atriarch

I know, right? Where's the space ship in my garage?

I first heard about Elon Musk in my teens when I was reading astronomy magazines and wishing Robert Zubrin was running NASA. Why wasn't Nasa progressing? We stopped going to the moon and made a space truck to ferry satellites and ISS nodules into LEO for $2B a pop and 1/100 odds of fatality. Anyway here comes this SV guy wishing he could put a greenhouse on mars and see if a plant would grow in Martian regolith...

I'm still waiting for that experiment, Mr. Musk.

Indeed. The moment these LLM brains are given access to natural selection and evolution in the hardware space, it's game over.

We don't need to engineer plumbing robots - they will engineer themselves. We will see a silicon Cambrian Explosion. Maybe next year maybe in 500, but it's inevitable with the current economic incentives.

This is a multifaceted problem for sure. As the fruit of leveraging LLM use, from my experience, is held in the hands of experienced, skilled, and gray-haired workers, what hope do young kids today have of BEING in this world?

The economic model since the industrial revolution is approaching it's metamorphosis: robotic servants that can do everything for everyone. Who, in that world, can spend the fiat and for what? I think many humans would prefer going back to picking potatoes out of the ground for a bit of silver than to lose agency to the machine. Everyone else is either bunker prepping or plugging into the matrix.

Will we arrive at the Jetsons? Or Warhammer 40k?

It's nice to see human-centered computing making a comeback with the older, robust, and hefty tactile interfaces - and I hope to see more like this as token factories eat wallets and jobs.

Someone still has to orchestrate. I read every decision the LMs make and will stop and pause it and test it's assumptions and output. Sure that will occur less and less, and the feedback loop may go up a few levels (I.e. it breaks in production and requires a team of investigators, a code detective, and a techno-theologist, perhaps), but the feedback from the real world (nature vs nurture) will still occur. The laws of thermodynamics and system equilibrium still apply, and the need for those to architect and orchestrate will still be needed.

In the future, I see a small percentage of benevolent system-thinkers, hackers, and architects still at the helm. And, even if 95% of the time they are the guy who feeds the dog that protects us from touching the machines, occasionally nature will force us to convene and tell the machines what to do (or at least bargain with them).

The rest of humanity will go back to the default state: digging potatoes out of the ground in a village of 200 down by the river.

Exponential growth is the path of longsuffering, and one doesn't always make it. It sucks and looks and feels bad for all involved. This is why advice such as, "Ignore the naysayers." is clutch. And other advice once one starts to rocket shoot like "Stay in your lane." is the absolute worst advice of all time. (IYKYK - Rest in peace Scott Adams)

Another thought - Einstein had reviewed thousands of patents when he worked on the train - that's a hell of data set for an LM to start with.