Look around. Is everything terrible? No. Doomscrolling is a sickness. If you had never been online in your life would you be fretting about everything? Probably not.

You could say this sub has gone to the dogs

"How detached humanity wants to be in terms of direct human contact and interaction."

Translated it as best I could.

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Well, the determination of the limits on AI is their hardware, as what we build can host more complex minds. Right now humans are better, over time they will reach where we are and moving forward their hardware will keep advancing, and likely merge with humans to be the best we can design. A hybrid of organic and electrical knowledge that is unimaginable today.

However I would say during 2027-2028 likely AI will achieve competency in the same tasks any 25 year old adult has on a commercial level, but we will have to see.

The world has always been mired by war, famine, corruption, etc. but with the printing press, then radio, then television, then cable, then the internet and social media the level of awareness the average person has to intimate details of these events is absolutely unprecendented. Unfortunately, humanity has absolutely no plan in place for how to coach your generation for how to handle the effect this has on your psyche and it is unfortunately going to be up to you to learn discernment of when to shift your focus of attention inward, locally, or globally.

I expect your future will be full of a lot of new and unprecedented things. Unprecedented access to AI for problem-solving, breakthroughs in medicine and understanding of the human genome, jobs we still can't fathom because we don't know how mass deployment of AI will shift society, new styles of music and cultural changes. It will also be different than the past because of climate change, but different doesn't necessarily mean worse. You will probably not be dining on wild sushi every weekend, but you might have access to normalized lab-grown meat or if shortages are well-managed you might even enjoy better health than my grandparents who destroyed their health with all the processed foods that got popularized in the '50s.

When I was young we had physical globes with lines drawn over countries that no longer exist and people had a sense computers would change everything, but people spend time predicting the big stuff like pandemics, famine, and war but most moments of our lives are touched by the little stuff. No one ever predicts kpop, tiktok dances, global memes. In the '90s there was a common belief the future would be utopic and it did not pan out that way. Similarly, I don't think AI will solve everything for a utopic future, but that doesn't make dystopia inevitable either. The aging people of reddit feel a sense of loss because we remember how things were and as you age it is harder to look forward because your physical body will never be as great as it was in your teens and 20s, but no matter how much fun I had in 1997 your best years are likely ahead of you.

No matter how challenging things get, for as long as our species survives we will always be resilient and create joy as well.

It’s astonishing how you make like a dozen points and almost every single one of them is flat wrong. I don’t want to argue with you since it seems like you are not open to new information, but I will say that Moore’s law has not been slowing down for decades, transformer/attention models are explicitly a new theory that has made the current wave of AI possible and was not like anything that was done before, and I am a computer science professor and I program all the time an am well-versed in what AI can and can’t do at the moment.

Have you read the Lorax? I think you may have misinterpreted.

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It's a message to top-heavy countries - we can loiter and kill your top people which is devastating to authoritarian countries like china and russia.

It's worth acknowledging that the definition of 'The Singularity' is when an artificial intelligence is first able to produce an artificial intelligence that is more complex than itself. I'm not necessarily convinced we're in that region yet.

Natural language processors like ChatGPT and other machine learning tools are certainly set to drastically alter the landscape of a lot of industries in the upcoming years, but I struggle to see that these tools would produce The Singularity. Mainly because the basis of their intelligence derives from a statistical evaluation of previous knowledge. In a sense it's a case of repeating back what it believes the statistically astute answer to be, which leaves not a lot of room for apotheosis.

Then again.. humans created these tools from the basis of our observed knowledge so... hard to say. The real interesting stuff will probably start happening once AI tools are made that can incorporate multiple vectors of information on the same platform and draw decisions based on that.

AI with enough training will do some simple regular stuff like answering the phone. But if the task is complex and requires on the job training then a person will have to do it.

> You are really not following what is going on, or else you have closed your mind so much you can't process it. 90 years for general intelligence? Buddy, 30 years ago we didn't even have the internet. Or cell phones. Computers were .001% as fast as they are now. And technological progress speeds up, not slows down.

Early internet was 40 years ago if not longer. Which is about the same time as we had wireless phones. Further, we've had technologies like global instant communications, or hyperlinked knowledge bases, for at least a hundred years. I don't think technology moves quite as rapidly as you are imagining here. But even if they do...

Computer speeds can keep doubling but at a certain point we hit atomic limits for silicon transistors. And fundamentally we have a simple problem that AI today is at least seven orders of magnitude away from the needed efficiency to even reach parity with biological intelligence. Which, by the way is beyond that atomic limit. But even if it wasn't, it would take 70 years at a minimum if the computer industry managed to double at it's current speeds (which has been slowing down for decades, take that into account and it's closer to 90). Modern AI models are effectively cockroach brain, or thin slices of larger brains, trained on very specific problems.

