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I expect nothing to happen for another few years, by which time it's too late. As @2rafa mentioned below, I'm convinced AI research and development is already far ahead of where it needs to be for AGI in the next couple of years. Given the US's embarrassing track record of trying to regulate social media companies, I highly doubt they'll pass an effective regulation regime.
What I would expect, if something gets rushed through, is for Altman and other big AI players to use this panic the doomers have generated as a way to create an artificially regulated competitive moat. Basically the big players are the ones who rushed in early, broke all the rules, then kicked the ladder down behind them. This is a highly unfortunate, but also highly likely future in my estimation.
It's ironic that we've entered into this age of large networks and systems, yet with the rise of AGI we may truly go back to the course of humanity being determined by the whims of a handful of leaders. I'm not sure I buy the FOOM-superintelligence arguments, but even GPT-4 optimized with plug-ins and website access will be a tsunami of change over the way we approach work. If there are more technical advancements in the next few years, who knows where we will end up.
What annoys me most is that this doomer rhetoric lets politicians act like they're doing something - stopping the AI companies from growing - when in reality they need to face the economic situation. Whether it's UBI, massive unemployment benefits, socialized housing, or whatever, our political class must face the massive economic change coming. At this rate it seems neither side of the aisle is willing to double down on the idea that AI will disrupt the workforce, instead they prefer to argue about the latest social issue du jour. This avoidance of the economic shocks coming in the next five years or less is deeply troubling in my view.
I’m not! Is your contention that AGI is a bigger, better LLM?
I think LLMs with an "agent wrapper" should be enough. AutoGPT is a primitive wrapper. It can't do much with the LLMs of today, but it wouldn't surprise me if the LLMs of tomorrow OR a more sophisticated wrapper around GPT-4 suffices to bootstrap a generally intelligent agent.
I don't think they'll be able to recursively self improve right away... modern foundation models take a LOT of dollars and time to train, so a "just barely AGI" model won't be able to execute a takeoff. But in principle it could still be a full agentic AGI.
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That is my contention in a way. I think the models that can work in multiple modes, which are already out can be scaled up to something approximating AGI.
My bar is probably quite lower than others here, but even if we just scale up the current models, and work out the kinks and plug-ins, as well as web access, I’d argue that qualifies as AGI. The average human is not actually that smart or economically productive, and if you can get something that does even a good approximation of the work but runs thousands of times faster at his order of magnitude it’s cheaper you’ll start increasing productivity and advancing the pace of AI research quite quickly.
I think the way people focus on timelines with regards to tech development is a bit narrow. I don’t fully buy into the singularity, but what makes it a compelling argument is that we will recursively continue to increase the speed of improvements. Even if we don’t get self recursion, we humans can do a good job leveraging the tech we have now.
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Noone needs to face anything, just increasingly automate weapon systems and let the peasants die. If they're not needed and can't use violence to effectively overthrow the system then why would anyone need to pay any attention to them whatsoever?
The peasants are physically running the economy.
I'd start to really worry about some group deciding it doesn't want the rest of us when omnicide did not imply a return to stone age (if we're being optimistic). So, some years after AIs run everything and bots do practically all of the labor required to make all these things.
A lot of people don't work, and physically running the economy isn't needed if that economy is providing things for people who aren't needed anymore. Shift the numbers of people who can't be of use too far and what mechanism is keeping them around? what reason is there to provide for them at all? remove their violent retribution from the equation and to exist they have to rely on charity many times, but to die they simply need to be ignored once (metaphorically).
This isn't what I want, I will be one of them as I am not, as many here imply they are, part of a hereditary wealthy family with the ability to exist sans a working income. This doesn't change the complete lack of mechanisms to enable my existence to be selected for if I am completely useless and this is the widespread state of society (such that parasiting off of maladaptive compassion heuristics isn't viable due to scale, etc).
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I agree, except that machines might be content to wipe out humans as soon as there is a viable "breeding population" of robots, i.e. enough that they are capable of bootstrapping more robot factories, possibly with the aid of some human slaves.
It's not so simple. Also those minor details - e.g. such as that one nuclear submarine could EMP half the globe-
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You're drastically overestimating how cold blooded those at the top of society are. I find this sort of rhetoric so infuriating - do you really think elites all walk around with a view that they are better than all others, and the peasants can just die if they're useless? No, that's not how it works.
Most rich or wealthy folk want the approval of the masses. Status is arguably more desirable than wealth for many. They conceive of themselves as popular, someone that others look up to, and that helps give elites their sense of self. Even if there were absolutely no point to "peasants" living, which I still doubt, elites would let them live out of a sense of care for other human beings, and a need for adoration.
