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Regarding a super intelligence creating new cures: a million plus people die from malaria and AIDS combined each year. We have effective treatments for both, y

Regarding a super intelligence creating new cures: a million plus people die from malaria and AIDS combined each year. We have effective treatments for both, yet the USAID was recently shut down. I enjoy technology but less and less so each year, because it increasingly feels like there’s some kind of disconnect with the real world that’s hard to put my finger on

lantry 1y ago
exactly. AI won't change the underlying incentives. We can't solve the problem of "alignment" between humans, so how can we ever solve it for AI? > Scientific progress is the biggest driver of overall progress; it’s hugely exciting to think about how much more we could have. Does he mean "how much more we could have if our federal government wasn't actively destroying our science institutions"?
- __MatrixMan__ 1y ago
  One could imagine scientific institutions that are less vulnerable to the whims of government. As loathe as I am to defend an Altman point, AI could play a role in making them possible.
  - lantry 1y ago
    There are lots of things AI could do. But the things AI will do are governed by the incentives of the underlying system (i.e. society).
    - __MatrixMan__ 1y ago
      Those incentives are themselves the output of a variety of heuristics that we rely on only due to a lack of viable alternatives. I expect that eventually AI will make some alternatives viable because the bottleneck is so often an information processing one. Three examples: - Loans get issued when they're likely to make a banker rich. We know that's a lousy proxy for assurances that their associated ventures will be beneficial to the public, but it kinda sorta works enough. - Those loans cause money to enter the system and then we all chase it around and we cooperate with people who give us some of it even though we know that having money is a lousy proxy for competence or vision or integrity or any other virtue that might actually warrant such deference, but it kinda sorta works enough. - Research gets done in support of publications, the count of which is used to assess the capability of the researcher, even though we know that having many publications is a lousy proxy for having a made a positive impact, but it kinda sorta works enough. If we can fix these systems that are just limping along... If money can enter the system in support of ventures which are widely helpful, not just profitable... If we can support each other due to traits we find valuable in each other, not just because of some happenstance regarding scarcity. If we can encourage effective research in pursuit of widely sought after goals, rather than just counting publications... well that will be a whole new world with a new incentive structure. AI could make it happen if it manages to dispense with all these lousy proxies.
      - lantry 1y ago
        > AI could make it happen if it manages to dispense with all these lousy proxies. The thing that you, altman, and every other AI booster fail to explain is how AI will do this. Every argument is littered with "if"s and "could"s, and it's just taken for granted that AI will be smart enough to find a solution that solves all our problems. It's also taken for granted that we'll actually implement the solution! If AI said that curing cancer requires raising taxes, cancer would remain uncured.
        __MatrixMan__ 1y ago
        I've got a few designs in mind for an alternative to scarcity based economics. I don't presume to have it right, but its worth a shot and its a bit more concrete than blind trust in one technology or another. I thought it would take my whole life to just lay the foundation, but with some AI help, maybe not. The trouble with you naysayers is you always take as immutable things that we can change.
        NoGravitas 1y ago
        We could have had meaningful post-scarcity economics in 1968 (read Murray Bookchin). It is not a technological problem. It is a social problem.
        __MatrixMan__ 1y ago
        That's a false dichotomy, technological advancement has been solving and causing social problems for as long as there has been technology.
        Karrot_Kream 1y ago
        So I think this piece by Altman is mostly hype smoke also but I really dislike your framing here. Somehow the "AI boosters" have to come up with a how but the "AI doomers" can just sit back, criticize, and not solution? Let's be real here, US politics is fucked and none of us knows how to fix it.
rglover 1y ago
> it increasingly feels like there’s some kind of disconnect with the real world that’s hard to put my finger on My take: echo chambers have become mainstream (ironically, aided by technology). Typically that's online for most people, but in SF, it's a physical echo chamber, too. That echo chamber allows large numbers of people (coincidentally, the people shepherding a lot of the technology) to rationalize any position they come up with and fall into a semi-permanent state of cognitive dissonance ("of course my technological solution is the solution"). If other people are saying the same thing nearly everywhere you look, who's to say those who disagree are actually the correct ones?
- Nevermark 1y ago
  > My take: echo chambers have become mainstream (ironically, aided by technology). Technology can scale up small conveniences into major economic and quality of life wins. But when it's tolerated, technology also ramps up seemingly small conflicts of interest into economic and society-degrading monsters. Our legal intolerance for conflicts of interest as business models needs to go up a lot. No amount of strongly worded letters, uncomfortable senate interviews, or unplug-the-system theater, are going to discourage billionaires farming people's behavior, attention and psychology from continuing to farm people's behavior, attention and psychology.
bko 1y ago
