16 ms·

This is delightfully unhinged, spending an amazing amount of time describing their model and citing their methodologies before getting to the meat of the meal m

• jacquesm 8mo ago
  > “here’s why replacing or suggesting the replacement of human labor prior to reforming society into one that does not predicate survival on continued employment and wages is very bad” And there are plenty of people that take issue with that too. Unfortunately they're not the ones paying the price. And... stock options.
  • stego-tech 8mo ago
    History paints a pretty clear picture of the tradeoff: * Profits now and violence later OR * Little bit of taxes now and accelerate easier Unfortunately we’ve developed such a myopic, “FYGM” society that it’s explicitly the former option for the time being.
    • AndrewKemendo 8mo ago
      Every possible example of “progress” have either an individual or a state power purpose behind it there is only one possible “egalitarian” forward looking investments that paid off for everybody I think the only exception to this is vaccines…and you saw how all that worked during Covid Everything else from the semiconductor to the vacuum cleaner the automobile airplanes steam engines I don’t care what it is you pick something it was developed in order to give a small group and advantage over all the other groups it is always been this case it will always be this case because fundamentally at the root nature of humanity they do not care about the externalities- good or bad
      • jacquesm 8mo ago
        COVID has cured me (hah!) of the notion that humanity will be able to pull together when faced with a common enemy. That means global warming or the next pandemic are going to happen and we will not be able to stop it from happening because a solid percentage can't wait to jump off the ledge, and they'll push you off too.
        • AndrewKemendo 8mo ago
          Yeah buddy we agree
        • jpadkins 8mo ago
          [flagged]
          • yifanl 8mo ago
            Great zinger buddy, you really showed off your wit.
          • Nevermark 8mo ago
            It is so easy to critique the response in hindsight. Or at the time. But critiques like that ignore uncertainty, risk, and unavoidably getting it "wrong" (on any and all dimensions), no matter what anyone did. With a new virus successfully circumnavigating the globe in a very short period of time, with billions of potential brand new hosts to infect and adapt within, and no way to know ahead of time how virulent and deadly it could quickly evolve to be, the only sane response is to treat it as extremely high risk. There is no book for that. Nobody here or anywhere knows the "right" response to a rapidly spreading (and killing) virus, unresponsive to current remedies. Because it is impossible to know ahead of time. If you actually have an answer for that, you need to write that book. And take into account, that a lot of people involved in the last response, are very cognizant that we/they can learn from what worked, what didn't, etc. That is the valuable kind of 20-20 vision. A lot of at-risk people made it to the vaccines before getting COVID. The ones I know are very happy about everything that reduced their risk. They are happy not to have died, despite those who wanted to let the disease to "take its natural course". And those that died, including people I know, might argue we could have done more, acted as a better team. But they don't get to. No un-nuanced view of the situation has merit. The most significant thing we learned: a lot of humanity is preparing to be a problem if the next pandemic proves ultimately deadlier. A lot of humanity doesn't understand risk, and doesn't care, if doing so requires cooperative efforts from individuals.
    • jpadkins 8mo ago
      Do you have a historical example of "Little bit of taxes now and accelerate easier"? I can't think of any.
      • nine_k 8mo ago
        If you replace "taxes" with more general "investment", it's everywhere. A good example is Amazon that has reworked itself from an online bookstore into a global supplier of everything by ruthlessly reinvesting the profits. Taxes don't usually work as efficiently because the state is usually a much more sloppy investor. But it's far from hopeless, see DARPA. If you're looking for periods of high taxes and growing prosperity, 1950s in the US is a popular example. It's not a great example though, because the US was the principal winner of WWII, the only large industrial country relatively unscathed by it.
        • PaulHoule 8mo ago
          With the odd story that we paid the price for it in the long term. This book https://www.amazon.com/Zero-Sum-Society-Distribution-Possibilities-Change/dp/0465085881 https://www.amazon.com/Zero-Sum-Society-Distribution-Possibi... tells the compelling story that the Mellon family teamed up with the steelworker's union to use protectionism to protect the American steel industry's investments in obsolete open hearth steel furnaces that couldn't compete on a fair market with the basic oxygen furnace process adopted by countries that had their obsolete furnaces blown up. The rest of US industry, such as our car industry, were dragged down by this because they were using expensive and inferior materials. I think this book had a huge impact in terms of convincing policymakers everywhere that tariffs are bad. Funny the Mellon family went on to further political mischief https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Mellon_Scaife#Opposition_to_Bill_Clinton https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Mellon_Scaife#Oppositi...