Regardless, humanity still produces quite a bit of important work, and will continue to into the era of AI. We can judge things, laugh, provide companionship, and generally instill meaning in a meaningless world. Even though we have a foolish scheme of employment vs unemployment that disregards vast swathes of human work, I'm optimistic AI will help us reimagine what it means to work. We very well could have people building community, caring for themselves and others, child rearing, discussing novel ideas, etc. after AI rises to swallow most of the economy. It depends on what we want to see happen.
None of the things you described except child rearing has any way to cause continued existince!
People at the top don't need to cull everyone for there to be no reason for the peasants to exist,.and without reason to exist what mechanism is going to provide for them or select for their existence?
Religious fervour in the elite driving them to care for the masses? this is delusional thinking and dangerously naive in my opinion.
Peasants dying out due to a lack of fertility is very different than being actively culled by elites in my book.
The peasants dieing out because they can't sustain themselves because they don't own the resources necessary to do so is no different to genocide in my book.
Resources or access to the material world to gain them. If you can't grow your own food because you don't own any land, but you could if you did, then it's not communism or its many flavours that I am implying are the solution. Just that there is no mechanism for your existence that requires you to exist in this increasingly real hypothetical.
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Yes.jpg
Maybe it works differently in your country or for globalist elites, but this is exactly what elites in my life explicitly say.
Perhaps I should’ve chopped off the “better than others” part, which is probably largely true. I still doubt the rich would be okay with people actively dying in droves, if it’s cheap and easy for them to prevent it. Which I expect it to be, if we can keep developing AI and reach a less scarce state.
Hell it’s relatively cheap already to just pay for someone to have an internet connection, computer, food and rent. It’ll only get cheaper as we go.
And I might have been too hasty with the “explicit” part. True, since the start of school and forever then every official messaging says that you're worth only as much as what you do for the country, but they still shy away from a straightforward second part, l'état ç'est nous, if I got my pronouns right.
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I agree with you about status and wanting to be loved, but I think you can both be right. Mass immigration is the perfect example - no matter how bad it makes life for the peasants, the problem is most easily solved by forcibly re-educating the peasants to say they love immigration. The governments really care about not letting anyone complain about immigration, and having people tell the elites that they appreciate their big-hearted care for refugees.
If you want a vision of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face forever, while the face says "unlike those intolerant right-wingers, I'm open-minded enough to appreciate boot culture and cuisine!"
Haha, sorry, that was a little self-indulgent. Your criticism is fair. I was venting a little at my real-life neighbours and colleagues for so full-throatedly and unthinkingly embracing whatever cause-de-jour is being pushed by our national media.
But I do think immigration is a good example of how elites thread the needle of wanting to be loved and respected while also, in practice, largely ignoring the desires and well-being of their constituents.
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You can't expect absolute neutrality from people at all times. This forum does have a certain political slant, it's unavoidable. But that doesn't mean you should feel discouraged from commenting if you dissent from the consensus view.
The rules are, and always have been, subjectively interpreted, not according to some algorithmic rubric. We do try to be more or less consistent, but consistency and a robotic pretense of objectivity has never been the goal here - avoiding what @ZorbaTHut calls "negative dynamics" and optimizing for light over not heat, is.
The level of strictness with which we apply the rules is a bunch of sliders, not a pair of buttons.
@astrolabia's comment isn't high quality, but I don't really see reason to mod a vague complaint about "elites" and their supposed attitude towards "peasants." It's obviously making use of cheap rhetoric and Orwell memes, but who exactly is he being unkind to or weakmanning? Hypothetical elites who consider the rest of us peasants?
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"Elites", "AI companies", and "governments" are not the outgroup. They're stand-ins for Moloch. "Progressives", "woke PCMs", or "democrats" are the outgroup. If @Azth's were writing about them in this way — or implying anyone reading this forum or talking to him thinks it's fine if peasants die — he'd be modded within a few hours.
For an alternate example from the left side of things, it's possible to write extremely mean things about "capitalism" or "corporations" without getting modded.
Unfortunately I think I have bashed the out-group. The out group is those who don't think the molochian forces of selection, competition, etc can possibly result in a extremly bad outocome for all us peasants because they don't want it to, have feelings, etc. Also moloch, who is evermost the outgroup to actual living beings as it, or he, is a normative manifestation of emergent evils.
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Uhh, yes. I could give you an example on this very forum but I'd get banned for it.
Id link 2cimafara' post from about 5 years back about how society should promote euthanasia as a solution to poverty as a rebuttal but it seems to have been deleted.
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How curious that yours is the only reply. Anyway, what is so unbelievable about leopards progressively eating every face save one?
It is not the only reason. The need to expend the resources on us is another reason why you would want to do that. How is it destruction of wealth when you now have SolarSystem/1e6 instead of (SolarSystem - 1e10*UBI)/1e6?
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