> Your average 'poor person' in America has HVAC. An unimaginable luxury in the EU
Lmao, did HN just glitch out and start showing me Pieter Levels' tweets?
3,993 karma · joined June 26, 2021
Lmao, did HN just glitch out and start showing me Pieter Levels' tweets?
I very specifically addressed this in my response to you. How much training data is contained in 16 waking hours of navigating the world fusing all sensory data, never mind data being simultaneously generated within the mind while this is all going on, from birth til death? From birth til pushing that shopping cart?
Far, far more than in all the training datasets being used for AI.
I also addressed this again in my reply to the sibling comment.
People tend to discount how much data humans have passing through their minds 24/7.
A human isn’t born in a vacuum as a fully formed adult and dropped into the shopping cart navigation problem.
A human has had far, far more training data fed into it that contains all the pieces necessary to translate to pushing a shopping cart when first seeing it, than a machine learning model which has been fed 1 million videos of a robot pushing a shopping cart.
What I’m saying is that the ultimate goal of those in power are not these sorts of altruistic or even scientific pursuits, and that the massive labor disruption and hyper concentration of power in the hands of those who are proving time and again that advancement of science and benefiting the whole of humanity are actually antithetical to their goals is likely a bad thing.
You are right to point out that the ones who fully own and pilot the machines all belong to the “fuck science and humanity as a whole” group. So the likely outcomes don’t look good.
Echoes the early promise of the internet vs the eventual state and consequences of it, although seemingly primed for far more dire and deeply penetrating consequences.
> novel to us every single day. Like navigating a shopping cart through tricky coridors in a store
We have been practicing navigating the physical world for something like 16hrs/day every day from the moment of our birth. All the sensory data passing through our brains during that time is far larger than any dataset an LLM is trained on.
Humans navigating a shopping cart at a store have likely navigated the physical world before, pushed a shopping cart before, and in combination have navigated stores while pushing shopping carts before. Nevertheless, many still bump into objects all along the way.
Them succeeding at successive variations of store layouts is not novel unless we expand the definition of novel to mean any recombination whatsoever of pre existing concepts.
I’m certain that with all the intense usage of AI by hundreds of millions of people, there have been countless collections of words passed to LLMs so far that have never before been uttered in exactly such a sequence, let alone in the dataset.
I’m equally certain the LLMs have responded to those words with collections of its own that have also never been uttered in that exact sequence, responding to their unique context.
It is trivial to produce an example of this now yourself if you’d like.
The LLM we’re talking about, mentioned in the OP, has never seen this solution to this problem in its dataset. A large number of brilliant mathematicians were not able to discover this solution. They are themselves expressing that this is a novel breakthrough and had this come from a human it would be treated as such.
If the response to that is “well it’s just recombining concepts it already knows until it finds a solution that works” I would ask how that differs from what humans do?
Much, if not the majority of synthetic data is AI generated. Human experts then evaluate samples of the data, but nothing like the entire corpus which can be trillions of tokens of generated material.
See here where Qwen team discusses synthesizing trillions of tokens for their pre training dataset - https://arxiv.org/html/2505.09388v1
> The rare geniuses of human history use a different magnitude and configuration of the same kind of human intelligence
I agree. What I don’t see any strong evidence for is that this intelligence is unique to humans. Nor do I see how it could ever be anything other than recombinations of existing data with random mutation. Where else would the building blocks for each invention come from, divine insight? We build on the shoulders of giants etc etc
Worth noting, as a sidebar, that we’re having this discussion on a post mentioning a novel breakthrough made by AI over a topic that many brilliant human mathematicians including Erdos himself failed to do.
> Regardless of whether something's been done before people still come up with them on their own without directly copying or amalgamating several copies.
I’m not even saying it in the “there’s nothing new under the sun” sense.
If you follow an average person’s day from beginning to end. Let’s say in Bangkok or NYC or Paris, at which part of the day are they not simply repeating a variation of something they’ve done many times before, or seen others around them do before, or read about others doing before, or heard about others doing before, watched others do before on TV etc etc
What you have left, how is it distinguishable, without reasoning backwards from the desired conclusion of human exceptionalism, from turning up the temperature on an LLM query?
How many data points does a human parse when they attempt to stand up as a toddler? Sight, sound, sensation from every limb and body part, inner ear, internal thought processes at the time conscious and unconscious related to the moment and attempting to interpret it in relation to all that it’s experienced to this point, including all prior attempts and whatever retained associated data, a hard to even comprehend stream of data, coming in continuously over however many minutes, hours, etc of attempts.
The stream of data the brain is processing from both external and internal sources from birth is incredibly rich, and if we attempted to represent the full depth of it it would far outweigh the size of any corpus models are being trained on now.