          • vondur 8mo ago
            Ha, we gutted our manufacturing base, so if we bring it back it will now be state of the art! Not sure if that will work out for us, but hey their is some precedence.
    • lbreakjai 8mo ago
      Violence was a moderating factor when people on each side were equally armed, and number was a deciding factor. Nowadays you could squash an uprising with a few operators piloting drones remotely.
      • elictronic 8mo ago
        Flying a drone around is easy. Identifying who is on the in group and out group and then moving them is the hard part. I’m not sure you have really thought out what the drone part is meant to do. Militaries gave outgunned populaces for decades at this point. You don’t need drones to kill civilians.
        • lbreakjai 8mo ago
          It's actually quite easy. Whoever isn't in the bunker is the outgroup. You only needed to tell people apart when you needed some meatware to man the factories and work the fields. Militaries can side with the crowd, or more likely decide to keep the power for themselves.
          • Radim 8mo ago
            Yeah ruling juntas do need to "man the fields & factories" (1st order meatware), in order to produce and maintain those drones. Or nukes, or whatever "deciding factor beyond numbers" put them in power. But they also need 2nd order meatware to support that 1st order: teachers, doctors, merchants… You need scientists to advance your technology against other militaries… You need leaders (3rd order) to keep the first two populations quiet and productive since that turns out to be more cost-effective than fear control through extermination… Hell you need a certain level of genetic diversity so your own kids don't come out weird. Give evolution a little more credit. The required number of humans for the in-group to be self-sustainable is definitely not billions, plus it's been shrinking with automation. But we are where we are for a reason – lots of alternative arrangements have been tried over millenia and found wanting. "Keep my bunker + my drone factory and some farmers, kill the rest" leaves rulers with terrible quality of life (bad) and the next-door-junta taking over pretty quickly (also bad). It is a self-defeating, poor long-term strategy. Automation tips the power balance further: fewer humans needed, more local autonomy. Which is, I suspect, why the ruling class are so terribly excited about AI, more so than some market valuations. Fewer pesky humans across all levels. Genetic diversity of bloodline remains the primary concern (unless you manage to live forever, which happens to be another evergreen of power ghouls).
    • mlrtime 8mo ago
      We have taxes now though, how much is enough? Hint: The answer for the government is, it's never enough. "little bit of taxes" is never what we had. Seriously though, I wouldn't mind "little bit of taxes" if there were guaranteed ways to stop funding something when it's a failed experiment, which is difficult in government. Because "a little bit more" is always wanted.
      • CodeMage 8mo ago
        Every time I hear an argument like this one, it's always phrased in terms of "the government is greedy and/or incompetent, therefore taxes are bad" and never in terms of "the government is greedy and/or incompetent, therefore our systems of controlling our government are not good enough".
        • mlrtime 8mo ago
          I didn't actually say they are greedy or incompetent. Government starts a new program and funds it with taxes. First, it is difficult to prove if the program is doing what it set out to do effectively. Second, there is 0 incentive to ever shut it down. The people working there don't want to, the group who started it also don't want to. The people funding it have 0 insight or say if it should continue.
• generic92034 8mo ago
  > Folks vibe with the latter I am not convinced, though, it is still up to "the folks" if we change course. Billionaires and their sycophants may not care for the bad consequences (or even appreciate them - realistic or not).
  • stego-tech 8mo ago
    Oh, not only do they not care about the plebs and riff-raff now, but they’ve spent the past ten years building bunkers and compounds to try and save their own asses for when it happens. It’s willful negligence on a societal scale. Any billionaire with a bunker is effectively saying they expect everyone to die and refuse to do anything to stop it.
    • dakolli 8mo ago
      It seems pretty obvious to me the ruling class is preparing for war to keep us occupied, just like in the 20s, they'll make young men and women so poor they'll beg to fight in a war. It makes one wonder what they expect to come out the other side of such a late-stage/modern war, but I think what they care about is that there will be less of us.
