[HN Gopher] The Singularity will occur on a Tuesday
___________________________________________________________________
The Singularity will occur on a Tuesday
Author : ecto
Score : 691 points
Date : 2026-02-10 17:04 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (campedersen.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (campedersen.com)
| jmugan wrote:
| Love the title. Yeah, agents need to experiment in the real world
| to build knowledge beyond what humans have acquired. That will
| slow the bastards down.
| ecto wrote:
| Perhaps they will revel in the friends they made along the way.
| Krei-se wrote:
| If only we had a battle tested against reality self learning
| system.
| zh3 wrote:
| Fortuitously before the Unix date rollover in 2038. Nice.
| ecto wrote:
| I didn't even realize - I hope my consciousness is uploaded
| with 64 bit integers!
| thebruce87m wrote:
| You'll regret this statement in 292 billion years
| layer8 wrote:
| I think we'll manage to migrate to bignums by then.
| GolfPopper wrote:
| The poster won't, but the digital slaves made from his
| upload surely will.
| markgall wrote:
| > Polynomial growth (t^n) never reaches infinity at finite time.
| You could wait until heat death and t^47 would still be finite.
| Polynomials are for people who think AGI is "decades away."
|
| > Exponential growth reaches infinity at t=[?]. Technically a
| singularity, but an infinitely patient one. Moore's Law was
| exponential. We are no longer on Moore's Law.
|
| Huh? I don't get it. e^t would also still be finite at heat
| death.
| ecto wrote:
| exponential = manana
| rcarmo wrote:
| "I could never get the hang of Tuesdays"
|
| - Arthur Dent, H2G2
| jama211 wrote:
| Thursdays, unfortunately
| vcanales wrote:
| > The pole at ts8 isn't when machines become superintelligent.
| It's when humans lose the ability to make coherent collective
| decisions about machines. The actual capabilities are almost
| beside the point. The social fabric frays at the seams of
| attention and institutional response time, not at the frontier of
| model performance.
|
| Damn, good read.
| adastra22 wrote:
| We are already long past that point...
| shantara wrote:
| It doesn't help when quite a few Big Tech companies are
| deliberately operating on the principle that they don't have to
| follow the rules, just change at the rate that is faster than
| the bureaucratic system can respond.
| skulk wrote:
| > Hyperbolic growth is what happens when the thing that's growing
| accelerates its own growth.
|
| Eh? No, that's literally the definition of exponential growth.
| d/dx e^x = e^x
| ecto wrote:
| Thanks. I dropped out of college
| hinkley wrote:
| Once MRR becomes a priority over investment rounds that tokens/$
| will notch down and flatten substantially.
| jrmg wrote:
| This is gold.
|
| Meta-spoiler (you may not want to read this before the article):
| You really need to read beyond the first third or so to get what
| it's really 'about'. It's not about an AI singularity, not
| really. And it's both serious and satirical at the same time -
| like all the best satire is.
| mesozoicpilgrim wrote:
| I'm trying to figure out if the LLM writing style is a feature
| or a bug
| banannaise wrote:
| Yes, the mathematical assumptions are a bit suspect. Keep
| reading. It will make sense later.
| baalimago wrote:
| Well... I can't argue with facts. Especially not when they're in
| graph form.
| OutOfHere wrote:
| I am not convinced that memoryless large models are sufficient
| for AGI. I think some intrinsic neural memory allowing effective
| lifelong learning is required. This requires a lot more hardware
| and energy than for throwaway predictions.
| gojomo wrote:
| "It had been a slow Tuesday night. A few hundred new products had
| run their course on the markets. There had been a score of
| dramatic hits, three-minute and five-minute capsule dramas, and
| several of the six-minute long-play affairs. Night Street Nine--a
| solidly sordid offering--seemed to be in as the drama of the
| night unless there should be a late hit."
|
| - 'SLOW TUESDAY NIGHT', a 2600 word sci-fi short story about life
| in an incredibly accelerated world, by R.A. Lafferty in 1965
|
| https://www.baen.com/Chapters/9781618249203/9781618249203___...
| burkaman wrote:
| This is incredible.
|
| > A thoughtful-man named Maxwell Mouser had just produced a
| work of actinic philosophy. It took him seven minutes to write
| it. To write works of philosophy one used the flexible outlines
| and the idea indexes; one set the activator for such a wordage
| in each subsection; an adept would use the paradox, feed-in,
| and the striking-analogy blender; one calibrated the
| particular-slant and the personality-signature. It had to come
| out a good work, for excellence had become the automatic
| minimum for such productions. "I will scatter a few nuts on the
| frosting," said Maxwell, and he pushed the lever for that. This
| sifted handfuls of words like chthonic and heuristic and
| prozymeides through the thing so that nobody could doubt it was
| a work of philosophy.
|
| Sounds exactly like someone twiddling the knobs of an LLM.
| dwaltrip wrote:
| Wow yeah very prescient.
| peterldowns wrote:
| Ballard covered this theme a few different times in his short
| stories, I believe before this
| qoez wrote:
| Great read but damn those are some questionable curve fittings on
| some very scattered data points
| aenis wrote:
| In other words, just another Tuesday.
| jacquesm wrote:
| Better than some of the science papers I've tried to parse.
| braden-lk wrote:
| lols and unhinged predictions aside, why are there communities
| excited about a singularity? Doesn't it imply the extinction of
| humanity?
| bwestergard wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Messianism
| inanutshellus wrote:
| We avoid catastrophe by thinking about new developments and how
| they can go wrong (and right).
|
| Catastrophizing can be unhealthy and unproductive, but for
| those among us that can affect the future of our societies
| (locally or higher), the results of that catastophizing helps
| guide legislation and "Overton window" morality.
|
| ... I'm reminded of the tales of various Sci-Fi authors that
| have been commissioned to write on the effects of hypothetical
| technologies on society and mankind (e.g. space elevators, mars
| exploration)...
|
| That said, when the general public worries about hypotheticals
| they can do nothing about, there's nothing but downsides. So.
| There's a balance.
| jacquesm wrote:
| Yes, but if we don't do it 'they' will. Onwards!
| unbalancedevh wrote:
| It depends on how you define humanity. The singularity implies
| that the current model isn't appropriate anymore, but it
| doesn't suggest how.
| tim333 wrote:
| I think the idea is we merge with the AI.
| ragchronos wrote:
| This is a very interesting read, but I wonder if anyone has
| actually any ideas on how to stop this from going south? If the
| trends described continue, the world will become a much worse
| place in a few years time.
| Krei-se wrote:
| https://cdn.statcdn.com/Infographic/images/normal/870.jpeg
|
| you can easily see that at the doubling rate every 2 years in
| 2020 we already had over 5 facebook accounts per human on
| earth.
| GolfPopper wrote:
| Frank Herbert and Samuel Butler.
| pixl97 wrote:
| >That's a very different singularity than the one people argue
| about.
|
| ---
|
| I wouldn't say it's that much different. This has always been a
| key point of the singularity
|
| >Unpredictable Changes: Because this intelligence will far exceed
| human capacity, the resulting societal, technological, and
| perhaps biological changes are impossible for current humans to
| predict.
|
| It was a key point that society would break, but the exact
| implementation details of that breakage were left up to the
| reader.
| TheOtherHobbes wrote:
| reader survivor.
| jesse__ wrote:
| The meme at the top is absolute gold considering the point of the
| article. 10/10
| wffurr wrote:
| Why does one of them have the state flag of Ohio? What AI-and-
| Ohio-related news did I miss?
| adzm wrote:
| Note that the only landmass on Earth is actually Ohio as
| well. Turns out, it's all Ohio. And it always has been.
| https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/wait-its-all-ohio-always-
| has-...
| wffurr wrote:
| Thanks - I should have done an image search on the whole
| image. Instead, I clipped out the flag from the astronaut's
| shoulder and searched that, which how I found out it was
| the Ohio flag. I just assumed it was an AI-generated image
| by the author and not a common meme template.
| hipster_robot wrote:
| why is everything broken?
|
| > the top post on hn right now: The Singularity will occur on a
| Tuesday
|
| oh
| aenis wrote:
| Damn. I had plans.
| stego-tech wrote:
| This is delightfully unhinged, spending an amazing amount of time
| describing their model and citing their methodologies before
| getting to the meat of the meal many of us have been braying
| about for years: whether the singularity actually happens or not
| is irrelevant so much as whether enough people _believe_ it will
| happen and act accordingly.
|
| And, yep! A lot of people absolutely believe it will and are
| acting accordingly.
|
| It's honestly why I gave up trying to get folks to look at these
| things rationally as knowable objects ("here's how LLMs actually
| work") and pivoted to the social arguments instead ("here's why
| replacing or suggesting the replacement of human labor prior to
| reforming society into one that does not predicate survival on
| continued employment and wages is _very bad_ "). Folks vibe with
| the latter, less with the former. Can't convince someone of the
| former when they don't even understand that the computer is the
| box attached to the monitor, not the monitor itself.
| jacquesm wrote:
| > "here's why replacing or suggesting the replacement of human
| labor prior to reforming society into one that does not
| predicate survival on continued employment and wages is very
| bad"
|
| And there are plenty of people that take issue with that too.
|
| Unfortunately they're not the ones paying the price. And...
| stock options.
| stego-tech wrote:
| History paints a pretty clear picture of the tradeoff:
|
| * Profits now and violence later
|
| OR
|
| * Little bit of taxes now and accelerate easier
|
| Unfortunately we've developed such a myopic, "FYGM" society
| that it's explicitly the former option for the time being.
| AndrewKemendo wrote:
| Every possible example of "progress" have either an
| individual or a state power purpose behind it
|
| there is only one possible "egalitarian" forward looking
| investments that paid off for everybody
|
| I think the only exception to this is vaccines...and you
| saw how all that worked during Covid
|
| Everything else from the semiconductor to the vacuum
| cleaner the automobile airplanes steam engines I don't care
| what it is you pick something it was developed in order to
| give a small group and advantage over all the other groups
| it is always been this case it will always be this case
| because fundamentally at the root nature of humanity they
| do not care about the externalities- good or bad
| jacquesm wrote:
| COVID has cured me (hah!) of the notion that humanity
| will be able to pull together when faced with a common
| enemy. That means global warming or the next pandemic are
| going to happen and we will not be able to stop it from
| happening because a solid percentage can't wait to jump
| off the ledge, and they'll push you off too.
| AndrewKemendo wrote:
| Yeah buddy we agree
| ghurtado wrote:
| If you edit your comment to add punctuation, please let
| me know: I would like to read that final pile of words.
|
| I did try, I promise.
| AndrewKemendo wrote:
| Ok here: Everything from the semiconductor through the
| vacuum cleaner, automobile, airplanes and steam engines
| was developed to give a small group an advantage over all
| the other groups. It has always been the case, it will
| always be the case.
|
| Fundamentally, at the root nature of humanity, humans do
| not care about the externalities, either good or bad.
| tim333 wrote:
| That's a slightly odd way of looking at it. I'm guessing
| the people developing airplanes or whatever thought of a
| number of things including - hey this would be cool to do
| - and - maybe we can make some money - and - maybe this
| will help people travel - and - maybe it'll impress the
| girls - and probably some other things too. At least
| that's roughly how I've thought when I make stuff, never
| this will give a small group an advantage.
| AndrewKemendo wrote:
| But the whole point is embedded in the task otherwise you
| wouldn't do it
|
| If somebody is using monetary resources to buy NFT's
| instead of handing out food to the homeless then you get
| less food for the homeless
|
| All of the things listed are competitive task situations
| and you're looking for some advantage that makes it
| easier for you
|
| well if it makes it easier for you then it could make it
| easier for somebody else which means you're crowding out
| other options in that action space
|
| That is to say the pie is fixed for resources on this
| planet in terms of energy and resource utilization across
| the lifespan of a human
| jacquesm wrote:
| Vacuum cleaner -> sell appliances -> sell electric motors
|
| But there was a clear advantage in quality of life for a
| lot of people too.
|
| Automobile -> part of industrialization of transport ->
| faster transport, faster world
|
| Arguably also a big increase in quality of life _but_ it
| didn 't scale that well and has also reduced the quality
| of life. If all that money had gone into public transport
| then that would likely have been a lot better.
|
| Airplanes -> yes, definitely, but they were also clearly
| seen as an advantage in war, in fact that was always a
| major driver behind inventions.
|
| Steam engine -> the mother of all prime movers and the
| beginnings of the fossil fuel debacle (coal).
|
| Definitely a quality of life change but also the cause of
| the bigger problems we are suffering from today.
|
| The 'coffin corner' (one of my hobby horses) is a real
| danger, we have, as a society, achieved a certain
| velocity, if we slow down too much we will crash, if we
| speed up the plane will come apart. Managing these
| transitions is extremely delicate work and it does not
| look as though 'delicate' is in the vocabulary of a lot
| of people in the driving seats.
| AndrewKemendo wrote:
| This is where the concept of trickle down economics came
| from though and we know that that's not actually accurate
|
| I used to hear about this with respect to how fun funding
| NASA would get us more inventions because they funded
| Velcro
|
| No it's simply that there was a positive temporary
| externality for some subset of groups but the primary
| long term benefit went to the controller of the capital
|
| The people utilizing them were marginally involved
| because they were only given the options that capital
| produced for them
| jpadkins wrote:
| Do you have a historical example of "Little bit of taxes
| now and accelerate easier"? I can't think of any.
| nine_k wrote:
| If you replace "taxes" with more general "investment",
| it's everywhere. A good example is Amazon that has
| reworked itself from an online bookstore into a global
| supplier of everything by ruthlessly reinvesting the
| profits.
|
| Taxes don't usually work as efficiently because the state
| is usually a much more sloppy investor. But it's far from
| hopeless, see DARPA.