I think what may be genuinely missing from AI is the type of data that doesn’t translate completely into text. The audio and images/video we feed in are a totally incomplete slice of the POV of say even a single average human through their lifetime, and bereft of all the associated data a human has access to in the moment (sensory etc).
I think this tends more towards the world models that Yann Lecun et al are promoting as the key to more capable AI.
To be very specific - what novel things did the majority of the ~8 bil humans on Earth do say, yesterday, that you wouldn't otherwise dismiss as non-intelligent rehashing of the same tired patterns they always inhabit were those same actions attributed to LLMs?
What I'm getting at is that I think you're falling into the trap of thinking of the rare geniuses of human history, and furthermore their rare moments of accomplishment (relative to the long span of their lifetimes filled mostly without these accomplishments) when you think of "human intelligence", which is of course far overstating what actual human intelligence is.
Or is there something fundamental in the way these models get deployed (encryption or something or than legal contracts?) at this scale that prohibits the owners of the infra from gaining this level of insight / access?
Do you pass that bar yourself?
The dollar being the world’s reserve currency gives us the ability to print dollars for infrastructure projects with relatively little consequence.
This is now being threatened by our best attempts to get everyone in the world to hate us and see us as hostile, unstable idiots and unreliable partners.
I’ll also note that the America First MAGA crowd seem to also be against funding public infrastructure projects, especially the radically socialist notion of high speed rail.
I say this as an anti-empirical leftist with no great sympathy for the effort, but for those proclaiming to put America's interests above all else it's just such an obvious and idiotic short-sighted self-own.
From another angle, OP's article mentioned something akin to sexual awakenings related to the content they trafficked in.
You can see how popular suicide drone footage out of Ukraine is, there is a large contingent of people eating that stuff up, cheering it on, despite watching a man desperately beg for his life as a drone circles him, toying with him, before going for his head and the feed blacking out being about as grim as it gets.
People are creating games now to replicate the experience. People want to drive drones into other people's heads, all along a spectrum from watching it on youtube, playing a video game, to joining the ukrainian effort and actually performing the act in real life.
My experience is you can find a customer for just about any content, including shock content. Some messages have broader appeal for sure, but even the worst thing you can imagine will have someone with whom it resonates.
It's clear that people are influenced by their environment, and things that were once considered grotesque and unacceptable can be watered down over time with exposure to where, for example, rapists and pedophiles can openly win presidential elections and be placed on the Supreme Court. To where large portions of nations rationalize and support genocide, or any horrible thing you can imagine, even when presented with images of the suffering inflicted.
Humans are malleable and you don't have to have a perfectly crafted advertising campaign to have some people decide they like what they're seeing and want to replicate it, no matter what it is.
I see these sorts of anecdotes (in the OP for ex.) through a romantic lens of people who are completely comfortable sharing their interests and who have those interests understood and reciprocated by their friends, alongside the reverse, outside of the "norm", enriching your own worldview.
I'm sure much of it is unrealistic vicarious dreaming, and projected regret for not pursuing my own interests, and friend groups aligned with those, more earnestly throughout my young life.
You want evidence that rises to the level of establishing "causality" in consideration of a natural experiment that is being run across all of humanity simultaneously?
What populations are protected from violent media?
How would you even disentangle all the countless confounding factors?
The arguments here are well-worn by the industries that peddle in these types of media, with obvious incentives, and obvious incentives on our side as consumers to not be restricted from consuming whatever we enjoy.
This is why I spent so much time referencing all the other ways in which humanity tends to emulate the behavior of other humans or be influenced by advertising/media, as it seems unlikely that these tendencies would suddenly cease around the sole category of "violent media".
Are you asking for evidence that humans tend to emulate what they see other humans do?
Are you asking the more direct classic question of if there's evidence that violent media correlates with violent acts?
I now develop software, and have nobody to really talk to about it. I'm even kind of bored of the idea of talking about it, feels like talking about World of Warcraft or something.
Was too concerned with being "cool", oh well. It's nice to see so many people were wiser and more headstrong and confident/authentic at a young age and found their people who they could more fully connect with.
Can't speak to the others.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10009492/ - slaughterhouse workers
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC12174799/ - healthcare workers
That said, to say they do not influence you in any way is to deny all of advertising, if not the basic reality that the stimuli to which we are exposed in life are the primary thing that shape us beyond our genetics.
Do they make you more likely to feel detachment at the thought of horrors being inflicted upon others, does that influence your career path or political leanings?
The number of times I've seen a commercial for pizza or taco bell or seen a food mentioned on a tv show or movie and thought "hmm that sounds good right now, i'm gonna order that" is way more than 0.
