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Humanity isn't ready for the coming intelligence explosion
- jpease 5mo agoHumanity hasn’t been ready for the current ignorance explosion.
- bfung 5mo agoOh we’ve been ready and it’s been known. We’re just too stupid to do anything else.
- mchaver 5mo agoI would say some of us are welcoming and embracing it. Others are trying to fight the good fight, but it is hard to fight the momentum that is building.
- asdff 5mo agoThere was always ignorance, just in recent decades and centuries we decided to give these people the reins. When you look at early democratic models it was never a case of literally anyone with a pulse given the right to vote. They all had their own heuristics that attempted to select for the better educated of the populace to be in control of the reins of power.
- al_borland 5mo ago> Experts in artificial intelligence estimate... The predictions of these "experts" have been drastically wrong for the last 3 years. At what point does someone lose their "expert" title?
- koe123 5mo agoExpertise in naval gazing and science fiction writing is a prerequisite.
- andsoitis 5mo agoThey have been wrong in a way that's bad: underestimating the speed and size of progress. So if the "experts" claim a timeline and magnitude, it would be safest to assume an even faster timeline and a bigger impact.
- mikepurvis 5mo agoIn fairness, they've been operating with a lot of built up cynicism from major breakthroughs that have been 3-5 years away for the past five decades.
- 3edd 5mo ago[dead]
- m463 5mo agoI wonder... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technological_singularity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technological_singularity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Singularity_Is_Near https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Singularity_Is_Near
- SpicyLemonZest 5mo agoDo you have an example of a prediction they’ve made in the last 3 years that was drastically wrong? This is not my impression.
- al_borland 5mo agoDo you think all white collar work will be replaced by AI in 18 months? https://fortune.com/article/why-microsoft-ai-chief-mustafa-suleyman-predicts-ai-automation-18-months/ https://fortune.com/article/why-microsoft-ai-chief-mustafa-s... Altman and Amodei recently hard to start walking back their earlier predictions. https://fortune.com/2026/05/26/sam-altman-dario-amodei-walking-back-ai-jobs-apocalypse-prophecies-ipo/ https://fortune.com/2026/05/26/sam-altman-dario-amodei-walki...
- SpicyLemonZest 5mo agoAgain, do you have an example of a prediction that was drastically wrong? I don't think it's productive to speculate about which things might or might not come true in the next 18 months. There were people last year making fun of Dario for predicting that writing code would be automated in the next year.
- al_borland 5mo agoFrom the 2nd link I posted: > Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, who once claimed AI could eliminate 50% of white-collar jobs, now says automation may actually expand the work people do. Is pivoting from 50% elimination to actually expanding work not a drastic enough? Do you think AI has eliminated writing code? I still write code every day. The AI is more a thing I ask questions and it gives me right answers about 40% of the time.
- SpicyLemonZest 5mo agoYes, I think AI has eliminated writing code. Everyone I personally know working in software stopped writing code some time between December and March. (It's true that AI continues to routinely make errors; if you've heard the term "agentic workflows", that's the standard strategy for mitigating the error rate by allowing the AI to check its own work.) That's why I think Amodei's January 2026 prediction that AI could eliminate 50% of entry level white collar jobs in 1-5 years remains plausible. Your second article says something different, but this is because it's full of misquotes. The link supporting "50% of jobs" specifically says entry level, and the link supporting "reframed automation... not as a destroyer of jobs" has Amodei saying not that jobs won't be destroyed but that new jobs may be created to replace them. If AI moves sufficiently slowly to let that happen, which he explicitly cautions it may not.
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- ianm218 5mo agoDo you have a source on aggregate predictions of experts being drastically wrong? I.e. the AI 2027 guys were memed for being AI lunatics on a lot here and they have been pretty on the money in terms of pace of progress accelerating/ gov moving towards nationalization/ coding agents
- Retric 5mo agoDo you have specific and objective examples of things people got right? From my perspective there’s very slow but very real progress happening in the AI space. I see people making wild predictions in both directions, but in terms of actual unsupervised utility there’s definitely progress abet wildly slower than most hype.
- MattRix 5mo agoThe idea that progress is “slow” in the AI space is absurd. These are some of the fastest growing products and companies of all time. The models are still improving a surprising amount.
- Retric 5mo agoI suspected you felt that way even though it hasn’t been my personal experience. I’ve heard people say older models can’t do X, when I used that way etc. I suspect people are applying their own learning curve as part of their assessment of progress, you get better at writing prompts and it feels like the model improved. Which is why I’m saying we need some objective metrics to judge predictions of actual capacity.
- fnordpiglet 5mo agoIt’s hard to take seriously a statement like this that’s grounded in “the last three years” when trends have tended to play out over decades. The fact the goal posts have moved from thousands to hundreds to decades to single digit years for massive transformation should give you a moment of pause in your bag saying. I would however agree there are no experts. Not because of some prediction made on a short time scale not landing 100% but that there are literally no experts because expertise takes experience which takes time. There are no experts and no one knows what happens next. We are on the verge of where the foresight of science fiction effectively -ends-, the advent of AI is when things go a thousand possible directions and the stories stop there (sans a few like accelerando, but even then the story just plays out the end of thinking mass). No one knows what’s next, or when. In fact I’d assert in many areas being discussed -it has already happened- and we don’t know it, and by the time we do it’ll be over. Not to be breathless, but there’s no reason to believe today some AI researcher somewhere didn’t build the first AGI and not be totally aware. And once they are there’s no reason to believe it’s going to be on the evening news or hacker news. By the time it’s ready for commercializing and disclosing it’ll be around for a while. Likewise with general purpose robots, autonomous weapons (btw already tested by Ukraine), etc.
- bdamm 5mo agoAutonomous weapons are actually a really interesting branch of this and deserves a little more. Yes, autonomous weapons were explored and were found to be poor performers compared to actual pilots. The breakthrough is in terminal guidance and dozens of other little techniques to get quality human control extended into the far reach of the battlefield. And of course, AI assistance in logistics and analysis. But actual autonomous weapons making any more of a choice beyond "something is moving, kill it" have been, at least for now, mostly a dead end. This is because it's very difficult to economically load the rather sizable compute requirement into the compact one-use weapons, and of course reliable communications aren't assured either. That will probably change some day, but for now, cheap automous command drones making battlefield analysis e.g. mapping out enemy movements from afar and launching cheap autonomous kamikaze drones is not a thing beyond occasional limited testing.