Unfortunately, many problems are last mile problems. If we could teleport medicine and technology to everyone who needs it, these problems would be mostly solved. And I'm sure drug companies would love to make money on those people since their marginal cost is so low. But coordination is hard, and it's not necessarily a problem money can fix. It's like the math that takes # of homeless people times cost of an apartment, and then people claim we can solve homelessness for [reasonable amount]. Makes sense until you look how much US spends on homelessness every year already. Cell phone technology was the closest thing we got to teleporting technology and wealth to the rest of the world. Most developing countries completely skipped a phase of development that required crazy amounts of infrastructure to be built out. More people have cell phones than running water. It's pretty incredible if you think about it. Hopefully AI will be a similar leap frog.
- jonplackett 1y ago
  I’m not sure - we have enough food to feed everyone on earth. We have cures to many diseases. We have enough homes for everyone. Inequality is bad and getting worse. Big changes accelerate it because richer people can adapt and take advantage faster. I enjoy playing around with AI for fun and find it amazingly useful. But I do not believe it can solve inequality - that’s a people problem.
  - godelski 1y ago
    I work in ML and honestly I agree. We live in a fairly post scarce world. We could already live in a much less post scarce world. AI, as most technology, make these things easier, but they are power. It's all about what you do with power. You can build power plants or bombs. AI could (let's be hypothetical) free humans from all necessary labor. Robots making all the food, mining all the materials, and do the whole pipeline. But that requires a fundamental rethinking of how we operate now. That world isn't socialism nor capitalism. That's a world where ownership becomes ill defined in many settings but still strict in others. It's easy to income Star Trek but hard to imagine how we get there from here. Do we trust a few people to make all the robots to do all those things and then just abdicate all that power? Do we trust governments to do it? There's reason to trust no one. Because a deep dystopian can be created from any such scenarios. Going towards that hypothetical future is dangerous. Not because super intelligences, but because of us. Those with power tend to not just freely abdicate it... that's not a problem we're discussing enough and our more frequent conversations of ASI and the like just distracts from this one.
theptip 1y ago
One lens is the “Thrive/Survive” axis. As more people thrive, they have more space for individualism, compassion for others, etc. This can be used to explain the arc of “moral progress” over time. A follow up would be to observe that in many places today, inequality causes substantial sub-populations to feel that they are not thriving, or even declining though GDP is increasing. Which would explain the rage of the middle-American and many Europeans. If you buy all this, then there is a clear path by which radical abundance resolves the problems. Same as how the Baby Boomers were a very low-polarization generation; when everybody is thriving it’s a lot easier to get along. Personally I worry more about the possible worlds where technology doesn’t bring us radical abundance. Declining empires with nuclear weapons don’t sound conducive to a fun time.
slibhb 1y ago
> a million plus people die from malaria and AIDS combined each year These are political problems not technological problems.
- Avicebron 1y ago
  we should separate the language a bit here, technological problems are political problems inasmuch as corporations and the individuals who harness that infrastructure to gain immense wealth proclaim themselves eminent technologists who exert influence over the political sphere through monetary feedback mechanisms that are created by selling technical solutions to political problems.
- michaelbarton 1y ago
  yeap! that was exactly my point, it was I reference to sama’s point in the article about super intelligence creating new cures
adverbly 1y ago
> I enjoy technology but less and less so each year, because it increasingly feels like there’s some kind of disconnect with the real world that’s hard to put my finger on Same here. I want to be an engineer. As a good engineer, I find a problem then recursively ask why. I end up with a political root cause - not a technical one. This makes me sad. I wish I could just be an engineer.
- nradov 1y ago
  [flagged]
- disqard 1y ago
  "Technology acts as an amplifier of Human intentions" -- Kentaro Toyama What the richest and most powerful people want, happens to be "be even richer and even more powerful". Banal, sad, and universal.
JshWright 1y ago
TB killed even more than those two combined and is also on the list of “things we know how to treat, but as a society have decided not to”.
imgabe 1y ago
USAID is not the sole source of administering AIDS and malaria treatments. No doubt many more people were successfully treated because those treatments exist. I don't think I understand your point. We shouldn't develop new treatments because one country won't supply them to the entire world for free? Why is it the US's responsibility to treat every disease everywhere in the world? Do these countries not have their own governments?
- nielsbot 1y ago
  People keep saying we're the richest country in the history of the world. I think we have a responsibility to practice good old fashioned Christian compassion (with a side of soft power if that's more your thing.)
  - imgabe 1y ago
    I thought we weren't a Christian country? Either way, individuals are welcome to practice any sort of compassion they want with their own money. The government collects tax dollars from citizens under threat of violence, and their only responsibility should be to use that money to ensure the welfare of its citizens, not to engage in charity work in other countries. If citizens want to do that, have the government collect fewer tax dollars and citizens can give them to charity as they see fit.
    - yablak 1y ago
      USAID is not just charity. It is a projection of soft power that keeps many countries and world citizens looking up to the USA. It reduces likelihood of terrorist attacks on US citizens.
      - imgabe 1y ago
        Among people likely to consider a terrorist attack, USAID is widely considered a front for the CIA to meddle in other countries' governments (and this has been proven to be the case in some instances). Which, if true, makes it a bad front for the CIA, and if false, means it creates more resentment than anything else and does little to reduce the likelihood of terrorist attacks.

