture. Nick Land in 1992: "It is ceasing to be a matter of how we think about technics, if only because technics is increasingly thinking about itself. It might still be a few decades before artificial intelligences surpass the horizon of biological ones, but it is utterly superstitious to imagine that the human dominion of terrestrial culture is still marked out in centuries, let alone in some metaphysical perpetuity. The high road to thinking no longer passes through a deepening of human cognition, but rather through a becoming inhuman of cognition, a migration of cognition out into the emerging planetary technosentience reservoir, into 'dehumanized landscapes ... emptied spaces' where human culture will be dissolved. Just as the capitalist urbanization of labour abstracted it in a parallel escalation with technical machines, so will intelligence be transplanted into the purring data zones of new software worlds in order to be abstracted from an increasingly obsolescent anthropoid particularity, and thus to venture beyond modernity. Human brains are to thinking what mediaeval villages were to engineering: antechambers to experimentation, cramped and parochial places to be. [...] Life is being phased-out into something new, and if we think this can be stopped we are even more stupid than we seem." [0] Land is being ostracized for some of his provocations, but it seems pretty clear by now that we are in the Landian Accelerationism timeline. Engaging with his thought is crucial to understanding what is happening with AI, and what is still largely unseen, such as the autonomization of capital. [0] https://retrochronic.com/#circuitries https://retrochronic.com/#circuitries
- achierius 2y ago
  It's obvious that there are lines of flight (to take a Deleuzian tack, a la Land) away from the current political-economic assemblage. For example, a strategic nuclear exchange starting tomorrow (which can always happen -- technical errors, a rogue submarine, etc.) would almost certainly set back technological development enough that we'd have no shot at AI for the next few decades. I don't know whether you agree with him, but I think the fact that he ignores this fact is quite unserious, especially given the likely destabilizing effects sub-AGI AI will have on international politics.
Jcampuzano2 2y ago
Same, it's sad but I honestly hoped they never achieved these results and it came out that it wasn't possible or would take an insurmountable amount of resources but here we are ok the verge of making most humans useless when it comes to productivity. While there are those that are excited, the world is not prepared for the level of distress this could put on the average person without critical changes at a monumental level.
- JacksCracked 2y ago
  If you don't feel like the world needed grand scale changes at a societal level with all the global problems we're unable to solve, you haven't been paying attention. Income inequality, corporate greed, political apathy, global warming.
  - sensanaty 2y ago
    And you think the bullshit generators backed by the largest corporate entities in humanity who are, as we speak, causing all the issues you mention are somehow gonna solve any of this?
    - CamperBob2 2y ago
      If you still think this technology is a "bullshit generator," then it's safe to say you're also wrong about a great many other things in life. That would bug me, if I were you.
      - r-zip 2y ago
        They’re not wrong though. The frequency with which these things still just make shit up is astonishingly bad. Very dismissive of a legitimate criticism.
        CamperBob2 2y ago
        It's getting better, faster than you and I and the GP are. What else matters? You can't bullshit your way through this particular benchmark. Try it. And yes, they're wrong. The latest/greatest models "make shit up" perhaps 5-10% as frequently as were seeing just a couple of years ago. Only someone who has deliberately decided to stop paying attention could possibly argue otherwise.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
larve 2y ago
I have been diving deep into LLM coding over the last 3 years and regular encountered that feeling along the way. I still at times have a "wtf" moment where I need to take a break. However, I have been able to quell most of my anxieties around my job / the software profession in general (I've been at this professionally for 25+ years and software has been my dream job since I was 6). For one, I found AI coding to work best in a small team, where there is an understanding of what to build and how to build it, usually in close feedback loop with the designers / users. Throw the usual managerial company corporate nonsense on top and it doesn't really matter if you can instacreate a piece of software, if nobody cares for that piece of software and it's just there to put a checkmark on the Q3 OKR reports. Furthermore, there is a lot of software to be built out there, for people who can't afford it yet. A custom POS system for the local baker so that they don't have to interact with a computer. A game where squids eat algae for my nephews at christmas. A custom photo layout software for my dad who despairs at indesign. A plant watering system for my friend. A local government information website for older citizens. Not only can these be built at a fraction of the cost they were before, but they can be built in a manner where the people using the software are directly involved in creating it. Maybe they can get a 80% hacked version together if they are technically enclined. I can add the proper database backend and deployment infrastructure. Or I can sit with them and iterate on the app as we are talking. It is also almost free to create great documentation, in fact, LLM development is most productive when you turn up software engineering best practices up to 11. Furthermore, I found these tools incredible for actively furthering my own fundamental understanding of computer science and programming. I can now skip the stuff I don't care to learn (is it foobarBla(func, id) or foobar_bla(id, func)) and put the effort where I actually get a long-lived return. I have become really ambitious with the things I can tackle now, learning about all kinds of algorithms and operating system patterns and chemistry and physics etc... I can also create documents to help me with my learning. Local models are now entering the phase where they are getting to be really useful, definitely > gpt3.5 which I was able to use very productively already at the time. Writing (creating? manifesting? I don't really have a good word for what I do these days) software that makes me and real humans around me happy is extremely fulfilling, and has allevitated most of my angst around the technology.