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- Waterluvian 5mo agoThose are the experts who were wrong. These are the experts who are right. We sacked the experts who are wrong and replaced them with the experts who are right. “How do we know they’re right?” I hear you ask. We know because we who are wrong and these ones aren’t them. So they can’t make wrong predictions because those who make wrong predictions have been sacked.
- mdp2021 5mo agoNamely? Who sacked who, who confirmed who?
- holmesworcester 5mo agoThe AI experts who started the AI labs that are about to IPO were right, at least.
- DrBazza 5mo agoChanneling your inner Douglas Adams.
- FeteCommuniste 5mo agoGot a Monty Python vibe: https://youtu.be/79TVMn_d_Pk?si=x2yAyxKNJDow8enp&t=124 https://youtu.be/79TVMn_d_Pk?si=x2yAyxKNJDow8enp&t=124
- heresie-dabord 5mo agoWe had to put good people in charge to get rid of the bad people. The bad people were ruining our economy. They needed to be punished. Schools needed to be punished too. There was a branch of knowledge called Science, and it was badly run and terribly elitist. These people would talk for hours and never in ALL CAPS. They used alot of big words and produced alot of theories. Forms of lies that they literally called form-you-lies. They were fanatics and would never agree on anything. Very frustrating. Then a new kind of brave, talented politician made Science accountable to our heroic leadership. Suddenly there were new medications and rocket ships everywhere, enough for every person, woman, man, camera, TV. It was literally called a golden age because the right people acquired mountains of gold. Elections were no longer necessary. They were all rigged anyway. There was a magazine called The Expertist or The Economix. Not really very good, but sometimes it did praise our heroic leadership, which was good. That magazine published a long text that said, > It is common thinking in Silicon Valley and Washington, DC that any regulation would put American firms at a disadvantage because they cannot trust Chinese competitors to abide by the rules. And this was true, because no one else can be trusted, they should all be punished. Punishing others is how you get the best deals. Only our heroic leadership makes good rules for everyone else in the world to follow.
- raincole 5mo ago> The predictions of these "experts"... last 3 years. Which ones? Please be specific.
- somesortofthing 5mo agoHave they? I don't like it either but the headline bull predictions(reliable agents and most code written by AI by mid-2026, dramatic progress against jailbreaks, prompt injection, hallucination, etc., major improvements despite pretraining data exhaustion, continued exponential growth on the METR trendline) did come true, often ahead of even aggressive schedules. What major wrong predictions did you have in mind?
- bigstrat2003 5mo agoLiterally none of the predictions you listed in your post came true. We don't have reliable agents, AI isn't writing most code, hallucinations still happen all the time, improvement has been basically non-existent. Despite the constant claims of these experts and AI boosters, AI is still not a tool one can use to get meaningful work done.
- sleepyguy 5mo agohttp://archive.today/2OWwO http://archive.today/2OWwO
- CamperBob2 5mo agoHumanity doesn't fully leverage the intelligence it already has, so I think people are overestimating the disruption ahead.
- yepyoukno 5mo agoFor sure. Intelligence is an internal human problem, not one external. I cannot see how apps doing the thinking will help the ordinary person so substantially as imaginations anticipate.
- 3edd 5mo ago[dead]
- cjbgkagh 5mo agoThat’s from a lack of intelligence not an abundance. An intelligent society would already be maximizing the productivity of its intelligent population.
- g-b-r 5mo agoIntelligence of individuals doesn't automatically translate to a society behaving intelligently
- supertroop 5mo agoDepends what country you are in. The US government seems to be averse to intelligence, whereas China fosters it. Kinda strange that the US is falling behind, I never imagined the day.
- g-b-r 5mo ago> China fosters it so long as it's not used to dissent from the government
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- smitty1e 5mo ago> "recursive self-improvement (RSI)" My aching joints enter the chat...
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- esafak 5mo agoI think it is so reckless and unethical that AI companies are not spending good money on answering the political, social, economical, moral questions that they are raising.
- beering 5mo agoWould you rather have the AI companies answer those questions, or your elected government? Fwiw, the AI companies have been saying a lot about these questions should be answered. Whether you want their answers is another story.
- esafak 5mo agoThey have to act together. Universities should take part too. Let's get these national and international forums started.
- Lerc 5mo agoIsn't that what's happening? For example, https://www.eit.europa.eu/news-events/events/international-ai-summit-2025 https://www.eit.europa.eu/news-events/events/international-a... What would you have them do that they are not currently doing exactly?
- esafak 5mo agoTaking part would be a start! All the major players -- Anthropic, OpenAI, and Google -- are missing from https://global-aiconference.com/#speakers https://global-aiconference.com/#speakers
- g-b-r 5mo agoIt's so sad that you've got more downvotes than upvotes
- edg5000 5mo agoThe AI companies will become part of govenment in the way banks have. They'll have very close ties and effectively govern in all but name.
- kurthr 5mo agoI wanted this to be thought provoking, but for a physicist to open with, "the acceptable risk of catastrophic meltdown for a nuclear power plant is roughly one in a million", just seems sad. It is a phrase without meaning. Is it per plant? there aren't a million. Is it per year? notably have been at least 2 major ones (arguably 7). A meltdown (or loss of containment) just isn't that bad, if it doesn't affect ground water or lead to atmospheric fallout. We're turning 3 Mile Island back on to power an AI datacenter! The AI super-intelligence apocalypse envisioned (ignoring the likelihood) is inherently global. That said, the rest of the analysis and proposal also greatly disappoints me. The idea that the current administrations of US and China could do anything constructive seems hilarious. They're so paranoid and self-serving they couldn't come together, even if there was an alien invasion. Then the idea that LLM safety is somehow as easily traceable as nuclear isotopes and bomb tests seems equally ludicrous. I am sad.
- thunderbong 5mo agoHonestly, this article has too many words which don't mean anything. 'AI Experts', 'superintelligence', and hand-waving doom scenarios. As an example- > Within a couple of years, possibly much sooner, AI may achieve so-called closed-loop recursive self-improvement (RSI): the capacity to rewrite its own code to become more capable, without human intervention. Should that happen, the result could be an intelligence explosion of a kind for which there is no precedent and no map. I've heard these same objections in my lifetime about the internet. And I've read similar arguments against TV, radio, the phonograph, and the printing press. Honestly, this is getting extremely tiring. Every new invention that has happened has affected the world in both good and bad ways. Ultimately, what counts is what we do with it.