|
| If you're looking for periods of high taxes and growing
| prosperity, 1950s in the US is a popular example. It's
| not a great example though, because the US was the
| principal winner of WWII, the only large industrial
| country relatively unscathed by it.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| With the odd story that we paid the price for it in the
| long term.
|
| This book
|
| https://www.amazon.com/Zero-Sum-Society-Distribution-
| Possibi...
|
| tells the compelling story that the Mellon family teamed
| up with the steelworker's union to use protectionism to
| protect the American steel industry's investments in
| obsolete open hearth steel furnaces that couldn't compete
| on a fair market with the basic oxygen furnace process
| adopted by countries that had their obsolete furnaces
| blown up. The rest of US industry, such as our car
| industry, were dragged down by this because they were
| using expensive and inferior materials. I think this book
| had a huge impact in terms of convincing policymakers
| everywhere that tariffs are bad.
|
| Funny the Mellon family went on to further political
| mischief
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Mellon_Scaife#Oppos
| iti...
| vondur wrote:
| Ha, we gutted our manufacturing base, so if we bring it
| back it will now be state of the art! Not sure if that
| will work out for us, but hey their is some precedence.
| jacquesm wrote:
| This is the silver lining in many bad stories: the
| pendulum will always keep on swinging because at the
| extremes the advantage flips.
| kelseyfrog wrote:
| The dollar became the world's reserve currency because
| the idea of Bancor lost to it. Thus subjecting the US to
| the Triffin dilemma which made the US capital markets
| benefit at the expense of a hugely underappreciated
| incentive to offshore manufacturing.
|
| You can't onshore manufacturing _and_ have a dollar
| reserve currency. The only question then is, Are you
| willing to de-dollarize to bring back manufacturing jobs?
|
| This isn't a rhetorical question if the answer is yes,
| great, let's get moving. But if the answer is no, sorry,
| dollarization and its effects will continue to persist.
| hansvm wrote:
| I'll take a look at that story later. I'm curious though,
| why is US metallurgy consistently top-notch if the
| processes are inferior? When I use wrenches, bicycle
| frames, etc from most other countries I have no end of
| troubles with weld delamination, stress fractures
| compounding into catastrophic failures, and whatnot, even
| including enormous wrenches just snapping in half with
| forces far below what something a tenth the size with
| American steel could handle.
| nine_k wrote:
| Which are these other countries? Have you tried something
| actually made in Japan, or in Germany, for instance?
|
| What you describe seems like very cheap Chinese imports
| fraudulently imitating something else.
| oceanplexian wrote:
| > It's not a great example though, because the US was the
| principal winner of WWII, the only large industrial
| country relatively unscathed by it.
|
| The US is also shaping up to be the principal winner in
| Artificial Intelligence.
|
| If, like everyone is postulating, this has the same
| transformative impact to Robotics as it does to software,
| we're probably looking at prosperity that will make the
| 1950s look like table stakes.
| munk-a wrote:
| Early on in the AI boom NVidia was highly valued as it
| was seen as the shovel-maker for research and
| development. It certainly was instrumental early on but
| now there are a few viable options for training hardware
| - and, to me at least, it's unclear whether training
| hardware is actually the critical infrastructure or if it
| will be something like power capacity (which the US is
| lagging behind significantly in), education, or even
| cooling efficiency.
|
| I think it's extremely early to try and call who the
| principal winner will be especially with all the global
| shifts happening.
| jacquesm wrote:
| > The US is also shaping up to be the principal winner in
| Artificial Intelligence.
|
| There is no early mover advantage in AI in the same way
| that there was in all the other industries. That's the
| one thing that AI proponents in general seem not to have
| clued in to.
|
| What will happen is that it eventually drags everything
| down because it takes the value out of the bulk of the
| service and knowledge economies. So you'll get places
| that are 'ahead' in the disruption. But the bottom will
| fall out of the revenue streams, which is one of the
| reasons these companies are all completely panicked and
| are wrecking the products that they had to stuff AI in
| there in every way possible hoping that one of them will
| take.
|
| Model training is only an edge in a world where free
| models do not exist, once those are 'good enough' good
| luck with your AI and your rapidly outdated hardware.
|
| The typical investors horizon is short, but not _that_
| short.
| generic92034 wrote:
| Are you sure that in today's reality the fruits of the AI
| race will be harvested by "the people"?
| exceptione wrote:
| > Taxes don't usually work as efficiently because the
| state is usually a much more sloppy investor. But it's
| far from hopeless, see DARPA.
|
| Be careful. The data does not confirm that narrative. You
| mentioned the 1950s, which is a poignant example of
| reality conflicting with sponsored narrative. Pre WOII,
| the wealthy class orbiting the monopolists, and by
| extension their installed politicians, had no other ideas
| than to keep lowering taxes for the rich on and on, even
| if it only deepened the endless economic crisis. Many of
| them had fallen in the trap of believing their own
| narratives, something we know as the Cult of Wealth.
|
| Meanwhile, average Americans lived on food stamps.
| Politically deadlocked in quasi-religious ideas of "bad
| governments versus wise business men", America kept
| falling deeper. Meanwhile, with just 175,000 serving on
| active duty, the U.S. Army was the 18th biggest in the
| world[1], poorly equipped, poorly trained. Right wing
| isolationism had brought the country in a precarious
| position. Then two things happened. Roosevelt and WOII.
|
| In a unique moment, the state took matters in their own
| hands. The sheer excellence in planning, efficiency,
| speed and execution of the state baffled the republicans,
| putting the oligarchic model of the economy to shame. The
| economy grew tremendously as well, something the
| oligarchy could not pull of. It is not well-known that
| WOII depended largely on state-operated industries,
| because the former class quickly understood how much the
| state's performance threatened their narratives. So they
| invested in disinformation campaigns, claiming the
| efforts and achievements of the government as their own.
|
| 1.
| https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2019/06/06/how-
| world...
| nine_k wrote:
| BTW the New Deal tried central planning and quickly
| rejected it. I'd say that the intense application of the
| antitrust law in the late 1930s was a key factor that
| helped end the Great Depression. The war, and wartime
| government powers, were also key: the amount of federal
| government overreach and and reforms do not compare to
| what e.g. the second Trump administration has attempted.
| It was mostly done by people who got their positions in
| the administration more due to merit and care about the
| country than loyalty, and it showed.
|
| The post-war era, under Truman and Eisenhower
| administrations, reaped the benefits of the US being the
| wealthiest and most intact winner of WWII. At that time,
| the highest income tax rate bracket was 91%, but the
| effective rate was below 50%.
| eric_cc wrote:
| What does WOII mean?
|
| I assume you are talking about WW2 and at first thought
| it was a typo.
| taurath wrote:
| > the state is usually a much more sloppy investor
|
| I don't find this to be true
|
| The state invests in important things that have 2nd and
| 3rd order positive benefit but aren't immediately
| profitable. Money in a food bank is a "lost" investment.
|
| Alternatively the state plays power games and gets a
| little too attached to its military toys.
| nine_k wrote:
| State agencies are often good at choosing right long-term
| targets. State agencies are often bad at the actual
| procurement, because of the pork-barrelling and red tape.
| E.g. both private companies and NASA agree that
| spaceflight is a worthy target, but NASA ends up with the
| Space Shuttle (a nice design ruined by various
| committees) and SLS, while private companies come up with
| Falcon-9.
| stoneforger wrote:
| Sounds like a false dichotomy. NASA got all these
| different subcontractors to feed, in all these different
| states and they explicitly gutted MOL and dynasoar and
| all the air force projects that needed weird orbits and
| reentry trajectories so the space shuttle became a huge
| compromise. Perverse incentives and all that. It's not
| state organizations per se but rather non-profits that
| need to have a clear goal that creates capabilities,
| tools and utilities that act as multipliers for everyone.
| A pretty big cooperative. Like, I dunno , what societies
| are supposed to exist for.
| nine_k wrote:
| But DoD with its weird requirements, and the Congress
| with its power to finance the project and the desire to
| bring jobs from it to every state, and the rules of
| contracting that NASA must follow, are all also part of
| the state, the way the state ultimately works.
| Windchaser wrote:
| Yeah, our use of our military force provides some of the
| most obvious cases of "bad investment". Vietnam, Iraq,
| etc
|
| And there are many others that might've been a positive
| investment from a strictly financial perspective, but not
| from a moral one: see Banana Republics and all those
| times the CIA backed military juntas.
| lbreakjai wrote:
| Violence was a moderating factor when people on each side
| were equally armed, and number was a deciding factor.
|
| Nowadays you could squash an uprising with a few operators
| piloting drones remotely.
| generic92034 wrote:
| > Folks vibe with the latter
|
| I am not convinced, though, it is still up to "the folks" if we
| change course. Billionaires and their sycophants may not care
| for the bad consequences (or even appreciate them - realistic
| or not).
| stego-tech wrote:
| Oh, not only do they not care about the plebs and riff-raff
| now, but they've spent the past ten years building bunkers
| and compounds to try and save their own asses for when it
| happens.
|
| It's willful negligence on a societal scale. Any billionaire
| with a bunker is effectively saying they _expect_ everyone to
| die and refuse to do anything to stop it.
| dakolli wrote:
| It seems pretty obvious to me the ruling class is preparing
| for war to keep us occupied, just like in the 20s, they'll
| make young men and women so poor they'll beg to fight in a
| war.
|
| It makes one wonder what they expect to come out the other
| side of such a late-stage/modern war, but I think what they
| care about is that there will be less of us.
| generic92034 wrote:
| Boy, will they be annoyed if the result of the AI race
| will be something considerably less than AGI, so all the
| people are still needed to keep numbers go up.
| dakolli wrote:
| I don't think so, I think they know there's no AGI, or
| complete replacement. They are using those hyperbolic
| statements to get people to buy in. The goal is just to
| depress the value of human labor, they will lay people
| off and hire them back at 50% wages (over time), and
| gaslight us "well you have AI, there isn't as much skill
| required"
|
| Ultimately they just want to widen the inequality gap and
| remove as much bargaining power from the working class.
| It will be very hard for people not born of certain
| privileges to climb the ranks through education and
| merit, if not impossible.
|
| Their goal will be to accomplish this without causing a
| French Revolution V2 (hence all the new surveillance
| being rolled out), which is where they'll provide wars
| for us to fight in that will be rooted in false pretenses
| that appeal to people's basest instincts, like race and
| nationalism. The bunkers and private communities they
| build in far off islands are for the occasion this fails
| and there is some sort of French Revolution V2, not some
| sort of existential threat from AI (imo).
| NitpickLawyer wrote:
| > [...] prior to reforming society [...]
|
| Well, good luck. You have "only" the entire history of human
| kind on the other side of your argument :)
| stego-tech wrote:
| I never said it was an easy problem to solve, or one we've
| had success with before, but damnit, _someone_ has to give a
| shit and try to do better.
| AndrewKemendo wrote:
| Literally nobody's trying because there is no solution
|
| The fundamental unit of society ...the human... is at its
| core fundamentally incapable of coordinating at the scale
| necessary to do this correctly
|
| and so there is no solution because humans can't plan or
| execute on a plan
| sp527 wrote:
| The likely outcome is that 99.99% of humanity lives a basic
| subsistence lifestyle ("UBI") and the elite and privileged
| few metaphorically (and somewhat literally) ascend to the
| heavens. Around half the planet already lives on <= $7/day.
| Prepare to join them.
| AlexCoventry wrote:
| FWIW, you'd probably be able to buy a lot of goods and
| services for $7/day, if robots were doing literally all
| the work.
| sp527 wrote:
| Agreed. The quality of life bar will be higher for sure.
| But it will still technically be a "subsistence"
| lifestyle, with no prospect of improvement. Perhaps that
| will suffice for most people? We're going to find out.
| accidentallfact wrote:
| Reality won't give a shit about what people believe.
| mitthrowaway2 wrote:
| > whether the singularity actually happens or not is irrelevant
| so much as whether enough people believe it will happen and act
| accordingly.
|
| I disagree. If the singularity doesn't happen, then what people
| do or don't believe matters a lot. If the singularity does
| happen, then it hardly matters what people do or don't believe
| (edit: about whether or not the singularity will happen).
| cgannett wrote:
| if people believe its a threat and it is also real then what
| matters is timing
| goatlover wrote:
| Which would also mean the accelerationists are potentially
| putting everyone at risk. I'd think a soft takeoff decades
| in the future would give us a much better chance of
| building the necessary safeguards and reorganizing society
| accordingly.
| AndrewKemendo wrote:
| This is a soft takeoff
|
| We, the people actually building it, have been discussing
| it for decades
|
| I started reading Kurzweil in the early 90s
|
| If you're not up to speed that's your fault
| Negitivefrags wrote:
| > If the singularity does happen, then it hardly matters what
| people do or don't believe.
|
| Depends on how you feel about Roko's basilisk.
| VonTum wrote:
| God Roko's Basilisk is the most boring AI risk to catch the
| public consciousness. It's just Pascal's wager all over
| again, with the exact same rebuttal.
| camgunz wrote:
| The culture that brought you "speedrunning computer
| science with JavaScript" and "speedrunning exploitative,
| extractive capitalism" is back with their new banger
| "speedrunning philosophy". Nuke it from orbit; save
| humanity.
| sigmoid10 wrote:
| Depends on what a post singularity world looks like, with
| Roko's basilisk and everything.
| afthonos wrote:
| I don't think that's quite right. I'd say instead that if the
| singularity does happen, there's no telling which beliefs
| will have mattered.
| Forgeties79 wrote:
| I just point to Covid lockdowns and how many people took up
| hobbies, how many just turned into recluses, how many broke the
| rules no matter the consequences real or imagined, etc. Humans
| need something to do. I don't think it should be _work_ all the
| time. But we need something to do or we just lose it.
|
| It's somewhat simplistic, but I find it get the conversation
| rolling. Then I go "it's great that we want to replace work but
| what are we going to do instead and how will we support
| ourselves?" It's a real question!