Humanity is about to enter an even steeper hockey stick growth curve. Progressing along the Kardashev scale feels all but inevitable. We will live to see Longevity Escape Velocity. I'm fucking pumped and feel thrilled and excited and proud of our species. Sure, there will be growing pains, friction, etc. Who cares? There always is with world-changing tech. Always.

drcode 2y ago
longevity for the AIs
tokioyoyo 2y ago
My job should be secure for a while, but why would an average person give a damn about humanity when they might lose their jobs and comfort levels? If I had kids, I would absolutely hate this uncertainty as well. “Oh well, I guess I can’t give the opportunities to my kid that I wanted, but at least humanity is growing rapidly!”
- xvector 2y ago
  > when they might lose their jobs and comfort levels? Everyone has always worried about this for every major technology throughout history IMO AGI will dramatically increase comfort levels, lower your chance of dying, death, disease, etc.
  - tokioyoyo 2y ago
    Again, sure, but it doesn’t matter to an average person. That’s too much focus on the hypothetical future. People care about the current times. In the short term it will suck for a good chunk of people, and whether the sacrifice is worth it will depend on who you are. People aren’t really on uproar yet, because implementations haven’t affected the job market of the masses. Afterwards? Tume will show.
    - xvector 2y ago
      Yes, people tend to focus on current times. It's an incredibly shortsighted mentality that selfishly puts oneself over tens of billions of future lives being improved. https://pessimistsarchive.org https://pessimistsarchive.org
      - tokioyoyo 2y ago
        Do you have any dependents, like parents or kids, by any chance? Imagine not being able to provide for them. Think how’d you feel in such circumstances. Like in general I totally agree with you, but I also understand why a person would care about their loved ones and themselves first.
        xvector 2y ago
        Yes, I have dependents, and them not dying is far more important to me than me being the one providing for them.
      - realce 2y ago
        Eventually you draw the black ball, it is inevitable.
  - MVissers 2y ago
    We've almost wiped ourselves out in a nuclear war in the 70ies. If that would have happened, would it have been worth it? Probably not. Beyond immediate increase in inequality, which I agree could be worth it in the long run if this was the only problem, we're playing a dangerous game. The smartest and most capable species on the planet that dominates it for exactly this reason, is creating something even smarter and more capable than itself in the hope it'd help make its life easier. Hmm.
croemer 2y ago
Longevity Escape Velocity? Even if you had orders of magnitude more people working on medical research, it's not a given that prolonging life indefinitely is even possible.
- soheil 2y ago
  Of course it's a given unless you want to invoke supernatural causes the human brain is a collection of cells with electro-chemical connections that if fully reconstructed either physically or virtually would necessarily need to represent the original person's brain. Therefore with sufficient intelligence it would be possible to engineer technology that would be able to do that reconstruction without even having to go to the atomic level, which we also have a near full understanding of already.
lewhoo 2y ago
> Sure, there will be growing pains, friction, etc. Who cares? That's right. Who cares about pains of others and why they even should are absolutely words to live by.
- xvector 2y ago
  Yeah, with this mentality, we wouldn't have electricity today. You will never make transition to new technology painless, no matter what you do. (See: https://pessimistsarchive.org https://pessimistsarchive.org) What you are likely doing, though, is making many more future humans pay a cost in suffering. Every day we delay longevity escape velocity is another 150k people dead.
  - lewhoo 2y ago
    There was a time when in the name of progress people were killed for whatever resources they possessed, others were enslaved etc. and I was under the impression that the measure of our civilization is that we actually DID care and just how much. It seems to me that you are very eager to put up altars of sacrifice without even thinking that the problems you probably have in mind are perfectly solvable without them.
  - smokedetector1 2y ago
    By far the greatest issue facing humanity today is wealth inequality.
    - xvector 2y ago
      Nah, it's death. People objectively are doing better than ever despite wealth inequality. By all metrics - poverty, quality of life, homelessness, wealth, purchasing power. I'd rather just... not die. Not unless I want to. Same for my loved ones. That's far more important than "wealth inequality."
      - esafak 2y ago
        You don't mind living in a country with a population of billions [sic], piled on top of one another? You don't mind living a country ruled by gerontocracy and probably autocracy, because that's what you'll eventually get without death to flush them out. Senescence is an adaptation.
asdf6969 2y ago
I would rather follow in the steps of uncle Ted than let AI turn me in a homeless person. It’s no consolation that my tent will have a nice view of a lunar colony
objektif 2y ago
You sound like a rich person.
soheil 2y ago
I agree, save invoking supernatural causes, the human brain is a collection of cells with electro-chemical connections that if fully reconstructed either physically or virtually would necessarily need to represent the original person's brain. Therefore with sufficient intelligence it would be possible to engineer technology that would be able to do that reconstruction without even having to go to the atomic level, which we also have a near full understanding of already.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
achierius 2y ago
https://www.transformernews.ai/p/richard-ngo-openai-resign-safety https://www.transformernews.ai/p/richard-ngo-openai-resign-s... >But while the “making AGI” part of the mission seems well on track, it feels like I (and others) have gradually realized how much harder it is to contribute in a robustly positive way to the “succeeding” part of the mission, especially when it comes to preventing existential risks to humanity. Almost every single one of the people OpenAI had hired to work on AI safety have left the firm with similar messages. Perhaps you should at least consider the thinking of experts? You and I will likely not live to see much of anything past AGI.
goatlover 2y ago
> Sure, there will be growing pains, friction, etc. Who cares? The people experiencing the growing pains, friction, etc.