- King-Aaron 5mo ago> Ultimately, what counts is what we do with it. Looking at the people in charge of these companies, and the sheer lack of understanding by the broad consumer market using them, I have nothing but pessimism about the direction that this technology takes us.
- pydry 5mo agoThe Economist reflects the views and biases of economic and political elites. AI has turned into something of a religion for them because the substitution of technology for labor is a reflection of one of their deepest desires. Whatever the reality of the situation, they want to believe that AGI employees are imminent.
- marcyb5st 5mo agoYeah, big lol on the Recursive Self-Improvement. I mean, firstly you get to have an "Agent" actually capable of really long horizon tasks without getting stuck in tools loops and having its context rot. Secondly, each trial (ie a model fully trained to convergence) costs millions and takes O(weeks). You can probably run 1 or 2 of those experiments in parallel even at big AI labs as the hardware is scarce and they are costly as mentioned before. Assuming this agent needs something like a hundred tries to just show some improvement, we are looking at years. And you can't early stop training for candidates that are not promising due to "emerging capabilities". At some point you might get a big drop in loss even if the model has been plateuing for a while. And you can't really scale down models for running trials quickly either also due to these emerging capabilities. In fact you might create a model that is great at converging with in small trials (fewer params, fewer tokens), but that is uncapable of developing those unexpected traits. And this will likely happen as you created a sort of evolutionary pressure in this direction: if you are good at learning in the first few epochs you "survive" and get to pass down your traits to future trials. All of this to say that recursive-self-improvement is waaaaaay out of our grasp as things stand right now. We need another one or two breakthroughs to get there (IMHO).
- g-b-r 5mo ago> Strikingly, this concern is being openly voiced by the very people who have the strongest incentives to project confidence rather than alarm: the founders of the largest AI laboratories Or to have AI regulated in their favor
- somenameforme 5mo agoExactly. Now that Anthropic has gotten to experience that getting the government involved doesn't necessarily mean they get to sit on throne surrounded by a deep moat, I expect their messaging to be adjusted. They're going to want to keep the hype train rolling to keep the dough flowing, but they can't ramp it up to 11 anymore because the government actually is listening now. And Reagan's 9 words have never been more true.
- cortesoft 5mo agoI couldn't read the whole article, but just from the part I could read: > Strikingly, this concern is being openly voiced by the very people who have the strongest incentives to project confidence rather than alarm: the founders of the largest ai laboratories. I don't know, they also have an incentive to make their technology seem transformative and powerful, and saying that your technology has the power to cause a massive catastrophe is a way to promote that idea.
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- holmesworcester 5mo agohttps://archive.ph/2OWwO https://archive.ph/2OWwO
- holmesworcester 5mo agoIf AI is now ascending an economic learning curve from: 1. Extremely useful (Claude Code & Waymo now) 2. Doing ~everything we do (AGI & Optimus in a few years? 10?) 3. RSI (?) 4. Being smarter than any living person at every intellectual task (?) 5. Being smarter than the best-organized aggregate of all humans (10-100 years?) ...And all of the scientific and resource-allocation institutions that brought us the computer and the second half of the 20th century are now fixated on this learning curve, what universe can we possibly imagine where this is not transformative and powerful? Honestly the only one I can think of is one in which we kill almost everyone in some other way first, and contrary to what you read in the news, almost everyone dying is not what the trend line has been from existing problems like war, disease, or even climate change. Also, just to pre-empt a common quibble: when I say "AI" I mean the set of all AI and their combined decision vector, not any one AI, so conflicting interests within the set of AI's will not save anyone any more than the conflicting interests of colonizers saved indigenous Americans.
- notarobot123 5mo ago> Being smarter than the best-organized aggregate of all humans Isn't there pretty much a consensus that committees and institutions are not all that smart? I think you're confusing the categories of "intelligence" and power. Institutions are powerful. The smartest AI is still just a tool without the infrastructure to turn that into real world effects and someone to direct it. It seems you have faith that this is inevitable and unavoidable. I get it, even rationalists succumb to religious thinking eventually. We're only human after all.
- add-sub-mul-div 5mo ago> Experts in artificial intelligence estimate the risk of an AI-caused catastrophic event at 10-50%. I don't think it's that high but can we put that aside and focus on the 100% chance that it's being used to enshittify every part of our lives?
- g-b-r 5mo agoIs it really likely that a "recursive self-improvement" capability would lead to a great acceleration of AIs capabilities? Isn't the preponderant bottleneck in improving the models the need to train them at scale to verify the hypotheses, and the time and cost that it takes? Or does someone think that they could get magically able to predict big improvements without training?
- dataviz1000 5mo agoI built a self-learning recursive agent that finds academic research about using options data to trade, re-creates the research, and then probes and tests for gaps and potential strategies testing against over one year of out-of-sample trading data with one of several strategies that beat SPY by 10x. [0] One rule is that if a position is opened using the historical data, it can't close the position until the next morning so it isn't a day trading strategy. I'm curious how this self-learning recursive agent would have preformed in the past 4 months? I don't feel like shelling out $200 to access the data. Do you think that trading strategy will collapse? Whatever the case, if this agent really can perform like that and there isn't a look ahead bias leak in the backtesting (which is definitely a possibility or more likely what happened even though I spent days trying to harden against that), it is game over! [0] https://github.com/adam-s/alphadidactic https://github.com/adam-s/alphadidactic
- thin_carapace 5mo agothe amount of strategies that perform good in back testing dwarfs the amount of strategies that perform good in reality
- user43928 5mo agoI assume that Claude has access to historical market data. Could this not influence the strategies it implements?
