Just like all the people who were worried about the nuclear bomb earlier in this age: the thing to do is to get on with living.
How about we try really, really hard to just not build the nuclear bomb (powerful AI)? Or make sure it will at least not explode in our faces on its own? Maybe that would help slightly with the whole “get on with living” thing.
It helps the rich and power entrench their power, so nah. Caution will not be heeded.
Yeah, really.
This person doesn’t realize how public pressure made nuclear disarmament and transparent inspections happen.
Public pressure doesn’t seem to mean anything to the people in power anymore. Who cares if you’re deeply unpopular if you can ride off into the sunset with millions (or billions) in stolen wealth?
They can ride into the sunset, but there’s more of us waiting in the night to correct this imbalance.
I’ll believe in consequences for american fascists when I start seeing them
Me too, man. Me too.
This is not about “technology itself.”
Just a guy reminiscing (with many words) about his long-gone youth, and probably facing a midlife crisis soon.
It seems to be just that consumer tech doesn’t evolve like it used to. It was insane how things went from the late nineteenth century to modern era, but lots of signs of slowing down.
While computer tech is going, it’s now only doing so by scaling behind home electrical capacity. The high end server chips are just cranking the wattage because they can’t improve within a more reasonable power envelope anymore. A 2026 laptop that replaced a 2020 laptop that was broken wasn’t really significantly faster. In 2000, a new PC would have been more than 10 fold faster than a 6 year old PC.
Tech progresses, (e.g. just got a phone with a solid state battery that’s crazy better than battery behavior before), it’s just some of the biggest consumer electronics things are hitting physics and things we are used to advancing are just flattening out.
Right? If it weren’t for the TPM I’d be just as happy running a machine I bought in 2018. It’s not the performance making the difference.
I disagree. In both the consumer electronics world and even in the world of super nerds of IT, there is a very distinct, palpable loss of the joy that accompanies new technologies. And I’m not reaching back to the late 90’s either. The difference between just 10 years ago and today is nuts. And it’s felt not just by me but also younger people just entering the workforce.
Holy shit, this came right from my brain. I think about this all the time.
CPU clock speed topped out around 4 - 5Ghz years ago. CPUs are all going multi core; hard work has moved to GPU or specialized ASIC.
Yes, phones and consumer gadgets are becoming “hot water” (at least for the affluent West). From that, he seemingly concludes that technology itself has no room for growth and development? I don’t quite follow his reasoning, but I notice a, dare I say, load-bearing sentence:
As it becomes more and more clear that these machines are nothing like conscious people, that they don’t do runaway self-improvement, and that they won’t foment the apocalypse, […]
Questions of consciousness aside, I don’t see how you can look at the developments of the last few years and conclude that AI is over, and that self-improvement is tapering off. To me, that’s still very much an unknown, and the latest model releases makes me lean more exponential than sigmoidal.
(I don’t particularly want to be right here, since I see the chances of us getting the Culture as rather slim 🖇️)
It’s not that it won’t improve, but it isn’t going to cause a runaway “singularity” event.
Like the drama around the models “escaping” and “amazing hacks” have turned out to be something, but not nearly what people were afraid it was going to be.
A lot of the fundamental limitations have remained, and we are figuring out the scenarios where those limitations are fine or there is a way to create a feedback mechanism to try to reroll the AI until it passes. Lots of success there, but the fundamental disconnects are still there, just not important for the task at hand or can be worked around.
That might very well be, and would probably be the best outcome we can hope for. I guess we’ll see the shape of the curve in the next year-ish - if recursive self-improvement hasn’t come into play for real by then, I can’t see how the current investment level is defensible (but I’m not sure I see that now, so who knows)