lantry 1y ago

exactly. AI won't change the underlying incentives. We can't solve the problem of "alignment" between humans, so how can we ever solve it for AI? > Scientific progress is the biggest driver of overall progress; it’s hugely exciting to think about how much more we could have. Does he mean "how much more we could have if our federal government wasn't actively destroying our science institutions"?

__MatrixMan__ 1y ago
One could imagine scientific institutions that are less vulnerable to the whims of government. As loathe as I am to defend an Altman point, AI could play a role in making them possible.
- lantry 1y ago
  There are lots of things AI could do. But the things AI will do are governed by the incentives of the underlying system (i.e. society).
  - __MatrixMan__ 1y ago
    Those incentives are themselves the output of a variety of heuristics that we rely on only due to a lack of viable alternatives. I expect that eventually AI will make some alternatives viable because the bottleneck is so often an information processing one. Three examples: - Loans get issued when they're likely to make a banker rich. We know that's a lousy proxy for assurances that their associated ventures will be beneficial to the public, but it kinda sorta works enough. - Those loans cause money to enter the system and then we all chase it around and we cooperate with people who give us some of it even though we know that having money is a lousy proxy for competence or vision or integrity or any other virtue that might actually warrant such deference, but it kinda sorta works enough. - Research gets done in support of publications, the count of which is used to assess the capability of the researcher, even though we know that having many publications is a lousy proxy for having a made a positive impact, but it kinda sorta works enough. If we can fix these systems that are just limping along... If money can enter the system in support of ventures which are widely helpful, not just profitable... If we can support each other due to traits we find valuable in each other, not just because of some happenstance regarding scarcity. If we can encourage effective research in pursuit of widely sought after goals, rather than just counting publications... well that will be a whole new world with a new incentive structure. AI could make it happen if it manages to dispense with all these lousy proxies.
    - lantry 1y ago
      > AI could make it happen if it manages to dispense with all these lousy proxies. The thing that you, altman, and every other AI booster fail to explain is how AI will do this. Every argument is littered with "if"s and "could"s, and it's just taken for granted that AI will be smart enough to find a solution that solves all our problems. It's also taken for granted that we'll actually implement the solution! If AI said that curing cancer requires raising taxes, cancer would remain uncured.
      - __MatrixMan__ 1y ago
        I've got a few designs in mind for an alternative to scarcity based economics. I don't presume to have it right, but its worth a shot and its a bit more concrete than blind trust in one technology or another. I thought it would take my whole life to just lay the foundation, but with some AI help, maybe not. The trouble with you naysayers is you always take as immutable things that we can change.
        NoGravitas 1y ago
        We could have had meaningful post-scarcity economics in 1968 (read Murray Bookchin). It is not a technological problem. It is a social problem.
        __MatrixMan__ 1y ago
        That's a false dichotomy, technological advancement has been solving and causing social problems for as long as there has been technology.
      - Karrot_Kream 1y ago
        So I think this piece by Altman is mostly hype smoke also but I really dislike your framing here. Somehow the "AI boosters" have to come up with a how but the "AI doomers" can just sit back, criticize, and not solution? Let's be real here, US politics is fucked and none of us knows how to fix it.

