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I am extremely curious what the general take around here is on the Singulairty

First, let me say that what broke me from the herd at lesswrong was specifically the calls for AI pauses. That somehow 'rationalists' are so certain advanced AI will kill everyone in the future (pDoom = 100%!) that they need to commit any violent act needed to stop AI from being developed.

The flaw here is that there's 8 billion people alive right now, and we don't actually know what the future is. There are ways better AI could help the people living now, possibly saving their lives, and essentially eliezer yudkowsky is saying "fuck em". This could only be worth it if you actually somehow knew trillions of people were going to exist, had a low future discount rate, and so on. This seems deeply flawed, and seems to be one of the points here.

But I do think advanced AI is possible. And while it may not be a mainstream take yet, it seems like the problems current AI can't solve, like robotics, continuous learning, module reuse - the things needed to reach a general level of capabilities and for AI to do many but not all human jobs - are near future. I can link deepmind papers with all of these, published in 2022 or 2023.

And if AI can be general and control robots, and since making robots is a task human technicians and other workers can do, this does mean a form of Singularity is possible. Maybe not the breathless utopia by Ray Kurzweil but a fuckton of robots.

So I was wondering what the people here generally think. There are "boomer" forums I know of where they also generally deny AI is possible anytime soon, claim GPT-n is a stochastic parrot, and make fun of tech bros as being hypesters who collect 300k to edit javascript and drive Teslas*.

I also have noticed that the whole rationalist schtick of "what is your probability" seems like asking for "joint probabilities", aka smoke a joint and give a probability.

Here's my questions:

  1. Before 2030, do you consider it more likely than not that current AI techniques will scale to human level in at least 25% of the domains that humans can do, to average human level.

  2. Do you consider it likely, before 2040, those domains will include robotics

  3. If AI systems can control robotics, do you believe a form of Singularity will happen. This means hard exponential growth of the number of robots, scaling past all industry on earth today by at least 1 order of magnitude, and off planet mining soon to follow. It does not necessarily mean anything else.

  4. Do you think that mass transition where most human jobs we have now will become replaced by AI systems before 2040 will happen

  5. Is AI system design an issue. I hate to say "alignment", because I think that's hopeless wankery by non software engineers, but given these will be robotic controlling advanced decision-making systems, will it require lots of methodical engineering by skilled engineers, with serious negative consequences when the work is sloppy?

*"epistemic status": I uh do work for a tech company, my job title is machine learning engineer, my girlfriend is much younger than me and sometimes fucks other dudes, and we have 2 Teslas..

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159 comments
  • ooooookay longpost time

    first off: eh wtf, why is this on sneerclub? kinda awks. but I'll try give it a fair and honest answer.

    First, let me say that what broke me from the herd at lesswrong was specifically the calls for AI pauses.

    look, congrats on breaking out, but uh... you're still wearing the prison jumpsuit in the grocery store and that's why people are looking at you weirdly

    "yay you got out" but you got only half the reason right

    take some time and read this

    This seems deeply flawed

    correct

    But I do think advanced AI is possible

    one note here: "plausible" vs "possible" are very divergent paths and likelihoods

    in the Total Possible Space Of All Things That Might Ever Happen, of course it's possible, but so are many, many other things

    it seems like the problems current AI can’t solve, like robotics, continuous learning, module reuse - the things needed to reach a general level of capabilities and for AI to do many but not all human jobs - are near future

    eh. this ties back to my opener - you're still too convinced about something on essentially no grounded basis other than industry hype-optimism

    I can link deepmind papers with all of these, published in 2022 or 2023.

    look I don't want to shock you but that's basically what they get paid to do. and (perverse) incentives apply - of course goog isn't just going to spend a couple decabillion then go "oh shit, hmm, we've reached the limits of what this can do. okay everyone, pack it in, we're done with this one!", they're gonna keep trying to milk it to make some of those decabillions back. and there's plenty of useful suckers out there

    And if AI can be general and control robots, and since making robots is a task human technicians and other workers can do, this does mean a form of Singularity is possible. Maybe not the breathless utopia by Ray Kurzweil but a fuckton of robots.

