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ZorbaTHut  2yr ago (text post)   31616 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 17, 2022

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I'm conflicted about this; on the one hand, international relations are disintegrating all over what with Russia and China events, and we can expect this to cause even further mass disruption in the economy. On the other hand, large language models seem to be the real deal in terms of AI taking over more and more low-skill tasks, and that's going to unlock a huge amount of productivity as we continue to scale up. This would be mostly in the US where all of this is taking place.

I do not believe the vast majority of major economic actors are particularly tuned-in to all the crazy shit going on in AI and why it matters; this is evident from, for one thing, the fact that neither third-party nor first-party analyses of Shutterstock (hobby horse of mine, I know) do not even mention AI as a plausible risk factor in the coming year in spite of the fact that groups are already successfully using AI-generated images as a stock image replacement. Admittedly instances of this aren't frequent, yet, but I'd be shocked if this didn't change in the coming 1-2 years, especially if we do see a depression (leading to cost-cutting across the board.)

That makes me believe even very-obviously-incoming AI advances are not actually priced into most economic indicators, including stock prices. Not sure whether, on net, we can expect economic indicators to improve or degrade going forward given all these facts.

I agree with you that people are sleeping on the huge recent advancements in AI.

But I don't think there's much of a sweet spot between "productivity gains" and "destruction of the human species". Maybe a few years at most. Certainly, there have been almost no productivity gains in the last couple decades in the Western world (less than 1% per year).

Yeah, I'm concerned about the "destruction of the human species" angle. I've been mulling over whether in surviving timelines TSM is disproportionately likely to get destroyed by China, thereby stalling AI advancement and also plunging the world into a depression since everyone needs their stuff.

We don't need TSMC for AI. If TSMC were destroyed tomorrow, it might set us back a year or two but it's not really a bottleneck. Software algorithms advance by orders of magnitude while hardware advances only linearly.

Moore's law says that hardware advances exponentially - and a lot of progress in modern AI is about adding more computing power to relatively simple algorithms.

If I needed an AI to tell me how to fight Omega in 2032, I would take 10 more years of Moore's law used to add more nodes to GPT3 over 10 more years of AI research used to implement better algos on existing hardware.

already successfully using AI-generated images as a stock image replacement

Can you point me to any examples? Besides that one Atlantic article that used an AI picture of Alex Jones

Sure. https://stratechery.com/2022/the-ai-unbundling/ did it for their article and https://www.thebulwark.com/trumps-save-america-scam/ credits midjourney for their cover art-- the latter is significant because the article has nothing to do with AI. I'd expect this kind of thing to start with small, cost-conscious, less fearful-of-controversy venues and then to accelerate to larger venues as it becomes normalized.

EDIT: I probably shouldn't use the stratechery article as an example, since it's actually about AI advancements and I figure it's better to discount that sort of article in gauging ai art acceptance.

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