the idea that a "singularity" is possible is just the idea that you can turn "mistaking a sigmoid for an exponential" into a millenarian religion
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if, in order to achieve your out-of-control doomsday robot scenario, a trillion dollars worth of human effort must be expended annually, and if any of it stops for even a moment than the whole thing implodes and grinds to a halt, _you can stop worrying_ that it is "the machines" which dominate us
@glyph Maybe the real singularity was the <s>friends we made along the way</s> black hole we dumped all our cash into
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put ME on CNN and MSNBC, you cowards.
@glyph That would be such an incredible improvement over their current coverage *and* I would pay to see that. Both things can be true.
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put ME on CNN and MSNBC, you cowards.
@glyph i would pay for that.
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doomers might look at my rant here and think, "but wait, once it's self-sustaining, even a little, it's TOO LATE, it's already out of control!!!" and to that I say: no. not even close. look the evolution of *any* business. managing resource flows is really hard. there is an off-ramp every single day
@glyph Ants are self-sustaining, self-reproducing, more intelligent than any AI humans have managed to make, and capable of directly altering the physical world.
If 'self-sustaining' were really the break-point, humans lost well before we existed as a species. -
put ME on CNN and MSNBC, you cowards.
like if anyone had halfway-plausible "grey goo" nanotech that could do anything that looked like computation, that might be worrying. a locally viable self-reproducing platform that can make another one of itself from a pile of dirt, even if it's like, special dirt, that might scare me a little bit. but an overlord hive-mind that requires an uninterrupted global high-purity helium supply chain just to make ONE more of itself is supposed to be a threat?
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RE: https://mastodon.social/@glyph/115076275195904439
I've written about this before and I will probably do it again. but I don't know what else to do but repeat myself when allegedly serious, internationally-renowned academic experts and influential public intellectuals are just going out there and saying stuff that would get you laughed out of a late night freshman dorm room conversation about philosophy
@glyph Or any other subject, really.
Even in STEM.
Like the introductory biology class I took with its toy population models that went sigmoid very quickly, simply because biologists understand that populations of living things hit barriers to growth. Or the control systems engineering class I took, where we figured out how to tell which parts of the system behavior would be good over the long term, which (to oversimplify only slightly) meant *no positive exponentials* anywhere in the math.
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like if anyone had halfway-plausible "grey goo" nanotech that could do anything that looked like computation, that might be worrying. a locally viable self-reproducing platform that can make another one of itself from a pile of dirt, even if it's like, special dirt, that might scare me a little bit. but an overlord hive-mind that requires an uninterrupted global high-purity helium supply chain just to make ONE more of itself is supposed to be a threat?
seriously just imagine the plot of one of the movies that doomers seem to think are documentaries, like Terminator 2. imagine the scene where the T-1000 is getting pelted with bullets. instead of seamlessly autonomously healing, imagine it has to lie down and wait for a human to place an order for $1,000,000 of NVIDIA GPUs to be delivered in a shipping container and then a construction crew to set up a methane generator to run for two weeks straight before it got up again. is that still scary?
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seriously just imagine the plot of one of the movies that doomers seem to think are documentaries, like Terminator 2. imagine the scene where the T-1000 is getting pelted with bullets. instead of seamlessly autonomously healing, imagine it has to lie down and wait for a human to place an order for $1,000,000 of NVIDIA GPUs to be delivered in a shipping container and then a construction crew to set up a methane generator to run for two weeks straight before it got up again. is that still scary?
casual thinkpieces and lazy attempts at scicomm are what has set me off but the actual thing I'm mad about is that we are ruled by people with a child's understanding of the world and the economy and that's actually really bad
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seriously just imagine the plot of one of the movies that doomers seem to think are documentaries, like Terminator 2. imagine the scene where the T-1000 is getting pelted with bullets. instead of seamlessly autonomously healing, imagine it has to lie down and wait for a human to place an order for $1,000,000 of NVIDIA GPUs to be delivered in a shipping container and then a construction crew to set up a methane generator to run for two weeks straight before it got up again. is that still scary?