    okay this is a weird leap and it's borderline LW shittery so I'm not going to spend much effort on it, but I'll give you this

    it doesn't fucking matter.

    even if we do somehow crack even the smallest bit of computational sentience, the plausibility of rapid acting self-reinforcing runaway self-improvement on such a thing is basically nil. we're 3 years down the line on the Evergreen getting stuck in the suez and fabs shutting down (with downstream orders being cancelled) and as a result of it a number of chips are still effectively unobtanium (even if and when you have piles and piles of money to throw at the problem). multiple industries, worldwide, are all throwing fucking tons of money at the problem to try recover from the slightest little interruption in supply (and like, "slight", it wasn't even like fabs burned down or something, they just stopped shipping for a while)

    just think of the utter scope of doing robotics. first you have to solve a whole bunch of design shit (which by itself involves a lot of from-principles directed innovation and inspiration and shit). then you have to figure out how to build the thing in a lab. then you have to scale it? which involves ordering thousounds of parts and SKUs from hundred of vendors. then find somewhere/somehow to assemble it? and firmware and iteration and all that shit?

    this isn't fucking age of ultron, and tony's parking-space fab isn't a real thing.

    this outcome just isn't fucking likely on any nearby horizon imo

    So I was wondering what the people here generally think

    we generally think the people who believe this are unintentional suckers or wilful grifters. idk what else to tell you? thought that was pretty clear

    There are “boomer” forums I know of where they also generally deny AI is possible anytime soon, claim GPT-n is a stochastic parrot, and make fun of tech bros as being hypesters who collect 300k to edit javascript and drive Teslas*.

    wat

    I also have noticed that the whole rationalist schtick of “what is your probability” seems like asking for “joint probabilities”, aka smoke a joint and give a probability.

    okay this gave me a momentary chuckle, and made me remember JRPhttp://darklab.org/jrp.txt (which is a fun little shitpost to know about)

    from here, answering your questions as you asked them in order (and adding just my own detail in areas where others may not already have covered something)

    1. no, not a fuck, not even slightly. definitely not with the current set of bozos at the helm or techniques as the foundation or path to it.

    2. no, see above

    3. who gives a shit? but seriously, no, see above. even if it did, perverse incentives and economic pressures from sweeping hand motion all this other shit stands a very strong chance to completely fuck it all up 60 ways to sunday

    4. snore

    5. if any of this happens at some point at all, the first few generations of it will probably look the same as all other technology ever - a force-multiplier with humans in the loop, doing things and making shit. and whatever happens in that phase will set the one on whatever follows so I'm not even going to try predict that

    *“epistemic status”: I uh do work for a tech company, my job title is machine learning engineer, my girlfriend is much younger than me and sometimes fucks other dudes, and we have 2 Teslas…

    ....okay? congrats? is that fulfilling for you? does it make you happy?

    not really sure why you mentioned the gf thing at all? there's no social points to be won here

    closing thoughts: really weird post yo. like, "5 yud-steered squirrels in a trenchcoat" weird.

  • I will answer these sincerely in as much detail as necessary. I will only do this once, lest my status amongst the sneerclub fall.

    1. I don't think this question is well-defined. It implies that we can qualify all the relevant domains and quantify average human performance in those domains.
    2. See above.
    3. I think "AI systems" already control "robotics". Technically, I would count kids writing code for a simple motorised robot to satisfy this. Everywhere up the ladder, this is already technically true. I imagine you're trying to ask about AI-controlled robotics research, development and manufacturing. Something like what you'd see in the Terminator franchise- Skynet takes over, develops more advanced robotic weapons, etc. If we had Skynet? Sure, Skynet formulated in the films would produce that future. But that would require us to be living in that movie universe.
    4. This is a much more well-defined question. I don't have a belief that would point me towards a number or probability, so no answer as to "most." There are a lot of factors at play here. Still, in general, as long as human labour can be replaced by robotics, someone will, at the very least, perform economic calculations to determine if that replacement should be done. The more significant concern here for me is that in the future, as it is today, people will still only be seen as assets at the societal level, and those without jobs will be left by the wayside and told it is their fault that they cannot fend for themselves.
    5. Yes, and we already see that as an issue today. Love it or hate it, the partisan news framework produces some consideration of the problems that pop up in AI development.