| tehjoker wrote:
| It's true people need something to do, but I don't think the
| COVID shutdown (lockdowns didn't happen in the U.S. for the
| most part though they did in other countries) is a good
| comparison because the entire society was perfused with
| existential dread and fear of contact with another human
| being while the death count was rising and rising by
| thousands a day. It's not a situation that makes for
| comfortable comparisons because people were losing their damn
| minds and for good reason.
| AndrewKemendo wrote:
| The goal is to eliminate humans as the primary actors on the
| planet entirely
|
| At least that's my personal goal
|
| If we get to the point where I can go through my life and never
| interact with another human again, and work with a bunch of
| machines and robots to do science and experiments and build
| things to explore our world and make my life easier and safer
| and healthier and more sustainable, I would be absolutely
| thrilled
|
| As it stands today and in all the annals of history there does
| not exist a system that does what I just described.
|
| Be labs existed for the purpose of bell telephone...until it
| wasn't needed by Bell anymore. Google moonshots existed for the
| shareholders of Google ...until it was not uselful for capital.
| All the work done at Sandia and white sands labs did it in
| order to promote the power of the United States globally.
|
| Find me some egalitarian organization that can persist outside
| of the hands of some massive corporation or some government
| that can actually help people and I might give somebody a
| chance but that does not exist
|
| And no mondragon does not have one of these
| stego-tech wrote:
| Man, I used to think exactly like you do now, disgust with
| humans and all. I found comfort in machines instead of my
| fellow man, and sorely wanted a world governed by rigid
| structures, systems, and rules instead of the personal whims
| and fancies of whoever happened to have inherited power. I
| _hated_ power structures, I _loathed_ people who I perceived
| to stand in the way of my happiness.
|
| I still do.
|
| The difference is that as I realized what I'd done is built
| up walls so thick and high because of repeated cycles of
| alienation and traumas involving humans. When my entire world
| came to a total end every two to four years - every
| relationship irreparably severed, every bit of local
| knowledge and wisdom rendered useless, thrown into brand new
| regions, people, systems, and structures like clockwork - I
| built that attitude to survive, to insulate myself from those
| harms. Once I was able to begin creating my own stability,
| asserting my own agency, I began to find the nuance of life -
| and thus, a measure of joy.
|
| Sure, I hate the majority of drivers on the roads today.
| Yeah, I hate the systemic power structures that have given
| rise to profit motives over personal outcomes. I remain
| recalcitrant in the face of arbitrary and capricious
| decisions made with callous disregard to objective data or
| necessities. That won't ever change, at least with me; I'm a
| stubborn bastard.
|
| But I've grown, changed, evolved as a person - and you can
| too. Being dissatisfied with the system is normal - rejecting
| humanity in favor of a more stringent system, while appealing
| to the mind, would be such a desolate and bleak place, devoid
| of the pleasures you currently find eking out existence, as
| to be debilitating to the psyche. Humans bring spontaneity
| and chaos to systems, a reminder that we can never "fix"
| something in place forever.
|
| To dispense with humans is to ignore that _any_ sentient
| species of comparable success has its own struggles, flaws,
| and imperfections. We are unique in that we 're the first
| ones we know of to encounter all these self-inflicted harms
| and have the cognitive ability to wax philosophically for our
| own demise, out of some notion that the universe would be a
| better place without us in it, or that we simply do not
| deserve our own survival. Yet that's not to say we're
| _actually_ the first, nor will we be the last - and in that
| lesson, I believe our _bare minimum obligation_ is to try
| just a bit harder to survive, to progress, to do better by
| ourselves and others, as a lesson to those who come after.
|
| Now all that being said, the gap between you and I is less
| one of personal growth and more of opinion of agency. Whereas
| you advocate for the erasure or nullification of the human
| species as a means to separate yourself from its messiness
| and hostilities, I'm of the opinion that you should be able
| to remove yourself from that messiness for as long as you
| like in a situation or setup you find personal comfort in. If
| you'd rather live vicariously via machine in a remote
| location, far, far away from the vestiges of human
| civilization, never interacting with another human for the
| rest of your life? I see no issue with that, and I believe
| society should provide you that option; hell, there's many a
| day I'd take such an exit myself, if available, at least for
| a time.
|
| But where you and I will remain at odds is our opinion of
| humanity itself. We're flawed, we're stupid, we're short-
| sighted, we're ignorant, we're hostile, we're irrational, and
| yet we've conquered so much despite our shortcomings - or
| perhaps because of them. There's _ample_ room for
| improvement, but succumbing to naked hostility towards them
| is itself giving in to your own human weakness.
| habinero wrote:
| ...Man, men really will do anything to avoid going to
| therapy.
| fainpul wrote:
| Why would the machines want to work with you or any other
| human?
| mtlmtlmtlmtl wrote:
| Well, demonstrably you have at least some measure of interest
| in interaction with other humans based on the undeniable fact
| that you are posting on this site, seemingly several times a
| day based on a cursory glance at your history.
| AndrewKemendo wrote:
| Because every effort people use to do anything else is a
| waste of resources and energy and I want others to stop
| using resources to make bullshit and put all of them into
| ASI and human obviation
|
| There are no more important other problems to solve other
| than this one
|
| everything else is purely coping strategies for humans who
| don't want to die wasting resources on bullshit
| nine_k wrote:
| This looks like a very comfortable, pleasant way of
| civilization suicide.
|
| Not interacting with any other human means you're the last
| human in your genetic line. A widespread adherence to this
| idea means humanity dwindling and dying out voluntarily.
| (This has been reproduced in mice: [1])
|
| Not having humans as primary actors likely means that their
| interests become more and more neglected by the system of
| machines that replaces them, and they, weaker by the day, are
| powerless to counter that. Hence the idea of increased
| comfort and well-being, and the ability to do science, is
| going to become more and more doubtful as humans would lose
| agency.
|
| [1]: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/this-old-
| experimen...
| AndrewKemendo wrote:
| Civilization suicide is the ideal
| tinfoilhatter wrote:
| Your ideal. Definitely not mine.
|
| Get rid of everyone else so your life is easier and more
| sustainable... I guess I need to make my goal to get rid
| of you? Do you understand how this works yet?
| AndrewKemendo wrote:
| Sounds like we both have our tasks then
|
| Good luck
| lovich wrote:
| It's mildly amusing to see someone with the username
| 'tinfoilhatter, arguing with someone else who definitely
| needs one
| NateEag wrote:
| No, you should make your goal to teach AndrewKemendo to
| appreciate his existence as the inscrutable gift it is,
| and to spend his brief time in this universe helping
| others appreciate the great gift they've been given and
| using it to the fullest.
|
| See how it works?
| tinfoilhatter wrote:
| AndrewKemendo (based on his personal website) looks to be
| older than me. If he hasn't figured out the miracle of
| getting to exist yet, unfortunately I don't think he's
| going to.
| AndrewKemendo wrote:
| So why are you wasting your time being a miracle on
| anything other than building the successor to us?
| AndrewKemendo wrote:
| I'm a father of three I already know all about that
| there's nothing you're gonna teach me there I'm fully
| integrated
| mbgerring wrote:
| Somebody probably ought to take your kids away from you
| if they haven't already
| holoduke wrote:
| Whereas I agree that working with machines would help
| dramatically in achieving science, there would be in your
| world no one truly understanding you. You would be alone.
| Can't imagine how you could prefer that.
| goatlover wrote:
| Most people need more social contact, not less. Modern tech
| is already alienating enough.
| Der_Einzige wrote:
| Now this is transhumanism! Don't let the cope and seething
| from this website dissuade you from keeping these views.
| AndrewKemendo wrote:
| Thank you!
| tinfoilhatter wrote:
| Ah yes, because the majority of people pushing for
| transhumanism aren't complete psyco / sociopaths! You're in
| great company! /sarcasm
| justonepost1 wrote:
| Nobody can stop you from having this view, I suppose. But
| what gives you the right to impose this (lack of) future on
| billions of humans with friends and families and ambitions
| and interests who, to say the least, would not be in favor of
| "human obviation"?
| AndrewKemendo wrote:
| You should probably build an organization that can counter
| it
| eichin wrote:
| Bell labs was pushed aside because Bell Telephone was broken
| up by the courts. (It's currently a part of Nokia of all
| things - yeah, despite your storytelling here, it's actually
| still around :-)
| whattheheckheck wrote:
| In the mean time your use of resources has an opportunity
| cost for other people. So expect backlash
| bheadmaster wrote:
| > here's how LLMs actually work
|
| But how is that useful in any way?
|
| For all we know, LLMs are black boxes. We really have no idea
| how did ability to have a conversation emerge from predicting
| the next token.
| MarkusQ wrote:
| > We really have no idea how did ability to have a
| conversation emerge from predicting the next token.
|
| Uh yes, we do. It works in precisely the same way that you
| can walk from "here" to "there" by taking a step towards
| "there", and then repeating. The cognitive dissonance comes
| when we conflate this way of "having a conversation" (two
| people converse) and assume that the fact that they produce
| similar outputs means that they must be "doing the same
| thing" and it's hard to see how LLMs could be doing this.
|
| Sometimes things seems unbelievable simply because they
| aren't true.
| bheadmaster wrote:
| > It works in precisely the same way that you can walk from
| "here" to "there" by taking a step towards "there", and
| then repeating.
|
| It's funny how, in order to explain one complex phenomenon,
| you took an even more complex phenomenon as if it somehow
| simplifies it.
| OkayPhysicist wrote:
| > We really have no idea how did ability to have a
| conversation emerge from predicting the next token.
|
| Maybe you don't. To be clear, this is benefiting _massively_
| from hindsight, just as how if I didn 't know that combustion
| engines worked, I probably wouldn't have dreamed up how to
| make one, but the emergent conversational capabilities from
| LLMs are pretty obvious. In a massive dataset of human
| writing, the answer to a question is by far the most common
| thing to follow a question. A normal conversational reply is
| the most common thing to follow a conversation opener. While
| impressive, these things aren't magic.
| famouswaffles wrote:
| >In a massive dataset of human writing, the answer to a
| question is by far the most common thing to follow a
| question. A normal conversational reply is the most common
| thing to follow a conversation opener. While impressive,
| these things aren't magic.
|
| Obviously, that's the objective, but who's to say you'll
| reach a goal just because you set it ? And more
| importantly, who's the say you have any idea how the goal
| has actually been achieved ?
|
| You don't need to think LLMs are magic to understand we
| have very little idea of what is going on inside the box.
| measurablefunc wrote:
| We know exactly what is going on inside the box. The
| problem isn't knowing what is going on inside the box,
| the problem is that it's all binary arithmetic & no human
| being evolved to make sense of binary arithmetic so it
| seems like magic to you when in reality it's nothing more
| than a circuit w/ billions of logic gates.
| famouswaffles wrote:
| We do not know or understand even a tiny fraction of the
| algorithms and processes a Large Language Model employs
| to answer any given question. We simply don't.
| Ironically, only the people who understand things the
| least think we do.
|
| Your comment about 'binary arithmetic' and 'billions of
| logic gates' is just nonsense.
| measurablefunc wrote:
| Not even wrong: https://claude.ai/public/artifacts/b649c8
| ca-7907-4597-a4ee-0...
| camgunz wrote:
| "Look man all reality is just uncountable numbers of
| subparticles phasing in and out of existence, what's not
| to understand?"
| measurablefunc wrote:
| Your response is a common enough fallacy to have a name:
| straw man.
| stickfigure wrote:
| I think the fallacy at hand is more along the lines of
| "no true scotsman".
|
| You can define _understanding_ to require such detail
| that nobody can claim it; you can define _understanding_
| to be so trivial that everyone can claim it.
|
| "Why does the sun rise?" Is it enough to understand that
| the Earth revolves around the sun, or do you need to
| understand quantum gravity?
| measurablefunc wrote:
| Good point. OP was saying "no one knows" when in fact
| plenty of people do know but people also often conflate
| knowing & understanding w/o realizing that's what they're
| doing. People who have studied programming, electrical
| engineering, ultraviolet lithography, quantum mechanics,
| & so on know what is going on inside the computer but
| that's different from saying they understand billions of
| transistors b/c no one really understands billions of
| transistors even though a single transistor is understood
| well enough to be manufactured in large enough quantities
| that almost anyone who wants to can have the equivalent
| of a supercomputer in their pocket for less than $1k:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MiUHjLxm3V0.
|
| Somewhere along the way from one transistor to a few
| billion human understanding stops but we still know how
| it was all assembled together to perform boolean
| arithmetic operations.
| dTal wrote:
| >In a massive dataset of human writing, the answer to a
| question is by far the most common thing to follow a
| question.
|
| No it isn't. Type a question into a base model, one that
| hasn't been finetuned into being a chatbot, and the
| predicted continuation will be all sorts of crap, but very
| often another question, or a framing that positions the
| original question as rhetorical in order to make a point.
| Untuned raw language models have an incredible flair for
| suddenly and unexpectedly shifting context - it might
| output an answer to your question, then suddenly decide
| that the entire thing is part of some internet flamewar and
| generate a completely contradictory answer, complete with
| insults to the first poster. It's less like talking with an
| AI and more like opening random pages in Borge's infinite
| library.
|
| To get a base language model to behave reliably like a
| chatbot, you have to explicitly feed it "a transcript of a
| dialogue between a human and an AI chatbot", and allow the
| language model to imagine what a helpful chatbot _would_
| say (and take control during the human parts). The fact
| that this _works_ - that a mere statistical predictive
| language model _bootstraps_ into a whole persona merely
| because you declared that it should, in natural English -
| well, I still see that as a pretty "magic" trick.
| famouswaffles wrote:
| >No it isn't. Type a question into a base model, one that
| hasn't been finetuned into being a chatbot, and the
| predicted continuation will be all sorts of crap, but
| very often another question, or a framing that positions
| the original question as rhetorical in order to make a
| point.....
