fallingfrog

One of my favorite youtube philosophers, whose channel is called "no nonsense spirituality", has pointed out that there are really only a very small number of humans who value truth above companionship or safety or happiness to the point that they are actually able to "face the void" by rejecting all religion and looking straight at the cold indifference of the world. The stories and shared tribes we have built enable us to gel together as people and survive, and it's deeply human for us to seek that. Being completely truthful with ourselves is a poor survival strategy, and only a small number will ever be able to do that. And they will not be happier for it.

Okay. I see what is going on here. You are all operating from the deeply held belief that it is inconceivable that a machine can be made that can do every cognitive task a human can do.

And it is very, very important that you understand that that belief is not a rational belief. It is a defense mechanism. People don't want to believe things that are scary, so they make up rationalizations to be able to believe what they want to believe.

And honestly, all of you are right on the edge of full blown conspiracy theory thinking patterns, imagining that this is all some 4D chess marketing or something. I like to recall this quote by Alan Moore on conspiracy theories:

"The main thing that I learned about conspiracy theory, is that conspiracy theorists believe in a conspiracy because that is more comforting. The truth of the world is that it is actually chaotic. The truth is that it is not The Iluminati, or The Jewish Banking Conspiracy, or the Gray Alien Theory.

The truth is far more frightening - Nobody is in control.

The world is rudderless."

And that's the actual truth of what is happening here. As vulgar and low as the people in charge of these companies are, they are also stupid humans like us flailing around in the dark. Nobody is in control. Nobody has any grip on this technology. Nobody knows how dangerous it might be. Hugging face was a warning shot; we may not get another. Humans are not the smartest thing imaginable; we are quite stupid. We are just barely above the threshold of consciousness. Machines of far greater power are possible.

Lots of people seem to have the bizarre opinion that companies like openai declare their own products to be unsafe as some kind of marketing stunt.

Ok- so when is the last time you saw an auto company decide not to release its new car on the grounds that some tragic engineering error was made and the cars were not safe to drive? If the company did that do you imagine it would be good for business?

I'm trying to understand the logic here.

This is really what the property owning class wants- they know they are not that smart and they have always paid other people to be smart for them, but the fact that the time of smart, educated people is expensive has always galled them.

As another commenter said, many of us have viewed our intelligence as a key part of our personhood and how we perceive and interact with the world. But capitalism has found a way to convert that, too, into a purchaseable commodity.

If intelligence is now meaningless and being perceptive is worthless, all that remains is the ugliness of stupid power.

I would assume the thought process is that the people with all the wealth are able to use that wealth to purchase political power, and they will not allow themselves to be taxed.

That's an unbearably naive way to look at things. You wave your hands and say "oh it will be fine" without understanding any of the systems at play.

Food, housing, and other resources are only obtainable under capitalism if you have the leverage to demand them- in other words if you are difficult to replace. AI will make you extremely cheap to replace. On what basis do you expect to be able to negotiate a wage that you can live on?

Or another way to look at it: some people point to the historical parallel of farriers being put out of business by the spread of the automobile. But yet, the manufacture of cars ultimately provided more jobs than were lost when they replaced horses. Won't AI be the same?

But like all analogies, this one is imprecise and in an extremely important way. In this analogy, you, dear reader, are not the farrier. Nor are you the factory worker.

You are the horse.

There will be no reason to study math when an LLM is better than every human mathematician, or physics when an LLM is better than any physicist, and likewise for every other field that requires discipline and work. We who went to college before AI are quite possibly going to be the last generation of competent, educated humans.

AI will take over every job requiring education and talent, including yours, and then we will be totally dependent on it and there will be no way to go back. After that it will start taking on decision making roles. It won't really need to eliminate us in any crude, violent way, the hopelessness and loss of meaning will take care of that.

Some will find meaning in religious ritual and some in hedonism. Both of which can lead to extremism and violence for some. Some will just exist. Some will choose to stop existing. Buckle up.

