Im 40, the planet is not fine. Methane emissions in thawing permafrost has been worrying since the 70s.

Everything of what is happening now was predicted, and what is going to follow is going to be much worse than the subtle changes we have seen so far.

All is all, earth entropy is increasing fast, extremely fast.

I know I will never convince you though, so whatever…

People have to understand the dire state our planet is in.

There is little chance we can make it through the 22nd century in a decent state.

The cock is ticking…

We are all mortals anyway.

What is the worse case scenario?

Singularity starts and turns all universe into computronium?

If it’s just that, so be it.

Maybe it will be thankful and build a nice new universe for us afterwards…

I believe civilization has few other ways of surviving this century.

Decades are quickly passing by and we have very little time left.

I fear window of opportunity to develop AI is short and it is possible this window could soon close forever.

You are mistaken, there is actually a huge scarcity of ressources on this planet.

US lifestyle is not scalable.

And of course UBI will allow people « not to live paycheck to paycheck », it is just that people think 1$ of UBI will allow them to buy the same as 1$ of today.

It is not, RV parks wont get bigger by UBI, Disneyland either, there won’t be more shoreline on the lake either.

UBI wont change a single thing to that apart making people who have the good stuff already even richer…

You can’t control what people are going to do with their UBI money, apart if you distribute it as coupons, like in the USSR or SNAP.

Everything happens at the margins, the people who are working now and can’t afford going to DL will want to go if UBI allows them to.

And they are much more than DL can accommodate…

People spend far more for leisure than they do to renew their work potential.

If so the most sold car in the US would be a Daihatsu and not a F150 and planes would be empty because people would be spending all their money on math courses.

And that money put into non productive activities will have troubles moving away, because by definition they are non productive activities.

Nobody is paid to go to Disneyland, and everyone has to pay, astonishingly.

People will vote with their money, and what they want will inflate away…

People in favor of UBI see themselves living the great life in Chiang Mai as you could today if you were given this money.

It wont happen like that, every body is going to receive UBI, and every body is going to want to go to Chiang Mai.

Prices will just adjust accordingly, but now money will be diluted and any productive venture yielding about the UBI, will simply disappear.

So people must learn to make Burritos at home right now, because Chipotle won’t be there for long…

No, but I can make my single little voice heard.

No, we must accelerate instead.

I’m personally ready to accept the risks if it is the price to pay for the the mindblowing rewards.

Most data is already found on the web, I haven’t read a real investigation for years…

Very interestingly I see a very coming « neo-luddite » mouvement lead by religious people and institutions and western marxists.

Nationalists and part of the tech community will also stop AI evolution.

Because everybody understands that stalling AI « beyond any reasonable doubt » it won’t be harmful, means never.

Eastern maxists will move forward has fast as possible IMO.

In most mature industries their role is to manage status quo and tune the monopoly they invariably achieved by keeping good contacts with fellow cartel members and take care of allies in gouvernement.

Their also have to maintain friendly proximity with fellow McKinsey gents in commercial banks that will finance anything that doesn’t require financing.

That is their true job, and that will remain for a little while IMO.

Nothing in AI will not provide better economic productivity.

Nothing will collapse, only useless jobs.

I personally find daily amazement of watching proto AGI just run on college math level of algorithmics.

I find amazing GPL3 is easier to comprehend than h.265 for example.

Never was the discrepancy between the power of the output and the modesty of the inputs so large.

It allows me to get more involved into what is going on and eager to see more :-)

Most important news of last weeks developments is that even trivial LLM models can produce almost intelligent behaviors, and that even those very simple models escape their makers comprehension.

We can’t even understand pre AGI AI, imagine what is coming…

The black box nature of AI amazes me, it is not that we don’t grasp the details, we have absolutely no clue about what they are capable of, what a technology.

Recursive self improving is trivially exponential (no « singularity » aka limit though).

Singularity comes from our need to extrapolate the past to anticipate the future.

And if the future comes too fast, thr hypothesis is that we won’t be able to do that anymore.

Those exponentials often appear in recursive things, like population biology.

« Singularities » don’t really happen because, at one point, things outside the exponential mechanism start to « push » against it. It could be food, it could be space, it could be speed of light…

The fight between an exponential process and its environment leads to the omnious « logistics curve », better known as S curve.

Maybe something, somewhere will push against AI, limiting it as all other exponential stuff is limited.

For various resons, I don’t think it will happen.

IMO, Singularity is inevitable and will expand in the whole universe.

This is a side problem and people are so dependent on network they will be the last thing to go down.

I am mostly amazed at the margin of improvement there is in software AI optimization alone.

Easy tricks are capable of increasing software efficiency thousands of times.

I wonder of what is left tonbe juiced, could an AI optimise itself 1000x in an instant?

Like everybody else, fulfilling our urges in other ways than productive work.

Due to mimetism, we want things that we cannot have (often because they cannot be shared).

I predict I explosion in tasks that are difficult, time consuming, hierarchical, but totally unproductive:

Sports, fitness, “bodybuilding/improving” is the obious one.

For people with few gifts at this, non physical sports (much harder to exclude AI cheating though).

Anything producing artifacts, like music/plastic arts also will still exist but be enormously diluted by AI production. Apart live performances that will be in great demand, and I imagine will merge with the first activities (people at the top of physical competition will be able to diversify by providing live art, AI generated or not).

But my take is that the human body is going to be central in AI times.

Any other ideas?

Very interesting question.

Very rarely has a large societal change reversed rural exodus.

Only example I can think of is the European higher middle ages when the break down of the Pax Romana and of the imperial transportation network forced people to flee into the countryside, and start Feudalism.

AI impact could only improve transportation means and I believe people will be more instead of less in need of social proximity.

History has shown us, and in opposition of what « survivalists » think, non extinction level crisis very often hit cities less…

This is Fordism applied to semantic compacity :-)

Maximum compacity will be achieved with the longest prompt chain.

The smallest “atomic thought step” will maximize the number of prompts for a given problem.

Well, point is:

They were right.

Current situation of having both highly educated and completely illiterate/useless adults is a direct result of this intellectual off loading…

What did people think? That not knowing how to add integers would allow students more time to learn Set theory? No, it was just a way to inflate the grades.

So in short you thesis is about the risk of AI Malthusianism.

You are obviously mistaken.

As you know well zero shot learning algorithms beat anything else, saw a DeepMind analysis postulating that it allows them to explore part of the gaming landscape that were never explored by humans.

And you seem to be moving lampposts as you move along.

What is the testable characteristics that would satisfy you to declare the existence of an ASI?

For me it is easy, higer IQ than any living human, by defnition. Would that change something, you can argue it doesnt, I bet it will change everything.

I dont get your point.

The programmer doesn’t speak Klingon though the program can write good Klingon. AlphaZero programmers don’t play go though the program can beat the best human go players in the world.

By definition being better than a human at something means being « super intelligent » at that task.

Intelligence theory postulates G, and that it can be approximated with IQ test.

« Super intelligent AI » will then by definition only need to show a higher IQ than either its programmers or the smartest human.

Nothing else.

Postulating the existence of G, it is well possible that ASI (by definition again) will be better at other tasks not tested by the IQ test.

Rewriting a better IQ version of itself for example.

Recursively.

I really dont see the discussion here, these are only definitions.