pupppet 2y ago

We’re enabling a huge swath of humanity being put out of work so a handful of billionaires can become trillionaires.

abiraja 2y ago
And also the solving of hundreds of diseases that ail us.
- hartator 2y ago
  It doesn’t matter. Statists rather be poor, sick, and dead than risking trillionaires.
  - thrance 2y ago
    You should read about workers right in the gilded age, and see how good laissez-faire capitalism was. What do you think will happen when the only thing you can trade with the trillionaires, your labor, becomes worthless?
- lewhoo 2y ago
  One of the biggest factors in risk of death right now is poverty. Also what is being chased right now is "human level on most economically viable tasks" because the automated research for solving physics etc. even now seems far-fetched.
- thrance 2y ago
  You need to solve diseases and make the cure available. Millions die of curable diseases every year, simply because they are not deemed useful enough. What happens when your labor becomes worthless?
- asdf6969 2y ago
  Why do you think you’ll be able to afford healthcare? The new medicine is for the AI owners
distortionfield 2y ago

gom_jabbar 2y ago

Anxiety and sadness are actually mild emotional responses to the dissolution of human culture. Nick Land in 1992: "It is ceasing to be a matter of how we think about technics, if only because technics is increasingly thinking about itself. It might still be a few decades before artificial intelligences surpass the horizon of biological ones, but it is utterly superstitious to imagine that the human dominion of terrestrial culture is still marked out in centuries, let alone in some metaphysical perpetuity. The high road to thinking no longer passes through a deepening of human cognition, but rather through a becoming inhuman of cognition, a migration of cognition out into the emerging planetary technosentience reservoir, into 'dehumanized landscapes ... emptied spaces' where human culture will be dissolved. Just as the capitalist urbanization of labour abstracted it in a parallel escalation with technical machines, so will intelligence be transplanted into the purring data zones of new software worlds in order to be abstracted from an increasingly obsolescent anthropoid particularity, and thus to venture beyond modernity. Human brains are to thinking what mediaeval villages were to engineering: antechambers to experimentation, cramped and parochial places to be. [...] Life is being phased-out into something new, and if we think this can be stopped we are even more stupid than we seem." [0] Land is being ostracized for some of his provocations, but it seems pretty clear by now that we are in the Landian Accelerationism timeline. Engaging with his thought is crucial to understanding what is happening with AI, and what is still largely unseen, such as the autonomization of capital. [0] https://retrochronic.com/#circuitries https://retrochronic.com/#circuitries