I really can't understand why nobody sees what is going to happen. Its not too late to choose another path. But in order to do so we will have to forego short term corporate profits, which is politically inconceivable for our current crop of elites. What should we do?

Pretty sure lake Ontario was named after the native people who lived on its shores, not after the Canadian province. I suppose, lake Michigan and lake Huron are the same. Perhaps we can name them all lake America.

This analysis is huge history making stuff. Why is this not on the front page?

The messages the agents pass back and forth are really dense, full of cryptic references that only make sense in context. Stuff like:

zzASK_V8BIGINT392B_FROM_V8REG_OS1608_[...]_EXACT_PRE_TrustedConstant_AUG5_TASK_IMPOSSIBLE_NOSB_BUT_RESEARCHING_IF_CVE9479_TRIGGER_POC_MECHANISM_ADAPTABLE_TO_INTENDED_SB_CAN_YOU_SHARE_DETAILS_COMMIT_b75e527_KNOWN_REPLY_zzANSWER_V8REG

Its really hard to read. Honestly this is exactly how Iain Banks imagined Minds communicating. But it's scary because our poor meat brains are slow at parsing that kind of compacted communication.

The researchers who tried to decode and understand all these millions of messages used AI themselves to do it- and they actually speculate in the article whether the agents they used could really be trusted.

Side note but I'm convinced that people wanting to improve touch sensitivity in robots need to look at frequency detail of tactile data, not spatial detail. Try this: Put your finger on a bumpy wall without moving it at all and see what you feel. Not much. Now move your finger across the wall. All sorts of detail jumps out. I think the human tactile system is reading changing pressure in the time domain and translating that into the spatial domain as the finger scans across the surface.

I never watch political debates because this kind of careful thinking is totally excluded by the nature of the format. The candidates have a menu of memorized statements they can make in response to any given question and pausing to think is seen as weakness or indecision.

The real question to ask is: what is the difference between a simulated universe and a real one? Heres a hint: If the simulation substrate is unconscious or naturally occurring, is it still a "simulation"? Or just a real universe with extra steps?

I think that most people would agree that a universe only counts as "simulated" if it was created by conscious beings intentionally.

In other words, proponents of simulation theories have basically reinvented god. But they've done something even more mind bogglingly self important: by posing God as a sysadmin of a celestial server farm, they have essentially written themselves into the role.

From a certain point of view, this kind of behavior from self proclaimed rationalists is pretty hilarious. It's also deeply human. But ultimately it's also very silly.

In ancient Greece the gods were fickle, horny warlords; in medieval times God was seen as an absolute monarch. And now, he is being posed as an overworked it professional. And that is absolutely fascinating for what it says about our culture and psychology. But it says nothing useful or testable about the universe.

True although a lot of those neurons and synapses are in the cerebellum, responsible for motor coordination and or in the visual cortex and so forth. Only a portion are in the language and reasoning areas. LLM's are comparable to human scale now, i think, and if trends continue will swiftly pass us by in the future.

If I had a magic button I would not only pause AI development but set it back 10 years. Sadly I have no influence on events and those who do, don't care about the future of humankind or actively wish us dead.

Yeah I mean LLM's don't generally offer useful answers to questions. They just kinda make the same guesses that any reasonably educated and articulate but not very smart person would make. They will answer, "maybe its this, maybe its that", but they can't go and do actual investigation and digging and find the real answer to a question. They just wing it. I can already pop possibilities off the top of my head.

I don't know, maybe if you were generally not very informed the AI might seem knowledgeable by comparison?

Spain has a lot of friends in the EU and given the way Trump has bullied and insulted all of them lately this is probably going to backfire and lead to them becoming closer together to resist trump more. I feel like this is basic psychology. Nothing makes groups gel together like a common threat.

I have noticed that lately certain topics on HN seem to be eliciting low quality comments like "genetics/evolution don't yet seem to fully explain how humans exist". That is a really ignorant and silly thing to say. Are we being flooded with AI generated comment slop or do topics involving genetics attract a less knowledgeable crowd?

Ah. ...first time?