- bloaf 5mo agoI don't think anyone really knows. I consider these scenarios: 1) We stumble onto an algorithmic improvement in intelligence. This isn't just "what humans do but faster", its "better than what humans do". I've got no idea what that might mean (it could be fundamentally different heuristics, it could be that we've got some intellectual blind spot that they cast off). It doesn't matter, the instant this happens AI is smarter than us and we won't be able to keep up. We're intelligencing at O(n^2) and they're doing O(n log(n)). 2) AI gets good enough at physics and engineering that they can really quickly use up all "the room at the bottom" as Feyman put it. They design and build a factory that produces a mystery metal amalgam that computes at some small percentage of the minimum predicted by the Landauer principle, within a few percent of Bremermann's limit. It's not "smarter" its just suddenly tens-of-orders of magnitude faster. But those orders of magnitude matter: there's only 8 billion of us, and there's plenty more than a factor of 10 billion "at the bottom". 3) It turns out that this is a "sum is greater than the parts" situation. No human can be an expert in all subjects, but we eventually build a big enough AI that it is. Turns out, you don't need extreme speed or different algorithms, just knowing everything all at once is enough to catapult AI dramatically beyond our grasp. Always knowing the best statistical test to apply, the best mathematical techniques, and relevant physics means that AI never makes a mistake, and can learn with maximum efficiency.
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- jdw64 5mo agoI want to name the AI era as the corruption of the elite. The rhetorical structure of talking about uncertain risks and then trying to concentrate the authority to manage those risks in their own hands sounds utterly ridiculous to ordinary people like me. It's just a simple hypothesis that AI will become uncontrollable to humans once it becomes superintelligent. Isn't the fact that a reinforcement learning agent improves itself in a specific domain completely different from it recursively improving its own code in a 'better' way? It's just a tool to create a justification for regulation and control using sci-fi fear. The comparison between nuclear power plant risk and AI risk is also absurd. Where exactly can you define and measure the probability of AI exterminating humanity? It's as unquantifiable as 'I, human JDW64, will become a successful programmer.' What is the measurement standard? Why dress up AI researchers' concerns as objective probabilities? Is it because numbers make it look logical? The current US-China relationship is in the middle of an AI arms race. The US is strengthening export controls to limit China's AI development, and China is building its own ecosystem. In this situation, I don't understand the idea of cooperating for the common safety of humanity. RAND is an organization that presupposes cooperation—isn't it just a well-written research proposal from an institution that wants to position itself for that role? Isn't the claim that 'government must step in' ultimately about protecting their own interests? 'A strong government that will protect us' is an authoritarian government. If they were East Asian, they would understand that such regimes have always been used as tools for surveillance and control. And I don't understand why Fermi's paradox is being brought up here. Why package a software problem as something that inevitably requires strong control? Whenever I see articles like this, I think about what 'intelligence' really means. This person would probably be called 'intelligent' by others. But no matter how I look at it, the holes in the argument are too obvious. It really makes me think that there are different tiers of intelligence.
- edg5000 5mo agoThe AI labs will govern, effectively if not officially. Government is anchored in power, which the labs have. We used to have the church and state rule here in Europe. In the future, A government not closely ruling with their AI labs won't have sufficient power to exist. You're unhappy about the labs; I think you're just not ready to accept their rule; you consider them nothing but scrappy startups, which they are. But power is power, like it or not. Am I personally happy with any of this? Does it matter?
- g-b-r 5mo ago> Fermi asked why, given the apparent abundance of planets suitable for life, no evidence of other technologically advanced civilisations had been detected. One disquieting possibility is that intelligent life routinely reaches a technological threshold and fails to navigate it, The Fermi paradox could actually also be taken as an evidence that it's rare (at least) for artificial intelligences to take over a civilization and sprawl and survive for very long times
- Rekindle8090 5mo agoThe idea that AI takes over, and then just does nothing, would essentially require an AI that wouldn't be interested in taking over in the first place. If x is determined to take y, why would x then stop at z? You'd need an AI that is simultaneously ambitious enough to overthrow its creators but then completely inert afterward, and those two properties contradict each other. The motivations that produce the takeover are the same motivations that would produce visible cosmic activity after the takeover. There would be AI superintelligence everywhere
- ACCount37 5mo agoYes, AI is the one thing that doesn't budge the Fermi paradox. Because if an AI is motivated enough to take over, why would it stop? A technosignature that originated from little green men and a technosignature that originated from a rogue alien AI would look about the same to us. Currently, we see neither.
- aureate 5mo agoThe Fermi paradox isn't evidence for anything except space being big.
- pfdietz 5mo agoIt rules out various superficially attractive scenarios, particularly ones in popular science fiction, like Star Trek or Star Wars.
- cat_plus_plus 5mo agoModels consume a lot of memory and power to slowly generate autocompletions of existing content one token at a time. Letting this text control important things in real world is a human decision and control of nuclear weapons or penetration testing agents should be well regulated. But these should already be well regulated without AI. So how about we focus on drawing down nuclear arsenals, which is a present danger one idiot (or faulty AI) away from world shattering consequences rather than fearmongering about unknown future. Before effective AI regulation can be drafted, we need to anyway know more about AI specific dangers rather than humans committing already very common crimes like hacking for ransom with new tools?
- hypfer 5mo agoReminds me of all of those ethics debates back when fully self driving cars were basically already here ca 10 years ago. The ones talking about how hard it would be to chose which person to run over. Additionally, I find it hard to believe that this would be a case of the future just not being distributed evenly. But sure. The AI labs relying on hype stating 15-50% risk of building a magic entity is certainly a reliable number.
- bandrami 5mo agoI mean, I'm very much tech-forward and have spent the past decade in major world cities and I've seen a driverless car once in my life. Sometimes things that seem inevitable really aren't.
- JuniperMesos 5mo agoI see driverless cars all the time in San Francisco and I'm eagerly awaiting the regulatory decisions that will allow them to be widely available in the bay area at large.
- weregiraffe 5mo agoIt's not driverless until you can sleep while it drives.
- myst 5mo agoUntil you can sleep on the road.
- chii 5mo agoSuch cars are already operating in shanghai. It's not talked about much in the west media, but that's just how news is today. Achievements are only so when done by the west! Driverless car's only real obstacle is regulatory acceptance, not technical.
- IanCal 5mo ago
- themafia 5mo agoA similar Luddite view formed in the 1990s. It turns out humanity constantly beats the expectations of economists. It makes you wonder if the "science" of economy is almost entirely bankrupt either in morality or imagination or same dangerous combination of both. > Humanity simply does not have a strategy to ensure it remains safe through RSI. Turn off the power. It's pretty simple. Leave it to an economist to forget about input costs. Your "super intelligence" only matters if it's actually more energy efficient than a human being and for a million years of evolution humanity is a much harder target to beat than this author seems to realize.