      • generic92034 8mo ago
        Boy, will they be annoyed if the result of the AI race will be something considerably less than AGI, so all the people are still needed to keep numbers go up.
        • dakolli 8mo ago
          I don't think so, I think they know there's no AGI, or complete replacement. They are using those hyperbolic statements to get people to buy in. The goal is just to depress the value of human labor, they will lay people off and hire them back at 50% wages (over time), and gaslight us "well you have AI, there isn't as much skill required" Ultimately they just want to widen the inequality gap and remove as much bargaining power from the working class. It will be very hard for people not born of certain privileges to climb the ranks through education and merit, if not impossible. Their goal will be to accomplish this without causing a French Revolution V2 (hence all the new surveillance being rolled out), which is where they'll provide wars for us to fight in that will be rooted in false pretenses that appeal to people's basest instincts, like race and nationalism. The bunkers and private communities they build in far off islands are for the occasion this fails and there is some sort of French Revolution V2, not some sort of existential threat from AI (imo).
• NitpickLawyer 8mo ago
  > [...] prior to reforming society [...] Well, good luck. You have "only" the entire history of human kind on the other side of your argument :)
  • stego-tech 8mo ago
    I never said it was an easy problem to solve, or one we’ve had success with before, but damnit, someone has to give a shit and try to do better.
    • AndrewKemendo 8mo ago
      Literally nobody’s trying because there is no solution The fundamental unit of society …the human… is at its core fundamentally incapable of coordinating at the scale necessary to do this correctly and so there is no solution because humans can’t plan or execute on a plan
    • sp527 8mo ago
      The likely outcome is that 99.99% of humanity lives a basic subsistence lifestyle ("UBI") and the elite and privileged few metaphorically (and somewhat literally) ascend to the heavens. Around half the planet already lives on <= $7/day. Prepare to join them.
      • AlexCoventry 8mo ago
        FWIW, you'd probably be able to buy a lot of goods and services for $7/day, if robots were doing literally all the work.
        • sp527 8mo ago
          Agreed. The quality of life bar will be higher for sure. But it will still technically be a "subsistence" lifestyle, with no prospect of improvement. Perhaps that will suffice for most people? We're going to find out.
        • pdonis 8mo ago
• accidentallfact 8mo ago
  Reality won't give a shit about what people believe.
• mitthrowaway2 8mo ago
  > whether the singularity actually happens or not is irrelevant so much as whether enough people believe it will happen and act accordingly. I disagree. If the singularity doesn't happen, then what people do or don't believe matters a lot. If the singularity does happen, then it hardly matters what people do or don't believe (edit: about whether or not the singularity will happen).
  • cgannett 8mo ago
    if people believe its a threat and it is also real then what matters is timing
    • goatlover 8mo ago
      Which would also mean the accelerationists are potentially putting everyone at risk. I'd think a soft takeoff decades in the future would give us a much better chance of building the necessary safeguards and reorganizing society accordingly.
      • AndrewKemendo 8mo ago
        This is a soft takeoff We, the people actually building it, have been discussing it for decades I started reading Kurzweil in the early 90s If you’re not up to speed that’s your fault
        • goatlover 8mo ago
          Decades from now. Society is nowhere near ready for a singularity. The AI we have now, as far as it has come, is still a tool for humans to use. It's more Augmented Intelligence than AGI. A hard takeoff would be the tool bootstrapping itself into an autonomous self-improving ASI in a short amount of time. And I read Kurzweil years ago too. He thought reverse engineering the human brain once the hardware was powerful enough would together give us the singularity in 2045. And the Turing Test would have been passed by 2029, but seems like LLMs have already accomplished this.
• Forgeties79 8mo ago
  I just point to Covid lockdowns and how many people took up hobbies, how many just turned into recluses, how many broke the rules no matter the consequences real or imagined, etc. Humans need something to do. I don’t think it should be work all the time. But we need something to do or we just lose it. It’s somewhat simplistic, but I find it get the conversation rolling. Then I go “it’s great that we want to replace work but what are we going to do instead and how will we support ourselves?” It’s a real question!
