First, let me say that what broke me from the herd at lesswrong was specifically the calls for AI pauses. That somehow ‘rationalists’ are so certain advanced AI will kill everyone in the future (pDoom = 100%!) that they need to commit any violent act needed to stop AI from being developed.
The flaw here is that there’s 8 billion people alive right now, and we don’t actually know what the future is. There are ways better AI could help the people living now, possibly saving their lives, and essentially eliezer yudkowsky is saying “fuck em”. This could only be worth it if you actually somehow knew trillions of people were going to exist, had a low future discount rate, and so on. This seems deeply flawed, and seems to be one of the points here.
But I do think advanced AI is possible. And while it may not be a mainstream take yet, it seems like the problems current AI can’t solve, like robotics, continuous learning, module reuse - the things needed to reach a general level of capabilities and for AI to do many but not all human jobs - are near future. I can link deepmind papers with all of these, published in 2022 or 2023.
And if AI can be general and control robots, and since making robots is a task human technicians and other workers can do, this does mean a form of Singularity is possible. Maybe not the breathless utopia by Ray Kurzweil but a fuckton of robots.
So I was wondering what the people here generally think. There are “boomer” forums I know of where they also generally deny AI is possible anytime soon, claim GPT-n is a stochastic parrot, and make fun of tech bros as being hypesters who collect 300k to edit javascript and drive Teslas*.
I also have noticed that the whole rationalist schtick of “what is your probability” seems like asking for “joint probabilities”, aka smoke a joint and give a probability.
Here’s my questions:
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Before 2030, do you consider it more likely than not that current AI techniques will scale to human level in at least 25% of the domains that humans can do, to average human level.
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Do you consider it likely, before 2040, those domains will include robotics
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If AI systems can control robotics, do you believe a form of Singularity will happen. This means hard exponential growth of the number of robots, scaling past all industry on earth today by at least 1 order of magnitude, and off planet mining soon to follow. It does not necessarily mean anything else.
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Do you think that mass transition where most human jobs we have now will become replaced by AI systems before 2040 will happen
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Is AI system design an issue. I hate to say “alignment”, because I think that’s hopeless wankery by non software engineers, but given these will be robotic controlling advanced decision-making systems, will it require lots of methodical engineering by skilled engineers, with serious negative consequences when the work is sloppy?
*“epistemic status”: I uh do work for a tech company, my job title is machine learning engineer, my girlfriend is much younger than me and sometimes fucks other dudes, and we have 2 Teslas…
ooooookay longpost time
first off: eh wtf, why is this on sneerclub? kinda awks. but I’ll try give it a fair and honest answer.
look, congrats on breaking out, but uh… you’re still wearing the prison jumpsuit in the grocery store and that’s why people are looking at you weirdly
“yay you got out” but you got only half the reason right
take some time and read this
correct
one note here: “plausible” vs “possible” are very divergent paths and likelihoods
in the Total Possible Space Of All Things That Might Ever Happen, of course it’s possible, but so are many, many other things
eh. this ties back to my opener - you’re still too convinced about something on essentially no grounded basis other than industry hype-optimism
look I don’t want to shock you but that’s basically what they get paid to do. and (perverse) incentives apply - of course goog isn’t just going to spend a couple decabillion then go “oh shit, hmm, we’ve reached the limits of what this can do. okay everyone, pack it in, we’re done with this one!”, they’re gonna keep trying to milk it to make some of those decabillions back. and there’s plenty of useful suckers out there
okay this is a weird leap and it’s borderline LW shittery so I’m not going to spend much effort on it, but I’ll give you this
it doesn’t fucking matter.
even if we do somehow crack even the smallest bit of computational sentience, the plausibility of rapid acting self-reinforcing runaway self-improvement on such a thing is basically nil. we’re 3 years down the line on the Evergreen getting stuck in the suez and fabs shutting down (with downstream orders being cancelled) and as a result of it a number of chips are still effectively unobtanium (even if and when you have piles and piles of money to throw at the problem). multiple industries, worldwide, are all throwing fucking tons of money at the problem to try recover from the slightest little interruption in supply (and like, “slight”, it wasn’t even like fabs burned down or something, they just stopped shipping for a while)
just think of the utter scope of doing robotics. first you have to solve a whole bunch of design shit (which by itself involves a lot of from-principles directed innovation and inspiration and shit). then you have to figure out how to build the thing in a lab. then you have to scale it? which involves ordering thousounds of parts and SKUs from hundred of vendors. then find somewhere/somehow to assemble it? and firmware and iteration and all that shit?
this isn’t fucking age of ultron, and tony’s parking-space fab isn’t a real thing.
this outcome just isn’t fucking likely on any nearby horizon imo
we generally think the people who believe this are unintentional suckers or wilful grifters. idk what else to tell you? thought that was pretty clear
wat
okay this gave me a momentary chuckle, and made me remember JRPhttp://darklab.org/jrp.txt (which is a fun little shitpost to know about)
from here, answering your questions as you asked them in order (and adding just my own detail in areas where others may not already have covered something)
no, not a fuck, not even slightly. definitely not with the current set of bozos at the helm or techniques as the foundation or path to it.