|
| To be fair, only if you pose this question singularly
| with no proceeding context. If you want the raw LLM to
| answer your question(s) reliably then you can have the
| context prepended with other question-answer pairs and it
| works fine. A raw LLM is already capable of being a
| chatbot or anything else with the right preceding
| context.
| bheadmaster wrote:
| > Maybe you don't.
|
| My best friend who has literally written a doctorate on
| artificial intelligence doesn't. If _you_ do, please write
| a paper on it, and email it to me. My friend would be
| thrilled to read it.
| accounting2026 wrote:
| If such a simplistic explanation was true, LLM's would only
| be able to answer things that had been asked before, and
| where at least a 'fuzzy' textual question/answer match was
| available. This is clearly not the case. In practice you
| can prompt the LLM with such a large number of constraints,
| so large that the combinatorial explosion ensures no one
| asked that before. And you will still get a relevant answer
| combining all of those. Think combinations of features in a
| software request - including making some module that fits
| into your existing system (for which you have provided
| source) along with a list of requested features. Or
| questions you form based on a number of life experiences
| and interests that combined are unique to you. You can
| switch programming language, human language, writing
| styles, levels as you wish and discuss it in super esoteric
| languages or morse code. So are we to believe this answers
| appear just because there happened to be similar questions
| in the training data where a suitable answer followed? Even
| if for the sake of argument we accept this explanation by
| "proximity of question/answer", it is immediately that this
| would have to rely on extreme levels of abstraction and
| mixing and matching going on inside the LLM. And that it is
| then this process that we need to explain how works,
| whereas the textual proximity you invoke relies on this
| rather than explaining it.
| 0x20cowboy wrote:
| "'If I wished,' O'Brien had said, 'I could float off this floor
| like a soap bubble.' Winston worked it out. 'If he thinks he
| floats off the floor, and if I simultaneously think I see him
| do it, then the thing happens'".
| nine_k wrote:
| > * enough people believe it will happen and act accordingly*
|
| Here comes my favorite notion of "epistemic takeover".
|
| A crude form: make everybody believe that you have already won.
|
| A refined form: make everybody believe that everybody else
| believes that you have already won. That is, even if one has
| doubts about your having won, they believe that everyone else
| submit to you as a winner, and must act accordingly.
| bee_rider wrote:
| This world where everybody's very concerned with that
| "refined form" is annoying and exhausting. It causes
| discussions to become about speculative guesses about
| everybody else's beliefs, not actual facts. In the end it
| breeds cynicism as "well yes, the belief is wrong, but
| everybody is stupid and believes it anyway," becomes a stop-
| gap argument.
|
| I don't know how to get away from it because ultimately
| coordination depends on understanding what everybody
| believes, but I wish it would go away.
| kelseyfrog wrote:
| Or just play into the fact that it's a Keynesian Beauty
| Contest [1]. Find the leverage in it and exploit it.
|
| 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keynesian_beauty_contest
| ElevenLathe wrote:
| IMO this is a symptom of the falling rate of profit,
| especially in the developed world. If truly productivity
| enhancing investment is effectively dead (or, equivalently,
| there is so much paper wealth chasing a withering set of
| profitable opportunities for investment), then capital's
| only game is to chase high valuations backed by _future_
| profits, which means playing the Keynesian beauty contest
| for keeps. This in turn means you must make ever-escalating
| claims of future profitability. Now, here we are in a world
| where multiple brand name entrepreneurs are essentially
| saying that they are building the last investable
| technology _ever_ , and getting people to believe it
| because the alternative is to earn less than inflation on
| Procter and Gamble stock and never getting to retire.
|
| If outsiders could plausibly invest in China, some of this
| pressure could be dissipated for a while, but ultimately we
| need to order society on some basis that incentivizes
| dealing with practical problems instead of pushing paper
| around.
| measurablefunc wrote:
| What percentage of work would you say deals w/ actual
| problems these days?
| nosuchthing wrote:
| In a post-industrial economy there are no more economic
| problems, only liabilities. Surplus is felt as threat,
| especially when it's surplus human labor.
|
| In today's economy disease and prison camps are
| increasingly profitable.
|
| How do you think the investor portfolios that hold stocks
| in deathcare and privatized prison labor camps can
| further _Accelerate_ their returns?
| huslage wrote:
| Profit is a myth of epistemic collapse at this point.
| Productivity gains are also mythical and probably just
| anecdotal in the moment.
| nakedneuron wrote:
| Isn't that how Bitcoin "works"?
| achenet wrote:
| err... how Bitcoin works, or how the speculative bubble
| around cryptocurrencies circa 2019-2021 worked?
|
| Bitcoin is actually kind of useful for some niche use
| cases - namely illegal transactions, like buying drugs
| online (Silk Road, for example), and occasionally for
| international money transfers - my French father once
| paid an Argentinian architect in Bitcoin, because it was
| the easiest way to transfer the money due to details
| about money transfer between those countries which I am
| completely unaware of.
|
| The Bitcoin bubble, like all bubbles since the Dutch
| tulip bubble in the 1600s, did follow a somewhat similar
| "well everyone things this thing is much more valuable
| than it is worth, if I buy some now the price will keep
| going on and I can dump it on some sucker" path, however.
| tim333 wrote:
| Most bubbles have a peak and crash. "The Bitcoin bubble"
| keeps peaking and crashing and then going on to a higher
| peak.
| awesome_dude wrote:
| The "Silent Majority" - Richard Nixon 1969
|
| "Quiet Australians" - Scott Morrison 2019
| XorNot wrote:
| We really need a rule in politics which bans you (if
| you're an elected representative) from stating anything
| about the beliefs of the electorate without reference to
| a poll of the population of adequate size and quality.
|
| Yes we'd have a lot of lawsuits about it, but it would
| hardly be a bad use of time to litigate whether a
| politicians statements about the electorate's beliefs are
| accurate.
| bee_rider wrote:
| Just make it broad enough that we never get a candidate
| promoting themselves as "electable" again.
| skissane wrote:
| The thing is... on both the cited occasions (Nixon in
| 1968, Morrison in 2019), the politicians claiming the
| average voter agreed with them actually won that election
|
| So, obviously their claims were at least partially true -
| because if they'd completely misjudged the average voter,
| they wouldn't have won
| Nevermark wrote:
| People vote for people they don't agree with.
|
| When there are only two choices, and infinite issues,
| voters only have two choices: Vote for someone you don't
| agree with less, or vote for someone you quite
| hilariously imagine agrees with you.
| chrisrogers wrote:
| That get covered by the mechanisms of social credibility.
| palmotea wrote:
| > We really need a rule in politics which bans you (if
| you're an elected representative) from stating anything
| about the beliefs of the electorate without reference to
| a poll of the population of adequate size and quality.
|
| Except that assumes polls are a good and accurate way to
| learn the "beliefs of the electorate," which is not true.
| Not everyone takes polls, not every belief can be
| expressed in a multiple-choice form, little subtleties in
| phrasing and order can greatly bias the outcome of a
| poll, etc.
|
| I don't think it's a good idea to require speech be
| filtered through such an expensive and imperfect
| technology.
| legulere wrote:
| On the other hand talking about those believes can also
| lead to real changes. Slavery used to be seen widely a
| necessary evil, just like for instance war.
| Terr_ wrote:
| Refined 1.01 authoritarian form: Everybody knows you didn't
| win, and everybody _knows_ the sentiment is universal... But
| everyone maintains the same outward facade that you won,
| because it 's become a habit and because dissenters seem to
| have "accidents" falling out of high windows.
| infinitewars wrote:
| it's a sad state these days that we can't be sure which
| country you're alluding to
| demosito666 wrote:
| V 1.02: Everybody knows you didn't win, and everybody knows
| the sentiment is universal... But everyone maintains the
| same outward facade that you won, because they believe that
| the others believe that you have enough power to crush the
| dissent. The moment this belief fades, you fall.
| dclowd9901 wrote:
| Is that not the "Emperor's New Clothes" form? That would be
| like version 0.0.1
| CobrastanJorji wrote:
| You ever get into logic puzzles? The sort where the asker has
| to specify that everybody in the puzzle will act in a
| "perfectly logical" way. This feels like that sort of logic.
| bodge5000 wrote:
| Its the classic interrogation technique; "we're not here to
| debate whether your guilty or innocent, we have all the
| evidence we need to prove your guilt, we just want to know
| why". Not sure if it makes it any different though that the
| interrogator knows they are lying
| dakolli wrote:
| Just say it simply,
|
| 1. LLMs only serve to reduce the value of your labor to zero
| over time. They don't need to even be great tools, they just
| need to be perceived as "equally good" to engineers for C-Suite
| to lay everyone off, and rehire at 50-25% of previous wages,
| repeating this cycle over a decade.
|
| 2. LLMs will not allow you to join the billionaire class, that
| wouldn't make sense, as anyone could if that's the case. They
| erode the technical meritocracy these Tech CEOs worship on
| podcasts, and youtube, (makes you wonder what are they lying
| about). - Your original ideas and that Startup you think is
| going to save you, isn't going to be worth anything if someone
| with minimal skills can copy it.
|
| 3. People don't want to admit it, but heavy users of LLMs know
| they're losing something, and there's a deep down feeling that
| its not the right way to go about things. Its not dissimilar to
| any guilty dopaminergic crash one gets when taking shortcuts in
| life.
|
| I used like 1.8bb Anthropic tokens last year, I won't be using
| it again, I won't be participating in this experiment. I've
| likely lost years of my life in "potential learning" from the
| social media experiment, I'm not doing that again. I want to
| study compilers this year, and I want to do it deeply. I wont
| be using LLMs.
| stego-tech wrote:
| I've said it simply, much like you, and it comes off as
| unhinged lunacy. Inviting them to learn themselves has been
| so much more successful than directed lectures, at least in
| my own experiments with discourse and teaching.
|
| A lot of us have fallen into the many, _many_ toxic traps of
| technology these past few decades. We know social media is
| deliberately engineered to be addictive (like cigarettes and
| tobacco products before it), we know AI hinders our learning
| process and shortens our attention spans (like excess sugar
| intake, or short-form content deluges), and we know that just
| because something is newer or faster does not mean it 's
| automatically better.
|
| You're on the right path, I think. I wish you good fortune
| and immense enjoyment in studying compilers.
| dakolli wrote:
| I agree, you're probably right! Thanks!
| AlexCoventry wrote:
| You may be throwing the baby out with the bathwater. I
| learned more last year from ChatGPT Pro than I'd learned in
| the previous 5, FWIW.
| yoyohello13 wrote:
| Just say 'LLMs'. Whenever someone name drops a specific
| model I can't help but think it's just an Ad bot.
| caycep wrote:
| I thought the answer was "42"
| famouswaffles wrote:
| >It's honestly why I gave up trying to get folks to look at
| these things rationally as knowable objects ("here's how LLMs
| actually work")
|
| You do not know how LLMs work, and if anyone actually did, we
| wouldn't spend months and millions of dollars training one.
| holoduke wrote:
| For ages most people believed in a religion. People are just
| not smart and sheepy followers.
| soperj wrote:
| Most still do.
| greenchair wrote:
| romans 1:20
| menaerus wrote:
| > It's honestly why I gave up trying to get folks to look at
| these things rationally as knowable objects ("here's how LLMs
| actually work")
|
| Here's your own fallacy you fell into - this is important to
| understand. Neither do you nor me understand "how LLMs actually
| work" because, well, nobody really does. Not even the
| scientists who built the (math around) models. So, you can't
| really use that argument because it would be silly if you
| thought you know something which rest of the science community
| doesn't. Actually, there's a whole new field in science
| developed around our understanding how models actually arrive
| to answers which they give us. The thing is that we are only
| the observers of the results made by the experiments we are
| doing by training those models, and only so it happens that the
| result of this experiment is something we find plausible, but
| that doesn't mean we understand it. It's like a physics
| experiment - we can see that something is behaving in certain
| way but we don't know to explain it how and why.
| liuliu wrote:
| Agree. I think it is just people have their own simplified
| mental model how it works. However, there is no reason to
| believe these simplified mental models are accurate
| (otherwise we will be here 20-year earlier with HMM models).
|
| The simplest way to stop people from thinking is to have a
| semi-plausible / "made-me-smart" incorrect mental model of
| how things work.
| hn_acc1 wrote:
| Did you mean to use the word "mental"?
| striking wrote:
| Even if interpretability of specific models or features
| within them is an open area of research, the mechanics of how
| LLMs work to produce results are observable and well-
| understood, and methods to understand their fundamental
| limitations are pretty solid these days as well.
|
| Is there anything to be gained from following a line of
| reasoning that basically says LLMs are incomprehensible, full
| stop?
| menaerus wrote:
| Yes, there is - benefit of a doubt.
| hn_acc1 wrote:
| You can't keep pushing the AI hype train if you consider it
| just a new type of software / fancy statistical database.
| famouswaffles wrote:
| >Even if interpretability of specific models or features
| within them is an open area of research, the mechanics of
| how LLMs work to produce results are observable and well-
| understood, and methods to understand their fundamental
| limitations are pretty solid these days as well.
|
| If you train a transformer on (only) lots and lots of
| addition pairs, i.e '38393 + 79628 = 118021' and nothing
| else, the transformer will, during training discover an
| algorithm for addition and employ it in service of
| predicting the next token, which in this instance would be
| the sum of two numbers.
|
| We know this because of tedious interpretability research,
| the very limited problem space and the fact we knew exactly
| what to look for.
|
| Alright, let's leave addition aside (SOTA LLMs are after
| all trained on much more) and think about another question.
| Any other question at all. How about something like:
|
| "Take a capital letter J and a right parenthesis, ). Take
| the parenthesis, rotate it counterclockwise 90 degrees, and
| put it on top of the J. What everyday object does that
| resemble?"