To be clear, I'm against any censorship of violent video games, movies, art, etc.
You can of course argue that school shooters and Stephen Miller would do what they do without all the media (social or not) they've consumed.
That said, what are we, after all, other than some sort of combination of our genetics and environment?
It's hard to argue that there isn't some sort of link between the mention of taco bell and me immediately doordashing it, which makes it hard to reconcile the two positions.
Something being alive has no more to do with it being sentient than it does with it having the capacity of sight.
You need an organism to actually develop all the components necessary to capture the photons, turn them into a signal, and transmit that signal to something like a brain that can process that into a vision. All living things, single celled organisms, do not just have the capacity of sight granted by virtue of being living.
Even in humans, which have all that machinery for sight, a slight disruption (trauma to the eye, retinal detachment, genetic disorders) can completely eliminate their ability to see.
It's the same for any number of capabilities, including consciousness. We know humans have the capacity for consciousness, and yet extremely subtle disruptions (a tiny amount of propofol, trauma to the brain, sleep itself) is enough to turn off consciousness, despite all that machinery still being in place and it being quite difficult from the outside to see anything awry.
That said, again and again, even if you want to pretend that every blade of grass, every life form down to the single celled, (and even every rock!) is as sentient as a human being, you will kill fewer plants, fewer microbial beings, clear less land (destroying fewer rocks, displacing and killing fewer people, animals, microbes etc.) by eating as low on the food chain as is feasible, and eliminating the inefficiencies of jumping up the trophic levels, which requires greater and greater inputs and destruction all the way up the chain to produce a given number of calories at the top.
A human is capable of sentience, a plant is not, nor is a rock. There's a plethora of evidence of humans coming out of comas and regaining sentience, and even of them dreaming/maintaining bits of awareness while from the outside appearing to be in a coma.
That said, there are also cases of clear brain death, in which case the human themselves is no longer capable of sentience, and so then their family unplugging them is not guilty of murder.
I value my own life (defined fundamentally by my ability to experience said life) and there is an overwhelming amount of evidence that the majority of other sentient beings do as well, humans (in temporary comas or not) and animals included, which is why I do not try to justify them being mass murdered for my personal hedonistic pleasure and try to work backwards from that end desire to find a way to justify the unjustifiable.
A value judgement would be saying that some sentient beings are more valuable than others. A statement of fact is that these living beings are capable of sentience, sight, hearing, flight, sexual reproduction, asexual reproduction, growing fur, breathing water, etc etc. and these other ones are not.
It’s not a value judgement, it’s establishing the basis for what constitutes an “other”.
There is no “other” within unconscious entities.
Regardless, once again, even if you felt the grass was objectively as conscious or “valuable” (what does value even mean in this context?) as much as your children or your dog (and of course you don't, if we’re being honest, this entire line of reasoning is not in good faith) - then again:
> That said, even if you granted that every blade of grass and kernel of corn was fully as sentient as a human being, that would only strengthen the argument for veganism many times over as animals act as inefficient intermediaries for those plant calories, burning most of them and leaving only a small fraction in their meat. You’d kill far fewer plants by eating the plants directly.
> That said, even if you granted that every blade of grass and kernel of corn was fully as sentient as a human being, that would only strengthen the argument for veganism many times over as animals act as inefficient intermediaries for those plant calories, burning most of them and leaving only a small fraction in their meat. You’d kill far fewer plants by eating the plants directly.
Were lab grown meat to be available today at a cost lower than regular meat, it is apparent that there would still be huge amounts of animal ag dollars spent on lobbying against and demonizing these things, and millions of people who would fall for the propaganda.
You can compare this to renewables now, even though they may be far cheaper per kwH, and the Trump admin's push to halt all renewable projects and do everything they can to prop up the viability of fossil fuels.
This means the vegan movement would need to continue to exist as does the environmental movement.
[0] https://www.cbsnews.com/miami/news/federal-appeals-court-uph...
Vegans base their line on a very easily defensible ability on behalf of the victim - sentience.
If there’s no sentience, there’s nobody within to experience the pain and fear, and there is no victim.
That said, even if you granted that every blade of grass and kernel of corn was fully as sentient as a human being, that would only strengthen the argument for veganism many times over as animals act as inefficient intermediaries for those plant calories, burning most of them and leaving only a small fraction in their meat. You’d kill far fewer plants by eating the plants directly.
Finally, to your other point, many humans die horrible deaths - whether in global poverty, war or of various types of disease, cancer and dementia in the wealthier countries. That of course does not justify serial killer cannibals who put a bullet in the back of their victims’ heads on the basis that they’re giving them a “humane” end and likely saving them a large amount of future suffering.