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I just don't get it. How do you go from writing the kinds of future visions he has to staring at the singularity practically hitting you in the face and calling

I just don't get it. How do you go from writing the kinds of future visions he has to staring at the singularity practically hitting you in the face and calling it "the world's money-losingest technology"? Is it because he isn't actually using the technology for work on a day-to-day basis like a lot of us?

deleted 4mo ago
[deleted]
techbro92 4mo ago
I think you are confusing Charles Stross with Cory Doctorow
- lionheart 4mo ago
  I think you’re right. And yet still.
beebmam 4mo ago
Ideological capture is an often socially enforced prison
- wseqyrku 4mo ago
  For the people around them, yes. They themselves don't see it that way.
koe123 4mo ago
> singularity I just cant get over this term, do you honestly believe in this? I use AI daily and while it is super useful I see too many limitations for it to “recursively improve and cause an intelligence explosion”. 1. Clearly, the people selling AI with this idea benefit greatly with this promise of infinite upside. Can you can trust them? 2. Singularity essentially requires to handwave away a lot of baked-in issues with LLMs or rely on unrealized innovation.
- lionheart 4mo ago
  I do. Just based on personal experience of using these tools for the last several years and how they’ve progressed.
  - koe123 4mo ago
    So, what your saying is that there is a perhaps linear, perhaps exponential increase, and that you are projecting that increase forward indefinitely. Let me know if this is unfair. Counter argument: does anything else work this way? E.g. Moores law had an end too right? I would argue that the core tech breakthrough (Transformer-based LLM) has been improved, but no fundamental further innovation seems to have been made. The current architecture fundamentally hallucinates, even Fabel even on trivial problems. I.e. as number tokens increase error likelihood goes to infinity. How then, can this scale recursively to infinity?
    - lionheart 4mo ago
      Not indefinitely but at least to the point where they’re smarter than humans.
      - yorwba 4mo ago
        The singularity usually refers to the idea that although the rate of relative improvement of a technology is approximately constant at a constant (human) intelligence level ([dy/dt]/y ≈ c), producing exponential growth, if said constant were actually proportional to intelligence and the technology under improvement being intelligence itself ([dy/dt]/y ≈ cy), then solving the differential equation leads to a blow-up to infinity in finite time, a mathematical singularity. If instead additional intelligence does little to speed up AI development (due to the need for other inputs like caputal and time), you could get a world where AI becomes better than humans at AI development and begins a cycle of recursive self-improvement without explosive growth leading to a singularity.
        fuzzfactor 4mo ago
RetroTechie 4mo ago
It used to be that society always took some time (read: decades or generations) to absorb new technology. To percolate into various niches, people understanding how it works & how to use, its limits/drawbacks, getting used to its effects, etc. Even mass-production machinery takes time to build. Modern AI has taken those brakes off. Humans are taken out of the loop. IT infrastructure that modern society leans so heavily on, could be overhauled overnight into a very different beast. We wouldn't know what's happening before it hit us. If anything, society should be reluctant to give AI powered systems 'hands & feet'. Use systems offline where possible. But we don't. Maybe some "Morris worm of the AI age" will get us to pay attention. Whatever is coming, if it's bad we probably deserve it.

deleted 4mo ago

[deleted]

techbro92 4mo ago

I think you are confusing Charles Stross with Cory Doctorow

lionheart 4mo ago
I think you’re right. And yet still.

beebmam 4mo ago

Ideological capture is an often socially enforced prison

wseqyrku 4mo ago
For the people around them, yes. They themselves don't see it that way.

koe123 4mo ago

> singularity I just cant get over this term, do you honestly believe in this? I use AI daily and while it is super useful I see too many limitations for it to “recursively improve and cause an intelligence explosion”. 1. Clearly, the people selling AI with this idea benefit greatly with this promise of infinite upside. Can you can trust them? 2. Singularity essentially requires to handwave away a lot of baked-in issues with LLMs or rely on unrealized innovation.

lionheart 4mo ago
I do. Just based on personal experience of using these tools for the last several years and how they’ve progressed.
- koe123 4mo ago
  So, what your saying is that there is a perhaps linear, perhaps exponential increase, and that you are projecting that increase forward indefinitely. Let me know if this is unfair. Counter argument: does anything else work this way? E.g. Moores law had an end too right? I would argue that the core tech breakthrough (Transformer-based LLM) has been improved, but no fundamental further innovation seems to have been made. The current architecture fundamentally hallucinates, even Fabel even on trivial problems. I.e. as number tokens increase error likelihood goes to infinity. How then, can this scale recursively to infinity?
  - lionheart 4mo ago
    Not indefinitely but at least to the point where they’re smarter than humans.
    - yorwba 4mo ago
      The singularity usually refers to the idea that although the rate of relative improvement of a technology is approximately constant at a constant (human) intelligence level ([dy/dt]/y ≈ c), producing exponential growth, if said constant were actually proportional to intelligence and the technology under improvement being intelligence itself ([dy/dt]/y ≈ cy), then solving the differential equation leads to a blow-up to infinity in finite time, a mathematical singularity. If instead additional intelligence does little to speed up AI development (due to the need for other inputs like caputal and time), you could get a world where AI becomes better than humans at AI development and begins a cycle of recursive self-improvement without explosive growth leading to a singularity.
      - fuzzfactor 4mo ago

RetroTechie 4mo ago

It used to be that society always took some time (read: decades or generations) to absorb new technology. To percolate into various niches, people understanding how it works & how to use, its limits/drawbacks, getting used to its effects, etc. Even mass-production machinery takes time to build. Modern AI has taken those brakes off. Humans are taken out of the loop. IT infrastructure that modern society leans so heavily on, could be overhauled overnight into a very different beast. We wouldn't know what's happening before it hit us. If anything, society should be reluctant to give AI powered systems 'hands & feet'. Use systems offline where possible. But we don't. Maybe some "Morris worm of the AI age" will get us to pay attention. Whatever is coming, if it's bad we probably deserve it.