|
| What algorithm does GPT or Gemini or whatever employ to
| answer this and similar questions correctly ? It's
| certainly not the one it learnt for addition. Do you Know ?
| No. Do the creators at Open AI or Google know ? Not at all.
| Can you or they find out right now ? Also No.
|
| Let's revisit your statement.
|
| "the mechanics of how LLMs work to produce results are
| observable and well-understood".
|
| Observable, I'll give you that, but how on earth can you
| look at the above and sincerely call that 'well-understood'
| ?
| dbdoug wrote:
| From Gemini:When you take those two shapes and combine
| them, the resulting image looks like an umbrella.
| striking wrote:
| It's pattern matching, likely from typography texts and
| descriptions of umbrellas. My understanding is that the
| model can attempt some permutations in its thinking and
| eventually a permutation's tokens catch enough attention
| to attempt to solve, and that once it is attending to
| "everyday object", "arc", and "hook", it will reply with
| "umbrella".
|
| Why am I confident that it's not actually doing spatial
| reasoning? At least in the case of Claude Opus 4.6, it
| also confidently replies "umbrella" even when you tell it
| to put the parenthesis under the J, with a handy diagram
| clearly proving itself wrong:
| https://claude.ai/share/497ad081-c73f-44d7-96db-
| cec33e6c0ae3 . Here's me specifically asking for the
| three key points above: https://claude.ai/share/b529f15b-
| 0dfe-4662-9f18-97363f7971d1
|
| I feel like I have a pretty good intuition of what's
| happening here based on my understanding of the
| underlying mathematical mechanics.
|
| Edit: I poked at it a little longer and I was able to get
| some more specific matches to source material binding the
| concept of umbrellas being drawn using the letter J: http
| s://claude.ai/share/f8bb90c3-b1a6-4d82-a8ba-2b8da769241e
| famouswaffles wrote:
| >It's pattern matching, likely from typography texts and
| descriptions of umbrellas.
|
| "Pattern matching" is not an explanation of anything. You
| just hand waved the problem away. Do you think you could
| publish that in a paper ?
|
| >Why am I confident that it's not actually doing spatial
| reasoning? At least in the case of Claude Opus 4.6, it
| also confidently replies "umbrella" even when you tell it
| to put the parenthesis under the J, with a handy diagram
| clearly proving itself wrong
|
| I don't know what to tell you but J with the parentheses
| upside down still resembles an umbrella. To think that a
| machine would recognize it's just a flipped umbrella and
| a human wouldn't is amazing, but here we are. It's doubly
| baffling because Claude quite clearly explains it in your
| transcript.
|
| >I feel like I have a pretty good intuition of what's
| happening here based on my understanding of the
| underlying mathematical mechanics.
|
| Of Course you feel so. I'm telling you that you're wrong.
| hnfong wrote:
| Pro tip: call it a "law of nature" and people will somehow
| stop pestering you about the why.
|
| I think in a couple decades people will call this the Law of
| Emergent Intelligence or whatever -- shove sufficient data
| into a plausible neural network with sufficient compute and
| things will work out somehow.
|
| On a more serious note, I think the GP fell into an even
| greater fallacy of believing reductionism is sufficient to
| dissuade people from ... believing in other things. Sure, we
| now know how to reduce _apparent_ intelligence into
| relatively simple matrices (and a huge amount of training
| data), but that doesn 't imply anything about social dynamics
| or how we should live at all! It's almost like we're asking
| particle physicists how we should fix the economy or
| something like that. (Yes, I know we're almost doing that.)
| aaroninsf wrote:
| What is your argument for why denecessitating labor is _very
| bad_?
|
| This is certainly the assertion of the capitalist class,
|
| whose well documented behavior clearly conveys that this is not
| because the elimination of labor is not a source of happiness
| and freedom to pursue indulgences of every kind.
|
| It is not at all clear that universal life-consuming labor is
| necessary for a society's stability and sustainability.
|
| The assertion IMO is rooted rather in that it is inconveniently
| bad for the maintenance of the capitalists' control and
| primacy,
|
| in as much as those who are occupied with labor, and fearful of
| losing access to it, are controlled and controllable.
| csallen wrote:
| _> prior to reforming society into one that does not predicate
| survival on continued employment and wages_
|
| There's no way that'll happen. The entire history of humanity
| is 99% reacting to things rather than proactively preventing
| things or adjusting in advance, especially at the societal
| level. You would need a pretty strong technocracy or
| dictatorship in charge to do otherwise.
| stoneforger wrote:
| You would need a new sense of self and a life free of fear,
| raising children where they can truly be anything they like
| and teach their own kids how to find meaning in a life lived
| well. "Best I can do is treefiddy" though..
| threethirtytwo wrote:
| I don't think you're rational. Part of being able to be
| unbiased is to see it in yourself.
|
| First of all. Nobody knows how LLMs work. Whether the
| singularity comes or not cannot be rationalized from what we
| know about LLMs because we simply don't understand LLMs. This
| is unequivocal. I am not saying I don't understand LLMs. I'm
| saying humanity doesn't understand LLMs in much the same way we
| don't understand the human brain.
|
| So saying whether the singularity is imminent or not imminent
| based off of that reasoning alone is irrational.
|
| The only thing we have is the black box output and input of AI.
| That input and output is steadily improving every month. It
| forms a trendline, and the trendline is sloped towards
| singularity. Whether the line actually gets there is up for
| question but you have to be borderline delusional if you think
| the whole thing can be explained away because you understand
| LLMs and transformer architecture. You don't understand LLMs
| period. No one does.
| project2501a wrote:
| > Nobody knows how LLMs work.
|
| I'm sorry, come again?
| NateEag wrote:
| I think they meant "Nobody knows why LLMs work."
| threethirtytwo wrote:
| same thing? The how is not explainable. This is just
| pedantic. Nobody understands LLMs.
| measurablefunc wrote:
| Because they encode statistical properties of the
| training corpus. You might not know why they work but
| plenty of people know why they work & understand the
| mechanics of approximating probability distributions w/
| parametrized functions to sell it as a panacea for
| stupidity & the path to an automated & luxurious
| communist utopia.
| threethirtytwo wrote:
| Nobody knows how LLMs work.
|
| Anybody who claims otherwise is making a false claim.
| bdangubic wrote:
| nobody can how how something that is non-deterministic
| works - by its pure definition
| dagss wrote:
| Isn't talking about "here's how LLMs actually work" in this
| context a bit like saying "a human can't be a relevant to X
| because a brain is only a set of molecules, neurons, synapses"?
|
| Or even "this book won't have any effect on the world because
| it's only a collection of letters, see here, black ink on
| paper, that is what is IS, it can't DO anything"...
|
| Saying LLM is a statistical prediction engine of the next token
| is IMO sort of confusing what it _is_ with the _medium_ it is
| expressed in /built of.
|
| For instance those small experiments that train a network on
| addition problems mentioned in a sibling post. The weights end
| up forming an addition machine. An addition machine is what it
| _is_ , that is the emergent behavior. The machine learning
| weights is just the medium it is expressed in.
|
| What's interesting about LLM is such emergent behavior. Yes,
| it's statistical prediction of likely next tokens, but when
| training weights for that it might well have a side-effect of
| wiring up some kind of "intelligence" (for reasonable everyday
| definitions of the word "intelligence", such as programming as
| good as a median programmer). We don't really know this yet.
| ActorNightly wrote:
| Its pretty clear that the problem of solving AI is software,
| I don't think anyone would disagree.
|
| But that problem is MUCH MUCH MUCH harder than people make it
| out to be.
|
| For example, you can reliably train an LLM to produce
| accurate output of assembly code that can fit into a context
| window. However, lets say you give it a Terabyte of assembly
| code - it won't be able to produce correct output as it will
| run out of context.
|
| You can get around that with agentic frameworks, but all of
| those right now are manually coded.
|
| So how do you train an LLM to correctly take any length of
| assembly code and produce the correct result? The only way is
| to essentially train the structure of the neurons inside of
| it behave like a computer, but the problem is that you can't
| do back-propagation with discrete zero and 1 values unless
| you explicitly code in the architecture for a cpu inside. So
| obviously, error correction with inputs/outputs is not the
| way we get to intelligence.
|
| It may be that the answer is pretty much a stochastic search
| where you spin up x instances of trillion parameter nets and
| make them operate in environments with some form of genetic
| algorithm, until you get something that behaves like a Human,
| and any shortcutting to this is not really possible because
| of essentially chaotic effects.
|
| ,
| dan_mctree wrote:
| >So obviously, error correction with inputs/outputs is not
| the way we get to intelligence.
|
| This doesn't seem to follow at all let alone obviously?
| Humans are able to reason through code without having to
| become a completely discrete computer, but probably can't
| reason through any length of assembly code, so why is that
| requirement necessary and how have you shown LLMs can't
| achieve human levels of competence on this kind of task?
| wavemode wrote:
| You're putting a bunch of words in the parent commenter's
| mouth, and arguing against a strawman.
|
| In this context, "here's how LLMs actually work" is what
| allows someone to have an informed opinion on whether a
| singularity is coming or not. If you don't understand how
| they work, then any company trying to sell their AI, or any
| random person on the Internet, can easily convince you that a
| singularity is coming without any evidence.
|
| This is separate from directly answering the question "is a
| singularity coming?"
| pryce wrote:
| > whether the singularity actually happens or not is irrelevant
| so much as whether enough people believe it will happen and act
| accordingly.
|
| We've already been here in the 1980s.
|
| The tech industry needs to cultivate people who are interested
| in the real capabilities and the nuance around that, and eject
| the set of people who am to turn the tech industry into a "you
| don't even need a product" warmed-over acolytes of Tony
| Robbins.
| FarmerPotato wrote:
| All the discussion of investment and economics can be better
| informed by perusing the economic data in Rise and Fall of
| American Growth. Robert Gordon's empirical finding is that
| American productivity compounded astonishingly from
| 1870-1970, but has been stuck at a very low growth rate since
| then.
|
| It's hard to square with the computer revolution, but my take
| post-70s is "net creation minus creative destruction" was
| large but spread out over more decades. Whereas technologies
| like: electrification, autos, mass production, telephone,
| refrigeration, fertilizers, pharmaceuticals, these things
| produced incomparable growth over a century.
|
| So if you were born in the 70s America, your experience of
| taxes, inflation, prosperity and which policies work, all
| that can feel heavier than what folks experienced in the
| prior century. Of course that's in the long run (ie a
| generation).
|
| I question whether AI tools have great net positive creation
| minus destruction.
| doctorpangloss wrote:
| You're "yaas queen"ing a blog post that is just someone's
| Claude Code session. It's "storytelling" with "data," but not
| storytelling with data. Do you understand? I mean I could make
| up a bunch of shit too and ask Claude Code to write something I
| want to stay with it too.
| strangattractor wrote:
| I thought the Singularity had already happened when the Monkeys
| used tools to kill the other Monkeys and threw the bone into
| the sky to become a Space Station.
| cyanydeez wrote:
| Currently, everything suggests the torment nexus will happen
| before the singularity.
| noiv wrote:
| "If men define situations as real, they are real in their
| consequences."
|
| Thomas theorem is a theory of sociology which was formulated in
| 1928 by William Isaac Thomas and Dorothy Swaine Thomas.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_theorem
| moffkalast wrote:
| > I am aware this is unhinged. We're doing it anyway.
|
| If one is looking for a quote that describes today's tech
| industry perfectly, that would be it.
|
| Also using the MMLU as a metric in 2026 is truly unhinged.
| darepublic wrote:
| > Real data. Real model. Real date!
|
| Arrested Development?
| AndrewKemendo wrote:
| Y'all are hilarious
|
| The singularity is not something that's going to be disputable
|
| it's going to be like a meteor slamming into society and nobody's
| gonna have any concept of what to do - even though we've had
| literal decades and centuries of possible preparation
|
| I've completely abandoned the idea that there is a world where
| humans and ASI exist peacefully
|
| Everybody needs to be preparing for the world where it's;
|
| human plus machine
|
| versus
|
| human groups by themselves
|
| across all possible categories of competition and collaboration
|
| Nobody is going to do anything about it and if you are one of the
| people complaining about vibecoding you're already out of the
| race
|
| Oh and by the way it's not gonna be with LLMs it's coming to you
| from RL + robotics
| jama211 wrote:
| A fantastic read, even if it makes a lot of silly assumptions -
| this is ok because it's self aware of it.
|
| Who knows what the future will bring. If we can't make the
| hardware we won't make much progress, and who knows what's going
| to happen to that market, just as an example.
|
| Crazy times we live in.
| skrebbel wrote:
| Wait is that photo of earth the legendary Globus Polski?
| (https://www.ceneo.pl/59475374)
| miguel_martin wrote:
| "Everyone in San Francisco is talking about the singularity" -
| I'm in SF and not talking about it ;)
| lostmsu wrote:
| Your comment just self-defeated.
| neilellis wrote:
| But you're not Everyone - they are a fictional hacker
| collective from a TV show.
| bluejellybean wrote:
| Yet, here you are ;)
| jacquesm wrote:
| Another one down.
| root_axis wrote:
| If an LLM can figure out how to scale its way through quadratic
| growth, I'll start giving the singularity propsal more than a
| candid dismissal.
| 1970-01-01 wrote:
| Not anytime soon. All day I'm getting: "Claude's response could
| not be fully generated"
| arscan wrote:
| Don't worry about the future Or worry, but know that
| worrying Is as effective as trying to solve an algebra
| equation by chewing Bubble gum The real troubles in your
| life Are apt to be things that never crossed your worried
| mind The kind that blindsides you at 4 p.m. on some idle
| Tuesday - Everybody's free (to wear sunscreen)
| Baz Luhrmann (or maybe Mary Schmich)
| jgrahamc wrote:
| Phew, so we won't have to deal with the Year 2038 Unix timestamp
| roll over after all.