  • tehjoker 8mo ago
    It's true people need something to do, but I don't think the COVID shutdown (lockdowns didn't happen in the U.S. for the most part though they did in other countries) is a good comparison because the entire society was perfused with existential dread and fear of contact with another human being while the death count was rising and rising by thousands a day. It's not a situation that makes for comfortable comparisons because people were losing their damn minds and for good reason.
    • Forgeties79 8mo ago
      That’s a fair point. I don’t mean to trivialize the actual fears and concerns surrounding the pandemic.
  • RGamma 8mo ago
    Make babies?
• AndrewKemendo 8mo ago
  The goal is to eliminate humans as the primary actors on the planet entirely At least that’s my personal goal If we get to the point where I can go through my life and never interact with another human again, and work with a bunch of machines and robots to do science and experiments and build things to explore our world and make my life easier and safer and healthier and more sustainable, I would be absolutely thrilled As it stands today and in all the annals of history there does not exist a system that does what I just described. Be labs existed for the purpose of bell telephone…until it wasn’t needed by Bell anymore. Google moonshots existed for the shareholders of Google …until it was not uselful for capital. All the work done at Sandia and white sands labs did it in order to promote the power of the United States globally. Find me some egalitarian organization that can persist outside of the hands of some massive corporation or some government that can actually help people and I might give somebody a chance but that does not exist And no mondragon does not have one of these
  • stego-tech 8mo ago
    Man, I used to think exactly like you do now, disgust with humans and all. I found comfort in machines instead of my fellow man, and sorely wanted a world governed by rigid structures, systems, and rules instead of the personal whims and fancies of whoever happened to have inherited power. I hated power structures, I loathed people who I perceived to stand in the way of my happiness. I still do. The difference is that as I realized what I'd done is built up walls so thick and high because of repeated cycles of alienation and traumas involving humans. When my entire world came to a total end every two to four years - every relationship irreparably severed, every bit of local knowledge and wisdom rendered useless, thrown into brand new regions, people, systems, and structures like clockwork - I built that attitude to survive, to insulate myself from those harms. Once I was able to begin creating my own stability, asserting my own agency, I began to find the nuance of life - and thus, a measure of joy. Sure, I hate the majority of drivers on the roads today. Yeah, I hate the systemic power structures that have given rise to profit motives over personal outcomes. I remain recalcitrant in the face of arbitrary and capricious decisions made with callous disregard to objective data or necessities. That won't ever change, at least with me; I'm a stubborn bastard. But I've grown, changed, evolved as a person - and you can too. Being dissatisfied with the system is normal - rejecting humanity in favor of a more stringent system, while appealing to the mind, would be such a desolate and bleak place, devoid of the pleasures you currently find eking out existence, as to be debilitating to the psyche. Humans bring spontaneity and chaos to systems, a reminder that we can never "fix" something in place forever. To dispense with humans is to ignore that any sentient species of comparable success has its own struggles, flaws, and imperfections. We are unique in that we're the first ones we know of to encounter all these self-inflicted harms and have the cognitive ability to wax philosophically for our own demise, out of some notion that the universe would be a better place without us in it, or that we simply do not deserve our own survival. Yet that's not to say we're actually the first, nor will we be the last - and in that lesson, I believe our bare minimum obligation is to try just a bit harder to survive, to progress, to do better by ourselves and others, as a lesson to those who come after. Now all that being said, the gap between you and I is less one of personal growth and more of opinion of agency. Whereas you advocate for the erasure or nullification of the human species as a means to separate yourself from its messiness and hostilities, I'm of the opinion that you should be able to remove yourself from that messiness for as long as you like in a situation or setup you find personal comfort in. If you'd rather live vicariously via machine in a remote location, far, far away from the vestiges of human civilization, never interacting with another human for the rest of your life? I see no issue with that, and I believe society should provide you that option; hell, there's many a day I'd take such an exit myself, if available, at least for a time. But where you and I will remain at odds is our opinion of humanity itself. We're flawed, we're stupid, we're short-sighted, we're ignorant, we're hostile, we're irrational, and yet we've conquered so much despite our shortcomings - or perhaps because of them. There's ample room for improvement, but succumbing to naked hostility towards them is itself giving in to your own human weakness.