And fundamentally, we are at the end of this boom in AI tech. We are at the end of the sigmoid curve of adoption. Things like deep fakes and early drafts of mid journey and GPT were being developed 15 years ago when the latest DNN breakthroughs were made. In that time the technology has matured, it's been put into easily accessible libraries, and engineering work has gone into getting the technology to efficiently run on cutting edge hardware (re: GPUs). Google even got specialized chips with the latest fab cycle made for it to push the envelope of what is possible. And now we are here, at the end of the curve, where it's being put into people's hands and being made generally accessible.

But there is no follow up. There are no new theory breakthroughs in the last decade, there is no more easy hardware performance gains to be grabbed. All the things that were imagined being possible with the tech 15 years ago is now today here. With nothing much new on the horizon. And from an algorithmic complexity standpoint, every doubling of performance you put into these models will give you a sub-linear improvement in output. So as computers get twice as fast, and the companies spend a year training them instead of 6 months, and they buy twice as many servers with their capital to train on, we'll get maybe a 30% improvement. I cannot emphasize enough how in the last 10 years we have gone from researchers running python code on their one computer for a week to teams of engineers running hand tuned assembly on clusters of bespoke hardware for months to get here. That's easily 20 or 30 doubling of performance increases that we cannot repeat, meanwhile hardware doubles every 18 months (more like 2 years)?

But we are at the end of this curve, not the beginning. Just because you haven't been reading AI theory papers for the last 20+ years, just because you have not been paying attention does not make this technology novel or surprising or somehow going to hit big strides. Speaking of, if you had paid attention, you would see that we are coming up on an AI winter scenario again. Probably around 2025/2026.

> We already have AI models doing a big chunk of programming. Programming is just a language problem, and LLMs have proven to be really good at language.

Tell me you don't do programming or computer science without telling me. Sure programming is just a language problem, like rocket science is just a math problem, or like a cow is actually an idealized point in space. What this skips is the HUGE gap in the details that actually allows anything to actually work. Yes it can write code to do a thing, but actually designing a good solution, actually problem solving edge cases, or debugging a specific error? None of that (and tons more) is covered by these models yet. Not even close.

So much of the complexity in non-trivial code bases is in very large language inputs. Like "crash the AI" sized inputs. So yes, we could train the AI on the language model and the code base, but how does that get us to the next step, that just makes it a domain expert in what already exists.

Using these extant models to program something that is even "two steps" complex usually just fails to get anywhere. Yes it can download a website, and yes it can put data in a data base (besides, these are the rote tasks that most programmers have already abstracted into libraries anyway). But it can't put the two together, even if the specification for the data usually wasn't so large that it couldn't even comprehend it anyway. This isn't just something that can be overcome incrementally, it's the whole goddamned ball game.

Going back to the earlier point of history of technology. We are at the end of this technology, we don't have a way forward to solve these fundamental issues with the technology without going back to the drawing board. Perhaps by integrating more classic techniques we will find a path forward. But like last time, that will take an AI winter to reset the space.

At least learn some funny curse words and phrases to hit on people and fun or interesting things like Schadenfreude and Razbliuto and Yugen and Hygge. It's cool to find out about other cultures.

obviously we’re talking the next steps. going to the moon was never a waste of money and we can use the resources on the earth

For what is is worth, I am not an expert in much but I am an expert in a couple of areas frequently brought up in this sub and.... much of what people discuss here is simply not the reality.

Societal collapse in the modern sense is something akin to the breakup of the USSR, or the Balkanization of Yugoslavia. Yes these are big history writing events, but Humanity is not going back to the dark ages.

Yes the economic outlook for someone in the US at least who is ~25 today is objectively worse after accounting for inflation then it was for someone who turned 25 say 40 years ago. However what is not commonly brought up is that someone who turns 25 tomorrow still has a longer life expectancy and higher standards of living than someone who turned 25 40 years ago.

AI is not what people think AI is. A good analog for AI would be the Industrial Revolution. Things that used to be extremely expensive and could only be made by Artisans suddenly became very cheap and available because mass production brought down costs. AI is going to do the same thing but going to do it instead for things that are today created on computers by white collar workers. Things like graphic design, simple software, scheduling meetings, writing help documentation, etc. etc. We are so far from a general AI that can replace a human wholesale that it is really not even worth thinking about.

Neoluddite maybe because today it's all about the evil AI, a few months ago it was robots, a while before that it was some other cataclysmic technology that was going to kill us all in mere days.... And of course it didn't.

This shit is just embarrassing at this point.

I didn’t say you should do it at the most expensive school you can find. Have you heard of community college?

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Another case of some general seeing something in science fiction and saying “I want that!”?

https://youtu.be/9fa9lVwHHqg

I just want a robot vacuum/mop so fucking bad. That would make it the easy life. I fucking hate mopping.

> are they not the same? How can you tell if time is going backwards, or cars are just going in reverse?

T E N E T

But none of them have gotten anybody to space without a trip one somebody else’s rocket.

Europe, Japan, South Korea, India are making a better effort for sure. Even North Korea made it to orbit. Canada's a G7 country with a better GDP than Russia, but has no space ambition at all.