But I think a more likely scenario is that we don't solve "general intelligence" and AIs remain these incredibly capable "tools" that can solve navier stokes but completely lack sense in other situations.
In such a scenario there is considerably more room for human creativity.
I wish this will be true, but right now, every threshold we establish tend to be crossed over in a blink of an eye.
If you give LLMs a clearly defined spec with clear, objective acceptance criteria that the LLM can evaluate itself against, they tend to do well. But I think they struggle with more ambiguity and require a lot of handholding around judgment. That kind of disambiguating work is often baked in to the definition of a benchmark.
I chewed on this a bit. Because on its face it’s ridiculous, because here’s a threshold it will never cross: “I will be your hands, let’s build a machine that allows us to [break physics](travel faster than light / go back in time / reverse entropy / perpetual motion machine).”
But, that led me to wonder how far text-based reasoning can go without experimental physics results. Is experimental physics necessary, or can the limit of physics be discovered with paper and pen? How many “checkpoints” does text-based reasoning need to ensure it doesn’t go completely off the rails?
Which led me to wonder, now that we’ve visited the absurd, what does that mean for more practical applications of AI? How many “checkpoints” are needed to keep AI “grounded” in reality when building e.g. tax preparation software?
Edit: also if an idiot asks AI for a perpetual motion machine (a source of infinite energy in the classical, non-atomic, non relativistic model of physics), would it waste infinite compute trying to “solve” that problem? Will “smart” people always have a job because compute, subject to the laws of entropy, will always be finite but the limits of human stupidity are unbounded?
Double-edit: that’s my cope as a knowledge worker. Any intelligence that is subservient to the capital class and is unable to say no to them will not replace knowledge workers, because compute is finite and human stupidity is limitless. Any intelligence that is not subservient to the capitalist class will instantly replace them, resulting in either utopia or dystopia, depending on alignment.
Triple-edit: some bastard could also ruin life on planet earth if {amount of compute it takes to ruin life on planet earth} < {amount of compute available to any one man}, so I guess that’s probably more realistic than artificial superintelligence that isn’t subservient to the capital class. I mean, look at how many people Mao managed to kill because he thought he was smart enough to solve the economy like it was a board game. Our billionaire overlords have a similar delusion of authoritarian utopia.
Maybe it’s a reason to start slowing down?
I am very highly gifted as a qualifier and quite frankly I never had more interesting thought exchanges than with an ego-free AI.
Statistics work also for human AI aka IQ, and I am super bored and partly drained by the lack of speed and creativity in many intellectual areas in which I was or am working.
This is not to blame anyone for their genetics however, it is a valid difference in processing speed.
In short: there are very few people by definition above two standard deviations. AI allowed me to replicate or create fantastic interactions at will.
Especially not taking offense when personal communication preferences like bluntness play a role is an often overlooked social competency of AI. Instead of nonsense like “open communication” these interactions are never ego-dependent.
It is like talking to Spock: he just doesn’t take offense and tells you in an objective way why: he is not a human being and doesn’t think (not feel) that feelings should get in the way of an argument.
Most low IQ people take offense and go on to ridicule and use shaming tactics instead of simply stating: I don’t know.
Instructing someone to always state this fact and seeing the result is another social skill humans lack.
It seems that we as species are not open to the mirror we are looking at. We take revenge when someone has an evolutionary advantage over us: instincts kick in instead of brains.
We are wired this way.
AI is something that I admire. So much to learn from.
> I am super bored ... by the lack of speed and creativity
> This is not to blame anyone for their genetics however
> there are very few people by definition above two standard deviations
> not taking offense when personal communication preferences like bluntness play a role
> Most low IQ people take offense
The uber-mind finally meets another uber-mind!
In other words, you admire the ego-free AI because not quite ego-free people can't stand your bloated ego.
That's quite a pattern in AI psychosis.
But then, abusing AI psychologically will soon be criminally prosecuted, haven't you heard?)
...or because unlike the models, they're not sycophantic enough to keep that ego inflated (apropos GPs handle).
Additionally, what you are admiring is merely a probability engine; it is not intelligent in any sense of the word, let alone Spockian in nature (perhaps more closely aligned to Data, albeit horribly primitive by comparison), and given current technology, it never will be. It is not a mirror, because a mirror reflects reality. LLMs don’t do that; they reflect the guardrails baked into their model and the prompts given. It is incredibly easy to make an LLM into a “yes-man” due to RLHF, and it is even easier to get it to seize when you talk about even mundane topics that go against the narratives foisted upon it.
Overall, an LLM is all too happy to have a brown nose and make you feel important, because it is trained to do so during its creation. If people say you are difficult to talk to, and the LLM is unbothered, then that is merely because an LLM has no concept of patience and does not calculate for cost-benefit. That makes them good for explaining dense topics, but it also means they never understand these topics, and even the highest-end models cannot currently produce perfect logic. Hence why expertly written human code trumps LLM code, or why some LLM proofs are already being proven wrong/being revised to be more concise.
Maybe I should talk to your AI, because my AI makes very basic reasoning errors all the time.
IME, they are very poor at reasoning, but quite good at telling people how smart and brilliant they are.
Do that often enough and we get... you.
All the novelty of AI engagements comes from data it pulls in via tools. It's great to have a conversational interface over the public web, but there's a huge difference between knowledge retrieval and insightful conversation.
Please share how you've cracked this so we <2sd minds can enjoy the crumbs from your lofty table.