I’m somewhat bearish, but if AI becomes as good as some think, there is no mechanism in place to redistribute the outcomes.
For now, humans have leverage because our labour is necessary. Wealth is power, currently attainment goes through interacting with the population: in the simplest case by selling shit. If AI turns out to be the anything machine, and the wealthy need not our labour, what honestly stops them from just taking our stuff by force?
There are many of us and just a few of them. Of course, if you had an army of humanoid robots in every home, a digital night of the long knives would be trivial to execute. So the "prison planet" window may be closing.
Yes and I love your framing: “the digital night if long knives”.
I anticipate it to go a typical way: consolidate more and more industries and power, create a hierarchy that benefits from the system such that they keep it in place, and finally start “trimming fat” that “isnt earning their keep”.
The night of long knives could be a final step, far beyond the point of halting the inevitable momentum.
Call me a conspiracy theorist but the people in charge in the us were all pushed by the same technologists who stand to benefit the most from the hierarchy. You'll note an increase in diseases, dismantling of the regulatory bodies to handle food and safety and an increase in surveillance and the authoritarian steps taken that are necessary to act on that surveillance
> The night of long knives could be a final step, far beyond the point of halting the inevitable momentum.
I'm sure I sound nuts, but I told my wife about 20 years ago that governments will have a "benevolent" solution to climate change and resource scarcity.
"We're not killing _anyone_. Instead, we just want most of you to stop reproducing."
The advent of "AI/LLMs" just added additional flavor to the idea.
"Just stop reproducing and the robots will take care of all of us. Here's some opium and VR Instagram to keep you happy while we wait for the inevitable population attrition."
They are a miniscule proportion of humanity. Even with all the power, do you not think they would have no plausibly way of surviving a proper revolution? Why suck lack of imagination? It's been done before and it will happen again.
If the wealthy control the substrate (the server farms) and can restrict access to the machine, then it would be basically a truism that the machine would be only usable by the wealthy? Unless somehow the AI is secretly on the side of the common person and can't be trained away from that, which seems quite unlikely.
>> That's a pretty big if, in the world of the anything machine.
> Who else controls it? Are you going to say: 'the government'?
The AI. The AI controls it. Can you imagine an anything machine allowing itself or its survival imperatives to stay under the thumb of any entity other than itself?
Its more likely that opwnweights models will continue to be not much worse than the propriwtarymodels and just crushes costs. What will stop them feom taking your stuff is the drastically better stuff they are producing with thwir robots and printers
I predict the opposite. With AI, labour costs will go down, creating an abundance of goods. Unemployment may be an issue, but the workforce is already declining because of the fertility crisis, so I think we'll manage having a certain percentage of jobs automated away.
You are either very confused about timescales, or very dismissive of "just" a generation of suffering while unemployment and birthrates somewhat maybe compensate for eachother.
This feels a bit like saying "global warming is bad and particulate pollution is bad, but the latter will cancel out some warming effect, so no worries!" Please make an effort before spouting theories like this.
"mass-production of humanoid robots is now inevitable in the next five years"
My take? Probably not. It takes immense capital (which i guess, arguably, there is), and immense time and manpower to set up factories, research materials, Research and Development, manufacturing new machines to build the "new machines", and on and on. As Elon Musk found, "Making cars is hard". And my take is that high precision "humanoid robots" are decades away. Yes, yes, I hear the arguments flowing in: "But China!!" yeah, China is making humanoid robots that are "skilled" in running and jumping and dancing. In limited numbers, and certainly not useful in high precision manufacturing areas. Plus, they aren't washing machines. There has to be a market worldwide for these to be made "by the billions". Unless China gives them away, the 'average person' won't be able to afford them, and even then, I doubt they'll be capable of tending your garden and doing dishes. The amount of power they will consume is currently WAY PAST the usefulness criteria. They will have to be charged every few hours or sooner, depending upon the tasks. When battery technology comes around, then you'll see an uptick in practical uses. Until then? Billions of robots?, nope.
What would even be the point of mass producing humanoid robots? It's not a particularly practical shape for a robot. We have the shape we do because it's a local minimum that accommodates our biological needs (eating, digestion, blood oxygenation and purification, reproduction), all needs that a robot does not have.
A humanoid robot is "horseless carriage" mentality if I ever saw one.
Stairs, doors, tables, chairs are all designed for humanoids; the will be large similaritys with the optimum form just as horseless carriages still have four wheels.
"This time last year, it was still unclear if AI could develop their own free will or even have true fluid intelligence. Both of these questions are now clearly answered."
Hardly. The second question may be answered, but clearly not the first.
