jkf
2d ago
Well his actual prediction (with the 50% caveat) would have been for 2019 -- so yeah, it's not really quibbling to say that he's wrong on the timeline. How wrong exactly is an open question, but that kind of the problem with timelines, yeah?
Timelines of exponential progress are very sensitive to the exact exponent.
Indeed, but the existence of an exponential term is very debatable in this case.
jkf
2d ago
We evolved from creatures that hunted in bands and were probably murdered by our kin shortly after we could not longer provide for ourselves.
vs
I'm confident in a post work society we can conjure up meaningful games to substitute for the drudgery of what is currently required to upkeep society.
Hmmm...
jkf
2d ago
Or something like this.
Sure, but does that thing talk? It's somewhat reasonable to argue that we have those things individually, but your guy seems to be expecting all of them as a unit?
Also 2011 + (8*1.5) would be 2023, at which point it would have been a much less reasonable argument...
jkf
2d ago
he was the sort of person to wander into a random shady New Age magic shop and pick up some tacky shit with purported magic powers.
Wait, the guy literally finds the wish-granting thingee in a creepy shop? That seems like a pretty strong monkey's paw callout in and of itself...
jkf
2d ago
By this I mean a system with basic vision, basic sound processing, basic movement control, and basic language abilities, with all of these things being essentially learnt rather than preprogrammed.
Seems like we are still missing a few of these bullets, even if we add his 50%?
jkf
3d ago
Fibre is cheap compared to nuke plants (or even transmission lines) -- failing that, I know a guy with a pretty nice fleet of satellites...
jkf
3d ago
If your bringing your own power, the US does have huge tracts of land in various places with little to no residents to speak of -- granted the stereotype of this being sun-blasted desert is not altogether wrong, but there are plenty of places with normal climates where you can literally just buy a bunch of land and start doing stuff. I guess some proximity to users is desirable, but I regularly use 'datacentres' (AKA AWS servers) that are physically pretty far from me, and the latency doesn't seem like it would be a big deal from (say) Montana to SFBA?
Coming soon on Yellowstone -- Sam & Dario move to Bozeman and compete to lease the ranch from Chief Rainwater; Cowboys & Indians with Rationalists!
(BRB, calling my agent...)
jkf
3d ago
But who's planting those arguments in their heads?
Datacentres have existed for an awfully long time without anyone caring, now even obscure fora have posters showing up and raising the issue.
I'm not sold, but it kind of makes one think -- I'm increasingly close to being sold on covert China media ops driving the entire political conversation here in Canada, so it's not a crazy idea.
jkf
4d ago
Hollywood didn't invent changing stories.
Surely not -- but at some point it feels like they started doing it themselves -- "The Maltese Falcon" is pretty interchangeable with the book; Cecil B. Demille mostly played it straight in his Biblical epics.
Not sure when this changed -- various mass-market James Clavell/Tom Clancy adaptations into the 90s seemed pretty true to the books, although I'm sure there are counter-examples from this period?
jkf
4d ago
Furthermore I'm pretty sure it wasn't legal to rape other people's slaves at any point -- I don't think it was that common actually for slaves not to be considered "people"; the sticking point was that they were people who you owned. And what's the point of owning someone if you can't have sex with them?
jkf
4d ago
I guess some of the problem is, has the Odyssey actually ever been faithfully adapted?
ISTR seeing a TV miniseries version in the 90s that was a pretty direct port -- it's not like the story is super-complex really?
I think the problem is that Hollywood thinks that everything needs to be "improved" -- not sure when this happened, but I think (for instance) the Biblical epics of the 50s/60s didn't do this?
jkf
4d ago
The doctor will probably give you some antidepressants while you're there getting your speed prescription if you ask him with the right magic words?
jkf
5d ago
Canada essentially did this by mistake with their licensing/registration scheme -- online private sales exploded, because you suddenly had a fairly transparent way of checking that somebody in (say) Newfoundland was who he said he was -- and some sort of recourse if he failed to ship your gun to the Yukon or whatever.
