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My niece weighed 3 kg one year ago. Now, she weighs 8.9 kg. By my modeling, she will weigh more than the moon in approximately 50 years. I've analyzed the error

by mlsu 1y ago

My niece weighed 3 kg one year ago. Now, she weighs 8.9 kg. By my modeling, she will weigh more than the moon in approximately 50 years. I've analyzed the errors in my model; regrettably, the conclusion is always the same: it will certainly happen within our lifetimes. Everyone needs to be planning for this -- all of this urgent talk of "AI" (let alone "climate change" or "holocene extinction") is of positively no consequence compared to the prospect I've outlined here: a mass of HUMAN FLESH the size of THE MOON growing on the surface of our planet!

habinero 1y ago
LOL, exactly. All of the weird AGI/doomer/whatever bullshit we're calling it/ feels like exactly this: people who think they're too smart to fall prey to groupthink and bias confirmation, and yet predictably are falling prey to groupthink and bias confirmation.
- mlsu 1y ago
  I have more fun reading it as a kind of collaborative real-time sci-fi story. Reads right out of a Lem novel.
- NalNezumi 1y ago
  There's a reason the 2027 and a lot of those weird guys come from (or overlap heavily with) the rationalist movement. <insert Obama giving Obama a medal meme>
  - Terr_ 1y ago
    Rationalizing religious impulses movement. :p
Workaccount2 1y ago
We have watched many humans grow so we have a pretty good idea of the curve. A better analogy is an alien blob appeared one day and went from 3kg to 9kg in a year. We have never seen one of these before, so we don't know what it's growth curve looks like. But it keeps eating food and keeps getting bigger.
- mlsu 1y ago
  Mine's different. She's cuter. On a more serious note. Have these AI doom guys ever dealt with one of these cutting edge models on out of distribution data? They suck so so bad. There's only so much data available, the models have basically slurped it all. Let alone like the basic thermodynamics of it. There's only so much entropy out there in cyberspace to harvest, at some point you run into a wall and then you have to build real robots to go collect more in the real world. And how's that going for them? Also I can't help remarking: the metaphor you chose is science fiction.
  - ben_w 1y ago
    > On a more serious note. Have these AI doom guys ever dealt with one of these cutting edge models on out of distribution data? They suck so so bad. There's only so much data available, the models have basically slurped it all. Many. Some of the doomers[0] even work at the big AI labs. Example of why this isn't sufficient to make them safe: Ebola is really stupid, infecting humans is effectively "out of distribution" for its genome, it is nevertheless really bad precisely because being out of distribution is why it often kills hosts too fast to infect enough other people to become a pandemic or endemic. > Let alone like the basic thermodynamics of it. There's only so much entropy out there in cyberspace to harvest, at some point you run into a wall and then you have to build real robots to go collect more in the real world. And how's that going for them? Apart from the existing few million industrial robots[1], the fleets of cars (not just Tesla but also) and farming equipment, all the drones including but not limited to delivery robots[2], and the robots widely used in scientific research to automate chemical and biological testing[3]? (But apart from that, what have the Romans ever done for us?) Don't get me wrong, I am willing to say that AI as it currently exists is "stupid" because of how much more training data it needs than most animals, let alone humans. It may be that any plausible number of robots in the real world still doesn't learn fast enough. And it may be that we're not smart enough to figure out how to make them as smart as us in any plausible timeframe, even though evolution managed it eventually without planning for us. But "you need robots" is not a strong argument. [0] for the purposes of this comment, P(doom)>0.1, though I am also critical of even just phrasing it in such a simplified way: https://benwheatley.github.io/blog/2024/11/18-13.16.17.html https://benwheatley.github.io/blog/2024/11/18-13.16.17.html [1] https://ifr.org/ifr-press-releases/news/record-of-4-million-robots-working-in-factories-worldwide https://ifr.org/ifr-press-releases/news/record-of-4-million-... [2] I assume this is basically just a Roomba with a fridge on it, but the sign on the elevator door is amusing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Hospital_delivery_robot_having_priority_to_elevators.jpg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Hospital_delivery_robot_h... [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laboratory_automation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laboratory_automation
nasmorn 1y ago
I came to say the same thing. All my work with LLMs so far has convinced me that it will be dish washer level technology. What I mean is that some tasks will be automated by it so completely that no business can function economically any more without utilizing its productivity increases but you will still need cooks. It might even be refrigeration style technology which will fundamentally restructure the whole supply chain of at least a lot of service companies. Which is huge in terms of business but not a sci-fi novel yet.