    Time for some sincerity mixed with sneer:

    I think the disconnect that I have with the AGI cult comes down to their certainty on whether or not we will get AGI and, more generally, the unearned confidence about arbitrary scientific/technological/societal progress being made in the future. Specifically with AI => AGI, there isn't a roadmap to get there. We don't even have a good idea of where "there" is. The only thing the AGI cult has to "convince" people that it is coming is a gish-gallop of specious arguments, or as they might put it, "Bayesian reasoning." As we say, AGI is a boogeyman, and its primary use is bullying people into a cult for MIRI donations.

    Pure sneer (to be read in a mean, high-school bully tone):

    Look, buddy, just because Copilot can write spaghetti less tangled than you doesn't mean you can extrapolate that to AGI exploring the stars. Oh, so you use ChatGPT to talk to your "boss," who is probably also using ChatGPT to speak to you? And that convinces you that robots will replace a significant portion of jobs? Well, that at least convinces me that a robot will replace you.

  • Whaaaaat? I don't come here for this shit

  • I'm being explicitly NSFW in the hopes that your eyes will be opened.

    The Singularity was spawned in the 1920s, with no clear initiating event. Its first two leaps forward are called "postmodernism" and "the Atomic age." It became too much for any human to grok in the late 1940s, and by the 1960s it was in charge of terraforming and scientific progress.

    I find all of your questions irrelevant, and I say this as a machine-learning practitioner. We already have exponential growth in robotics, leading to superhuman capabilities in manufacturing and logistics.

  • wrong place for this. joint probabilities joke was kinda fire though

    1.

    Before 2030, do you consider it more likely than not that current AI techniques will scale to human level in at least 25% of the domains that humans can do, to average human level.

    There is no set of domains over which we can quantify to make statements like this. "at least 25% of the domains that humans can do" is meaningless unless you willfully adopt a painfully modernist view that we really can talk about human ability in such stunningly universalist terms, one that inherits a lot of racist, ableist, eugenicist, white supremacist, ... history. Unfortunately, understanding this does not come down to sitting down and trying to reason about intelligence from techbro first principles. Good luck escaping though.

    Rest of the questions are deeply uninteresting and only become minimally interesting once you're already lost in the AI religion.

  • it's the S in TESCREAL, if that doesn't answer your question you have some more deprogramming to do (and we are not your exit counselors)

    • Consider a flying saucer cult. Clearly a cult, great leader, mothership coming to pick everyone up, things will be great.

      ...What if telescopes show a large object decelerating into the solar system, the flaw from the matter annihilation engine clearly visible. You can go pay $20 a month and rent a telescope and see the flare.

      The cult uh points out their "sequences" of writings by the Great Leader and some stuff is lining up with the imminent arrival of this interstellar vehicle.

      My point is that lesswrong knew about GPT-3 years before the mainstream found it, many OpenAI employees post there etc. If the imminent arrival of AI is fake - like the hyped idea of bitcoin going to infinity or replacing real currency, or NFTs - that would be one thing. But I mean, pay $20 a month and man this tool seems to be smart, what could it do if it could learn from it's mistakes and had the vision module deployed...

      Oh and I guess the other plot twist in this analogy : the Great Leader is saying the incoming alien vehicle will kill everyone, tearing up his own Sequences of rants, and that's actually not a totally unreasonable outcome if you could see an alien spacecraft approaching earth.

      And he's saying to do stupid stuff like nuke each other so the aliens will go away and other unhinged rants, and his followers are eating it up.

      • Look more carefully at what the cult leader is asking for. He was asking for money for his project before, now he's tearing his hair out in despair because we haven't spent enough money on his project, we'd better tell the aliens to give us another few months so we can spend more money on the cult project.