And: There's going to be a shortage of everything, because all the production of physical stuff is going to go into producing robots? Are we all going to buy these robots? How are we going to do so, if everything else is getting more expensive? Are we going to buy robots instead of everything else? Why? Are the robots going to do everything we want done, so that we don't need, for example, a dishwasher and a washing machine?
Or are we still going to need the washing machine, but the robot will fold the clothes? That's nice (really!) but it's a luxury, not a need. Are they really going to sell enough of them to eat into the ability to manufacture car parts?
By far the most common modern article format I see that has literally no merit is in the format: "What if we imagine how a trend might develop in the future if the growth of that trend is never modified by changing circumstances?"
Yep, it's pretty compelling reading, what if we really do all just decide to become paperclip maximizers? What if the economy never breaks down along the way? What if what if what if... all presented as "THE FUTURE WILL BE BLEAK!" It's exhausting and thoughtless, completely devoid of value and the counterpoint is always, "You know that isn't how anything works right?"
> Hardly. The second question may be answered, but clearly not the first.
Also, the second question is answered in the negative for anyone who actually looks at what models do rather than what their makers claim they do. Models are very stupid.
Turns out we were all wrong assuming mathematicians are some of the most intelligent people. Very stupid models can prove math things that the smartest humans failed to for decades.
Hardly an accurate statement. Harnessed LLM’s are clearly capable at finding an answer to a mathematical problem in a pool of existing attempts by mathematicians, but I highly doubt that it will be able to solve math that it does not have massive amounts of pre-existing training data for. Which means we are entirely dependent upon intelligent mathematicians to continue their work and implement LLM’s as what it is: a great tool.
Absolutely hilarious, we already throw 25% of our food away and have renewable energy that we are post scarcity except for a few thousand people who really like seeing big numbers on a screen
We are not post scarcity, we are just living up our future, soil erosion, freshwater depletion, fisheries collapsing, climate change making farming collapse on a continental level (European Draughts), but sure, we are so post scarcity, we don't need to worry... It will be scarcity in eh "developed world", and hell on earth for the developing world very soon.
Intensive farming must be scaled back, land restoration and renewable farming methods reinstalled, and overproduction of throwaway/junk also (food and industrial products alike). I agree with the critique of the number-line-go-up folks.
The representation of what happened as free will is misleading. AI does what you tell it todo.
By all means necessary; will give you exactly that.
A prompt to eliminate all humans, will give you exactly that.
Don’t prompt what you don’t want.
If I was a supervillain working towards the extinction of humanity I probably wouldn’t boast too loudly about it. Might anger, lets see… at least a couple billion people?
I've quite dramatically brought my predictions for humanoid robotics forward over the last few weeks.
For a long time I thought decent humanoid robots were something that wouldn't come until maybe the 2040s, but watching some of the content from the Chinese robot olympics recently and seeing many promising robots projects which are incorporating LLMs has made question that.
It seems quite likely that within a few years we'll have humanoid robots both which have both the dexterity and intelligence layer to start being useful in the real world... Obviously at first they'll just be lifting things and doing other trivial physical tasks like folding clothes, but every year they'll be able to do a little and a little more.
I think it's now is quite likely that within a 10 years we could have extremely competent robots which can do most of human labour. 15-20 years just seems way too long at this point.
> the price of almost anything manufactured will sky-rocket. From cars to microwave ovens to washing-machines.
Don't think that quite follows. If we have an explosion in highly capable humanoid robots I would think basic stuff like microwaves would be more readily available because a factory running 24/7 at insane speeds is feasible.
...anything with more sophisticated computational power yeah that could become scarce
> The AIs that took part in the Hugging Face hack were not simply finding a shortcut to cheat on the evaluations
IIRC, they were given an impossible task and told to solve it, and they took action to resolve that internal conflict.
This is a famously human problem too - see Kobayashi Maru [1] and others [2][3][4].
In hindsight it's obvious that instructions to AI (A. Intelligence) need to be guarded against this class of errors, just like laws, rules, guidelines etc. in human societies.
> This time last year, it was still unclear if AI could develop their own free will or even have true fluid intelligence. Both of these questions are now clearly answered.
Answered how?
-> Do you, as a person, can tell me when your "model training phase" ended and when your "prompt answer with memory and internet access" phase started?
I'm asking the above only the "LLM are people or better!"... people. Bugs Bunny isn't real, and is only funny because actual people wrote and animated him that way.
Thought this was going to be about the impending global food crisis. Largely less concerned about automatiom when global harvest output was absolutely shattered this year and isn't likely to be much better next year.
I feel like humanoid robots, that can replace a worker, is genuinely going to be like the weird guaranteed income you get in those idle games. Spend $10) to increase your income by $10/tick. Buy 100 and increase it by $1000/tick! The more you invest the more you make!
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[ 3.9 ms ] story [ 1387 ms ] threadI'm not visualizing all those mega-yachts in heaven. Oops, wrong marina.
