companies routinely demand and supply things of and to each other.
i don't see why the economy necessarily has to "touch a floor" of human desire.
a company could be founded with the goal of, for example, colonizing mars. fulfilling this mandate (this prompt...) would then drive economic impulses such as acquiring materials for constructing rockets.
in parallel that company might satisfy the demands of other companies which need, for example, orbital insertions to fulfill their mandate.
perhaps without a floor of demand driven by darwinian organisms the whole thing fizzles out eventually.
but i also don't see why a darwinian agent can't emerge from the corporate process...
perhaps that comes about very quickly once humans can no longer acquire and exercise purchasing power - a company simply spins up some emulations of humans to create demand in the economy.
yes, this all sounds very "empty" to me, but frankly that's also how i feel about the world as it is.
given how much suffering arises by way of the human driven economy being kept in motion, i think there's even a moral case for allowing the whole thing to fade into an empty mechanical pantomime.
i just sincerely hope the artificial processes that replace us aren't also somehow instantiating suffering...
You really think a bunch of people holding signs on the weekend, then going back to work the next day is accomplishing anything? What are you accomplishing?
It doesn't matter how many of you there are if none of you are willing to actually do anything. If I just ignore you, how does it change anything in my life? The only thing you're achieving is making yourselves feel better about accomplishing nothing.
at a minimum, it makes it clear to others that they are not alone in thinking this regime is beyond the pale.
people who are able to take other actions like engaging via the judicial system, or peacefully refusing to continue working, are also encouraged by seeing peaceful masses of people agreeing with them.
it actually harms the cause to be dismissive of people who can contribute by simply making their peaceful objection visible.
> it actually harms the cause to be dismissive of people who can contribute by simply making their peaceful objection visible
I think it harms the cause to feel better about accomplishing nothing. You've created a morale booster, but you haven't actually achieved anything or put forth any sort of plan to enact any sort of change. Assuming your goal is to make the government function according to written laws, why would the current president give a shit about anything you say when he can just continue to ignore you? If he ignored you before, you holding up a sign isn't going to do anything.
Protests work when there is some sort of threat behind it. Most protests you read about in history aren't a few hours on the weekend, they're ongoing where everybody is already participating in a strike. And many of them have the obvious threat of violence behind them. This "protest on the weekend" shit is pathetic. I'm not going to congratulate you for wasting time while everything continues to get worse. From my perspective you are part of the problem.
That’s a very interesting take. I hadn’t really considered evolution
I guess if you really wanted to start from scratch, you could figure out how to evolve the whole system from a single cell or something like that. In some ways neural networks have kind of evolved in that way, assisted by humans. They started with a single perceptron, and have gone all the way to deep learning and convolutional networks
I also remember a long time ago studying genetic and evolutionary algorithms, but they were pretty basic in terms of what they could learn and do, compared to modern LLMs
Although recently I saw some research in which they were applying essentially genetic algorithms to merge model weights and produce models with new/evolved capabilities
It's this take on the situation which I think needs more emphasis.
Whether anyone likes it or not, these systems have co-evolved with us.
Hundreds of researchers contributing and just like English for example, it's ever-changing and evolving.
Given this trend, it's highly unlikely we won't achieve ASI.
It's not like hardware engineers stop innovating or venture capital stops wanting more. There might be a massive dip or even another AI winter but like the last one, eventually it picks up momentum again because there's clearly utility in these systems.
I've been coding for 25+ years and only a couple of days ago did it hit me that my profession has changed in a very dramatic way - I'm very critical of AI output, but I can read and comprehend code much quicker than I can write it relative to these systems.
Of course, that creates a barrier to holding a system in your head so going slow is something that should be pushed for when appropriate.
How much compute does simulating the earth for 4.7 billion years at atomic precision take? Why would that be more efficient than current approaches? Evolutionary algorithms work but are extremely inefficient, we don't have the compute to evolve even a single bacteria, let alone the whole history of the planet so we can arrive at human-like species.
I am sorry, but the sameness will be quantified and dealt with algorithmically, as and if desired.
Dial up the temperature, launch however many parallel threads to research and avoid precedent, et cetera, ad infinitum.
I am sorry, but all of human creativity, including originality, is ultimately also just a mechanical phenomenon, and so it cannot resist mechanization.
i'm curious, how did you arrive at "40-50%" possible human performance?
the task of "predicting the next word" can be understood as either "correctly choosing the next word in the hidden context", or "predicting the likelihood of each possible word".
the quiz is evaluating against the former, but humans are still far from being able to express a percentile likelihood for each possibility.
i only consciously arrive at a vague feeling of confidence, rather than being able to weigh the prediction of each word with fractional precision.
one might say that LLMs have above human introspective ability in that regard.
> "Researchers claim it is the first time an LLM has made a novel scientific discovery"
LLM didn't make discovery on its own in that work, it played role in one step of unknown importance, other steps were lots of manual coding and lots of CPUs to brute force solution.
If you have strong opinions, you're dividing people. If you're Bezos, you've got a lot of influence. If you then dump them out of opportunism, you're ignoring any morality.
I agree, there are hundreds of comments in this post, which is not at all unusual for these kinds of societal topics, yet very few actually clarified the basics.
The goals, desires, motivations, assumptions, etc., of the various parties and groups involved.
Without this, the vast majority of effort seems to be spent going in circles. Some might be convinced from position A to B, some might be convinced from position B to C, and some might be convinced from position C to A.
i don't see why the economy necessarily has to "touch a floor" of human desire.
a company could be founded with the goal of, for example, colonizing mars. fulfilling this mandate (this prompt...) would then drive economic impulses such as acquiring materials for constructing rockets.
in parallel that company might satisfy the demands of other companies which need, for example, orbital insertions to fulfill their mandate.
perhaps without a floor of demand driven by darwinian organisms the whole thing fizzles out eventually.
but i also don't see why a darwinian agent can't emerge from the corporate process...
perhaps that comes about very quickly once humans can no longer acquire and exercise purchasing power - a company simply spins up some emulations of humans to create demand in the economy.
yes, this all sounds very "empty" to me, but frankly that's also how i feel about the world as it is.
given how much suffering arises by way of the human driven economy being kept in motion, i think there's even a moral case for allowing the whole thing to fade into an empty mechanical pantomime.
i just sincerely hope the artificial processes that replace us aren't also somehow instantiating suffering...