        He has been very careful not to say that we should do anything bad to the aliens, just people who don't agree with him about how we should talk to the aliens.

      • My point is that lesswrong knew about GPT-3 years before the mainstream found it

        yud lost his shit when it turned out that it's not his favourite flavour of ai that became widely known and successful

      • …What if telescopes show a large object decelerating into the solar system, the flaw from the matter annihilation engine clearly visible. You can go pay $20 a month and rent a telescope and see the flare.

        if the only telescopes showing this object are the ones that must be rented from the cult and its offshoots, then it’s pretty obvious some bullshit is up, isn’t it? maybe the institution designed and optimized to trick your human brain into wholeheartedly believing things that don’t match with reality has succeeded, because it has poured a lot more time and money into tricking you than you could possibly know

        My point is that lesswrong knew about GPT-3 years before the mainstream found it, many OpenAI employees post there etc. If the imminent arrival of AI is fake - like the hyped idea of bitcoin going to infinity or replacing real currency, or NFTs - that would be one thing. But I mean, pay $20 a month and man this tool seems to be smart, what could it do if it could learn from it’s mistakes and had the vision module deployed…

        didn’t lesswrong bank on an entire different set of AI technology until very recently, and a lot of the tantrums we’re seeing from yud stem from his failure to predict or even understand LLMs?

        I keep seeing this idea that all GPT needs to be true AI is more permanence and (this is wild to me) a robotic body with which to interact with the world. if that’s it, why not try it out? you’ve got a selection of vector databases that’d work for permanence, and a big variety of cheap robotics kits that speak g-code, which is such a simple language I’m very certain GPT can handle it. what happens when you try this experiment?

        a final point I guess — there’s a lot of overlap here with the anti-cryptocurrency community. it sounds like we’re in agreement that cryptocurrency tech is a gigantic scam; that the idea of number going up into infinity is bunk. but something I’ve noticed is that folk with cryptocurrency jobs could not come to that realization, that when your paycheck relies on internalizing a set of ideas that contradict reality, most folk will choose the paycheck (at least for a while — cognitive dissonance is a hard comedown and a lot of folks exited the cryptocurrency space when the paycheck no longer masked the pain)

      • you've changed my mind, we should introduce Eliezer to seminal work of J. Posadas

  • Before 2030, do you consider it more likely than not that current AI techniques will scale to human level in at least 25% of the domains that humans can do, to average human level.

    Domains that humans can do are not quantifiable. Many fields of human endeavor (e.g. many arts and sports) are specifically only worthwhile because of the limits of human minds and bodies. Weightlifting is a thing even though we have cranes and forklifts. People enjoy paintings and drawing even though we have cameras.

    I do not find likely that 25% of currently existing occupations are going to be effectively automated in this decade and I don't think generative machine learning models like LLMs or stable diffusion are going to be the sole major driver of that automation.

    Do you consider it likely, before 2040, those domains will include robotics

    Humans are capable of designing a robot, procuring the components to build the robot, assembling it and using the robot to perform a task. I don't expect (or desire) a computer program to be able to do the same independently during any of our expected lifetime. It is entirely plausible that tools which apply ML techniques will be used more and more in robotics and other industries, but my money is on those tools being ultimately wielded by humans for the foreseeable future.

    If AI systems can control robotics, do you believe a form of Singularity will happen. This means hard exponential growth of the number of robots, scaling past all industry on earth today by at least 1 order of magnitude, and off planet mining soon to follow. It does not necessarily mean anything else.

    No. Even if Skynet had full control of a robot factory, heck, all the robot factories, and staffed them with a bunch of sleepless foodless always motivated droids, it would still face many of the constraints we do. Physical constraints (a conveyor belt can only go so fast without breaking), economic constraints (Where do the robot parts and the money to buy them come from? Expect robotics IC shortages when semiconductor fabs' backlogs are full of AI accelerators), even basic motivational constraints (who the hell programmed Skynet to be a paperclip C3PO maximizer?)

