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..
if the only telescopes showing this object are the ones that must be rented from the cult and its offshoots, then it’s pretty obvious some bullshit is up, isn’t it? maybe the institution designed and optimized to trick your human brain into wholeheartedly believing things that don’t match with reality has succeeded, because it has poured a lot more time and money into tricking you than you could possibly know
didn’t lesswrong bank on an entire different set of AI technology until very recently, and a lot of the tantrums we’re seeing from yud stem from his failure to predict or even understand LLMs?
I keep seeing this idea that all GPT needs to be true AI is more permanence and (this is wild to me) a robotic body with which to interact with the world. if that’s it, why not try it out? you’ve got a selection of vector databases that’d work for permanence, and a big variety of cheap robotics kits that speak g-code, which is such a simple language I’m very certain GPT can handle it. what happens when you try this experiment?
a final point I guess — there’s a lot of overlap here with the anti-cryptocurrency community. it sounds like we’re in agreement that cryptocurrency tech is a gigantic scam; that the idea of number going up into infinity is bunk. but something I’ve noticed is that folk with cryptocurrency jobs could not come to that realization, that when your paycheck relies on internalizing a set of ideas that contradict reality, most folk will choose the paycheck (at least for a while — cognitive dissonance is a hard comedown and a lot of folks exited the cryptocurrency space when the paycheck no longer masked the pain)
Just to be clear, you can build your own telescope now and see the incoming spacecraft.
Right now you can go task GPT-4 with solving a problem about equal to undergrad physics, let it use plugins, and it will generally get it done. It's real.
Maybe this is the end of the improvements, just like maybe the aliens will not actually enter orbit around earth.
This is a fucking brilliant analogy, thank you.