Thanks, put on my reading list!

Did some digging. They used 800000 cells, it never got to superhuman levels, human cells are better than mouse cells.

Things to take away, 800k is not equivalent to 800k parameters. 800k cells might equal anywhere between 800m to 8b parameter(1000 - 10000 synapses per neuron). If a bloody 800m parameter model can't learn to play ping pong like a superhuman it's not really that great. However, it probably does converge sooner, given that the way neurons learn in brain isn't like a feed forward network.

The most curious thing here is that apparently neurons work by trying to reduce entropy. Looks like all of life is trying to do the same at many levels.

This is ahistorical nonsense. The lowest labor force participation on record (since we started tracking) was 58.1% in December 1954 (source: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CIVPART). Remember, far fewer women worked then. The US population in 1954 was roughly 154M people. Today it is roughly 336M (source: https://www.census.gov/data/tables/time-series/dec/popchange-data-text.html). For added context, unemployment during the Great Depending was somewhere around 25% (source: https://www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/1948/article/pdf/labor-force-employment-and-unemployment-1929-39-estimating-methods.pdf) and much higher among people of color and women. So, yes, there are far more workers today and far lower unemployment.

Labor force participation rate has declined from its all-time high in the late 90s, but population has increased at the same time. In 2003, when the labor force participation rate was above 65%, there were roughly 138M workers in the US. In January 2023, there were over 160M workers (source: https://www.bls.gov/charts/employment-situation/civilian-employment.htm), greater than the entire US population when labor force participation was at its lowest — and 22M people higher than two decades ago despite a ~3.5%-4% decline in participation rate.

Are there problems in this country? Absolutely. But we can’t fix them if we ignore basic facts.

Which is outside the set I was talking about.

I mean it seems impossible to know. I feel like it’s doubtful that if we still exist in some form we would even do things with our regular bodies but rather in simulations. Not to mention with the amount of flaws we have as a species I wouldn’t be shocked if we had modified ourselves beyond recognition and at some point cease to be human in the traditional sense. So many primitive behaviors and negative emotions that would be unnecessary to keep.

But the prompt engineering jobs will be all over the place. AI is a black box, so there is still a lot of work to do. Besides ChatGPT can't find all the information on the web yet. It can't decode images or videos. And the text it produces needs to be edited and checked. So there's jobs for editors and fact checkers. In the best case, we'll have UBI or four day work week in a decade. In the worst the elite will replace as many people as they can with cloned cyborgs.

Nobody knows is the real answer.

Honestly, what would have been news is if they were not building a ChatGPT rival, especially by now. If they're only starting now, they're helplessly behind all the companies that took notice with GPT-3 at the latest.

No, the author mentions civilizations from thousands of years before our era, not pre-industrial times.

Glad you asked. Well I wrote a post on the subject if you're interested : https://www.reddit.com/r/singularity/comments/uiy5rv/most_of_our_problems_are_cultural_not_technical/

i'm in my 30s, settling down with wife and cats, so i understand that i don't share the same angst people in 20s have right now. i would like to point out that you are one of the very few ones who see the drastic societal changes inbound. this gives you an unfair advantage to think more coherently and prepare for it. make use of it. and go educate others. i can imagine a very enthusiastic student unaware of obsolete things and how automation exists for mindless things now, knowing about singularity cushions the blow.

The singularity hasn't happened yet.

I agree with this. I'm a middle aged engineer and believe it or not there used to be a time when assembly was considered "automation of programming".

Before before assembly you would have to hot-wire individual 1s and 0s into the hardware to program which was a labor intensive jobs. You had to memorize the instructions and data sequence as strings of 1s and 0s.

Then assembly came along and suddenly a lot of the work was simplified to only writing a command that was equivalent to those instructions.

Then there was another big paradigm shift with "high level languages" like C and C compilers.

Essentially ever since C and other compiled languages existed most people haven't truly programmed anymore. Because essentially you're just communicating to a computer program what the computer program should actually program for you.

The C/C++ or Python code you're writing today? That's not actually programming. It's just you telling the computer what it should program for you.

