It's fascinating, existential, hopeful, and worrisome to the n'th degree, here's hoping its post scarcity utopia, rather than something Orwell could never have fathomed.

We started with people saying that ChatGPT is ASI. Then a week later it was AGI. Then ASI would arrive in 2023. Now we're at AGI would be here in 2024. It's all clickbait for Medium.

Good governments try to educate people; most tech companies try to put whatever sensational fluff is popular in front of them. But it turns out education is boring whereas speculation about AI is fun. This is why the oligarchs will win. You can't fight human nature.

Listen Tauwieniesha

Yes, but, intelligence isn't just depth, it's breadth.

In this case, to make possible exponential growth, AI has to be able to do most of the steps required to build more AI (and useful things for humans to get money).

Right now that means AI needs to be capable of controlling many robots, doing many separate tasks that need to be done (to ultimately manufacture more chips and power generators and so on).

So while chatGPT seems to be really close to passing a Turing test, the papers for robotics are like this : https://www.deepmind.com/blog/building-interactive-agents-in-video-game-worlds

And not able, yet, to actually control this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XPVC4IyRTG8 . (that boston dynamics machine is kinda hard coded, it is not being driven by current gen AI)

I think we're close and see for the last steps people can use chatGPT/codex to help them write the code, there's a lot more money to invest in this, they can use AI to design the chips for even better compute : lots of ways to make the last steps take less time than expected.

"As smart as" is difficult to measure and judge. I think by 1980s standards, we might already be at something like a singularity as they might have judged it.

Well, it's impossible for it to be farther.

They like to read about their future.

There are countries where sex workers are legal.

Come to think of it, the absolutely unprecedented number of people worldwide on a prescription of anti-depressants might have something to do with a decent chunk of that demographic. Emotional blunting, and all that. I hear it's beginning to show signs of long-term effects, if I understand correctly. Yay.

The singularity is a prediction of exponential growth once AI is approximately as smart as a human being.

So you might hear in the news that tsmc has cancelled all chip orders except for AI customers, and there are zero new devices anywhere that are recently made with advanced silicon in them.

You might see in the news that the city of Shenzhen has twice as much land covered with factories as it did last month.

Then another month and it's doubled again.

And so on. Or if the USA has the tech for themselves similar exponential growth.

At some point you would probably suddenly see whoever has the tech launching tens of thousands of rockets and at night you would see lights on the Moon..that double every few weeks how much surface is covered.

This is the metric: anything that is clear and sustained exponential growth driven by AI systems at least as smart as humans.

Smart meaning they score as well as humans on a large set of objective tests.

There are a lot of details we don't know - would the factories in the Moon even be visible at night or do the robots see in IR - but that's the signature of it.

Probably just the Moon. Someone could set up biotech clinics there that offer therapies directly from an AGI (that doesn't care about drug patent law) or strip mine the place without environmental impact paperwork or licensing

They will be easily tracked and caught.

You understand the idea of singularity criticality right? Currently demonstrated models (especially RL based ones) are ALREADY better than humans at key tasks related to AI like:

1. Network architecture search
2. Chip design
3. Activation function design

I can link papers (usually Deepmind) for each claim.

This means AI is being accelerated by AI.

2050-60 is a remote and unlikely possiblity. Like expecting covid to just stop with China and take 10 years to reach the US, if the year were 2020.

It's a good illustration of the limits if a singularity happens. For example in the near future if it starts, AI companies will have rapidly more intelligent models (like now but faster) until tsmc and a couple other facilities are basically exclusively making AI chips.

New phones, GPUS, and game consoles would become unattainable.

And then things don't go crazy yet because every chip is going to AI research or AIs making money for their owners, and progress is rate limited by the chip production rate.

Later stages this will be solved somehow and there will be new bottlenecks.

How is animation a good option when Motion art AIs are the next step in generative AI technologies?

And at that point the world will either be in one of these two scenarios: Star Trek or Terminator.

I hope it's the former, working/studying solely for the love of what you do or because that's your passion in a post-scarcity world. But the humanity from today and the humanity from Star Trek are extremely different, that's what I fear.

Umm....

Ok so you are saying we couldn't, I dunno, make an AI training bench that resulted in a capable machine able to successfully perform most things humans can do? Including highly advanced skilled tasks like designing computer chips and jet aircraft?

Or the von Neumann replication idea? That won't happen or can't?

...why not. I would like to hear from you if you have a non emotional argument. How would this not work, what specifically. Give details

I mean nuclear weapons are real and they had a powerful effect on history.

In 1944 as a member of the public how would the capabilities describe sound to you?

"Oh yeah some special rocks we found and a lot of chemistry will let us annihilate a whole country in 30 minutes. If we had nukes on V2 missiles right now we could defeat the Nazis and the soviets in 30 minutes, leaving all of them dead, with every single city they have turned to rubble"

ChatGPT Influx?

You do grasp the concept of singularity criticality right. (AI improving AI, making the singularity happen at an accelerating pace).

If this theory is right - it's just math, not controversial, and S curve improvements in technology have happened many times before - then longevity won't make enough progress to matter before we have ai smart enough to help us.

Or kill us.

Point is the cultist/doomer argument isn't fair. What is happening right now is the flying saucer AI cult has produced telescope imagery of the actual mother ship approaching. Ignore it at your peril.

The same happened to r/futurology too. I remember a time when it was an interesting and optimistic sub.

I know. Don't forget "they will exclusively hoard anti-aging for themselves". (Ignoring the reality that governments and health insurance companies have more money than all billionaires combined, and they have to pay a fortune because everything in a person breaks as aging slowly wrecks everything and they become unable to work)

Or "we would be so overpopulated life would suck". Nevermind that governments could require aging clinics to make their clients infertile. You would need a license to have an additional child after your normal reproductive lifetime.

Note that with futurology, 30-50 years of science press has promised the "next big thing". Better batteries, flying cars, online shopping, tablet computers, fusion power.

Some of these things minimal instrumental progress was made on in 50 years, others are now reality.

The Singularity just might happen for real before people become jaded.

Childcare. Daycare, Nannies. Also many professions will be augmented by AI but won’t actually go away soon.

Maybe it's because the singularity is near[er].