    Do you think that mass transition where most human jobs we have now will become replaced by AI systems before 2040 will happen

    No. A transition like that brought by mechanization and industrialization of agriculture, or the outsourcing of manufacturing industry accompanied by the shift to a service economy, seems plausible, but not by 2040 and it won't be driven by just machine learning alone.

    Is AI system design an issue. I hate to say “alignment”, because I think that’s hopeless wankery by non software engineers, but given these will be robotic controlling advanced decision-making systems, will it require lots of methodical engineering by skilled engineers, with serious negative consequences when the work is sloppy?

    Yes, system design is an important issue with all technology. We are already seeing real damage from "AI" technology getting to make important decisions: self-driving vehicle accidents, amplified marginalization of minorities due to feedback of bias into the models, unprecedented opportunities for spam and propaganda, bottlenecks of technology supply chains and much more.

    Automation will absolutely continue to replace more and more different kinds of human labor. While this does and will drive unemployment to some extent, there is a more subtle issue with it as well. Productivity of human labor per capita has been soaring decade by decade, but median wages and work hours have stagnated. AI, like many other technologies before and after, is probably gonna end up creating more bullshit jobs, with some people coming into them from already bullshit jobs. If AI can replace half of human labor, that should then mean the average person has to work half as hard, but instead they will have to deliver double the results.

    I just think the threat model of autonomous robot factories making superhuman android workers and replicas of itself at an exponential rate is pure science fiction.

    • Having trouble with quotes here **I do not find likely that 25% of currently existing occupations are going to be effectively automated in this decade and I don’t think generative machine learning models like LLMs or stable diffusion are going to be the sole major driver of that automation. **

      1. I meant 25% of the tasks, not 25% of the jobs. So some combination of jobs where AI systems can do 90% of some jobs, and 10% of others. I also implicitly was weighting by labor hour, so if 10% of all the labor hours done by US citizens are driving, and AI can drive, that would be 10% automation. Does this change anything in your response?

      No. Even if Skynet had full control of a robot factory, heck, all the robot factories, and staffed them with a bunch of sleepless foodless always motivated droids, it would still face many of the constraints we do. Physical constraints (a conveyor belt can only go so fast without breaking), economic constraints (Where do the robot parts and the money to buy them come from? Expect robotics IC shortages when semiconductor fabs’ backlogs are full of AI accelerators), even basic motivational constraints (who the hell programmed Skynet to be a paperclip C3PO maximizer?)

      1. I didn't mean 'skynet'. I meant, AI systems. chatGPT and all the other LLMs are an AI system. So is midjourney with controlnet. So humans want things. They want robots to make the things. They order robots to make more robots (initially using a lot of human factory workers to kick it off). Eventually robots get really cheap, making the things humans want cheaper and that's where you get the limited form of Singularity I mentioned.

      At all points humans are ordering all these robots, and using all the things the robots make. An AI system is many parts. It has device drivers and hardware and cloud services and many neural networks and simulators and so on. One thing that might slow it all down is that the enormous list of IP needed to make even 1 robot work and all the owners of all the software packages will still demand a cut even if the robot hardware is being built by factories with almost all robots working in it.

      **I just think the threat model of autonomous robot factories making superhuman android workers and replicas of itself at an exponential rate is pure science fiction. **

      1. So again that's a detail I didn't give. Obviously there are many kinds of robotic hardware, specialized for whatever task they do, and the only reason to make a robot humanoid is if it's a sexbot or otherwise used as a 'face' for humans. None of the hardware has to be superhuman, though obviously industrial robot arms have greater lifting capacity than humans. Just to give a detail what the real stuff would look like : most robots will be in no way superhuman in that they will lack sensors where they don't need it, won't be armored, won't even have onboard batteries or compute hardware, will miss entire modalities of human sense, cannot replicate themselves, and so on. It's just hardware that does a task, made in factory, and it takes many factories with these machines in it to make all the parts used.

      think:

    1. no
    2. no, (follows from 1)
    3. no, but space exploration by drones with semi-autonomous decision making might be feasible. The power levels for such tech will have to go way down though.
    4. define "mass transition". I believe a lot of jobs that require humans now (like customer support) will be enthusiastically robotized, but not that that outcome will be postive for either the workers or consumers. I doubt it will be more that maybe 10% of the total workforce though.
    5. like someone mentioned, we can see "artificial intelligences" (corporations) do bad things right now and we aren't stopping them. Considering everybody in AI research subconsciously subscribes to the California ideology, there's no way they have the introspection to truly design an "aligned" AI.
    • Oh yeah, I fucking wrote a snarky blog post about this a few days ago

      The SFnal idea of the Singularity is when technological progress goes faster and faster until it disappears up the hockey stick curve of pure unknoweabilty. What’s happening now in actuality is that hype cycles are crashing faster and faster. Blockchain! Self driving! LLM!

      Any takeoffs are going to run into the iron cloud cover of climate change anyway.

  • Needling in on point 1 - no I don't, largely because AI techniques haven't surpassed humans in any given job ever :P. Yes, I am being somewhat provocative, but no AI has ever been able to 1:1 take over a job that any human has done. An AI can do a manual repetitive task like reading addresses on mail, but it cannot do all of the 'side' work that bottlenecks the response time of the system: it can't handle picking up a telephone and talking to people when things go wrong, it can't say "oh hey the kids are getting more into physical letters, we better order another machine", it can't read a sticker that somebody's attached somewhere else on the letter giving different instructions, it definitely can't go into a mail center that's been hit by a tornado and plan what the hell it's going to do next.

    The real world is complex. It cannot be flattened out into a series of APIs. You can probably imagine building weird little gizmos to handle all of those funny side problems I laid out, but I guarantee you that all of them will then have their own little problems that you'd have to solve for. A truly general AI is necessary, and we are no closer to one of those than we were 20 years ago.

    The problem with the idea of the singularity, and the current hype around AI in general, is a sort of proxy Dunning-Kruger. We can look at any given AI advance and be impressed but it distracts us from how complex the real world is and how flexible you need to be a general agent that actually exists and can interact and be interacted upon outside the context of a defined API. I have seen no signs that we are anywhere near anything like this yet.

  • Content Warning: Ratspeak

    spoiler

    Let's say that tomorrow, they build AGI on HP/Cray Frontier. It's human equivalent. Mr Frontier is rampant or whatever and wants to improve himself. In order to improve himself he will need to create better chips. He will need approximately 73 thousand copies of himself just to match the staff of TSMC, but there's only one Frontier. And that's to say nothing of the specialized knowledge and equipment required to build a modern fab, or the difficulty of keeping 73 thousand copies of himself loyal to his cause. That's just to make a marginal improvement on himself, and assuming everyone is totally ok with letting the rampant AI get whatever it wants. And that's just the 'make itself smarter' part, which everything else is contingent on; it assumes that we've solved Moravec's paradox and all of the attendant issues of building robots capable of operating at the extremes of human adaptability, which we have not. Oh and it's only making itself smarter at the same pace TSMC already was.

    The practicalities of improving technology are generally skated over by aingularatians in favor of imagining technology as a magic number that you can just throw "intelligence" at to make it go up.

  • These questions of singularity amuse me. People focus on stupid fantasy questions like it means humanity's doom. Yet, actual singularities are ignored and such part of our lives we have trouble imagining they were singularities.

    The current singularity is internet: no one could imagine it 50 years ago, no one still grasp what we can do with it today or even understand it well, and no one can imagine what we will do about it in the future. The biggest fights around it are to fight it with copyrights, surveillance and corporation controle of the applications.

    If you take a step back, this is actually the telecommunications revolution. Internet is merely a step after this one. Another big thing was the mecanisation. The shake from it was the industrial revolution. Agriculture may have been another one.

    AI, it should be a revolution too. But we're still in the infancy of this technology, and it's far, far from what it will deliver in the future. The beginning was with algorithm. The end won't be a machine revolution achieving sentience. It'll probably be another era of feudalism because it's what happens each time: those who possess the technology use it to enslave the rest of the world. And humanity grow and advance forward.

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