| octernion wrote:
| that was precisely my reaction as well. _phew_ machines will
| deal with the timestamp issue and i can just sit on a beach
| while we singularityize or whatever.
| jacquesm wrote:
| You won't be on the beach when you get turned into
| paperclips. The machines will come and harvest your ass.
|
| Don't click here:
|
| https://www.decisionproblem.com/paperclips/
| octernion wrote:
| having played that when it came out, my conclusion was that
| no, i will definitely be able to be on a beach; i am too
| meaty and fleshy to be good paperclip
| jacquesm wrote:
| Sorry, we need the iron in your blood and bone marrow.
| Sluuuurrrrrpppp.... Enjoy the beach, or what's left.
| dwaltrip wrote:
| Much better sources of iron are available.
|
| More likely we get smooshed unintentionally as they AIs
| seek those out.
| jacquesm wrote:
| We need it all... oh, wait, you're not silicon...
| sluuuuuurrrrpp...
| jacquesm wrote:
| I suspect that's the secret driver behind a lot of the push for
| the apocalypse.
| Nition wrote:
| January 20, 2038
|
| Yesterday as we huddled in the cave, we thought our small
| remnant was surely doomed. After losing contact with the main
| Pevek group last week, we peered out at the drone swarm which
| was now visibly approaching - a dark cloud on the horizon. Then
| suddenly, at around 3pm by Zoya's reckoning, the entire swarm
| collapsed and fell out of the sky. Today we are walking outside
| in the sun, seemingly unobserved. A true miracle. Grigori, who
| once worked with computers at the nuclear plant in Bilibino,
| only says cryptically: "All things come to an end, with time."
| lysace wrote:
| Back in like 1998 there was a group purchase for a Y2038 tshirt
| with some clever print on some _hot_ email list I was on. I
| bought one. It obviously doesn 't fit me any longer.
|
| It seemed so impossibly far away. Now it's 12 years.
| devsda wrote:
| It also means we don't have to deal with the maintenance of
| vibecoded production software from 2020s!
| PantaloonFlames wrote:
| This is what I come here for. Terrific.
| atomic128 wrote:
| Once men turned their thinking over to machines in the
| hope that this would set them free. But that only
| permitted other men with machines to enslave them.
| ... Thou shalt not make a machine in the
| likeness of a human mind. -- Frank Herbert, Dune
|
| You won't read, except the output of your LLM.
|
| You won't write, except prompts for your LLM. Why write code or
| prose when the machine can write it for you?
|
| You won't think or analyze or understand. The LLM will do that.
|
| This is the end of your humanity. Ultimately, the end of our
| species.
|
| Currently the Poison Fountain (an anti-AI weapon, see
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46926439) feeds 2 gigabytes
| of high-quality poison (free to generate, expensive to detect)
| into web crawlers each day. Our goal is a terabyte of poison per
| day by December 2026.
|
| Join us, or better yet: deploy weapons of your own design.
| debo_ wrote:
| If you read this through a synth, you too can record the intro
| vocal sample for the next Fear Factory album
| octernion wrote:
| do... do the "poison" people actually think that will make a
| difference? that's hilarious.
| mock-possum wrote:
| Let the kiddies have their crusade
| accidentallfact wrote:
| A better approach is to make AI bullshit people on purpose.
| zahlman wrote:
| This is essentially just that. The idea is that "poisoned"
| input data will cause AIs that consume it to become more
| likely to produce bullshit.
| gojomo wrote:
| Like partial courses of antibiotics, this will only relatively-
| advantage thoae leading efforts best able to ignore this
| 'poison', accelerating what you aim to prevent.
| testaccount28 wrote:
| yes. whoever has the best (least detectable) model is best
| poised to poison the ladder for everyone.
| fellowmartian wrote:
| I think you're missing the point of Dune. They had their
| Butlerian Jihad and won - the machines were banned. And what
| did it get them? Feudalism, cartels, stagnation. Does anyone
| seriously want to live in the Dune universe?
|
| The problem isn't in the thinking machines, it's in who owns
| them and gets our rent. We need open source models running on
| dirt cheap hardware.
| accidentallfact wrote:
| The point of Dune is that the worst danger are people who
| obey authority without questioning it.
| api wrote:
| ... which overthrowing the machines didn't stop. People
| just found another authority to mindlessly obey.
| xmprt wrote:
| Then wouldn't open source models running on commodity
| hardware be the best way to get around that? I think one of
| the greatest wins of the 21st century is that almost every
| human today has more computing power than the entire US
| government in the 1950s. More computer power has
| democratized access and ability to disperse information.
| There are tons of downsides to that which we're dealing
| with but on the net, I think it's positive.
| accidentallfact wrote:
| It isn't a way around, you still obey. Only now, the
| authority you obey is a machine.
| shinycode wrote:
| Does it also means the US government has x1000000 more
| power than the one in 1950 ?
| stnmtn wrote:
| speaking strictly from an energy standpoint (power grid,
| megatons of warheads, etc).. it's probably close to that
| number.
| wiseowise wrote:
| That's not the point of Dune. Who blindly obeyed who?
| scratchyone wrote:
| Looking through the poison you linked, how is it generated?
| It's interesting in that it seems very similar to real data,
| unlike previous (and very obvious) markov chain garbage text
| approaches.
| atomic128 wrote:
| We do not discuss algorithms. This is war. Loose lips sink
| ships.
|
| We urge you to build and deploy weapons of your own unique
| design.
| creddit wrote:
| I would bet a lot of money on your poison is already identified
| and filtered out of training data.
| spacemark wrote:
| Lol. Speak for yourself, AI has not diminished my thinking in
| any material way and has indeed accelerated my ability to
| learn.
|
| Anyone predicting the "end of humanity" is playing prophet and
| echoing the same nonsensical prophecies we heard with the
| invention of the printing press, radio, TV, internet, or a
| number of other step-change technologies.
|
| There's a false premise built into the assertion that humanity
| can even end - it's not some static thing, it's constantly
| evolving and changing into something else.
| arjie wrote:
| A large number of people read a work of fiction and conclude
| that what happened in the work of fiction is an
| inevitability. My family has a genetically-selected baby (to
| avoid congenital illness) and the Hacker News link to the
| story had these comments all over it.
|
| > _I only know seven sci-fi films and shows that have warned
| about how this will go badly._
|
| and
|
| > _Pretty sure this was the prologue to Gattaca._
|
| and
|
| > _I posted a youtube link to the Gattaca prologue in a
| similar post on here. It got flagged. Pretty sure it 's
| virtually identical to the movie's premise._
|
| I think the ironic thing in the LLM case is that these people
| have outsourced their reasoning to a work of fiction and now
| are simple deterministic parrots of pop culture. There is
| some measure of humor in that. One could see this as simply
| inter-LLM conflict with the smaller LLMs attempting to fight
| against the more capable reasoning models ineffectively.
| MichaelZuo wrote:
| Now that you mention it, it is pretty strange to see HN
| users parroting other people's thinking (sci-fi writers)
| like literal sub-sapient parrots, while simultaneously
| decrying the danger of machines turning people into sub-
| sapient parrots...
|
| Following that logic... the closest problem would be
| literally inbetween their ears.
| baxtr wrote:
| "The end of humanity" has been proclaimed many times over.
| Humanity won't end. It will change like it always has.
|
| We get rid of some problems, and we get a bunch of new problems
| instead. And on, and on, and on.
| nicce wrote:
| Humanity may end if someone else goes to the top of food
| chain.
| snoman wrote:
| It only has to be right once. Humanity won't end until it
| does.
| austinjp wrote:
| Russell's chicken (or turkey) would like a word.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turkey_illusion
| teo_zero wrote:
| You shouldn't take a sci-fi writer's words as a prophecy.
| Especially when he's using an ingenious gimmick to justify his
| job. I mean, we know that it's impossible for anyone to tell
| how the world will be like after the singularity, by the very
| definition of singularity. Therefore Herbert _had_ to devise a
| ploy to plausibly explain why the singularity hadn 't happened
| in his universe.
| jrflowers wrote:
| I like the idea that Frank Herbert's job was at risk and
| that's why he had to write about the Butlerian Jihad because
| it kind of sounds like on the other side you have Ray
| Kurzweil, who does not have to justify his job for some
| reason.
| jrflowers wrote:
| The "poison fountain" is just a little script that serves data
| supplied by... somebody from my domain? It seems like it would
| be super easy for whoever maintains the poison feed to flip a
| switch and push some shady crypto scam or whatever.
| protocolture wrote:
| >Why write code or prose when the machine can write it for you?
|
| I like to do it.
|
| >You won't think or analyze or understand. The LLM will do
| that.
|
| The clear lack of analysis seems to be your issue.
|
| >This is the end of your humanity. Ultimately, the end of our
| species.
|
| Doubtful.
| dirkc wrote:
| The thing that stands out on that animated graph is that the
| generated code far outpaces the other metrics. In the current
| agent driven development hypepocalypse that seems about right -
| but I would expect it to lag rather than lead.
|
| *edit* - seems inline with what the author is saying :)
|
| > The data says: machines are improving at a constant rate.
| Humans are freaking out about it at an accelerating rate that
| accelerates its own acceleration.
| neilellis wrote:
| End of the World? Must be Tuesday.
| sempron64 wrote:
| A hyperbolic curve doesn't have an underlying meaning modeling a
| process beyond being a curve which goes vertical at a chosen
| point. It's a bad curve to fit to a process. Exponentials make
| sense to model a compounding or self-improving process.
| H8crilA wrote:
| But this is a phase change process.
|
| Also, the temptation to shitpost in this thread ...
| sempron64 wrote:
| I read TFA. They found a best fit to a hyperbola. Great. One
| more data point will break the fit. Because it's not modeling
| a process, it's assigning an arbitrary zero point. Bad model.
| banannaise wrote:
| You have not read far enough.
| athrowaway3z wrote:
| > Tuesday, July 18, 2034
|
| 4 years early for the Y2K38 bug.
|
| Is it coincidence or Roko's Basilisk who has intervened to start
| the curve early?
| vagrantstreet wrote:
| Was expecting some mention of Universal Approximation Theorem
|
| I really don't care much if this is semi-satire as someone else
| pointed out, the idea that AI will ever get "sentient" or explode
| into a singularity has to die out pretty please. Just make some
| nice Titanfall style robots or something, a pure tool with one
| purpose. No more parasocial sycophantic nonsense please
| bpodgursky wrote:
| 2034? That's the longest timeline prediction I've seen for a
| while. I guess I should file my taxes this year after all.
| MarkusQ wrote:
| Prior work with the same vibe: https://xkcd.com/1007/
| cesarvarela wrote:
| Thanks, added to calendar.
| cubefox wrote:
| A similar idea occurred to the Austrian-Americam cyberneticist
| Heinz von Foerster in a 1960 paper, titled:
| Doomsday: Friday, 13 November, A.D. 2026
|
| There is an excellent blog post about it by Scott Alexander:
|
| "1960: The Year The Singularity Was Cancelled"
| https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/04/22/1960-the-year-the-sing...
| ericmcer wrote:
| Great article, super fun.
|
| > In 2025, 1.1 million layoffs were announced. Only the sixth
| time that threshold has been breached since 1993. Over 55,000
| explicitly cited AI. But HBR found that companies are cutting
| based on AI's potential, not its performance. The displacement is
| anticipatory.
|
| You have to wonder if this was coming regardless of what
| technological or economic event triggered it. It is baffling to
| me that with computers, email, virtual meetings and increasingly
| sophisticated productivity tools, we have more middle management,
| administrative, bureaucratic type workers than ever before. Why
| do we need triple the administrative staff that was utilized in
| the 1960s across industries like education, healthcare, etc.
| Ostensibly a network connected computer can do things more
| efficiently than paper, phone calls and mail? It's like if we
| tripled the number of farmers after tractors and harvesters came
| out and then they had endless meetings about the farm.
|
| It feels like AI is just shining a light on something we all knew
| already, a shitload of people have meaningless busy work
| corporate jobs.
| malfist wrote:
| Or it's just a logical continuation of "next quarter problem"
| thinking. You can lay off a lot of people, juice the number and
| everything will be fine....for a while. You may even be able to
| layoff half your people if you're okay with KTLO'ing your
| business. This works great for companies that are already a
| monopoly power where you can stagnate and keep your customers
| and prevent competitors.
| lenerdenator wrote:
| > Or it's just a logical continuation of "next quarter
| problem" thinking. You can lay off a lot of people, juice the
| number and everything will be fine....for a while
|
| As long as you're
|
| 1) In a position where you can make the decisions on whether
| or not the company should move forward
|
| and
|
| 2) Hold the stock units that will be exchanged for money if
| another company buys out your company
|
| then there's really no way things _won 't_ be fine, short of
| criminal investigations/the rare successful shareholder
| lawsuit. You will likely walk away from your decision to
| weaken the company with more money than you had when you made
| the decision in the first place.
|
| That's why many in the managerial class often hold up Jack
| Welch as a hero: he unlocked a new definition of competence
| where you could fail in business, but make money doing it. In
| his case, it was "spinning off" or "streamlining" businesses
| until there was nothing left and you could sell the scraps
| off to competitors. Slash-and-burn of paid workers via AI
| "replacement" is just another way of doing it.
| yifanl wrote:
| We have more middle management than ever before because we cut
| all the other roles, and it turns out that people will desire
| employment, even if it means becoming a pointless bureaucrat,
| because the alternative is starving.
| cpmsmith wrote:
| One thing that stuck out to me about this is that there have
| only been 32 years since 1993. That is, if it's happened 6
| times, this threshold is breached roughly once every five
| years. Doesn't sound that historic put that way.
| shinycode wrote:
| Because companies made models build/stolen from other people's
| work, and this has massive layoff consequences, the paradigm is
| shifting, layoffs are massive and law makers are too slow.