• bheadmaster 8mo ago
  > here’s how LLMs actually work But how is that useful in any way? For all we know, LLMs are black boxes. We really have no idea how did ability to have a conversation emerge from predicting the next token.
  • MarkusQ 8mo ago
    > We really have no idea how did ability to have a conversation emerge from predicting the next token. Uh yes, we do. It works in precisely the same way that you can walk from "here" to "there" by taking a step towards "there", and then repeating. The cognitive dissonance comes when we conflate this way of "having a conversation" (two people converse) and assume that the fact that they produce similar outputs means that they must be "doing the same thing" and it's hard to see how LLMs could be doing this. Sometimes things seems unbelievable simply because they aren't true.
    • bheadmaster 8mo ago
      > It works in precisely the same way that you can walk from "here" to "there" by taking a step towards "there", and then repeating. It's funny how, in order to explain one complex phenomenon, you took an even more complex phenomenon as if it somehow simplifies it.
      • MarkusQ 8mo ago
        Sorry, can't tell if that's sarcasm or not. I wasn't referring to the biomechanical process of walking, I was referring to the process of gradient descent, which is well understood and yes, quite simple.
        • bheadmaster 8mo ago
          If that was true, knowing how elementary particles work would give us understanding of the whole universe, in which case no other science would exist. But other sciences do exist, ergo, you're wrong.
• 0x20cowboy 8mo ago
  "'If I wished,' O'Brien had said, 'I could float off this floor like a soap bubble.' Winston worked it out. 'If he thinks he floats off the floor, and if I simultaneously think I see him do it, then the thing happens'".
• nine_k 8mo ago
  > * enough people believe it will happen and act accordingly* Here comes my favorite notion of "epistemic takeover". A crude form: make everybody believe that you have already won. A refined form: make everybody believe that everybody else believes that you have already won. That is, even if one has doubts about your having won, they believe that everyone else submit to you as a winner, and must act accordingly.
  • deleted 8mo ago
    [deleted]
  • bee_rider 8mo ago
    This world where everybody’s very concerned with that “refined form” is annoying and exhausting. It causes discussions to become about speculative guesses about everybody else’s beliefs, not actual facts. In the end it breeds cynicism as “well yes, the belief is wrong, but everybody is stupid and believes it anyway,” becomes a stop-gap argument. I don’t know how to get away from it because ultimately coordination depends on understanding what everybody believes, but I wish it would go away.
    • kelseyfrog 8mo ago
      Or just play into the fact that it's a Keynesian Beauty Contest [1]. Find the leverage in it and exploit it. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keynesian_beauty_contest https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keynesian_beauty_contest
      • nosuchthing 8mo ago
        Manipulating the The Keynesian Beauty Contest is the metagame, especially after the era of /r/Wall-street bets swelled up. What do you think Jim Kramer gets paid to do, report facts? By 2017 teenagers were running quantitative trading algorithms and semantic analysis trading bots they found from influencers and github. Around that time private subscription fee telegram and discord "whale" insider trading groups often had multiple levels of insider trading market manipulation running pump and dump schemes. Marks would pay to join the private chat group and at a certain time of day a ticket symbol would be released for "insiders" to buy before it's promoted in public channels. The outer circle was just providing liquidity for the deeper insiders to exit with easy profit. Most VC gambits are not much different. Sell the news. Unleash the rumors.
• dakolli 8mo ago
  Just say it simply, 1. LLMs only serve to reduce the value of your labor to zero over time. They don't need to even be great tools, they just need to be perceived as "equally good" to engineers for C-Suite to lay everyone off, and rehire at 50-25% of previous wages, repeating this cycle over a decade. 2. LLMs will not allow you to join the billionaire class, that wouldn't make sense, as anyone could if that's the case. They erode the technical meritocracy these Tech CEOs worship on podcasts, and youtube, (makes you wonder what are they lying about). - Your original ideas and that Startup you think is going to save you, isn't going to be worth anything if someone with minimal skills can copy it. 3. People don't want to admit it, but heavy users of LLMs know they're losing something, and there's a deep down feeling that its not the right way to go about things. Its not dissimilar to any guilty dopaminergic crash one gets when taking shortcuts in life. I used like 1.8bb Anthropic tokens last year, I won't be using it again, I won't be participating in this experiment. I've likely lost years of my life in "potential learning" from the social media experiment, I'm not doing that again. I want to study compilers this year, and I want to do it deeply. I wont be using LLMs.
