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PaperclipPerfector  8d ago (text post)   32185 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 24, 2025

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Because right now we're not even close to AI being able to equal humans, let alone exceed them. And because this is cutting edge research, we simply cannot know what roadblocks might occur between now and then. To me, the correct null hypothesis is "it won't happen soon" until such time as there is a new development which pushes things forward quite a bit.

Seems like you're just begging the question here. Why is that the correct null hypothesis?

I don't see how it's begging the question at all. Why shouldn't it be the null hypothesis, rather than the claim that we will see AI eclipse humans soon? Why is it begging the question when I do it, but not when someone else chooses a different theory? I'm willing to agree that the choice of "what is the appropriate null hypothesis" is not one which can be proven to be correct, which is why I said "to me" the correct null hypothesis is that we won't see that soon. But I'm not willing to agree that I'm committing some kind of epistemological sin here.

I'm hoping you'd providing arguments or evidence about the likelihood of different outcomes. I'm not sure what calling something a null hypothesis means other than being a bald assertion that it's likely.

I'll go first: rapid recent improvements in AI continuously over the last 12 years and massive R&D efforts going on make it likely that substantial improvements will continue.

I don't agree we've had rapid improvements over the last 12 years. We haven't really had any noticeable improvement since the introduction of ChatGPT (2-3 years ago? I forget), and we didn't have anything to write home about for a long time before that. From my perspective, we had a big spike of improvement once, and nothing since. Therefore it doesn't seem likely to me that huge progress is about to happen any day now.

Thanks for clarifying your position. I suppose if I thought that ChatGPT was a one-off, I might have a similar position to yours. In my view, however, there's been a pretty consistent, smooth, and somewhat predictable trajectory that whole time, and has continued since ChatGPT. If every almost single remaining eval being almost saturated from ChatGPT till now doesn't look like "anything to write home about", I don't know what could.

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