Evolution of AI and Amara's Law
n9o.xyz
n9o.xyz
> We tend to overestimate the effect of a technology in the short run and underestimate the effect in the long run.
Amara's Law is a good one, esp in these circles where we have many people working on cutting edge technology. They often give up because it doesn't see adoption, and then move on to something else. Two or three cycles later, when that technology is finally gaining traction, someone takes some off the shelf components and slaps it together, profiting in ways that the original creators would have liked to have seen.
Timing is everything, and the technoseti are often _too early_. But they also underestimate how big something will get.
I am a huge Python fan, but I never expected back in 2000 that it would be as big as it is today. Never. Cloud Computing, NLP, etc. Google suffers from this immensely.
I am not scared by AGI. But to get to AGI you have to pass through a couple points on a curve that occupy the most powerful in terms of agency, less than AGI. An angry toddler that has > 1TW (terawatts) of power.
OTOH, an LLM trained by the FSB or CIA to help their agents, with no limits on what the agents are allowed to get as help because their bosses trust it's always in the service of the nation, will quite "happily" write that essay… and almost certainly get leaked eventually — 10 years, 50 years, doesn't matter — at which point someone who isn't so trustworthy will ask for a doomsday plan and it will be equally "happy" to write that too.
Hopefully the agencies like the FSB and CIA aren't quite as bad as I fear, but secrecy and what little has become public makes it impossible to trust them.
Wait, really? I would expect that most programmers could absolutely implement one if they understood what they are, but perhaps I'm biased from living in embedded land
AGI? Lots of people are still talking like it will be an assistant, perhaps using the "centaur" metaphor, and refusing to believe that it could[0] result in everyone's mental capacities having all the economic relevance of equine muscle power.
ASI? We don't know how far above us IQ can go, but it seems reasonable to guess that the smallest possible margin above us is such that even asking that question is like asking the question is akin to asking Chimpanzees to imagine the moon landing, while at worst it's like asking your lawn the same question.
[0] I say "could" rather than "will" because there's always the question of "how much does it cost to run that software?" — but the cost of 3430 W at $0.03/kWh matches the World Bank's international poverty line inflation adjusted to 2022: https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=%283430+watts+*+%240.03...
I at least don't consider people to be uniform. If I act like I do, that's illusory.
For orders of magnitude higher performance by AI: all have a massive intrinsic speed advantage already (which is currently balanced by an almost but not quite equally massive training set required disadvantage — they can read the entire internet, but they need to too), and the go and chess AI have already vastly exceeded human capacity.
I think this kind of thing is also part of why AGI means different things to different people.
By my standards, ChatGPT is already an AGI, it's able to operate on text-based tasks in general (the G in AGI) at a level higher than some humans and lower than others — if I'm right, a lot of people are already no longer capable of being economically viable, and their only hope in the current economic system is that the market for their labour doesn't act with perfect information. I may also just be wildly over-estimating the capabilities of ChatGPT.
Not "prove", but it is suggestive. To prove it, ChatGPT would have to also prevent them getting another one.
> do anyone care people who displace by chatGPT?
I can't parse this sentence. Are you asking:
1. Does anyone care about the people who are displaced by ChatGPT?
2. Does anyone care for the people who are displaced by ChatGPT?
3. Does anyone care that people are displaced by ChatGPT?
4. Does anyone care about the people who are using ChatGPT to displace others?
Or something else?
Maybe it won't take all jobs. but this displayed that it is impossible to implement UBI or other strategies before most of people losing job.
>I can't parse this sentence. thanks for your free English class, bro.
"You mustn't be afraid to dream a little bigger" with regards to the hierarchy of intelligence - the "at worst" is much further away than human-to-lawn. Look at the intellectual power of angels in Catholic theology and consider an intelligence that can reason from universals to all particular instances as its default mode of operation. Then consider that each angelic being is distinct from each other one by nature (since they are immaterial). Which means that there is a species-level difference between each of them and the lowest one is already far above us. Then consider that there are (at least) billions of them, each one order of magnitude more intelligent than the one below it. Then consider the kind of intellect that can create those kinds of intellects.
Fortunately, you can't give what you don't have, so we're quite safe from the basilisk. But the wild imaginings of John C. Wright's Count to the Eschaton Sequence are probably not far off for "hey how weird could it get?"
Maybe too early to say if blockchain will turn out to follow Amara's Law, but I have my doubts.
Someone using Amara's Law in the first or second AI winters (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_winter) would, of course, have the option of just continually saying "it hasn't been long enough yet". But, you know, that very fact means that Amara's Law doesn't tell you much, even in the cases where it turns out the be true. And it doesn't, usually, turn out to be true.
As Carl Sagan pointed out, "…the fact that some geniuses were laughed at does not imply that all who are laughed at are geniuses." The same applies to technologies. The fact that a technology has shown slower-than-expected progress is not a foolproof indication that it will eventually have massive impact. It may just not be as useful as it initially seemed, or may even be supplanted by a completely different technology.
It always seemed like an attention bias to me. Because for sure there are many more stories about the doctor being right and the person did never actually walk again. And we don't really pay attention to the stories about the doctor saying they would walk again. Those aren't interesting.
It can also be a bias with the triumphant person overestimating the negativity of the past. Like did the doctor really say you will never walk again, or that it will be tremendously difficult and unlikely?
People like an underdog story and will hold it with more attention than other stories in which the expectations met reality.
The expectation when you first try modern image or text generators is sth like 'this will replace all artists, programmers, writers and probably most white-collar workers'. Upon closer inspection, it turns out that the image generators fail on details like hands, and the text generators are too unreliable for production-grade code or writing articles. So the result in the short term is that you still need the same people with the same skills babysitting the models' outputs. They've just become a bit more productive. But in the longer run, even plain efficiency gains can have a large impact, and it seems like we might not need any more fundamental breakthroughs to make those tools actually production-ready (at least largely) on their own. The hands in the images, the bugs in the code and the hallucinations in the texts can probably be fixed with clever, but ultimately straightforward, iterations over the existing models.
> Stability AI - Develops AI solutions aimed at stabilizing and improving the performance of various AI applications.
Key ideas from the very early ages of computers and a few new tweaks only recently found the compute power to become useful.