  • stego-tech 8mo ago
    I've said it simply, much like you, and it comes off as unhinged lunacy. Inviting them to learn themselves has been so much more successful than directed lectures, at least in my own experiments with discourse and teaching. A lot of us have fallen into the many, many toxic traps of technology these past few decades. We know social media is deliberately engineered to be addictive (like cigarettes and tobacco products before it), we know AI hinders our learning process and shortens our attention spans (like excess sugar intake, or short-form content deluges), and we know that just because something is newer or faster does not mean it's automatically better. You're on the right path, I think. I wish you good fortune and immense enjoyment in studying compilers.
    • dakolli 8mo ago
      I agree, you're probably right! Thanks!
  • AlexCoventry 8mo ago
• caycep 8mo ago
  I thought the answer was "42"
• famouswaffles 8mo ago
  >It’s honestly why I gave up trying to get folks to look at these things rationally as knowable objects (“here’s how LLMs actually work”) You do not know how LLMs work, and if anyone actually did, we wouldn't spend months and millions of dollars training one.
• holoduke 8mo ago
  For ages most people believed in a religion. People are just not smart and sheepy followers.
  • soperj 8mo ago
    Most still do.
  • greenchair 8mo ago
    romans 1:20
  • MSKJ 8mo ago
    That is a very uncharitable take. Faith is often a source of meaning or purpose independent of intelligence. I would recommend "A Confession by Tolstoy" for a different perspective
• menaerus 8mo ago
  > It’s honestly why I gave up trying to get folks to look at these things rationally as knowable objects (“here’s how LLMs actually work”) Here's your own fallacy you fell into - this is important to understand. Neither do you nor me understand "how LLMs actually work" because, well, nobody really does. Not even the scientists who built the (math around) models. So, you can't really use that argument because it would be silly if you thought you know something which rest of the science community doesn't. Actually, there's a whole new field in science developed around our understanding how models actually arrive to answers which they give us. The thing is that we are only the observers of the results made by the experiments we are doing by training those models, and only so it happens that the result of this experiment is something we find plausible, but that doesn't mean we understand it. It's like a physics experiment - we can see that something is behaving in certain way but we don't know to explain it how and why.
  • liuliu 8mo ago
    Agree. I think it is just people have their own simplified mental model how it works. However, there is no reason to believe these simplified mental models are accurate (otherwise we will be here 20-year earlier with HMM models). The simplest way to stop people from thinking is to have a semi-plausible / "made-me-smart" incorrect mental model of how things work.
    • hn_acc1 8mo ago
      Did you mean to use the word "mental"?
  • striking 8mo ago
    Even if interpretability of specific models or features within them is an open area of research, the mechanics of how LLMs work to produce results are observable and well-understood, and methods to understand their fundamental limitations are pretty solid these days as well. Is there anything to be gained from following a line of reasoning that basically says LLMs are incomprehensible, full stop?
    • 8mo ago
• aaroninsf 8mo ago
  What is your argument for why denecessitating labor is very bad? This is certainly the assertion of the capitalist class, whose well documented behavior clearly conveys that this is not because the elimination of labor is not a source of happiness and freedom to pursue indulgences of every kind. It is not at all clear that universal life-consuming labor is necessary for a society's stability and sustainability. The assertion IMO is rooted rather in that it is inconveniently bad for the maintenance of the capitalists' control and primacy, in as much as those who are occupied with labor, and fearful of losing access to it, are controlled and controllable.
  • germandiago 8mo ago
    I think this goes beyond capitalism. People willing to do something harder or more risky than others will always have a bigger chance to get a better position. Be that sports, labor or anything in life.
    • aaroninsf 8mo ago
      I am 1000% OK with living in a world where basic needs are fully provided for, and competition and drive are worked out in domains which do not come at the expense of someone else's basic needs. Scifi has speculated about many potential outlets for "human drive," the frontier/pioneer spirit being a big one; if I could name my one dream for my kids it'd be that they live in an equitable post-scarcity society which has turned its interests to exploring the solar system and beyond. Sports, "FKT" competitions, and social capital ("influence") are also relatively innocuous ways to absorb the drive for hierarchy and power. The X factor is, is the will to dominate/control/be subjugated to, suppressible or manageable. If not we're in for a bad time.
