10 ms·
AGI is the Sisyphean task of our age. We’ll push this boulder up the mountain because we have to, even if it kills us.
by dkobia 2y ago
AGI is the Sisyphean task of our age. We’ll push this boulder up the mountain because we have to, even if it kills us.
- h0l0cube 2y agoThere's no doubt been progress on the way to AGI, but ultimately it's still a search problem, and one that will rely on human ingenuity at least until we solve it. LLMs are such a vast improvement in showing intelligent-like behavior that we've become tantalized by it. So now we're possibly focusing our search in the wrong place for the next innovation on the path to AGI. Otherwise, it's just a lack of compute, and then we just have to wait for the capacity to catch up.
- idiotsecant 2y agoAnd when we get it there, it kills us.
- hex3 2y ago[dead]
- anothernewdude 2y ago[flagged]
- falcor84 2y agoIt seems to me that given how AI is likely to continuously increase capitalism's efficiency, your argument actually supports the claim you're trying to dispute.
- sourcepluck 2y agoCapitalism is not efficient, it's grabby. Read Bullshit Jobs. Moreover, capitalism isn't interested in efficiency, it's interested in grabbing more stuff. It's relatively effiicient at centralising power and resources into the pockets of shareholders, but that's probably not what you meant. I think this is borne out even moreso in recent years, as environmental degradation continues, and we watch as capitalist systems are unable to do anything but continue to efficiently funnel money into the pockets of shareholders. The word "efficient" can only plausibly be applied to overly simplified models in fantastical economic theories which don't reflect reality. The kind of AI offered by companies like OpenAI may very well be an effective tool at grabbing more stuff though, sure. Or, rather, at convincing everyone they simply must move to this new area, that they control, effectively grabbing that newly created space.
- thrwthsnw 2y agoThe thing that is killing us is the same thing that is killing capitalism
- jprete 2y agoI think you're both right and wrong. You're right that capitalism has become a paperclip machine, but capitalism also wants AI so it can cheaply and at scale replace the human components of the machine with something that has more work capacity for fewer demands.
- h0l0cube 2y agoThe problem is that the people in power will want to maintain the status quo. So the end of human labor won't naturally result in UBI – or any kind of welfare – to compensate for the loss of income, let alone afford any social mobility. But wealthy people will be able to leverage AGI to defend themselves from any uprising by the plebs. We're too busy trying to make humans irrelevant, but not asking what exactly we do as a species of 10+ billion individuals do afterwards. There's some excited discussions about a rebirth of culture, but I'm not sure what that means when machines can do anything humans can do but better. Perhaps we just tinker around with our hobbies until we die? I honestly don't think it will play out well for us.
- jprete 2y agoThe problem is that the "we" who are busy trying to make humans irrelevant seem to be completely unconcerned with the effects on the "we" who will be superfluous afterwards.
- wsintra2022 2y agoMachines can’t have fun for us. They can’t dance to a beat, they can’t experience altered states of mind. They can’t create a sense of belonging through culture and ritual. Yes we have lost a lot in the last 100 years but there are still pockets of resistance that carry old knowledge that “we the people” will be glad of in the coming century.
- h0l0cube 2y agoIt's a similar story around extant ancient/indigenous cultures. And similarly we've seen apathy from elites, especially when indigenous rights get in the way of resource extraction or generating wealth in any way, and also witnessed condescension towards indigenous peoples by large segments of the world population. That's not to detract from the many defenders of indigenous rights, but if we look a the state of how older cultures, designated as 'obsolete' by wider society have been treated, I don't humans will fare well when silicon takes over. > They can’t dance to a beat, they can’t experience altered states of mind. That's a whole other conversation.
- dgfitz 2y agoI wonder how Russian and North Korean citizens would feel about a capitalist, representative democracy?
- anticorporate 2y agoI think they'd have thing or two to say about living under the rule of wealthy elites. We'd do well to listen to them.
- rkatry 2y ago[flagged]
- anothernewdude 2y agoOf course you're right, there's something worse, therefore capitalist, unrepresentative democracy is perfect. How could I be so naive?
- dgfitz 2y agoWhat’s the quote, something like: “democracy and capitalism are horrendous, but they’re better than everything else we tried so far”
- anothernewdude 2y agoPeople give communism a bad rap, but the soviets had maybe a quarter the resources, a much smaller population and logistical problems from geography and kept up with the US for decades, outpacing in several areas.
