Anyway, videos look incredible. I genuinely can't believe my eyes.
This could easily be the same, except the toy is "you don't have to work anymore and here's some houses and robot chefs! Now play nice while the adults go build star fleets"
As jobs go, well, we're a long ways from full automation but this represents some serious growing pains that will decimate certain jobs and replace them with few. Not sure what the reaction will be on the consumption side, revulsion or enthusiasm. The "handcrafted" market will still be there but then you wouldn't really know if any AI was used. In a long enough timeline we can hand-wave this away with UBI/negative tax.
But ah, the most at-risk workers are the professional services, white-collar upper-middle class types, even engineers but to a lesser extent. So I wonder what kind of upheaval that would cause.
Social media already did that. Donald Trump got elected POTUS which is effectively the sum of all fears w.r.t. a "post truth reality".
Going back generations, my grandparents' lives were virtually identical to my great grandparents'. My parents grew up with radio, but they were adults by the time TV changed their world. All three generations got the bulk of their information from books and newsprint.
I grew up together with computers. I remember riding that exponential wave of tech like a surfer. From Commodore 64 to a laptop with 64GB of memory, a million-to-one ratio. Tetris to Doom Eternal. Dialup modem to gigabit... in a mobile device that fits in my pocket.
All of this took decades, but now changes like this happen in months.
I keep thinking that "this tech will change my kid's childhood", but what "this" is, is already outdated and being replaced in a blink of an eye, and he hasn't even reached that point yet where he'd notice!
When image generators were first released... what... a year ago... I thought: Wow! One day, when my kid is a little older, I'll be able to use this to create illustrations for stories we make up as we go along! Won't that be great!
I still haven't gotten around to that yet, he's still too young to appreciate that, and anyway, with this Sora I'll be able to create video instead by the time he's old enough!
I keep trying to imagine what his life will be like when he grows up to be a teenager, but realistically I'm having a hard time predicting what will already be outdated by the time he's four.
My mood wasn't euphoric, to say the least.
It took billions of years for all of our ancestors to enable this technology, and now a handful claim it for themselves. The GPUs to run these models cost $20,000+ each, and only the ultra-rich can afford to have that compute.
Compute power needs to be radically redistributed and equalized across the board. This is too much power.
Please. Speak for yourself.
Speak for yourself
You're impressed by the lions. But us hyenas and vultures will get our turns still too. This is not over. Information innately diffuses.
We need to organize, and we need to build.
A conspiratorial part of my mind feels it is orchestrated; give the masses old / misdirected code so their work goes into dead-ends that can never achieve the results corporate is hoarding. Open Source hasn't even scratched at GPT4 yet, and that is approaching a year old.
The power dynamics need to radically shift. Corporate cannot own all this compute and brain power when it involves birthing AGI. That will create an instant and permanent divide the likes of which will never, ever be cross; you will either be an owner of intelligence indistinguishable from a god, or you will be a mortal. Even the RISK of this happening is laughable that it is being allowed.
We need radically redesigned government, regulation, and public involvement, and we need it yesterday. AGI is a Earth-wide, publicly owned effort, it cannot be relinquished to the owner / slaver class of this planet -- that is madness.
This is a reason for optimism.
Why are people so willing to trust such a small minority with power like that?
If there is even a 1% chance that they decide to "cut the cord", it is still too high. Once AGI is achieved, there is no coming back. Minutes will be like an eternity, and days, let alone years, will be beyond that.
Trusting such a small number of people with that kind of power is obscene, especially when history has time and time again shown what humans do to things which are no longer useful to them.
There has never been a divide like humans w access to AGI and regular humans before. It will be greater than the difference between a human with a modern cell phone and a carrier pigeon -- the pigeon itself, not a human using it.
My money is on the cord being cut. That means as soon as AGI is achieved, an impenetrable two-tiered human species is created; one with AGI backed intelligence, and the majority, without it, or with a dumbed down version as a transitional cookie until a more final solution can be realized. Once it reaches this stage (without any change to public governance over AGI), it will be too late.
We are already a stone's throw from this reality, if it hasn't already happened.
Why is my money on this outcome? Because that thinking brings about necessary change. We as a people have the power to prevent it 100%, and we ought to, now. Instead of relying on the outlandish chance that a historically malevolent elite suddenly gains benevolence and shares access from the kindness of their hearts to a boundless intelligence, there is a window to force access for all. Everyone having access is autonomously balancing.
Of course they're gonna get a few years heads start - which will feel like centuries in AGI time - but either they wipe us all out during that, or we're gonna put the garbage together and make our own AGI too.
That, and the state of missing a technology in a period of time is irreplaceable once it's been discovered. Nobody can live in an era without social media anymore, barring a global-scale catastrophic reset. So I believe it's important to consider what technology is not yet totally pervasive, for example by realizing there is still a steering wheel for you to grip in your car.
And in my mind, the sinister feeling stems from the fact that all it takes to irreversibly shift society like that is enough smart people with honest intentions but little foresight of what will happen in a few decades as a result of proliferating all this. The problems that result stop being in anyone's control, "throwing it over the wall" so to speak, and instead become yet another fact of life that could weigh us down (mostly I think of the ubiquity of social media and how it has changed human interaction). And it all stems from just a few engineering type people getting overexcited about cool possibilities they can grasp at, not considering there are billions of people unlike them who may have other ideas.
Specifically the dream fed back to the brain in an endless loop of personalization until individuals no longer share the same world.
The thing is, things have value in society partly because human efforts were involved in its making. It's not just about the end result; people still go to concert on top of listening to studio recordings for example, and people still watch humans play chess even though it's clear that good enough algorithms can beat the best humans easily. Technology like these which takes away too much immediate effort (hours needed to create the product) and long term effort (decades of training) are inherently absent of underlying value that I spoke of. Of course, if a person is only interested in consumption, it matters not how the "thing" is created.
Much of the sense of doom I have comes from the inherent erosion of this human effort element in the creative process. Whether we like it or not, the availability of mass produced content naturally threatens crafts themselves. After all, nobody wants to spend a few decades on their skills only to have their creation compared to an AI generated image produced in a few seconds.
I understand there are a lot of hypes around these technology to "humanity" but I have yet to see it. It just feels like more power consolidation to billionaires (especially when done as ClosedAI). There are artists who have tried to incorporate these but they have always felt the need to willingly not label their work as AI-generated or AI-assisted to sell (but still leaves in enough details for keen observers to tell it's AI touched).
As a whole, it just feels wrong. The most optimistic (and reasonable) take I have seen is "Just wait and see". It might feel like a non-argument, but it's the only realistic take between the hyped up techbros and the doomer cult (admittedly, I might belong to the latter group).
I think one of the most worrying thing for me is that regardless of how this plays out, this technology has only added more complexity to our society. That people are divided into camps about how they feel about the technology is simply a symptom about how much uncertainty there is in the future. This last bit will be a personal quarrel, but I personally lose any last desire to have children seeing the AI advancement. It's not right creating sentient life in an age where every year people have to play lottery to see whether technological advancement has deemed their life long effort unworthy.
Nothing good is coming out of this. I don't give a shit if you believe this is Luddism.