no, see above
who gives a shit? but seriously, no, see above. even if it did, perverse incentives and economic pressures from sweeping hand motion all this other shit stands a very strong chance to completely fuck it all up 60 ways to sunday
snore
if any of this happens at some point at all, the first few generations of it will probably look the same as all other technology ever - a force-multiplier with humans in the loop, doing things and making shit. and whatever happens in that phase will set the one on whatever follows so I’m not even going to try predict that
…okay? congrats? is that fulfilling for you? does it make you happy?
not really sure why you mentioned the gf thing at all? there’s no social points to be won here
closing thoughts: really weird post yo. like, “5 yud-steered squirrels in a trenchcoat” weird.
a lot of corporations involved with AI are doing their damndest to damage our relationship with the scientific process by releasing as much fluff disguised as research as they can manage, and I really feel like it’s a trick they learned from watching cryptocurrency projects release an interminable amount of whitepapers (which, itself, damaged our relationship with and expectations from the engineering process)
As someone who went from high school directly into a publishing company as a “web designer” in 1998 I spent the next 20 years assuming that academic work was completely uninfluenced by commercial interests. HCI was academic, UX was commercial. Wasn’t till around 2019 that I started reading ACM papers about HCI from the 70s up. Fuck me was I surprised with how mixed up it all is. ACM interactions magazine published monthly case studies for Apple or did profiles on Jef Raskin talking about HCI for brand loyalty.
Anyway. Point is a published paper doesn’t mean shit if you just read a few because an article pointed you to them. I don’t know. This thread sucks
Preach, as someone inside academia, the bullcrap is real. I very rarely read a paper that hasn’t got a major stats issue—an academic paper is only worth something if you understand it enough to know how wrong it is or there’s plenty of replication/related work building on it, ideally both. (And it’s a technical field with an objective measure of truth but don’t let my colleagues in humanities hear me say that—its not that their work is worthless, its just its not reliable.)
“shitcoiners or oil companies… who wore it best?”
but the rest of your reply reminds me that someone (I think steve or blake?) mentioned a thing here recently about a book on blaming guthenberg for this state of fucking everything up. I want to go read that, and I really need to get around to writing my rantpost about the “the problem of information transfer at scale is that scale is lossy, and this is why … [handwaves at many problems, examples continue]” thing that at least 8 friends of mine have had to put up with in DM over the last few years
They also hyped autonomous cars and the Internet itself including streaming video for years before it was practical. Your filter of “it’s all hype” only works 99 percent of the time.
autonomous cars aren’t
look, there is no way on earth you didn’t lose a fortune in crypto last year
Just I think to summarize your beliefs: rationalists are wrong about a lot of things and assholes. And also the singularity (which predates yuds existence) is not in fact possible by the mechanism I outlined.
I think this is a big crux here. It’s one thing if its a cult around a false belief. It’s kind of a problem to sneer at a cult if the core S of it happens to be a true law of nature.
Or an analogy. I think gpt-4 is like the data from the Chicago pile. That data was enough to convince the domain experts then a nuke was going to work to the point they didn’t test Fat Man, you believe not. Clearly machine generality is possible, clearly it can solve every problem you named including, with the help of humans, ordering every part off digikey and loading the pick and place and inspecting the boards and building the wire harnesses and so on.
don’t be puttin’ words in my mouth yo
this is a big set of very many people and lots of details
many of them about many things, yes
some, provably
whether it’s the wet dream of kurzweil or yud or whoever else, doesn’t matter? but as to the details… you’re engaging with this like the rats do (yes, told you, you only half escaped). you “set the example”, and then “test the details”
just … don’t?
the siren song of this is “okay what if I change the details of the experiment slightly?”
we’ve had the trolley problem for ages, doesn’t mean it’s just “solved”. you won’t manage to “solve” whether the singularity can happen or not here, for the same reason
fuck off with the cult jargon
Are you mixing up Fat Man and Little Boy? Because Fat Man was an implosion-type bomb, just like the Trinity device. Little Boy was a gun-type. From vague memories of Rhode’s book, they wanted implosion types to maximize Pu weight to kiloton ratio, but it was much less straightforward than a gun-type bomb.
Whoa whoa whoa there! I’m the contrarian that thinks that gpt is clearly more that just plagiarizing things, but it’s still just a step above Mad Libs in terms of intelligence. It’s not clear that you could get it to be smarter than a goldfish, let alone a human being. It’s just really good at stringing words together in a way that sounds good.
I read it. I appreciated the point that human perception of current AI performance can scam us, though this is nothing new. People were fooled by Eliza.
It’s a weak argument though. For causing an AI singularity, functional intelligence is the relevant parameter. Functional intelligence just means “if the machine is given a task, what is the probability it completes the task successfully”. Theoretically an infinite chinese room can have functional intelligence (the machine just looks up the sequence of steps for any given task).
People have benchmarked GPT-4 and it’s got general functional intelligence at tasks that can be done on a computer. You can also just go pay up $20 a month and try it. It’s below human level overall I think, but still surprisingly strong given it’s emergent behavior from computing tokens.