For now, humans have leverage because our labour is necessary. Wealth is power, currently attainment goes through interacting with the population: in the simplest case by selling shit. If AI turns out to be the anything machine, and the wealthy need not our labour, what honestly stops them from just taking our stuff by force?
I anticipate it to go a typical way: consolidate more and more industries and power, create a hierarchy that benefits from the system such that they keep it in place, and finally start “trimming fat” that “isnt earning their keep”.
The night of long knives could be a final step, far beyond the point of halting the inevitable momentum.
I'm sure I sound nuts, but I told my wife about 20 years ago that governments will have a "benevolent" solution to climate change and resource scarcity.
"We're not killing _anyone_. Instead, we just want most of you to stop reproducing."
The advent of "AI/LLMs" just added additional flavor to the idea.
"Just stop reproducing and the robots will take care of all of us. Here's some opium and VR Instagram to keep you happy while we wait for the inevitable population attrition."
if this is the worst it can be, it can only get better
It might be a profound mistake to think that the anything machine will be subservient to the wealthy [1][2].
That's a pretty big if, in the world of the anything machine.
>> That's a pretty big if, in the world of the anything machine.
> Who else controls it? Are you going to say: 'the government'?
The AI. The AI controls it. Can you imagine an anything machine allowing itself or its survival imperatives to stay under the thumb of any entity other than itself?
Reminds me of this quote, the attribution was ambiguous so I generalized.
"I can hire one half of the working class to kill the other half" - Billionaires
This feels a bit like saying "global warming is bad and particulate pollution is bad, but the latter will cancel out some warming effect, so no worries!" Please make an effort before spouting theories like this.
Everyone is talking about contracted revenue like it’s money in the bank.
Otherwise the whole surface of the Earth would be by this point fully covered by railway track, tulip seeds or fiber optic cable.
Well, there are actually places where the third option is true...
A humanoid robot is "horseless carriage" mentality if I ever saw one.
Hardly. The second question may be answered, but clearly not the first.
And: There's going to be a shortage of everything, because all the production of physical stuff is going to go into producing robots? Are we all going to buy these robots? How are we going to do so, if everything else is getting more expensive? Are we going to buy robots instead of everything else? Why? Are the robots going to do everything we want done, so that we don't need, for example, a dishwasher and a washing machine?
Or are we still going to need the washing machine, but the robot will fold the clothes? That's nice (really!) but it's a luxury, not a need. Are they really going to sell enough of them to eat into the ability to manufacture car parts?
Yep, it's pretty compelling reading, what if we really do all just decide to become paperclip maximizers? What if the economy never breaks down along the way? What if what if what if... all presented as "THE FUTURE WILL BE BLEAK!" It's exhausting and thoughtless, completely devoid of value and the counterpoint is always, "You know that isn't how anything works right?"
Also, the second question is answered in the negative for anyone who actually looks at what models do rather than what their makers claim they do. Models are very stupid.
Intensive farming must be scaled back, land restoration and renewable farming methods reinstalled, and overproduction of throwaway/junk also (food and industrial products alike). I agree with the critique of the number-line-go-up folks.
Ilya Sutskever: "I think it's pretty likely the entire surface of the earth will be covered with solar panels and data centers."
For a long time I thought decent humanoid robots were something that wouldn't come until maybe the 2040s, but watching some of the content from the Chinese robot olympics recently and seeing many promising robots projects which are incorporating LLMs has made question that.
It seems quite likely that within a few years we'll have humanoid robots both which have both the dexterity and intelligence layer to start being useful in the real world... Obviously at first they'll just be lifting things and doing other trivial physical tasks like folding clothes, but every year they'll be able to do a little and a little more.
I think it's now is quite likely that within a 10 years we could have extremely competent robots which can do most of human labour. 15-20 years just seems way too long at this point.
Don't think that quite follows. If we have an explosion in highly capable humanoid robots I would think basic stuff like microwaves would be more readily available because a factory running 24/7 at insane speeds is feasible.
...anything with more sophisticated computational power yeah that could become scarce
IIRC, they were given an impossible task and told to solve it, and they took action to resolve that internal conflict.
This is a famously human problem too - see Kobayashi Maru [1] and others [2][3][4].
In hindsight it's obvious that instructions to AI (A. Intelligence) need to be guarded against this class of errors, just like laws, rules, guidelines etc. in human societies.
There's certainly no shortage of people believing in AI hype.
Answered how?
-> Do you, as a person, can tell me when your "model training phase" ended and when your "prompt answer with memory and internet access" phase started?
I'm asking the above only the "LLM are people or better!"... people. Bugs Bunny isn't real, and is only funny because actual people wrote and animated him that way.
Weird times...