To this day this is an area in which Canada is a lot freer than the US for gun-buyers -- the lack of the whole FFL/interstate commerce thing helps of course, but even if that were repealed I'd think that Americans would find transacting with BamaBoy666 on reddit a bit fraught...
jkf
6d ago
Fast food is really fast. Burgers with avocado and fresh-grilled Hatch chile slices are not something we're going to make every day, or every week, at home, but if I want something 40% as good I could have it any time by swinging by one of many convenient drive-thru lanes. Making it so easy to indulge makes it too easy to over-indulge.
It's a good point but burgers are not the best example -- my burger-making strategy these days is:
- heat pan
- scoop 1/3 lb beef with measuring cup
- slap in pan
- squish with flipper
- flip after 2-3 minutes
- wait a couple more minutes then add cheese
- put on bun with mustard, butter and whatever veggies
If I'm at home it's pretty much the fastest easiest thing I can make, and probably at least half-way between your avocado burger and the fast food one; if I'm not at home obviously stopping at a restaurant is faster, but a burger is probably the easiest, fastest fast food to make for yourself in the universe.
jkf
6d ago
I don't know that AlexNet et al were truly breakthroughs in and of themselves so much as a logical extension of existing NN stuff enabled by the step-change in GPU hardware -- as I recall LeCun was doing similar work in the 1980s, and I myself did a project with a simple one-layer LSTM network in the late 90s in which I had to work at night because the server load involved was bringing down other (so-called) "important workloads" at my department (at a major university) during the day.
None of this was really feasible, even as research, until pretty near 2010 -- the hardware just wasn't there yet.
jkf
9d ago
I think it would be more accurate to say the business entity owns the output.
Well that is what I said -- but to your point, if the person asking you to produce the work is your manager, from a business perspective he does indeed in some way "own" your work. (also owning the consequences if it's bad work, which seems relevant to AI generated text)
jkf
9d ago
What I meant was a normal contractor contract -- and non-famous freelance writers absolutely do sign over copyright to their counterparty.
jkf
9d ago
Ya it was a fun dig -- I love that the Florida hotel scene was arguably developed by a single dude because his wife liked it there!
I already kind of new that trains were great, and I do like riding on them myself -- but it's kind of amazing how great they really were at the time. We've maybe halved the ground-travel time to Florida from New York in the last 100 years -- a hundred years before that it would have been a dangerous journey taking... months, I'm guessing?
jkf
10d ago
Well, it doesn't, anymore than if you asked a work colleague to write that report for you.
If you are a business owner, you unquestionably acquire copyright/ownership of anything written by people in your employ; contractors too under most normal employment contracts.
jkf
11d ago
Seems like one guy (who became filthy rich by involvement with Standard Oil, and who's wife liked the climate in Florida) basically built/acquired/standardized railroads and put up hotels all over the place:
https://flaglermuseum.org/history/florida-east-coast-railway
This all happened right around the turn of the century though -- by the '10s and '20s I'd think you could pretty easily interconnect up the Eastern Seaboard via Jacksonville -- apparently there was freight service to Cuba (!) even, accomplished by loading cars onto a ferry.
By the mid-20s it looks like you could do NY-Miami in about a day and a half:
https://streamlinermemories.info/FL/SAL26OrangeBlossomSpecial.pdf
https://streamlinermemories.info/FL/SAL27OrangeBlossomSpecial.pdf
Which I guess is a bit longer than driving down there now (Google says 19 hours), but considering that you could eat/drink/sleep/get a haircut on the way, not really that bad! (Certainly nicer than being herded around JFK and getting searched/felt up by the help along the way -- after all one is on vacation; what's the hurry?)
jkf
13d ago
OK, but why -- Google is pretty good at marketing and should know better; why are they doing this?
jkf
14d ago
gives me a strange worlds-collide sort of feeling.
Kind of like they could never tear you apart?
jkf
14d ago
The companies are using the free samples as a sales come-on though -- like if the smashburger place were giving out shitty frozen burgers on the street as an ad campaign to get people to come pay for their good burgers, it would be weird, right?
Most normies are experiencing AI through the lens of Google's shitty free one -- which seems particularly shitty if you ask it about normie things. It seems like this should be anti-convincing in terms of driving adoption of the paid product.
"fiction of my imagination", "state of nature"; potato, potahto.
We are only a hundred years out from the state of nature in the west; swathes of the world are more or less still there -- I don't think we can take for granted that backsliding is impossible. Especially if we are postulating something as bizarre as non-human superintelligence.
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