rglover 1y ago

> it increasingly feels like there’s some kind of disconnect with the real world that’s hard to put my finger on My take: echo chambers have become mainstream (ironically, aided by technology). Typically that's online for most people, but in SF, it's a physical echo chamber, too. That echo chamber allows large numbers of people (coincidentally, the people shepherding a lot of the technology) to rationalize any position they come up with and fall into a semi-permanent state of cognitive dissonance ("of course my technological solution is the solution"). If other people are saying the same thing nearly everywhere you look, who's to say those who disagree are actually the correct ones?

Nevermark 1y ago
> My take: echo chambers have become mainstream (ironically, aided by technology). Technology can scale up small conveniences into major economic and quality of life wins. But when it's tolerated, technology also ramps up seemingly small conflicts of interest into economic and society-degrading monsters. Our legal intolerance for conflicts of interest as business models needs to go up a lot. No amount of strongly worded letters, uncomfortable senate interviews, or unplug-the-system theater, are going to discourage billionaires farming people's behavior, attention and psychology from continuing to farm people's behavior, attention and psychology.

bko 1y ago

Unfortunately, many problems are last mile problems. If we could teleport medicine and technology to everyone who needs it, these problems would be mostly solved. And I'm sure drug companies would love to make money on those people since their marginal cost is so low. But coordination is hard, and it's not necessarily a problem money can fix. It's like the math that takes # of homeless people times cost of an apartment, and then people claim we can solve homelessness for [reasonable amount]. Makes sense until you look how much US spends on homelessness every year already. Cell phone technology was the closest thing we got to teleporting technology and wealth to the rest of the world. Most developing countries completely skipped a phase of development that required crazy amounts of infrastructure to be built out. More people have cell phones than running water. It's pretty incredible if you think about it. Hopefully AI will be a similar leap frog.

jonplackett 1y ago
I’m not sure - we have enough food to feed everyone on earth. We have cures to many diseases. We have enough homes for everyone. Inequality is bad and getting worse. Big changes accelerate it because richer people can adapt and take advantage faster. I enjoy playing around with AI for fun and find it amazingly useful. But I do not believe it can solve inequality - that’s a people problem.
- godelski 1y ago
  I work in ML and honestly I agree. We live in a fairly post scarce world. We could already live in a much less post scarce world. AI, as most technology, make these things easier, but they are power. It's all about what you do with power. You can build power plants or bombs. AI could (let's be hypothetical) free humans from all necessary labor. Robots making all the food, mining all the materials, and do the whole pipeline. But that requires a fundamental rethinking of how we operate now. That world isn't socialism nor capitalism. That's a world where ownership becomes ill defined in many settings but still strict in others. It's easy to income Star Trek but hard to imagine how we get there from here. Do we trust a few people to make all the robots to do all those things and then just abdicate all that power? Do we trust governments to do it? There's reason to trust no one. Because a deep dystopian can be created from any such scenarios. Going towards that hypothetical future is dangerous. Not because super intelligences, but because of us. Those with power tend to not just freely abdicate it... that's not a problem we're discussing enough and our more frequent conversations of ASI and the like just distracts from this one.