- missedthecue 2y agoDo we know LLMs are the path to AGI? If they're not, we'll just end up with some neat but eye wateringly expensive LLMs.
- andrepd 2y agoI would put no money on the latter.
- foolfoolz 2y agoAGI will arrive like self driving cars. it’s not that you will wake up one day and we have it. cars gained auto-braking, parallel parking, cruise control assist. and over a long time you get to something like waymo, which still is location dependent. i think AGI will take decades but sooner will be some special cases that are effectively the same
- teleforce 2y ago> AGI will arrive like self driving cars The statement is promising as the earth will dissapear sometimes in the future. Actually the earth will dissapear has more bearing than that.
- danpalmer 2y agoInteresting idea. The concept of The Singularity would seem to go against this, but I do feel that seems unlikely and that a gradual transition is more likely. However, is that AGI, or is it just ubiquitous AI? I’d agree that, like self driving cars, we’re going to experience a decade or so transition into AI being everywhere. But is it AGI when we get there? I think it’ll be many different systems each providing an aspect of AGI that together could be argued to be AGI, but in reality it’ll be more like the internet, just a bunch of non-AGI models talking to each other to achieve things with human input. I don’t think it’s truly AGI until there’s one thinking entity able to perform at or above human level in everything.
- marcus_holmes 2y agoThe Singularity is caused by AI being able to design better AI. There's probably some AI startup trying to work on this at the moment, but I don't think any of the big boys are working on how to get an LLM to design a better LLM. I still like the analogy of this being a really smart lawn mower, and we're expecting it to suddenly be able to do the laundry because it gets so smart at mowing the lawn. I think LLMs are going to get smarter over the next few generations, but each generation will be less of a leap than the previous one, while the cost gets exponentially higher. In a few generations it just won't make economic sense to train a new generation. Meanwhile, the economic impact of LLMs in business and government will cause massive shifts - yet more income shifting from labour to capital - and we will be too busy dealing with that as a society to be able to work on AGI properly.
- wruza 2y agoSays who? And more importantly, is this the boulder? All I (and many others here) see is that people engage others to sponsor pushing some boulder, screaming promises which aren’t even that consistent with intermediate results that come out. This particular boulder may be on a wrong mountain, and likely is. It all feels like doubling down on astrology because good telescopes aren’t there yet. I’m pretty sure that when 5 comes out, it will show some amazing benchmarks but shit itself in the third paragraph as usual in a real task. Cause that was constant throughtout gpt evolution, in my experience. even if it kills us Full-on sci-fi, in reality it will get stuck around a shell error message and either run out of money to exist or corrupt the system into no connectivity.
- Workaccount2 2y agoThe buzzkill when you fire up the latest most powerful model only for it to tell you that peanut is not typically found in peanut butter and jelly sandwiches.
- singpolyma3 2y agoI don't think providing accurate answers to context free questions is even something anyone is seriously working on making them do. Using them that way is just a wrong use case.
- Workaccount2 2y agoPeople are working -very- seriously on trying to kill hallucinations. I'm not sure how you surmised the use case here, as nothing was given other than an example of a hallucination.
- singpolyma3 2y agoThere's a difference between trying to get it to accurately answer based on the input you provide (useful) and trying to get it to accurately answer based on whatever may have been in the training data (not so useful)
- ulfw 2y agoWhy? Nobody asked us if we want this. Nobody has a plan what to do with humanity when there is AGI
- goatlover 2y agoThe plan is to not pay human workers. Never mind what happens to the economy or political landscape.
- khana 2y ago[dead]
- madeofpalk 2y agoWhat has AGI got to do with this?
- mrbungie 2y agoPart of the ideas pushed into the narrative by Marketing departments / consultants / hyperscalers to movilize growth in the AI ecosystem.
- goatlover 2y agoWhy do we have to?
- jayseattle 2y ago[dead]
- soheil 2y agoReally the killing part was not necessary to make your point and thus injecting your Sisyphean prose. Any technology may kill us, but we'll keep innovating as we ought to. What's your next point?
- namaria 2y agoA task that is completed and kills us is pretty much the opposite of a Sisyphean task.