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…
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we held off for a bit cos we don’t want to be actively unkind to the recovering rationalists, and he was our first ardent debate bro actually on the instance, but he rapidly also became our first 24 hour ban of a local account rather than a federated one. perhaps his posting will improve a day hence!
tbh I read the statement about epistemic status as ironic. I was disabused of this notion rapidly.
Thanks for articulating this.
I appreciated this post because it never occurred to me that the “thumb might be on the scales” for the “rules for discourse” that seems to be the norm around the rat forms. I personally ignore most of it, however, the “ES” rat phrase is simply saying, “I know we humans are biased observers, this is where I’m coming from”. If the topic were renewable energy and I was the ‘head of extraction at BP’, you can expect that whatever I have to say is probably biased against renewable energy.
My other thought reading this was : what about the truth. Maybe the mainstream is correct about everything. “Sneer club” seems to be mostly mainstream opinions. That’s fine I guess but the mainstream is sometimes wrong about issues that have been poorly examined or near future events. The collective opinions of everyone don’t really price in things that are about to happen, even if it’s obvious to experts. For example, the mainstream opinion on covid was usually lagging several weeks behind Zvi’s posts on lesswrong.
Where I am going with this is you can point out bad arguments on my part, but I mean in the end, does truth matter? Like are we here to score points on each other or share what we think reality is or will in the very near future be?
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@YouKnowWhoTheFuckIAM@awful.systems and yourself have done an excellent job of showing why our mediocre friend isn’t going to get better anytime soon, and their posting time here has come to an end
I would hardly consider myself in favour of “the mainstream”, but I also know that what counts as “mainstream” is irreducibly dependent on your point of view. As far as I’m concerned a great deal of anti-“mainstream” opinion is reactionary and/or stupid, so anti-“mainstream” only by default. A stopped clock, famously, tells the truth twice a day - whether its on CBS or LessWrong. If you want the “truth” I recommend narrowing your focus until you start making meaningful distinctions. I hope that as comfortably vitiates your point as it should.
Next time it would be polite to answer the fucking question.
Sorry sir:
*I have to ask, on the matter of (2): why? * I think I answered this.
I am not sure what you are asking here, sir. It’s well known to those in the AI industry that a profound change is upon us and that GPT-4 shows generality for it’s domain, and robotics generality is likely also possible using a variant technique. So individuals unaware of this tend to be retired people who have no survival need to learn any new skills, like my boomer relatives. I apologize for using an ageist slur.
I didn’t ask you to apologise for using an “ageist slur”, I asked you, of the particular affects you adopted in your opening gambit here, which corresponded to how you really feel. You adopted a tone and verbiage which implied you were, as I put it, “amongst friends”, but on the other you also tried to suggest you didn’t actually know anything about SneerClub. On that other hand, you set yourself up as in favour of everything rationalism except this one tiny thing, but back on the first and again here you’re suggesting that you know pretty well where you are (re: “mainstream”, and SneerClub’s alleged favouring it against rationalism in general). My suggestion was that this muddle of cant implies a fundamental dishonesty: you’re hiding all sorts of opinions behind a borrowed language of (at least in its original context: passive aggressive) non-confrontation. Most of that is well confirmed when you slip into this dropping of “sir”s and openly passive aggressive apologising just because I was explicitly impatient.
The world doesn’t slow down but it turns smoother when you just say what you mean or decide you didn’t have anything to say in the first place.
Look back at that guff about “discovering reality”, now if that isn’t just the adderall talking it’s a move you make when you don’t particularly like somebody but you want to make them look or at least feel a little bad for not being appropriately high-minded. “High-minded” here would further translate into real demands as “getting with the right programme”, to the exclusion of what your opposite partner was doing - in this case, allegedly, scoring points “off each other”. “Off each other” was another weasel phrase: you know that at least at first blush you weren’t scoring points off anyone, so you also know that the only remaining target of that worry could have been SneerClubbers.
Nail on the head. Especially on the internet/‘tech bro’ culture. All my leads at work also have such a, “extreme OCD” kinda attitude. Sorry if you feel offended emotionally, I didn’t mean it.
The rest of your post is ironically very much something that Eliezer posits a superintelligence would be able to do. Or from the anime Death Note. I use a few words or phrases, you analyze the shit out of them and try to extract all the information you can and have concluded all this stuff like
opening gambit
“amongst friends”
hiding all sorts of opinions behind a borrowed language
guff about “discovering reality”
real demands as “getting with the right programme”,
allegedly, scoring points “off each other”
Off each other” was another weasel phrase
you know that at least at first blush you weren’t scoring points off anyone
See everything you wrote above is a possibly correct interpretation of what I wrote. It’s like the english lit analysis after the author’s dead. Eliezer posits a superintelligence could use this kind of analysis to convince operators with admin authority to break the rules, or L in death note uses this to almost catch the killer.
It’s also all false in this case. (it’s also why a superintelligence probably can’t actually do this) I’ve been on the internet long enough to know it is almost impossible to convince someone of anything, unless they already were willing and you just link some facts they didn’t know about. So my gambit actually something very different.
Do you know how you get people to answer a question on the internet? To post something that’s wrong*. And it clearly worked, there’s more discussion on this thread than this entire forum in several pages, maybe since it was created.
*ironically in this case I posted what I think is the correct answer but it disagrees with your ontology. If I wanted lesswrongers to comment on my post I would need a different OP.
If you are finding it hard to not take pills, are concerned its warping your behaviour, self-perception, or affecting your interpersonal relationships, I recommend looking up your local NA hotline on google, it’ll be open 24/7
like Christ look at all the nonsense they posted to try to distract from the adderall thing
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Nobody more twisted up with resentment on planet earth than somebody just flying on an adderall binge
I’ve fucking seen it myself! I’ll never understand why my industry has such a casual relationship with problem drug use
Epistemic Status: Single/Cali girl ;)
Lurk moar.
Heaven forbid the mainstream take a few weeks to figure shit out when presented with new information instead of violently changing gears every time a new story or rumor gets published.
For anyone curious: https://www.lesswrong.com/s/rencyawwfr4rfwt5C
My favorite quotes from within: