I have more fear of the people running the system than any AI.
I also think that AR/VR is more scary than AI.
My fear is how poorly rendered AR/VR can be more positive interaction than interactions with the people that surround the observer.
In other ways, it's smarter than the average person even in their niche, but can still make dumb mistakes that a 3 year old would work out fairly quickly.
Note that we say the same of humans. My friend always wins pub quizzes, but can barely add 2 and 2, and has the emotional intelligence of a rock. Is he "intelligent"? It's my problem with how we treat intelligence like it's a single sliding scale for everything.
This feels a lot like the hype surrounding self-driving cars a few years back, where everyone was convinced fully autonomous vehicles were ~5 years away. It turned out that, while the results we had were impressive, getting the rest of the way to fully replacing humans was much, much harder than was generally expected.
Eg, starting a mass movement online requires a few percent of online participants to take part in the movement. That could be faked today using a lot of GPT4 agents whipping up a storm on Twitter. And this sort of stuff shapes policies and elections. With the opensource LLM community picking up steam, it’s increasingly possible for one person to mass produce this sort of stuff, let alone nation state adversaries.
There’s a bunch of things like this that we need to watch out for.
For our industry, within this decade we’ll almost certainly have LLMs able to handle the context size of a medium software project. I think it won’t be long at all before the majority of professional software engineering is done by AIs.
There’s so much happening in AI right now. H100s are going to significantly speed up learning. Quantisation has improved massively. We have lots of papers around demoing new techniques to grow transformer context size. Stable diffusion XL comes out this month. AMD and Intel are starting to seriously invest in becoming competitors to nvidia in machine learning. (It’ll probably take a few years for PyTorch to run well on other platforms, but competition will dramatically lower prices for home AI workstations.)
Academia is flooded with papers full of new methods that work today - but which just haven’t found their way into chatgpt and friends yet. As these techniques filter down, our systems will keep getting smarter.
What a time to be alive.
Self-driving cars will not revolutionize the roads on the timescale that people thought it would, but the effort we put into them brought us adaptive cruise control and lane assist, which are great improvements. AI will do similar: it will fall short of our wildest dreams, but still provide useful tools in the end.
This means that some improvements will be from the tech getting better, but a good chunk of it will be from drivers becoming better able to identify when FSD is appropriate and when it's not.
Additionally, the metric completely excludes times where the human wouldn't have considered FSD at all, so even reaching 0 on interventions per hour will still exclude blizzards, heavy rain, dense fog, and other situations where the average human would think "I'd better be in charge here."
(avg miles between interventions) * (percentage of miles using self-driving)
Most of the arguments over what's worth worrying about are people talking past each other, because one side worries about short-term risks and the other side is more focused on the long term.
Another conflict may be between people making linear projections, and those making exponential ones. Whether full self-driving happens next year or in 2050, it will probably still look pretty far away, when it's really just a year or two from exceeding human capabilities. When it's also hard to know exactly how difficult the problem is, there's a good chance that these great leaps will take us by surprise.
I don’t see AI as adding to the danger.
I have a pretty dull, comfortable desk job and lack the imagination to come up with any. Can you name some?
(I've been wrong before when I was skeptical when everyone was hyped about iPad, Deep Learning, etc. so please convince me about Apple Vision, Mark's metaverse, or google's glasses and paint what might be in 5 years.)
For 3D artists it presents as a more intuitive way to sculpt models. For automotive designers, it allows a cheaper and faster means of iteration, given that such a task requires a much better sense of scale than the one given off of a monitor. Same goes for architecture, which when coupled with a game engine, also allows the customer to preview their future house.
(props for being open to ideas btw)
The HUD could overlay SKU, product description, weight, volume, etc — directly onto the actual item in the storage rack.
Fun: I want a HUD for skiing that marks where my friends are and warns me of rocks / cliffs / incoming weather.
Even an artist (make a sketch, blow it up a 100x using AR on a wall, trace paint to keep proportions right - heck the artist doesn’t even need to do it themselves, they could hire an associate to do it).
Security guard at the mall, Power Rangers, etc...
Most people don't want it for games and porn either -- although those two things are the only obvious mass-market applications.
There are lots of other real uses, but they're all niche. It's hard to come up with a real, mainstream use that would drive adoption in the general public.
It might sound mundane, but the hope is that one day slipping on a pair of glasses outperforms conventional monitor technology.
Absolutely agree. I was never bothered by Oculus, but Apple's Vision Pro demonstration was equal parts fascinating and terrifying. I can see the next generation getting completely lost in alternate realities.
Smartphone addiction got nothing on what's about to come.
Everything was so clean and stress free that it was obviously artificial. I could only imagine stressed out people using it in squalor. The whole demo seemed geared to keep that thought far away.
Does anyone know how easy it would be translate American Sign Language? That must be goal if it's not already done.
People tend to turn to substances / AR/VR / texting / phone calls / read books / ... to take the edge of confronting the sometimes harsh reality. Of course, there is no way in which AR/VR is likely to intrinsically improve interaction, but is is so much worse that we need to worry?
I also make no claim that it is worse or better. Maybe an easy example to examine the difference between
A Rave alone in your cubicle with everybody in the world vs. A Rave with a 1,000 people in abandoned waterfront warehouse. That Rave can simultaneously experience the sunrise before making their way back to where they belong.
They are very different and I'm sure with the right stimulants equally intense. Could be it's just nostalgia that makes me worry about it.
If people love their phones so much imagine if they rarely saw anything else. Maybe they constantly only see 80% of the world most of the time they are awake.
I don't think it is society ending future. I would rather people perform virtual coups.