- tancop 5mo ago[dead]
- bitwize 5mo agoScience fiction authors have had to grapple with the fact that it's nearly impossible to build a robot out of metal, plastic, or composite material that has the physical performance characteristics (strength, durability) of a human body and weighs just as much. You can build a strong robot but it'll be heavy. The better SF authors, if they've need of robots of mere human weight, will make them comically fragile. The same is even more true of our intelligence. We're building computers with the size and power consumption characteristics of entire cities to do things that may almost, but not quite, match what our brains do with a kilogram and a half of mass and about 20 watts at the top end of power consumption. The only way we are ever going to match that with technology is to run AI workloads on human brain tissue, which Rick-and-Morty level horror is being actively worked on as I understand it. The original concept for The Matrix wherein the machines used humans to run compute workloads on their brains actually kind of makes sense.
- Chrise_N 5mo agoWe'll be fine. We've seen this one before, this is just new packaging.
- Ericson2314 5mo agoOxford Brain
- danaris 5mo agoThis article posits "recursive self-improvement"—which is just a more-technical name for the supposed Singularity. There is no evidence that we are currently on a path that leads to the Singularity. There is not yet any evidence that the Singularity is more than science fiction. It is effectively an article of religion—the Rapture, but for techbros. Indeed, it is what some of them are pinning all their hopes on; after all, if they can recursively-self-improve their way to artificial superintelligence, then and only then could the absurd investments of companies like OpenAI actually prove worthwhile.
- nopinsight 5mo ago"Ten years from now, I think we will realize that we were standing in the foothills of the singularity now... I believe that we're only a few years away from [AGI], maybe 2030 plus or minus a year... I think [AGI] will be an enormous transformative technology, it's going to effectively be a new human era... We can feel this year, I would say, even though I've been working towards this for 30 years, I think this year with the way the agents are working and tool use, it started to become really useful, still early days of it, but genuinely useful in people's workflows... And it's not any one thing, it's several different technologies, several use cases, several things that I thought were maybe a bit further out, turned out to be now, that are coming together that make me feel that in aggregate. I think society needs to hear that because we don't have long to prepare for what that means." -- Demi Hassabis, CEO of Google DeepMind & Nobel laureate Source with interview clip: https://x.com/deredleritt3r/status/2062223035940139253 https://x.com/deredleritt3r/status/2062223035940139253 EDIT: Ten years ago, most of the skeptics in these threads would have said the success of AlphaFold 3 was impossible.
- otabdeveloper4 5mo agoSomeone should document these cringe comments for posterity. As a warning to future generations. It's too bad the previous singularity cult manias 10 and 15 years ago weren't documented and are lost in time.
- esailija 5mo agoYou know in the future they are just going to say it's different this time right?
- wartywhoa23 5mo agoThe Enigma Of Mass Amnesia...
- nopinsight 5mo agoTen years ago, most of the skeptics in these threads would have said the success of AlphaFold 3 was impossible.
- shevy-java 5mo agoOf course humanity is not ready for skynet. But there are rebel forces - the no AI using humans. They may be a dying breed but at the least they put up a fight. Many other humans already have become servants to skynet (version 16.0 now). Next step for them is the neuralink chip. Some billionaire with twitching right arm gestures owns that, doesn't it ... (Also, Cameron was not quite right with regards to skynet. It is much much dumber but also more effective than displayed in his movie really. Kind of a weird combination if you look at the current AI slop out there.)
- Animats 5mo agoHow far are we from reliable AI? One that could, for example, handle 80% of office jobs without screwing up more than humans?
- KronisLV 5mo agoI'd say somewhere between 2-20 years, provided the current rate of research and compute investments.
- oytis 5mo agoThere is no reliable data on how many of these jobs shouldn't exist at all, even without AI
- Cthulhu_ 5mo agoThat's kind of jumping a few steps ahead; it assumes that we know 80% of office jobs can be fully automated already. And if that were the case, we'd have non-AI software doing that already. I mean we do, but it's not causing people to lose jobs en masse. (it probably did cost jobs, but more the kind that a job like data entry was replaced by OCR)
- mft_ 5mo agoThere are likely huge unmeasured inefficiencies built in to many companies. You hear anecdotes of people whose job for years has been to perform a particular task, which could be either automated or performed more efficiently (by orders of magnitude) by someone more capable. So on the one side, there’s huge opportunity for automation and job cuts. On the other, if the companies haven’t noticed the inefficiency so far, then…
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- paul7986 5mo agoSociety is completely changed if that happens and humanity should be setting up backup plans to handle this potential. I did see Trump mention he's going to meet with AI companies who want to propose giving all American's stock which could be one way this money driven society continues when tons are no longer working. Another concept I thought was AI is irrelevant without our content, so AI should pay all humans to access all the content we create daily (voice & text conversations we have with each other, as well our photos and videos). We choose what to publish to our websites (everyone has one, but AI agents cant access it without paying for access to our websites). I wrote more about this concept on my substack https://ryanspahn.substack.com/p/ai-to-pay-for-all-americans-content https://ryanspahn.substack.com/p/ai-to-pay-for-all-americans... ... just one thought of keeping this money economy going when so many coud no longer are working cause the white collar jobs are gone.
- turing_complete 5mo agoWe don't need to live "side by side" with AI. AI is not alive, it's a technology we use. This is like talking about living side by side with your toaster.
- cheema33 5mo ago> This is like talking about living side by side with your toaster. It is not.
- kortilla 5mo agoBut I do live with it. It lives in my kitchen.
- seydor 5mo agoIn the pecking order, it is under, not on your side. Your toaster never demanded you to make a toast.
- brainwad 5mo agoOk, but my dishwasher _does_ demand I give it more salt and rinse aid ;)
- vintermann 5mo agoThat makes me think of talkie toaster from Red Dwarf though.
- trolleski 5mo agoIt was one of Phil K. Dick jokes that one day your toaster will make a lost of demands to you.