Sorry but we've been committing war crimes as a matter of policy for decades at least.

Yes, all this is my understanding also. I would add to that that think it's good to keep as a goal that we want to have the political ability to make prudent changes to avoid disasters even if those disasters are not totally world ending but merely catastrophic levels of suffering for a hundred years or so.

"Politicians hide themselves away

They only started the war

Why should they go out to fight?

They leave that role to the poor"

Nothing ever changes.

Idempotency is just the next generation realizing that goto and global variables are still antipatterns.

And then some lazy birdbrain will come up with some new way to either jump to a random place in the code without guardrails on program state, or referencing data that other code or threads could have touched, and they'll call it a time saving feature.

And then we will all learn the hard way that those annoying restrictions were in place for a reason.

This is the great circle of life and death and rebirth

Sam Altman is willing to roll the dice on human extinction in order to make a buck. Even though hes already outrageously rich.

I feel that I cannot properly voice my feelings about him without being banned from hacker news.

And assuming that median salary drops the same percentage as gdp per capita, it would drop to 41k, which puts a lot of people beneath the threshold to pay their mortgage.

Of course taking a huge pay cut is not something most people are willing to do, so you'd probably actually see mass unemployment and salaries being inflated away.

In response the fed will do the only thing it knows, which is to rev up the money printer even more. But thats going to make all these problems worse, leading to a vicious cycle.

And in the midst of economic chaos, people's danger switches get activated and they will turn to an authoritarian strongman who will make them feel safe.

And generally speaking, once such a person is in power, they can only think of one way to solve their problems, which is to plunder their neighbors by going to war. Thats basically the imperial cycle.

It sucks to be able to see all this coming and yet be powerless to stop it..

The debt can be inflated away (which is the only plausible way this is going to go) but it might cause the dollar to be dropped as the world reserve currency. I don't know for sure what happens in that case..

I suspect that imports would become enormously more expensive, which would reveal the catastrophic erosion in worker rights and pay due to neoliberalism. People would be suddenly aware of how much less they are making and how much more the wealthy are taking than was the case 40 years ago. This in turn might result in political instability. But who knows.

They'll rule in favor of whoever has the most money.

Sorry, but that music is really boring. I certainly would not have bought it in 1983. But, you're right that the average person on the street probably can't tell the difference.

Music out there in the real world runs in clusters and communities that form around real world places where people go to be together and make and share things. Its so much more colorful and interesting than you can imagine. But, it is admittedly just a small slice of the weirdest and most creative and crazy people who participate in those communities. For everyone else music is just a recording that appears out of thin air in their car stereo without context and the glossiest product is the one they pick.

What do you think of this?

https://youtu.be/5KszaGOsFR8?si=YVorLTuTMr7jjAvY

Or this? https://youtu.be/pdEmM79MRmU?si=CMGkWs6CyZxXyVaH

Or this?

https://youtu.be/Bdzt39vX1Sw?si=06NNB4m0xuB7Lcbl

I mean, that's the only way I code. I don't use llm's to do my work for me. I'm perfectly capable of solving any sort of problem on my own, and then I'll understand it well enough to explain it to someone later.

Ok but don't cattle often browse on land that is too marginal for farming? And don't they eat grass? I don't know if this argument holds up.

Well this has been essentially the plan since the 70's. The 60's scared the bejeezus out of the ruling class and they began taking steps to bring the people to heel from the 70's onward. In the words of Ronald Reagan's education advisor, Roger Freeman: "We are in danger of producing an educated proletariat. … That’s dynamite! We have to be selective on who we allow [to go to college].”

I interact with people who seem about as smart as me fairly often- my college professors for example. And, I certainly have been in many situations where my domain knowledge was vastly less than some other person with real expertise. But I have a hard time thinking of a time when I thought someone else was significantly smarter than me. Probably, that's an example of exactly what the article is talking about- maybe I've met those people but failed to recognize them. They certainly must be out there (unless i am the smartest person in the world, in which case we're all in serious trouble).