• csallen 8mo ago
  > prior to reforming society into one that does not predicate survival on continued employment and wages There's no way that'll happen. The entire history of humanity is 99% reacting to things rather than proactively preventing things or adjusting in advance, especially at the societal level. You would need a pretty strong technocracy or dictatorship in charge to do otherwise.
  • stoneforger 8mo ago
    You would need a new sense of self and a life free of fear, raising children where they can truly be anything they like and teach their own kids how to find meaning in a life lived well. "Best I can do is treefiddy" though..
  • tim333 8mo ago
    The UK seems to be prototyping that. We're changing to a society where everyone lives by claiming benefits. (eg. https://www.gbnews.com/money/benefits-claimants-earnings-revealed-broken-britain https://www.gbnews.com/money/benefits-claimants-earnings-rev...)
    • Nursie 8mo ago
      Ugh, GBNews, outrage fodder for idiots and the elderly with no ability to navigate the modern information landscape. You can tell it's watched almost exclusively by old people because all the ads on the channel are for those funeral pre-pay services or retirement homes. Safe to ignore anything they have to say.
      • kylegordon 8mo ago
        > Safe to ignore anything they have to say. And that of anyone who quotes them too
        • tim333 8mo ago
          The everyone living on benefits as a prototype for the singularity was a bit tongue in cheek.
• threethirtytwo 8mo ago
  I don’t think you’re rational. Part of being able to be unbiased is to see it in yourself. First of all. Nobody knows how LLMs work. Whether the singularity comes or not cannot be rationalized from what we know about LLMs because we simply don’t understand LLMs. This is unequivocal. I am not saying I don’t understand LLMs. I’m saying humanity doesn’t understand LLMs in much the same way we don’t understand the human brain. So saying whether the singularity is imminent or not imminent based off of that reasoning alone is irrational. The only thing we have is the black box output and input of AI. That input and output is steadily improving every month. It forms a trendline, and the trendline is sloped towards singularity. Whether the line actually gets there is up for question but you have to be borderline delusional if you think the whole thing can be explained away because you understand LLMs and transformer architecture. You don’t understand LLMs period. No one does.
  • project2501a 8mo ago
    > Nobody knows how LLMs work. I'm sorry, come again?
    • NateEag 8mo ago
      I think they meant "Nobody knows why LLMs work."
      • threethirtytwo 8mo ago
        same thing? The how is not explainable. This is just pedantic. Nobody understands LLMs.
      • measurablefunc 8mo ago
        Because they encode statistical properties of the training corpus. You might not know why they work but plenty of people know why they work & understand the mechanics of approximating probability distributions w/ parametrized functions to sell it as a panacea for stupidity & the path to an automated & luxurious communist utopia.
• dagss 8mo ago
  Isn't talking about "here’s how LLMs actually work" in this context a bit like saying "a human can't be a relevant to X because a brain is only a set of molecules, neurons, synapses"? Or even "this book won't have any effect on the world because it's only a collection of letters, see here, black ink on paper, that is what is IS, it can't DO anything"... Saying LLM is a statistical prediction engine of the next token is IMO sort of confusing what it is with the medium it is expressed in/built of. For instance those small experiments that train a network on addition problems mentioned in a sibling post. The weights end up forming an addition machine. An addition machine is what it is, that is the emergent behavior. The machine learning weights is just the medium it is expressed in. What's interesting about LLM is such emergent behavior. Yes, it's statistical prediction of likely next tokens, but when training weights for that it might well have a side-effect of wiring up some kind of "intelligence" (for reasonable everyday definitions of the word "intelligence", such as programming as good as a median programmer). We don't really know this yet.