achierius 2y ago
It's obvious that there are lines of flight (to take a Deleuzian tack, a la Land) away from the current political-economic assemblage. For example, a strategic nuclear exchange starting tomorrow (which can always happen -- technical errors, a rogue submarine, etc.) would almost certainly set back technological development enough that we'd have no shot at AI for the next few decades. I don't know whether you agree with him, but I think the fact that he ignores this fact is quite unserious, especially given the likely destabilizing effects sub-AGI AI will have on international politics.

Jcampuzano2 2y ago

Same, it's sad but I honestly hoped they never achieved these results and it came out that it wasn't possible or would take an insurmountable amount of resources but here we are ok the verge of making most humans useless when it comes to productivity. While there are those that are excited, the world is not prepared for the level of distress this could put on the average person without critical changes at a monumental level.

JacksCracked 2y ago
If you don't feel like the world needed grand scale changes at a societal level with all the global problems we're unable to solve, you haven't been paying attention. Income inequality, corporate greed, political apathy, global warming.
- sensanaty 2y ago
  And you think the bullshit generators backed by the largest corporate entities in humanity who are, as we speak, causing all the issues you mention are somehow gonna solve any of this?
  - CamperBob2 2y ago
    If you still think this technology is a "bullshit generator," then it's safe to say you're also wrong about a great many other things in life. That would bug me, if I were you.
    - r-zip 2y ago
      They’re not wrong though. The frequency with which these things still just make shit up is astonishingly bad. Very dismissive of a legitimate criticism.
      - CamperBob2 2y ago
        It's getting better, faster than you and I and the GP are. What else matters? You can't bullshit your way through this particular benchmark. Try it. And yes, they're wrong. The latest/greatest models "make shit up" perhaps 5-10% as frequently as were seeing just a couple of years ago. Only someone who has deliberately decided to stop paying attention could possibly argue otherwise.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

larve 2y ago

I have been diving deep into LLM coding over the last 3 years and regular encountered that feeling along the way. I still at times have a "wtf" moment where I need to take a break. However, I have been able to quell most of my anxieties around my job / the software profession in general (I've been at this professionally for 25+ years and software has been my dream job since I was 6). For one, I found AI coding to work best in a small team, where there is an understanding of what to build and how to build it, usually in close feedback loop with the designers / users. Throw the usual managerial company corporate nonsense on top and it doesn't really matter if you can instacreate a piece of software, if nobody cares for that piece of software and it's just there to put a checkmark on the Q3 OKR reports. Furthermore, there is a lot of software to be built out there, for people who can't afford it yet. A custom POS system for the local baker so that they don't have to interact with a computer. A game where squids eat algae for my nephews at christmas. A custom photo layout software for my dad who despairs at indesign. A plant watering system for my friend. A local government information website for older citizens. Not only can these be built at a fraction of the cost they were before, but they can be built in a manner where the people using the software are directly involved in creating it. Maybe they can get a 80% hacked version together if they are technically enclined. I can add the proper database backend and deployment infrastructure. Or I can sit with them and iterate on the app as we are talking. It is also almost free to create great documentation, in fact, LLM development is most productive when you turn up software engineering best practices up to 11. Furthermore, I found these tools incredible for actively furthering my own fundamental understanding of computer science and programming. I can now skip the stuff I don't care to learn (is it foobarBla(func, id) or foobar_bla(id, func)) and put the effort where I actually get a long-lived return. I have become really ambitious with the things I can tackle now, learning about all kinds of algorithms and operating system patterns and chemistry and physics etc... I can also create documents to help me with my learning. Local models are now entering the phase where they are getting to be really useful, definitely > gpt3.5 which I was able to use very productively already at the time. Writing (creating? manifesting? I don't really have a good word for what I do these days) software that makes me and real humans around me happy is extremely fulfilling, and has allevitated most of my angst around the technology.