theptip 1y ago

One lens is the “Thrive/Survive” axis. As more people thrive, they have more space for individualism, compassion for others, etc. This can be used to explain the arc of “moral progress” over time. A follow up would be to observe that in many places today, inequality causes substantial sub-populations to feel that they are not thriving, or even declining though GDP is increasing. Which would explain the rage of the middle-American and many Europeans. If you buy all this, then there is a clear path by which radical abundance resolves the problems. Same as how the Baby Boomers were a very low-polarization generation; when everybody is thriving it’s a lot easier to get along. Personally I worry more about the possible worlds where technology doesn’t bring us radical abundance. Declining empires with nuclear weapons don’t sound conducive to a fun time.

slibhb 1y ago

> a million plus people die from malaria and AIDS combined each year These are political problems not technological problems.

Avicebron 1y ago
we should separate the language a bit here, technological problems are political problems inasmuch as corporations and the individuals who harness that infrastructure to gain immense wealth proclaim themselves eminent technologists who exert influence over the political sphere through monetary feedback mechanisms that are created by selling technical solutions to political problems.
michaelbarton 1y ago
yeap! that was exactly my point, it was I reference to sama’s point in the article about super intelligence creating new cures

adverbly 1y ago

> I enjoy technology but less and less so each year, because it increasingly feels like there’s some kind of disconnect with the real world that’s hard to put my finger on Same here. I want to be an engineer. As a good engineer, I find a problem then recursively ask why. I end up with a political root cause - not a technical one. This makes me sad. I wish I could just be an engineer.

nradov 1y ago
[flagged]
disqard 1y ago
"Technology acts as an amplifier of Human intentions" -- Kentaro Toyama What the richest and most powerful people want, happens to be "be even richer and even more powerful". Banal, sad, and universal.

JshWright 1y ago

TB killed even more than those two combined and is also on the list of “things we know how to treat, but as a society have decided not to”.

imgabe 1y ago

USAID is not the sole source of administering AIDS and malaria treatments. No doubt many more people were successfully treated because those treatments exist. I don't think I understand your point. We shouldn't develop new treatments because one country won't supply them to the entire world for free? Why is it the US's responsibility to treat every disease everywhere in the world? Do these countries not have their own governments?

nielsbot 1y ago
People keep saying we're the richest country in the history of the world. I think we have a responsibility to practice good old fashioned Christian compassion (with a side of soft power if that's more your thing.)
- imgabe 1y ago
  I thought we weren't a Christian country? Either way, individuals are welcome to practice any sort of compassion they want with their own money. The government collects tax dollars from citizens under threat of violence, and their only responsibility should be to use that money to ensure the welfare of its citizens, not to engage in charity work in other countries. If citizens want to do that, have the government collect fewer tax dollars and citizens can give them to charity as they see fit.
  - yablak 1y ago
    USAID is not just charity. It is a projection of soft power that keeps many countries and world citizens looking up to the USA. It reduces likelihood of terrorist attacks on US citizens.
    - imgabe 1y ago
      Among people likely to consider a terrorist attack, USAID is widely considered a front for the CIA to meddle in other countries' governments (and this has been proven to be the case in some instances). Which, if true, makes it a bad front for the CIA, and if false, means it creates more resentment than anything else and does little to reduce the likelihood of terrorist attacks.