@glyph Meanwhile, the actual potential (but mitigatable) doom - the methane generators poisoning the air and worsening the severity and frequency of climate disasters, the technofascists spending obscene amounts of money undermining governments and trying to radicalize large parts of the population, while burning resources at a rate only a captain planet villain could find reasonable, etc. - goes largely unremarkedupon -_-;
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@glyph Meanwhile, the actual potential (but mitigatable) doom - the methane generators poisoning the air and worsening the severity and frequency of climate disasters, the technofascists spending obscene amounts of money undermining governments and trying to radicalize large parts of the population, while burning resources at a rate only a captain planet villain could find reasonable, etc. - goes largely unremarkedupon -_-;
@glyph so much energy, and so many articles, are going into the scifi-fanfiction doom that it's seemingly crowding out the actual, tangible, presently-addressable, immanent problems, that have fuck-all to do with chatbot pseudogods, and everything to do with the people building them.
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in order to be a singularity candidate, an AI would need to achieve vertical integration from silicon fabrication through logistics and integration, into operating systems and applications, with tight whole-system feedback from the robotics to the shipping to the power generation and back
@glyph With literally not even one minuscule step in the process dependent on a human doing things at human speed via flesh and blood movement. Because if any of those processes could be made to work without a human doing something physical, why wouldn’t the people with money have done that already??
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seriously just imagine the plot of one of the movies that doomers seem to think are documentaries, like Terminator 2. imagine the scene where the T-1000 is getting pelted with bullets. instead of seamlessly autonomously healing, imagine it has to lie down and wait for a human to place an order for $1,000,000 of NVIDIA GPUs to be delivered in a shipping container and then a construction crew to set up a methane generator to run for two weeks straight before it got up again. is that still scary?
@glyph however i *am* scared of the economic system that would bother to do that
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@glyph however i *am* scared of the economic system that would bother to do that
@glyph this is how you turn a post-scarcity society into … … whatever it is we're doing now
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we are not even remotely close to a single LLM meaningfully constructing even a portion of the pipeline to train another LLM. you can sort of argue around the edges that maybe under certain synthetic conditions this is borderline possible now, but on the "singularity" progress bar, that is 0.5%
@glyph it’s like saying that the Parker solar probe being the fastest thing ever produced by humanity, at nearly 500,000 mph, is a material step towards relativistic travel.
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RE: https://mastodon.social/@glyph/115076275195904439
I've written about this before and I will probably do it again. but I don't know what else to do but repeat myself when allegedly serious, internationally-renowned academic experts and influential public intellectuals are just going out there and saying stuff that would get you laughed out of a late night freshman dorm room conversation about philosophy
@glyph yes, but to destroy is so much easier than to create. I worry that some moron might put spicy autocorrect in charge of a hydro dam or one of those shooty tooties the US has all over Europe. It wouldn't take much for Musk to (accidentally on purpose) Heinlein us all with Starlink.
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@glyph yes, but to destroy is so much easier than to create. I worry that some moron might put spicy autocorrect in charge of a hydro dam or one of those shooty tooties the US has all over Europe. It wouldn't take much for Musk to (accidentally on purpose) Heinlein us all with Starlink.
@pkraus there are lots of very scary things happening right now, it's just that "swarms of killer robots with minds beyond our comprehension" are not among them
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casual thinkpieces and lazy attempts at scicomm are what has set me off but the actual thing I'm mad about is that we are ruled by people with a child's understanding of the world and the economy and that's actually really bad
@glyph reading this thread was a great cap to my evening, thanks
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@glyph my assertion was that the singularity, as described by ray kurzweil, accurately describes the invention of writing, and i don't see why it would be more interesting if the self-improving intelligent mechanism were made of etched silicon instead of CHNOPS nanomachines. it is harder for etched silicon to self-reproduce, anyway. the CHNOPS nanomachines just do that.
i think human advancement *has* followed an exponential-*looking* curve since that point, albeit with a low base.
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@glyph reading this thread was a great cap to my evening, thanks
@darkuncle very kind of you to say so, thanks
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the idea that a "singularity" is possible is just the idea that you can turn "mistaking a sigmoid for an exponential" into a millenarian religion
@glyph
People also forget that the definition of singularity was simply a point beyond which we have no hope of making any accurate predictions.
Reaching the singularity didn't necessarily mean that we would suddenly get AGI or extropian uploading or any of the myriad other things other science fiction authors layered on it or ascribed to it.
That original definition might still apply to a sigmoid, but obviously it's much less certain.