by mlsu 1y ago

habinero 1y ago

LOL, exactly. All of the weird AGI/doomer/whatever bullshit we're calling it/ feels like exactly this: people who think they're too smart to fall prey to groupthink and bias confirmation, and yet predictably are falling prey to groupthink and bias confirmation.

mlsu 1y ago
I have more fun reading it as a kind of collaborative real-time sci-fi story. Reads right out of a Lem novel.
NalNezumi 1y ago
There's a reason the 2027 and a lot of those weird guys come from (or overlap heavily with) the rationalist movement. <insert Obama giving Obama a medal meme>
- Terr_ 1y ago
  Rationalizing religious impulses movement. :p

Workaccount2 1y ago

We have watched many humans grow so we have a pretty good idea of the curve. A better analogy is an alien blob appeared one day and went from 3kg to 9kg in a year. We have never seen one of these before, so we don't know what it's growth curve looks like. But it keeps eating food and keeps getting bigger.

mlsu 1y ago
Mine's different. She's cuter. On a more serious note. Have these AI doom guys ever dealt with one of these cutting edge models on out of distribution data? They suck so so bad. There's only so much data available, the models have basically slurped it all. Let alone like the basic thermodynamics of it. There's only so much entropy out there in cyberspace to harvest, at some point you run into a wall and then you have to build real robots to go collect more in the real world. And how's that going for them? Also I can't help remarking: the metaphor you chose is science fiction.
- ben_w 1y ago
  > On a more serious note. Have these AI doom guys ever dealt with one of these cutting edge models on out of distribution data? They suck so so bad. There's only so much data available, the models have basically slurped it all. Many. Some of the doomers[0] even work at the big AI labs. Example of why this isn't sufficient to make them safe: Ebola is really stupid, infecting humans is effectively "out of distribution" for its genome, it is nevertheless really bad precisely because being out of distribution is why it often kills hosts too fast to infect enough other people to become a pandemic or endemic. > Let alone like the basic thermodynamics of it. There's only so much entropy out there in cyberspace to harvest, at some point you run into a wall and then you have to build real robots to go collect more in the real world. And how's that going for them? Apart from the existing few million industrial robots[1], the fleets of cars (not just Tesla but also) and farming equipment, all the drones including but not limited to delivery robots[2], and the robots widely used in scientific research to automate chemical and biological testing[3]? (But apart from that, what have the Romans ever done for us?) Don't get me wrong, I am willing to say that AI as it currently exists is "stupid" because of how much more training data it needs than most animals, let alone humans. It may be that any plausible number of robots in the real world still doesn't learn fast enough. And it may be that we're not smart enough to figure out how to make them as smart as us in any plausible timeframe, even though evolution managed it eventually without planning for us. But "you need robots" is not a strong argument. [0] for the purposes of this comment, P(doom)>0.1, though I am also critical of even just phrasing it in such a simplified way: https://benwheatley.github.io/blog/2024/11/18-13.16.17.html https://benwheatley.github.io/blog/2024/11/18-13.16.17.html [1] https://ifr.org/ifr-press-releases/news/record-of-4-million-robots-working-in-factories-worldwide https://ifr.org/ifr-press-releases/news/record-of-4-million-... [2] I assume this is basically just a Roomba with a fridge on it, but the sign on the elevator door is amusing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Hospital_delivery_robot_having_priority_to_elevators.jpg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Hospital_delivery_robot_h... [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laboratory_automation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laboratory_automation

nasmorn 1y ago

I came to say the same thing. All my work with LLMs so far has convinced me that it will be dish washer level technology. What I mean is that some tasks will be automated by it so completely that no business can function economically any more without utilizing its productivity increases but you will still need cooks. It might even be refrigeration style technology which will fundamentally restructure the whole supply chain of at least a lot of service companies. Which is huge in terms of business but not a sci-fi novel yet.