In a way ChatGPT and other systems like it are just a newer higher level programming language. Because you're still communicating to the computer what it needs to program. But it's just in a more intuitive human way.

I don't think the job of programmer is going to go away at all. Just like Assembly didn't crash the occupation or C didn't crash the occupation. It's just yet another layer of abstraction on top of it.

As an old-school kind of guy I have to admit that I liked writing assembly more than C and I like C more than Python. And yet again I like Python more than typing into ChatGPT. But this is how software development has always been. You adapt to the new developments, you specialize into a very specific niche, or you exit the labor market and become a hobbyist.

Young people have too much anxiety about these things because the last ~15 years have been relatively stagnant in terms of big paradigm shifts within programming.

Big shifts like this used to happen every 2-3 years.

you skipped 80% of my comment

Those layoffs weren't from AI, though. They were from recession and inflation fears.

My CEO did say that this year and next "we'll have to do more with less", so I think if we don't start using AI tools now, we'll be left behind.

If you look at it optimistically, in the eyes of ordinary human beings after 200 years of enhancement, the scholars of our era are as primitive as monkeys.

but if it becomes easier that means more people are able to do it, that's a problem if you want a high salary or make money from your game.

Why do you continuously make broad generalizations about the members of this subreddit and singularitarians? It's revealing that your initial assumption is to label them as degenerates who prioritize endless porn and waifu relationships over anything else. Most "real people" don't even comprehend the magnitude of the changes that will impact society over the next few decades, so it's not surprising that they don't care when presented with extreme versions of these ideas.

Additionally, in another comment, you state that people desire meaningful work or the ability to make a difference, but then contradict yourself by suggesting that we need to provide employment even if it is meaningless.

That being said, it's plausible that people may develop an anti-AI stance due to the rapid changes occurring in a short time span ( nowhere near billions though), but I think this would be mainly due to governments dragging their feet in facilitating the transition to a society that is heavily automated, rather than the change itself being the driving factor.

Some people want to leave a legacy be it through ideas, passing in their genes, or building literal or metaphorical empires. So if humanity's legacy is AGI or ASI, what will AGI or ASI's legacy be? I hope it's not just getting really good at chess or Go.

Something intangible like style or personal preferences seems fleeting. Brad Pitt is replaceable. Anyway these kind of preferences are subjective. But there must be something fundamental to certain works of art and stories. The ones that were made thousands of years ago.

And you need to consider how tastes and ideologies evolved over time. Much of what was acceptable in the time period of William Shakespeare is now unacceptable. ASI could play a role here. It could simulate human society through alternative futures. A crystal ball of possible tomorrows...

Even still, before all that I'm sure they will be able to configure some way for machines to automate that process. The only thing the company would have to do in the immediate future is file paperwork (for now).

I don't want to be uploaded unless orgasms exist up there. The virtual world is a great stimulant. But only if I have a fist and something to grab ahold of.

Yeah. Brand new 3d printed homes, and these companies are going to get more affordable as the technology gets better

People have been using rotoscoping as a shortcut in animation for a long long time, but you can always tell and it's not really popular outside rock videos.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=djV11Xbc914

This workflow is going to be something highschool students are making compelling anime with in a few months.

I've already seen an industry basically disappear over night. A friend of mine did work where she'd listen to a meeting, and type it out, highlight important sections, etc ... and she was pretty well paid.

One day they just quit getting work. The head of the company realized that most of their clients went with an AI solution to do the same job for pennies instead being charged $100/hour.

I also had some friends who'd supplement their income doing drawings for people, and that all dried up almost entirely, overnight, last summer when all the AI art generation stuff came out.

Again, just, one day they were making decent money drawing things for people on demand, the next day no one was calling them.

We're at the very, very, beginning stage of this, but we're already seeing it happen, and it's so fast it's insane. One day, people need you to produce something. The next day, they don't, and never will again.

you base your argument on the thought that in the past society operated on the basis of exchanges, as it does today, and that the nobles needed to have resources to exchange with the poor.

Did you forget about the existence of slaves? 1/3 of the population of the Roman Empire was already occupied only by slaves, you don't need to have resources to give for someone's work if you can force him to work for free