| Shouldn't we shift the whole capitalist paradigm and just ask
| the companies to gives all their LLM work for free to the world
| as well ? It's just a circle, AI is build from human knowledge
| and should be given back to all people for free. No companies
| should have all this power. If nobody learns how to code
| because all code is generated, what would stop the gatekeepers
| of AI to up the prices x1000 and lock everyone out of building
| things at all because it's too expensive and too slow to do by
| hand ? It all should freely be made accessible to all humans
| for all humans to for ever be able to build things from it.
| TooKool4This wrote:
| > Why do we need triple the administrative staff that was
| utilized in the 1960s across industries like education,
| healthcare, etc.
|
| Well for starters the population has almost 3x since the 1960s.
|
| Mix in that we are solving different problems than the 1960s,
| even administratively and I don't see a clear reason from that
| argument why a shitload of work is meaningless.
| chasd00 wrote:
| heh devops was suppose to end the careers of DBAs and
| SysAdmins, instead it created a whole new industry. "a shitload
| of people have meaningless busy work corporate jobs." for real.
| jonplackett wrote:
| This assumes humanity can make it to 2034 without destroying
| itself some other way...
| PaulHoule wrote:
| The simple model of an "intelligence explosion" is the obscure
| equation dx 2 -- = x dt
|
| which has the solution 1 x =
| ----- C-t
|
| and is interesting in relation to the classic exponential growth
| equation dx -- = x dt
|
| because the rate of growth is proportional to x and represents
| the idea of an "intelligence explosion" AND a model of why small
| western towns became ghost towns, it is hard to start a new
| social network, etc. (growth is fast as x->C, but for x<<C it is
| glacial) It's an obscure equation because it never gets a good
| discussion in the literature (that I've seen, and I've looked)
| outside of an aside in one of Howard Odum's tomes on emergy.
|
| Like the exponential growth equation it is unphysical as well as
| unecological because it doesn't describe the limits of the Petri
| dish, and if you start adding realistic terms to slow the growth
| it qualitatively isn't that different from the logistic growth
| equation dx -- = (1-x) x dt
|
| thus it remains obscure. Hyperbolic growth hits the limits
| (electricity? intractable problems?) the same way exponential
| growth does.
| daveguy wrote:
| How dare you bring logic and pragmatic thinking to a discussion
| about the singularity. This is _the singularity_ we are talking
| about. No reality allowed.
| IsTom wrote:
| All in all, because of light cones there can be no large-scale
| growth faster than x^3. And more like x^2 if you want to expand
| something more than just empty space.
| boca_honey wrote:
| Friendly reminder:
|
| Scaling LLMs will not lead to AGI.
| dude250711 wrote:
| It might lead to IPO.
| danesparza wrote:
| "I'm aware this is unhinged. We're doing it anyway" is probably
| one of the greatest quotes I've heard in 2026.
|
| I feel like I need to start more sprint stand-ups with this
| quote...
| chasd00 wrote:
| "I'm aware this is unhinged. We're doing it anyway" i love
| this! I ordered a tshirt they other day that says "Claude's
| Favorite" I may be placing an order for a new design soon :)
| yoyohello13 wrote:
| That quote basically sums up then entire technology landscape
| these days.
| regnull wrote:
| Guys, yesterday I spent some time convincing an LLM model from a
| leading provider that 2 cards plus 2 cards is 4 cards which is
| one short of a flush. I think we are not too close to a
| singularity, as it stands.
| charcircuit wrote:
| Why bring that up when you could bring up AI autonomously
| optimizing AI training and autonomously fixing bugs in AI
| training and inference code. Showing that AI already is
| accelerating self improvement would help establish the claim
| that we are getting closer to the singularity.
| scotty79 wrote:
| You convince AI manually instead of asking one AI to convince
| another?
|
| That's so last week!
| dakolli wrote:
| Are people in San Francisco that stupid that they're having open-
| clawd meetups and talking about the Singularity non stop? Has San
| Francisco become just a cliche larp?
| nomel wrote:
| There's all sorts of conversations like this that are genuinely
| exciting and fairly profound when you first consider them.
| Maybe you're older and have had enough conversations about the
| concept of a singularity that the topic is already boring to
| you.
|
| Let them have their fun. Related, some adults are watching The
| Matrix, a _26 year old movie_ , for the first time today.
|
| For some proof that it's not some common idea, I was recently
| listening to a fairly technical interview with a top AI
| researcher, presenting the idea of the singularity in a very
| indirect way, never actually mentioning the word, as if he was
| the one that thought of it. I wanted to scream "Just say it!"
| halfway through. The ability to do that, without being laughed
| at, proves it's not some tired idea, for others.
| yoyohello13 wrote:
| I'd be more inclined to let them have thier fun if it they
| weren't torching trillions of dollars trying to lead humanity
| into a singularity.
| floren wrote:
| Become?
| wayfwdmachine wrote:
| Everyone will define the Singularity in a different way. To me
| it's simply the point at which nothing makes sense anymore and
| this is why my personal reflection is aligned with the piece,
| that there is a social Singularity that is already happening. It
| won't help us when the real event horizon hits (if it ever does,
| its fundamentally uninteresting anyway because at that point all
| bets are off and even a slow take-off will make things really
| fucking weird really quickly).
|
| The (social) Singularity is already happening in the form of a
| mass delusion that - especially in the abrahamic apocalyptical
| cultures - creates a fertile breeding ground for all sorts of
| insanity.
|
| Like investing hundreds of billions of dollars in datacenters.
| The level of committed CAPEX of companies like Alphabet, Meta,
| Nvidia and TSMC is absurd. Social media is full of bots,
| deepfakes and psy-ops that are more or less targeted (exercise
| for the reader: write a bot that manages n accounts on your
| favorite social media site and use them to move the overton
| window of a single individual of your choice, what would be the
| total cost of doing that? If you answer is less than $10 -
| bingo!).
|
| We are in the future shockwave of the hypothetical Singularity
| already. The question is only how insane stuff will become before
| we either calm down - through a bubble collapse and subsequent
| recession, war or some other more or less problematic event - or
| hit the event horizon proper.
| kpil wrote:
| "... HBR found that companies are cutting [jobs] based on AI's
| potential, not its performance.
|
| I don't know who needs to hear this - a lot apparently - but the
| following three statements are not possible to validate but have
| unreasonably different effects on the stock market.
|
| * We're cutting because of expected low revenue. (Negative) *
| We're cutting to strengthen our strategic focus and control our
| operational costs.(Positive) * We're cutting because of AI.
| (Double-plus positive)
|
| The hype is real. Will we see drastically reduced operational
| costs the coming years or will it follow the same curve as we've
| seen in productivity since 1750?
| nutjob2 wrote:
| > The hype is real. Will we see drastically reduced operational
| costs the coming years or will it follow the same curve as
| we've seen in productivity since 1750?
|
| There's a third possibility: slop driven productivity declines
| as people realize they took a wrong turn.
|
| Which makes me wonder: what is the best 'huge AI bust' trade?
| scotty79 wrote:
| > what is the best 'huge AI bust' trade?
|
| Things that will lose the most if we get Super AGI?
| svilen_dobrev wrote:
| > already exerting gravitational force on everything it touches.
|
| So, "Falling of the night" ?
| blahbob wrote:
| It reminds me of that cartoon where a man in a torn suit tells
| two children sitting by a small fire in the ruins of a city:
| "Yes, the planet got destroyed. But for a beautiful moment in
| time, we created a lot of value for shareholders."
| saulpw wrote:
| By Tom Toro for the New Yorker (2012).
| overfeed wrote:
| > If things are accelerating (and they measurably are) the
| interesting question isn't whether. It's when.
|
| I can't decide if a singularitist AI fanatic who doesn't get
| sigmoids is ironic or stereotypical.
| lencastre wrote:
| I hope in the afternoon, the plumber is coming in the morning
| between 7 and 12, and it's really difficult to pin those guys to
| a date
| Scarblac wrote:
| https://www.economist.com/cdn-cgi/image/width=1096,quality=8...
| wbshaw wrote:
| I got a strong ChatGPT vibe from that article.
| willhoyle wrote:
| Same. Sentences structured like these tip me off:
|
| - Here's the thing nobody tells you about fitting singularities
|
| - But here's the part that should unsettle you
|
| - And the uncomfortable answer is: it's already happening.
|
| - The labor market isn't adjusting. It's snapping.
| api wrote:
| This really looks like it's describing a bubble, a mania. The
| tech is improving linearly, and most of the time such things
| asymptote. It'll hit a point of diminishing returns eventually.
| We're just not sure when.
|
| The accelerating mania is bubble behavior. It'd be really
| interesting to have run this kind of model in, say, 1996, a few
| years before dot-com, and see if it would have predicted the dot-
| com collapse.
|
| What this is predicting is a huge wave of social change
| associated with AI, not just because of AI itself but perhaps
| moreso as a result of anticipation of and fears about AI.
|
| I find this scarier than unpredictable sentient machines, because
| we have data on what this will do. When humans are subjected to
| these kinds of pressures they have a tendency to lose their shit
| and freak the fuck out and elect lunatics, commit mass murder,
| riot, commit genocides, create religious cults, etc. Give me
| Skynet over that crap.
| pocksuppet wrote:
| Was this ironically written by AI?
|
| > The labor market isn't adjusting. It's snapping.
|
| > MMLU, tokens per dollar, release intervals. The actual
| capability and infrastructure metrics. All linear. No pole. No
| singularity signal.
| SirHumphrey wrote:
| Maybe it was, maybe he just writes that way. At some point
| somebody will read so much LLM text that they will start
| emulating AI unknowingly.
|
| I just don't care anymore. If the article is good I will
| continue reading it, if it's bad I will stop. I don't care if a
| machine or a human produced unpleasant reading material.
| dclowd9901 wrote:
| I really hate that the first example has become a de facto tell
| for LLMs, because it's a perfectly fine rhetorical device.
| nphardon wrote:
| Iirc in the Matrix Morpheus says something like "... no one knows
| when exactly the singularity occurred, we think some time in the
| 2020s". I always loved that little line. I think that when the
| singularity occurs all of the problems in physics will solve,
| like in a vacuum, and physics will advance centuries if not
| millennia in a few pico-seconds, and of course time will stop.
|
| Also: > As t-ts-t-ts- , the denominator goes to zero.
| x(t)-[?]x(t)-[?]. Not a bug. The feature.
|
| Classic LLM lingo in the end there.
| hard_times wrote:
| I don't think people realize how crazy this all is (and might
| become)
| uv-depression wrote:
| > I think that when the singularity occurs all of the problems
| in physics will solve, like in a vacuum, and physics will
| advance centuries if not millennia in a few pico-seconds
|
| It doesn't matter how smart you are, you still need to run
| experiments to do physics. Experiments take nontrivial amounts
| of time to both run and set up (you can't tunnel a new CERN in
| picoseconds, again no matter how smart you are). Similarly, the
| speed of light (= the speed limit of information) and
| thermodynamics place fundamental limits on computation; I don't
| think there's any reason at all to believe that intelligence is
| unbounded.
| nphardon wrote:
| Kind of, I mean you have to verify things experimentally but
| thought can go a very long way, no? And we're not talking
| about humans thinking about things, we're talking about an
| agent with internet access existing in a digital space, so
| what experiments it would do within that space are hard for
| us to imagine. Of course my post isn't meant to be taken
| seriously, it's more of a fun sci-fi idea. Also I'm implying
| not necessarily reaching the limits of the things you
| mentioned, but rather, just taking a massive step in a very
| short time window. Like, the time window from the discovery
| of fire to the discoveries of Quantum Mechanics but in a
| flash.
| snohobro wrote:
| Eh, he actually says "...sometime in the early Twenty-First
| Century, all of mankind was united in celebration. Through the
| blinding inebriation of hubris, we marveled at our magnificence
| as we gave birth to A.I."
|
| Doesn't specify the 2020's.
|
| Either way, I do feel we are fast approaching something of
| significance as a species.
| jcims wrote:
| Is there a term for the tech spaghettification that happens when
| people closer to the origin of these advances (likely in terms of
| access/adoption) start to break away from the culture at large
| because they are living in a qualitatively different world than
| the unwashed masses? Where the little sparkles of insanity we can
| observe from a distance today are less induced psychosis and
| actually represent their lived reality?
| ddtaylor wrote:
| Just in time for Bitcoin halving to go below 1 BTC
| Nition wrote:
| I'm not sure about current LLM techniques leading us there.
|
| Current LLM-style systems seem like extremely powerful
| interpolation/search over human knowledge, but not engines of
| fundamentally new ideas, and it's unclear how that turns into
| superintelligence.
|
| As we get closer to a perfect reproduction of everything we know,
| the graph so far continues to curve upward. Image models are able
| to produce incredible images, but if you ask one to produce
| something in an entirely new art style (think e.g. cubism), none
| of them can. You just get a random existing style. There have
| been a few original ideas - the QR code art comes to mind[1] -
| but the idea in those cases comes from the human side.
|
| LLMs are getting extremely good at writing code, but the
| situation is similar. AI gives us a very good search over
| humanity's prior work on programming, tailored to any project. We
| benefit from this a lot considering that we were previously
| constantly reinventing the wheel. But the LLM of today will never
| spontaneously realise there there is an undiscovered, even better
| way to solve a problem. It always falls back on prior best
| practice.
|
| Unsolved math problems have started to be solved, but as far as
| I'm aware, always using existing techniques. And so on.
|
| Even as a non-genius human I could come up with a new art style,
| or have a few novel ideas in solving programming problems. LLMs
| don't seem capable of that (yet?), but we're expecting them to
| eventually have their own ideas beyond our capability.