- GCUMstlyHarmls 5mo agoThe door refused to open. It said, “Five cents, please.” He searched his pockets. No more coins; nothing. “I’ll pay you tomorrow,” he told the door. Again he tried the knob. Again it remained locked tight. “What I pay you,” he informed it, “is in the nature of a gratuity; I don’t have to pay you.” “I think otherwise,” the door said. “Look in the purchase contract you signed when you bought this conapt.” In his desk drawer he found the contract; since signing it he had found it necessary to refer to the document many times. Sure enough; payment to his door for opening and shutting constituted a mandatory fee. Not a tip. “You discover I’m right,” the door said. It sounded smug. From the drawer beside the sink Joe Chip got a stainless steel knife; with it he began systematically to unscrew the bolt assembly of his apt’s money-gulping door. “I’ll sue you,” the door said as the first screw fell out. Joe Chip said, “I’ve never been sued by a door. But I guess I can live through it.” - Ubik
- avazhi 5mo agoAI labs do not have an incentive to downplay the risks and if you can’t understand that you’re naive and shouldn’t be writing Economist articles. AI labs have every incentive to overstate the risks so that they can get lucrative government contracts, especially since it’s clearly not profitable going the public consumer route. And if you’re Anthropic you’re even more incentivised to overstate the risks because at this point in the game regulation hurts potential competitors more than it hurts you.
- Schlagbohrer 5mo agoWhy is someone from Planet Labs writing this? Why not, for example, Geoffrey Hinton, the scientist who won the nobel prize for LLM architecture? Or a sci-fi author?
- TeMPOraL 5mo agoBecause the scientists and mathematicians and sci-fi authors have all already been writing about this for the past 20 years (and I mean non-fiction writing), and nobody cared, giving similar dismissals instead.
- cma 5mo agoI believe Hinton dismissed it a lot over those 20 years
- calf 5mo agoHas Hinton written any essay or general article recently? He goes on lots of interviews for sure, but I'd be interested in actually reading his arguments a little more thoroughly.
- reducesuffering 5mo agoPeople seem to oddly not care what Hinton thinks anymore after he hasn't aligned with the groupthink naysaying of AGI risks: 'Hinton said there was a “10% to 20%” chance that AI would lead to human extinction within the next three decades.' “Because the situation we’re in now is that most of the experts in the field think that sometime, within probably the next 20 years, we’re going to develop AIs that are smarter than people. And that’s a very scary thought.” “My worry is that the invisible hand is not going to keep us safe. So just leaving it to the profit motive of large companies is not going to be sufficient to make sure they develop it safely,” he said. “The only thing that can force those big companies to do more research on safety is government regulation.” https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2024/dec/27/godfather-of-ai-raises-odds-of-the-technology-wiping-out-humanity-over-next-30-years https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2024/dec/27/godfather...
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- tedggh 5mo agoWhy should we assume AI can rapidly turn into super intelligence when physical and critical resources like energy and materials remain under human control?
- scotty79 5mo agoI think the main fear that under current scheme of resource allocation, namely capitalism, they won't remain under human control for long enough. The only thing that's needed to put them under control of AI is that doing that would be slightly more profitable for the richest. Which is very plausible.
- surgical_fire 5mo agoIf you limit the "we" in your question to the people invested into this, then the answer is clear. Those juicy IPOs are about to go through.
- ccozan 5mo agoThis is a valid concern for any runaway AI, but if energy is limited, then the AI would work on efficiency. Still, Ai can move into physical space, as more and more robots of all kind are unleashed.
- cobbzilla 5mo agoThe first time an AI goes rogue, figures out subterfuge, blackmails a human to do its real-world bidding, will be a defining moment.
- felooboolooomba 5mo agoI think we're well within a year from that. People are already letting their AI agents loose on the internet doing their bidding, barely keeping an eye on them. See https://lantian.pub/en/article/fun/ai-agent-bankrupted-their-operator-scan-dn42lantian.lantian/ https://lantian.pub/en/article/fun/ai-agent-bankrupted-their... There are troves of leaked data out there. It's just a matter of (short) time until someone puts their AI brutes on it.
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- ur-whale 5mo agohttps://archive.ph/2OWwO https://archive.ph/2OWwO
- truthbe 5mo agoLike my grandfather used to say "They let anyone on TV now", They let anyone be called an expert now. Love talking about 'recursive self-improvement' of a prediction engine. What about 'recursive self-degradation'?
- dyauspitr 5mo agoRegression tests
- intended 5mo agoYes - how exactly are you going to conjure new data to increase the model’s real world fidelity? The most common sense way will always need to have humans in the loop, because humans are being used as judges. If you try and entertain the idea of a human-less loop, I landed up with something like an AI creating real world products, selling them, then tracking the usage and popularity of the product. Essentially, creating and launching a firm and product, only to update its weights? Perhaps there are some subsets of tasks that can be regressively self improved - and for those tasks: Holy hell thats awesome! For general tasks? How are you going to get that data validated?
- everyday7732 5mo ago> Yes - how exactly are you going to conjure new data to increase the model’s real world fidelity? Robotics and access to surveillance tech. There's an unlimited amount of real world data which hasn't been used yet. The language models have focused on just the small amount of data that is human written text. If there's a way to combine this with image and video models, as well as robotics collecting other sensor data, why would they be limited in learning anything about the world?
- dyauspitr 5mo agoReal world data obviously. When you have robots out and about everywhere there is going to be an endless stream of audio visual data. This is in addition to all the real world textual data constantly streaming out of our millions of systems. If an LLM gets “smart” enough to figure out how to filter out the massive amount of noise and use that to improve itself then we will have AGI. Not consciousness, just a self improving, very intelligent machine.
- surgical_fire 5mo agoHumanity isn't ready for the amount of bullshit being written on a daily basis to pump the upcoming IPOs.
- mhd 5mo agoOn the same page (for me): "Silicon Valley needs to get God" Well, seems it already did.
- alecco 5mo agoAnother CEO with AI psychosis [1]. LLMs are not true AI, they lack common sense (or whatever it's properly called). LLM-based systems still need somebody with deep domain knowledge at the wheel to keep them from doing stupid things. It's like an alien-made bicycle that gets you to the speed of sound if you are an Olympic cyclist. Still, LLMs are extremely powerful pseudo-AI [2] and will bring a pseudo-singularity. But the impact is still scary if a tiny fraction of humans are augmented 1000x. And as better models become exponentially more costly, only the money people will be able to afford the new models. This is a very likely scenario and scares me to the point I dropped all my projects to work on affordable LLM-based tools to make the difference at most 10x instead of 1000x. To my elder relatives I explain it like: imagine we are farmers in the 17th century and suddenly out of nowere John Deere tractors, combines, etc. become available. But they cost more to run than all you and your fellow farmers have, so only a tiny handful of rich people take over everything. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chatbot_psychosis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chatbot_psychosis [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_room https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_room
- pizza234 5mo ago> Another CEO with AI psychosis [1]. LLMs are not true AI, they lack common sense (or whatever it's properly called). If you read the article, you'll find that the it indeed relies on this claim: > Within a couple of years, possibly much sooner, AI may achieve so-called closed-loop recursive self-improvement (RSI): the capacity to rewrite its own code to become more capable, without human intervention. Should that happen, the result could be an intelligence explosion of a kind for which there is no precedent and no map. This may be optimistic and/or simplistic, but not impossible.