  • ActorNightly 8mo ago
    Its pretty clear that the problem of solving AI is software, I don't think anyone would disagree. But that problem is MUCH MUCH MUCH harder than people make it out to be. For example, you can reliably train an LLM to produce accurate output of assembly code that can fit into a context window. However, lets say you give it a Terabyte of assembly code - it won't be able to produce correct output as it will run out of context. You can get around that with agentic frameworks, but all of those right now are manually coded. So how do you train an LLM to correctly take any length of assembly code and produce the correct result? The only way is to essentially train the structure of the neurons inside of it behave like a computer, but the problem is that you can't do back-propagation with discrete zero and 1 values unless you explicitly code in the architecture for a cpu inside. So obviously, error correction with inputs/outputs is not the way we get to intelligence. It may be that the answer is pretty much a stochastic search where you spin up x instances of trillion parameter nets and make them operate in environments with some form of genetic algorithm, until you get something that behaves like a Human, and any shortcutting to this is not really possible because of essentially chaotic effects. ,
• pryce 8mo ago
  > whether the singularity actually happens or not is irrelevant so much as whether enough people believe it will happen and act accordingly. We've already been here in the 1980s. The tech industry needs to cultivate people who are interested in the real capabilities and the nuance around that, and eject the set of people who am to turn the tech industry into a "you don't even need a product" warmed-over acolytes of Tony Robbins.
  • FarmerPotato 8mo ago
    All the discussion of investment and economics can be better informed by perusing the economic data in Rise and Fall of American Growth. Robert Gordon's empirical finding is that American productivity compounded astonishingly from 1870-1970, but has been stuck at a very low growth rate since then. It's hard to square with the computer revolution, but my take post-70s is "net creation minus creative destruction" was large but spread out over more decades. Whereas technologies like: electrification, autos, mass production, telephone, refrigeration, fertilizers, pharmaceuticals, these things produced incomparable growth over a century. So if you were born in the 70s America, your experience of taxes, inflation, prosperity and which policies work, all that can feel heavier than what folks experienced in the prior century. Of course that's in the long run (ie a generation). I question whether AI tools have great net positive creation minus destruction.
• doctorpangloss 8mo ago
  You’re “yaas queen”ing a blog post that is just someone’s Claude Code session. It’s “storytelling” with “data,” but not storytelling with data. Do you understand? I mean I could make up a bunch of shit too and ask Claude Code to write something I want to stay with it too.
• strangattractor 8mo ago
  I thought the Singularity had already happened when the Monkeys used tools to kill the other Monkeys and threw the bone into the sky to become a Space Station.
• cyanydeez 8mo ago
  Currently, everything suggests the torment nexus will happen before the singularity.
• noiv 8mo ago
  "If men define situations as real, they are real in their consequences." Thomas theorem is a theory of sociology which was formulated in 1928 by William Isaac Thomas and Dorothy Swaine Thomas. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_theorem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_theorem
• mgraczyk 8mo ago
  This entire chain of reasoning takes for granted that there won't be a singularity If you're talking about "reforming society", you are really not getting it. There won't be society, there won't be earth, there won't be anything like what you understand today. If you believe that a singularity will happen, the only rational things to do are to stop it or make sure it somehow does not cause human extinction. "Reforming society" is not meaningful
  • corndoge 8mo ago
    There will be earth!
• catoc 8mo ago
  > ”when they don’t even understand that the computer is the box attached to the monitor, not the monitor itself” Laughed out loud at that - and cried a little. I have had trouble explaining people: “No! don’t use your email password! This is not your email you are logging in to, your email address is a username for this other service. Don’t give them your email password!”
• sublinear 8mo ago
  Equally unhinged. Cheers to you!
• raghavbali 8mo ago
  > Can’t convince someone of the former when they don’t even understand that the computer is the box attached to the monitor, not the monitor itself. This is so true and more often than it should be. I am going to use this phrase !
• theboonies 8mo ago
  The problem that I see with this analysis is that the author is trying to describe a curve in data that is kind of a punctuated equilibrium on steroids. Given that the takeoff event is when systems are capable of recursive self-improvement and that event will be a huge inflection point in the curve, it feels like they are trying to predict the second half of a biphasic graph based on data from the first half, when the second half is distinctly different than the first. Thinking about how this might work, the slope of the first half does not predict the inflection point. Once the threshold for recursive self-improvement gets crossed, the curve changes drastically. From what I have heard MAYBE we are just starting to see the glimmers of possible recursive self-improvement in GPT-5.3 / Opus 4.6. If so, this discussion, while interesting, is trying to predict the new curve based on a single relevant data point.