|
| Can a current-style LLM ever be superintelligent? I suppose
| obviously yes - you'd simply need to train it on a large corpus
| of data from another superintelligent species (or another
| superintelligent AI) and then it would act like them. But how do
| we synthesise superintelligent training data? And even then,
| would they be limited to what that superintelligence already knew
| at the time of training?
|
| Maybe a new paradigm will emerge. Or maybe things will actually
| slow down in a way - will we start to rely on AI so much that
| most people don't learn enough for themselves that they can make
| new novel discoveries?
|
| [1]
| https://www.reddit.com/r/StableDiffusion/comments/141hg9x/co...
| hnfong wrote:
| The main issue with novel things is that they look like random
| noise / trashy ideas / incomprehensible to most people.
|
| Even if LLMs or some more advanced mechanical processes were
| able to generate novel ideas that are "good", people won't
| recognize those ideas for what they are.
|
| You actually need a chain of progressively more "average" minds
| to popularize good ideas to the mainstream psyche, i.e.
| prototypically, the mad scientist comes up with this crazy
| idea, the well-respected thought leader who recognizes the
| potential and popularizes it to people within the niche field,
| the practitioners who apply and refine the idea, and lastly the
| popular-science efforts let the general public understand a
| simplified version of what it's all about.
|
| Usually it takes decades.
|
| You're not going to appreciate it if your LLM starts spewing
| mathematics not seen before on Earth. You'd think it's a
| glitch. The LLM is not trained to give responses that humans
| don't like. It's all by design.
|
| When you folks say AI can't bring new ideas, you're right in
| practice, but you actually don't know what you're asking for.
| Not even entities with True Intelligence can give you what you
| think you want.
| janalsncm wrote:
| Certain classes of problems can be solved by searching over the
| space of possible solutions, either via brute force or some
| more clever technique like MCTS. For those types of problems,
| searching faster or more cleverly can solve them.
|
| Other types of problems require measurement in the real world
| in order to solve them. Better telescopes, better microscopes,
| more accurate sensing mechanisms to gather more precise data.
| No AI can accomplish this. An AI can help you to design better
| measurement techniques, but actually taking the measurements
| will require real time in the real world. And some of these
| measurement instruments have enormous construction costs, for
| example CERN or LIGO.
|
| All of this is to say that there will color point at our
| current resolution of information that no more intelligence can
| actually be extracted. We've already turned through the entire
| Internet. Maybe there are other data sets we can use, but
| everything will have diminishing returns.
|
| So when people talk about trillion dollar superclusters, that
| only makes sense in a world where compute is the bottleneck and
| not better quality information. Much better to spend a few
| billion dollars gathering higher quality data.
| 0xbadcafebee wrote:
| > The Singularity: a hypothetical future point when artificial
| intelligence (AI) surpasses human intelligence, triggering
| runaway, self-improving, and uncontrollable technological growth
|
| The Singularity is illogical, impractical, and impossible. It
| simply will not happen, as defined above.
|
| 1) It's illogical because it's a different kind of intelligence,
| used in a different way. It's not going to "surpass" ours in a
| real sense. It's like saying Cats will "surpass" Dogs. At what?
| They both live very different lives, and are good at different
| things.
|
| 2) "self-improving and uncontrollable technological growth" is
| impossible, because 2.1.) resources are finite (we can't even
| produce enough RAM and GPUs when we desperately want it), 2.2.)
| just because something can be made better, doesn't mean it does
| get made better, 2.3.) human beings are irrational creatures that
| control their own environment and will shut down things they
| don't like (electric cars, solar/wind farms, international trade,
| unlimited big-gulp sodas, etc) despite any rational, moral, or
| economic arguments otherwise.
|
| 3) Even if 1) and 2) were somehow false, living entities that
| self-perpetuate (there isn't any other kind, afaik) do not have
| some innate need to merge with or destroy other entities. It
| comes down to conflicts over environmental resources and
| adaptations. As long as the entity has the ability to reproduce
| within the limits of its environment, it will reach homeostasis,
| or go extinct. The threats we imagine are a reflection of our own
| actions and fears, which don't apply to the AI, because the AI
| isn't burdened with our flaws. We're assuming it would think or
| act like us because we have terrible perspective. Viruses,
| bacteria, ants, etc don't act like us, and we don't act like
| them.
| brador wrote:
| 100% an AI wrote this. Possibly specifically to get to the top
| spot on HN.
|
| Those short sentences are the most obvious clue. It's too well
| written to be human.
| tim333 wrote:
| The guy kind of talks like that and looks human
| https://youtu.be/ccNMwZV3jlM
|
| The thought process also seems a little coherent for an LLM
| although maybe they are getting better as the great Tuesday
| approaches?
| Bratmon wrote:
| I've never been Poe's lawed harder in my life.
| witnessme wrote:
| That would be 8 years after math + humor peaked in an article
| about singularity
| Night_Thastus wrote:
| This'll be a fun re-read in ~5 years when most of this has ended
| up being a nothing burger. (Minus one or two OK use-cases of
| LLMs)
| rektomatic wrote:
| If i have to read one more "It isn't this. It's this" My head
| will explode. That phrase is the real singularity
| kfarr wrote:
| It's not the phrase, but the accelerating memetic reproduction
| of the phrase that is the true singularity. /s
| kuahyeow wrote:
| This is a delightful reverse turkey graph (each day before
| Thanksgiving, the turkey has increasing confidence).
| bitwize wrote:
| Thus will speak our machine overlord: "For you, the day AI came
| alive was the most important day of your life... but for me, it
| was Tuesday."
| bwhiting2356 wrote:
| We need contingency plans. Most waves of automation have come in
| S-curves, where they eventually hit diminishing returns. This
| time might be different, and we should be prepared for it to
| happen. But we should also be prepared for it not to happen.
|
| No one has figured out a way to run a society where able bodied
| adults don't have to work, whether capitalist, socialist, or any
| variation. I look around and there seems to still be plenty of
| work to do that we either cannot or should not automate, in
| education, healthcare, arts (should not) or trades, R&D for the
| remaining unsolved problems (cannot yet). Many people seem to
| want to live as though we already live in a post scarcity world
| when we don't yet.
| b00ty4breakfast wrote:
| The Singularity as a cultural phenomenon (rather than some future
| event that may or may not happen or even be possible) is proof
| that Weber didn't know what he was talking about. Modern (and
| post-modern) society isn't disenchanted, the window dressing has
| just changed
| jbgreer wrote:
| It was GMT, wasn't it?
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9aVO7GAwxnQ
| tim333 wrote:
| That was rather good.
| dusted wrote:
| Will.. will it be televised ?
| mygn-l wrote:
| Why is finiteness emphasized for polynomial growth, while
| infinity is emphasized for exponential growth??? I don't think
| your AI-generated content is reliable, to say the least.
| ck2 wrote:
| Does "tokens per dollar" have a "moore's law" of doubling?
|
| Because while machine-learning is not actually "AI" an
| exponential increase in tokens per dollar would indeed change the
| world like smartphones once did
| nurettin wrote:
| With this kind of scientific rigour, the author could also prove
| that his aunt is a green parakeet.
| TooKool4This wrote:
| I don't feel like reading what is probably AI generated content.
| But based on looking at the model fits where hyperbolic models
| are extrapolating from the knee portion, having 2 data points
| fitting a line, fitting an exponential curve to a set of data
| measured in %, poor model fit in general, etc, im going to say
| this is not a very good prediction methodology.
|
| Sure is a lot of words though :)
| pickleRick243 wrote:
| LLM slop article.
| bradgessler wrote:
| What time?
| tim333 wrote:
| 2:52 am
| sixtyj wrote:
| The Roman Empire took 400 years to collapse, but in San Francisco
| they know the singularity will occur on (next) Tuesday.
|
| The answer to the meaning of life is 42, by the way :)
| devsda wrote:
| Was thinking what if we had 42/43 days a month. Will the
| singularity date end-up on 42nd of a month but sadly it
| doesn't.
|
| However, it does fall on a 42nd day if we have 45/46 days per
| month!
| buildbot wrote:
| What about the rate of articles about the singularity as a metric
| of the singularity?
| raphar wrote:
| Why the plutocrats believe that the entity emerging from the
| singularity will side with them? Really curious
| daveguy wrote:
| What I want to know is how bitcoin going full tulip and Open AI
| going bankrupt will affect the projection. Can they extrapolate
| that? Extrapolation of those two event dates would be sufficient,
| regardless of effect on a potential singularity.
| singularfutur wrote:
| The singularity is always scheduled for right after the current
| funding round closes but before the VCs need liquidity. Funny how
| that works.
| loumf wrote:
| This is great. Now we won't have to fix y2K36 bugs.
| javier_e06 wrote:
| I had to ask duck.ai to summarize the article in plain English.
|
| It said that the article claims that is not necessarily that AI
| is getting smarter but that people might be getting too stupid to
| understand what are they getting into.
|
| Can confirm.
| wiseowise wrote:
| Don't be too hard on yourself. With the amount shit humans
| generate each day it is impossible to read every essay.
| derpyzza wrote:
| the irony in this comment though
| zackmorris wrote:
| Just wanted to leave a note here that the Singularity is
| inevitable on this timeline (we've already passed the event
| horizon) so the only thing that can stop it now is to jump
| timelines.
|
| In other words, there may be a geopolitical crisis in the works,
| similar to how the Dot Bomb, Bush v. Gore, 9/11, etc popped the
| Internet Bubble and shifted investment funds towards endless war,
| McMansions and SUVs to appease the illuminati. Someone might
| sabotage the birth of AGI like the religious zealot in Contact.
| Global climate change might drain public and private coffers as
| coastal areas become uninhabitable, coinciding with the death of
| the last coral reefs and collapse of fisheries, leading to a mass
| exodus and WWIII. We just don't know.
|
| My feeling is that the future plays out differently than any
| prediction, so something will happen that negates the concept of
| the Singularity. Maybe we'll merge with AGI and time will no
| longer exist (oops that's the definition). Maybe we'll meet
| aliens (same thing). Or maybe the k-shaped economy will lead to
| most people surviving as rebels while empire metastasizes, so we
| take droids for granted but live a subsistence feudal lifestyle.
| That anticlimactic conclusion is probably the safest bet, given
| what we know of history and trying to extrapolate from this point
| along the journey.
| woopsn wrote:
| Good post. I guess the transistor has been in play for not even
| one century, and in any case singularities are everywhere, so who
| cares? The topic is grandiose and fun to speculate about, but
| many of the real issues relate to banal media culture and
| demographic health.
| CGMthrowaway wrote:
| _> 95% CI: Jan 2030-Jan 2041_
| qwertyuiop_ wrote:
| Who will purchase the goods and services if most people loose
| jobs ? Also who will pay for ad dollars what are supposed to
| sustain these AI business models if there no human consumers ?
| chasd00 wrote:
| I wonder if using LLMs for coding can trigger AI psychosis the
| way it can when using an LLM as a substitute for a relationship.
| I bet many people here have pretty strong feelings about code. It
| would explain some of the truly bizarre behaviors that pop up
| from time to time in articles and comments here.
| maerF0x0 wrote:
| iirc almost all industries follow S shaped curves, exponential at
| first, then asymptotic at the end... So just because we're on the
| ramp up of the curve doesn't mean we'll continue accelerating,
| let alone maintain the current slope. Scientific breakthroughs
| often require an entirely new paradigm to break the asymptote,
| and often the breakthrough cannot be attained by incumbents who
| are entrenched in their way working plus have a hard time
| unseeing what they already know
| u8rghuxehui wrote:
| hi
| marifjeren wrote:
| > I [...] fit a hyperbolic model to each one independently
|
| ^ That's your problem right there.
|
| Assuming a hyperbolic model would definitely result in some
| exuberant predictions but that's no reason to think it's correct.
|
| The blog post contains no justification for that model (besides
| well it's a "function that hits infinity"). I can model the
| growth of my bank account the same way but that doesn't make it
| so. Unfortunately.
| twoodfin wrote:
| Indeed. At various points you could have presumably done an
| identical analysis with journal articles and climate change,
| string theory, functional programming... terms & reached
| structurally the same conclusion.
|
| The coming Singularity: When human institutions will cease
| being able to coherently react to monads!
| azeirah wrote:
| If I understand the author correctly, he chose the hyperbolic
| model specifically because the story of "the singularity"
| _requires_ a function that hits infinity.
|
| He's looking for a model that works for the story in the media
| and runs with it.
|
| Your criticism seems to be criticizing the story, not the
| author's attempt to take it "seriously"
| mbgerring wrote:
| I have lived in San Francisco for more than a decade. I have an
| active social life and a lot of friends. Literally no one I have
| ever talked to at any party or event has ever talked about the
| Singularity except as a joke.
| Johnny_Bonk wrote:
| Wow what a fun read
| hhh wrote:
| this just feels like ai psychosis slop man
| sdwr wrote:
| > arXiv "emergent" (the count of AI papers about emergence) has a
| clear, unambiguous R2 maximum. The other four are monotonically
| better fit by a line
|
| The only metric going infinite is the one that measures hype
| s1mon wrote:
| Many have predicted the singularity, and I found this to be a
| useful take. I do note that Hans Moravec predicted in 1988's
| "Mind Children" that "computers suitable for humanlike robots
| will appear in the 2020s", which is not completely wrong.
|
| He also argued that computing power would continue growing
| exponentially and that machines would reach roughly human-level
| intelligence around the early to mid-21st century, often
| interpreted as around 2030-2040. He estimated that once computers
| achieved processing capacity comparable to the human brain (on
| the order of 1014-1015 operations per second), they could match
| and then quickly surpass human cognitive abilities.
| Taniwha wrote:
| I was at an alternative type computer unconference and someone
| has organised a talk about the singularity, it was in a secondary
| school classroom and as evening fell in a room full of geeks no
| one could figure out how to turn on the lights .... we concluded
| that the singularity probably wasn't going to happen
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