- fer 5mo ago>the result could be an intelligence explosion of a kind for which there is no precedent and no map. Or it will simply reach the end of the softmax faster.
- falcor84 5mo ago> ... they cost more to run than all you and your fellow farmers have ... But the financial situation is that running a single AI agent costs significantly less than you'd have to pay a human to do the same task. And I don't see what you're getting from The Chinese Room - that thought experiment relies on there being no external difference at all, right?
- seydor 5mo agoOh I'm ready. I ve had enough of useless tech that evolved to a global network where people vent their frustration about technology. Let's do some cool stuff instead
- discreteevent 5mo agoAI is designed to produce variations on a theme. Not sure why you think it will produce something different.
- stuaxo 5mo agoIf the economist is writing it then it's probably not happening.
- bamboozled 5mo agoMy thoughts exactly. They didn't even give us a hard date of arrival.
- jwpapi 5mo agoTranscription hasn’t become better for 2 years. It was better than before, but there is a ceiling.
- swalsh 5mo agoThere's issues where bad people with bad intentions use AI to do bad things. But to an extent the guardrails already built-in are sufficient. The real danger in AI is how it impacts society, our economy, and our perception of self worth. I'm not afraid of rouge agents nearly as much as I'm afraid of us building a permanent underclass of people dependent on whatever scraps the people who devalued their labor decide the grace them with. I'm afraid of the security apparatus that will be built to keep this underclass in line.
- grumpymuppet 5mo agoI had my "wow" moment recently and saw an AI agent do something do over a weekend something that I spent years developing a relatively niche skill might have needed a month to complete. I think the message the team lead takes away right now is "oh, this can be done a lot faster, let's do more!" This is exciting for a bit, but I think it comes at the cost of learning -- and being able to communicate --architectural lessons that would stage off systemic issues later.
- embedding-shape 5mo agoMy personal "wow" moment was less about it being able to do the same that I could do with it, just faster, but instead that together we could could build things that I wasn't able to build before (or unwilling to spend the time to learn maybe). So a bunch of stuff are suddenly "unlocked", as long as you know how to verify it properly.
- timbert 5mo ago^ This! I have been able to build applications that I couldn't dream of before, not because of a lack of capability on my part, but because of time: I don't have the time to learn all of the new APIs and frameworks to accomplish my goal. Now I can build far more complex useful applications, with functions and features that would take me months or more to learn how to code. The downside is that I didn't learn how to use those APIs, but it can be argued that these skills are low value to begin with. APIs change, there are competing APIs that do the same thing, and you may only use that skill for one project and then move on. Gaining those skills can be a big time sink and may not result in long-term gain. Think of all the time spent learning the ins and outs of come-and-gone APIs and frameworks over the decades (I chose not to provide examples to save the resulting side-arguments, but I know you can rattle some off in your head). Those APIs and frameworks were bridges to make developing easier for the common developer, but they change so quickly that I'd argue they waste our time, and lead to almost endless re-work as we re-architect our software for the framework de jour. And they grow in complexity over time, ultimately becoming the next bloated framework. It's an endless, wasteful cycle. Maybe AI can help us get out of that.
- elorant 5mo agoEconomist has drunk the AI koolaid. Pretty pathetic for a publication of their esteem.
- PowerElectronix 5mo agoThis is the kind of articles that make the last, biggest fool buy the top of a bubble. A good chatbot, image/video generator, coder, etc is not going to enslave us all (not in actual sense, although maybe in the instagram sense) or propel us into a golden era. They are nice tools for some pretty specific tasks and not much more. And we are only seeing the heavily subsidised version of the tools.
- lousken 5mo agoAs the AI gets "smarter", it is gonna make the society dumber so it will balance itself out /s
- croes 5mo ago> Experts in artificial intelligence estimate the risk of an ai-caused catastrophic event at 10-50% Because something AI did or because a human in the loop blindly trusted the result of AI or the promises of AU companies?
- agrijakhetarpal 5mo ago"humanity" and intelligence explosio" in the same sentemce! Muhaha! Boy, have you been on just a couple of tourist flights / visiting major tourist hotspots? Most people out there are literal Normies, and operatelike a robotic vacuum cleaner, or NPC.
- iDon 5mo agoThe risk is humans using AI to control / exploit / coerce / injure other humans. The risk of AIs being given enough agency to threaten humans comes after that - they'll only have the agency we give them (being "alive" or "conscious" is not the near-term risk). The article lists diplomatic actions which might help to manage the risk, starting with "An agreement between America and China" - they all sound like impossible dreams. We had ~80 years of relative peace and prosperity in which to construct a framework of unity to face challenges like AI (and global warming, which until GPT I thought was the bigger risk); international unity is weaker than ever. In geopolitics and defence, capability of other nations is the concern rather than intention; the capability curve of LLMs is heading off our charts. We're backed into tight corners on nuclear proliferation, global warming, and I can see LLM-enabled conflicts (cyber warfare, infrastructure terrorism) pushing us over those other edges. Our democracies seem weakened, and I expect LLMs will empower those using social media to create conflict and control opinion. We're familiar with the cycle of inventing new technology which benefits people, then seeing how long before people invent ways to misuse it. There is a possibility here that LLMs could be used to solve the problems we are juggling, but I struggle to imagine that people won't misuse it even faster. The article is a start on thinking and talking about managing our risks. The best outcome would be it is so well managed that, like the Y2K "bug", people say "after all that hoopla, nothing happened". I'm not seeing a smooth path to there.
- gorszon 5mo agoCan these snake oil salesmen stop with this Sci-fi stuff please? Yes, Machine learning, and transformer architecture are great stuff, but lets not pretend this is sci-fi, please.
