Hmm, its not like 2023 is a little bit unlike 2020 AI wise.

The very concept of singularity is self improving AI pushing into ASI.

I don’t get how you can trivialize a LLM seemingly starting to show competency in the very programming language it is written into.

What new particular characteristic of an AI would impress you more and show things are accelerating?

I believe humans get desensitized very quickly and when shown an ASI doing beyond standard model physics will still manage to say: so what? Ive been expecting for more since at least 6 months…

We are nearing self improving code IMO.

Once we get past that, we have crossed the threshold.

Seeing the large variance in the hardware cost/performance of current models, Id think the progression margin for software optimization alone is huge.

I believe we already have the hardware required for one ASI.

Things will soon accelerate, the box has been opened already :-)

Hmm, now?

“Reskilling” is only really possible before mid 30s imo.

Put AI before finance or economy and you’ll be the last to go.

15 years ago, back then in medicine, elite academics were coming from physics. I said, all medical academics careers are gonna be given to AI-pick your specialty.

Bonus, you don’t actually need to know anything about it, just have some professors and postdocs numbers and will be all. It is so fashionable and obscure everybody will see AI wherever they wish to :-)

Well that book is very explicitly written by a anarchist activist with the intend of making the concept relevant in modern politics again.

It is not a scientific book, and I must say I have some sympathies towards anarchy myself.

Problem is, those very primitive and unspecialized cultures weren’t advanced enough to invent writing, so most if not all of their culture is lost in time, forever.

People with a political agenda have time and time again tried to make them say thing we are mostly unsure.

I am more interested in living ethnology, especially the study on native cultures around the world.

Their societies obviously are not very specialized, individuals mostly segregated by sex, age and power.

An interesting point is their demography, if life was so great, a “saturating” fertility level should easily allow their population to double every generation.

And that was never seen.

Life witnesses, for example in very early colonial Brazil seem to point that those native cultures were far from being food limited (they had plenty of free time to increase harvest intensity), but they were waging constant extermination war with “neighboring” tribes.

In fact, land was plentiful, they had to travel extensively to meet those adversaries.

The goal was genocide of all the opposing men (and not land as said by the natives themselves), either directly or after a variable period of slavery followed by ritual torture, execution and often cannibalism. Women were taken as brides by the young winners (not much polygamy in what I read it seems).

This live experience bears much stronger witness about the quality of life in those happy times.

What saved those cultures was in fact that they were not specialized enough to create more advanced weapons…

IMO

Well that is the point, is abundance a cause or a consequence of a political system.

See some rich Sicilian acquaintances, I already have an idea :-)

You are optimistic:-)

In my experience, Southern Italians have already some troubles properly paying their taxes as of now lol

Indeed, it is the abstraction of value.

It seems that the set of all the different representations of what money could buy, is just influence…

Funny thing is that, you don’t have to spend money to gain influence, just to show it.

I find it quite ironic :-)

Asking that in a Singularity channel is a bit ironic :-)

The very meaning of Singularity is that soon, something will come and make the future world incomprehensible.

Im very biased and I can’t find a way for AGI not to “quickly” devolve into computronium+von Neumann probes+hopefully virtual existence for us in that mess lol

IMO, computronium maximization is the very nature of self improving AI and anything different will require a huge (insurmountable?) effort.

Vital uncertainty IMO:

How much better will “impossible to run locally AI” compared to “run in one GPU AI”.

If people can do most of what Google can do, AI hacking will be a huge anti-centralizing power.

As an alternative, how can “distributed AI” or “peer to peer AI” not emerge?

Well considering it was 7 in the morning and not my native language, I decide to leave that quirk as it is :-)

I see what you mean, “Social democracy” is often used a synonym of Sweden or Germany.

We must be careful because those are peculiar protestant cultures (in the grand scheme of things).

They have very specific value sets hidden behind socialism and democracy, I don’t think those models would world that well in India or Nigeria for example…

Per Marx, the act of overproducing and investing the surplus is what capitalism is.

He wasn’t against that, quite the opposite in fact, he was just arguing that the laborers were not payed the amount of value they put in their work. (Quite debatable, problem of « transferance » still stands today)

Communism would put an end to this by creating a « man of a new type » with socially determined needs and abilities (aka, ants).

The intermediate stage towards that goal would be the « dictatorship of the proletariat », guided by the genius vision of the central committee and the gentle authority of the KGB.

But it didn’t work.

And capitalism remained, and will remain always.

Because the act of investing overproduction will also stand true with AI, only this time the workers won’t work anymore and the capitalist will reside in a GPU.

Exchange means you have something of value to trade.

Who is going to let you have his seat on his plane, have his spot at Machu Pichu, have his quiet spot of land to grow kale or have his bio baby milk formula, if you don’t give him something he wants in return?

AI is not going to make everything plentiful, and those simple thing we have today (automagically because you live in the US), may become what’s gonna be scarce in the future.

Even a WOW player develops a career in game because it is more efficient for him to acquire scare ressources that way…

That « Noble savage » vision by Rousseau has been debunked.

Northern American native cultures were very often waging constant extermination wars, maintaining their population at quasi steady state despite high natality rates.

If I am not mistaken, one of the most violent culture in the world were native inhabitants of the San Fernando valley.

Not politically correct, Im sorry.

But the old days were not always amazing…

$600/a day, you are optimistic.

Regular overnight stay is $12’000 on average.

ICU stay is many times that…

AI = deflation.

That is the thesis.

Anonymous art and many other things will loose all value that is for sure.

But there is only one Palm Beach and physical attractiveness still follows a hierarchy.

That can’t be reproduced by AI, and people controlling AI will use all of its powers to conquer whats best.

So everything productive and anonymous (whether people or things) will become cheap and everything non productive and non anonymous will become expensive, IMO.

Economic relationships are widely defined by « the exchange of rare goods ».

I have the chance to be able to personally witness quite wealthy and successful people in an advanced economy.

With the coming of efficient web crawlers and intellectual outsourcing since about a generation, the importance of non physical production has already greatly diminished.

In the positions expressly designed for such jobs, payed to produce something sounding « intelligent » and « innovative », well, that has been a side business for them since maybe 20 years.

That freed time has been invested in giving value to the individual personal characteristics instead.

That time is spend in daily training for the monthly ultra trail competition (thise people are in their late 40s early 50s), perfecting the new rich sport (often combining workds like free, foil, surf, …) for a good insta profile, strengthening political ties by participating in exclusive clubs and competing for rich mates.

IMO, the coming of AGI, will only unbuild what the Renaissance has done and I see a very strong chance for Feudalism to come back.

Communists will be happy, production through work will indeed mean nothing anymore, only your very personal « value » will.

Pray to look beautiful and for your family to own the big castle on the heights, because nothing you can do could make you have a piece (apart marriage, good luck with that :-))

Gods bow to no men :-)

Amazing article

Political problems concerning reelection are managed through taxation.

Problems concerning survival are always managed through inflation…

Hopefully communists in China will make ideas of communists in the USA, unworkable.

But some are engineers, and the others, not so much…

Very interesting, much more actionable IRL to have a large set of answers with attached probabilities.

Guess they are not as advanced in LLM, it seems their focus is elsewhere, in more « b2b » applications… AlphaFold will change the world as much as chatGPT.

Transhumanism is just accomplished existentialism