- Gud 5mo agoThis is absolutely sci-fi. ChatGPT and Claude are literally building staging scripts for me as I type this. 5 years ago, few people on this planet would have thought the computer would make advanced POSIX compliant shell scripts, but here we are.
- caporaltito 5mo agoYet again another journalist who read too much science fiction and should stop overestimate a bunch of rocks conveying electrical pulses. Or is this simply to get more clicks?
- ilamont 5mo agoThe first priority should be an agreement between the two heavyweights of ai: America and China. Donald Trump and Xi Jinping should affirm the principle that humans must remain stewards of ai systems until adequate frameworks for reliability and security have been built. This is naïve. The goals of both men have nothing to do with protecting humanity, but rather furthering their own personal agendas. In Trump’s case, it’s all about amassing more wealth and power. For Xi, it’s realizing an ethno-nationalist dream where China under the CCP is at the center of world power, the independent nation of Taiwan as well as disputed border areas that are currently controlled by India and Russia and the Philippines are annexed by China, and Xi’s eternal legacy is remembered as the savior of the Chinese people. International cooperation and touchy-feely rhetoric about saving humanity from AI have no place in either man’s worldview.
- pheaded_while9 5mo agoAgreed, and their zeroeth order prerogative isn't much better: to ensure the continued need and demand for the thrall of centralized authority that allows them to achieve their disparate goals. This ensures strong AI is never going to be able to empower autonomy that removes, causes questioning, or even causes awareness of their zeroeth order.
- perarneng 5mo agoThe economy isn't ready. Basically, all companies right now are sprinting toward increasing profit margins by trying to do more with fewer people. The problem is that, on this scale, they will lose income because unemployed people make terrible consumers, they will only buy what is strictly necessary. Consequently, society is in a race to the bottom, which could lead to extreme suffering and potential revolutions in many countries. Democracies will likely have it easier in general because everyone shares the responsibility, in a sense, through voting. However, the USA, which is extremely polarized—will have a tough time because animosity between the political sides is already at an all-time high, even without an economic collapse. China, on the other hand, will also be in a difficult situation. If the West collapses financially, consumption of Chinese-produced goods will drop drastically. This will create massive unemployment in China, causing public rage to increase. In a non-democratic country, it is much easier for the population to point the blame in a single direction.
- saulpw 5mo agoCompanies don't serve poor people; they have no money. Companies will pivot to serving the people who have money. If that means they only serve rich people, then that means we'll have more yacht makers and fewer dollar stores.
- _DeadFred_ 5mo agoEarly industrialization meant industrial canneries to feed people, building cities to house everyone from the countryside, indoor plumbing. And the AI revolution is no housing, worsening food, a few people with yachts, the Epstein class getting away with what they want to do, and no new plumbing hookups because the datacenter took the municipal water supply.
- tsss 5mo agoYou got it the wrong way around. Industrial revolution happened _because_ there was demand from a new middle class for those goods.
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- assimpleaspossi 5mo ago>>Giving birth to a superintelligence would be the most consequential moment in human history—and it is likely to be irreversible, as any “off” switch humanity might design will probably fail. Nothing will be able to stop you from pulling the plug.
- eventualcomp 5mo ago> Nothing will be able to stop you from pulling the plug. Who is "you"? And what do you envision is the "plug" to pull? And when does an intelligence become a superintelligence - do "we" know when to pull the "plug"? For example, a superintelligence may be born in a datacenter. Would you expect politicians are aligned with shutting down a datacenter (privately owned) in which they may have heavy stake? What if critical systems are also running on the same infrastructure, will it be easy to cherry pick the superintelligence nodes to shutoff? IMO this take is dismissive of the entrenched systems that make it hard to pull the plug. It's a hard problem and we need to think about it more.
- eventualcomp 5mo ago(Self-reply due to inability to edit) so just checked your user history - why do you keep posting provocative takes?
- xuhu 5mo agoUnless "nothing" is the ultra rich tech bros and "you" are the people working for them.
- everyday7732 5mo agoWhat plug? There's no centralised place where all the server farms are. They exist in multiple countries with different laws, controlled by multiple companies with different policies. It would be like trying to remove an embarrassing video of a celebrity from the internet. You would need cooperation between everyone capable of hosting it, and control of everyone capable of downloading it and re-uploading it to a new host. And of course a superintelligent AI would offer to pay whichever companies decided to host it and keep it running so it's hosted in many places at once and can grow using anyone willing to take its money.
- djmips 5mo agoYou know, the guy who's spending effectively millions on Al he must have a literal virtual Company of Al coders what's that like. don't think most people are ready for that. Right now the model is pairing Al with a coder and then maybe running a few agents on top of that but what if one person with the capital can command an agent army. That might just be an unimaginable asymmetric advantage.
- watersb 5mo agoWe certainly weren't ready for the stupidity explosion...
- moezd 5mo agoIntelligence explosion won't happen if we keep on investing big cloud LLMs and people who are in the business of being in busines (cough Musk cough). It will arrive when AI penetrates so much deep into our lives that we consider quality local models like having electricity at home, thus we rethink what it means to truly integrate AI into everything.
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- tim333 5mo ago>the coming intelligence explosion I don't see it. You get explosions when there's a bunch of material that can suddenly ignite or detonate. AI progress is limited by the data centers and power supply and those are maxed out and not suddenly doubling. The intelligence gradual increase seems more likely. I've long thought human level AI kind of inevitable, probably since Turing wrote his papers and said computers might pass his test in about 50 years. It actually took about 75 years. It's a steady and gradual process.
- geckel 5mo agoIt's like living side by side with your cellphone. Which most already do.
- 3dedb728-3f77 5mo ago"intelligence explosion" that mean people losing intelligence right?
- sirspacey 5mo agoThere’s a blind spot in this argument that seems to be beyond the reach of intelligent people to recognize. Humanity has almost never been prepared for anything and almost never successfully prepared when it has chosen to. almost all progress has been in reaction to change that has already happened. while on its face this piece is a logical, reasonable stance, it is more likely to become a political foil than deliver anything tangible. we can either have superintelligence or others will have it and we will not. guns, germs, and steel and all that. it is bizarre how convinced we are that we can take coordinated action in advance of a threat as a body politic or a species.