When my mother was born, Lindbergh had just crossed the Atlantic.
My grandparents who had left Ireland five years before could only write a letter and wait for it to make its way across the Atlantic to Dublin to Donegal to the village postmistress hopefully to be picked up when one of their families came down on Sunday for church.
When my mother was born, Lindbergh had just crossed the Atlantic.
My grandparents who had left Ireland five years before could only write a letter and wait for it to make its way across the Atlantic to Dublin to Donegal to the village postmistress hopefully to be picked up when one of their families came down on Sunday for church.
There are no antibiotics. There is no running water. There is no electric. Both of their families are still using donkey and cart. When my great uncles got the flu in 1918, my grandmother sat with them until they died - neither one of them had seen 21.
I am the grandchild of people who believed it always gets better if you make it better. I have yet to find that to be untrue.
And you will never die because you have not died yet, by the same logic.
I remember my 20s and 30s. All of them held more hope than now. My children may not even get to grow up because of AGI.
When I was in Bavaria, I briefly stayed at a religious community that barely used electricity. I missed some things but much was beautiful - the feel of community, the nightly gathering by the inn fire, the morning crispness of animals and farmers.
I have heard the saying that life on the body is easier, but easier on the spirit. I find it to be true.
And as you may have guessed, Irish American. I'm pretty sure someone was whispering to me in my crib -- "Welcome to the world, baby girl! Now, let's talk about how you plan a funeral."
Dying is familiar to me.
Again, read science fiction from the 1930s-1950s. There's a great fear of super computers - except what they were talking about was an IBM style machine. You have more computing power in your phone.
Before you worry about AGI, think about the resources it will require. What will generate those resources? If it makes human beings irrelevant, where's their market?
Then remind yourself that the self proclaimed boy genius took a company worth $45B and pretty much burnt it to the ground. If AI is actually going to be taking over, the first thing it will do is make Elon Musk obsolete.
Do you camp? It sounds like you could use some nature.
I am not sure why you are equating Elon with AI - he spent most of 2017 and even now trying to campaign against it.
But the entire point of AGI is a full replacement of humanity, wherein the entire notion of resources can be indicated.
I implore you to keep an open mind, even at 65. Technology was good for the horse until it wasn't; the same could be said of the human. But AGI is predicated on the mimic of humanity and it has already brought a lot of misery with the AI as is and many artists and writers - the best people of humanity, would relate.
Now if you dont care about human extinction, that is another story.
And like many other technologies, I'm not sure the economics are going to work out the way proponents believe they will.
What happens if artists and writers can't make a living doing their craft?
Then they'll find other work.
But if AI is creating new art and new writing, who's the market? Readers won't find anything new -- just rehashes of old plots. AI is already generating garbage books and they're going unread.
Art? Speculators will make a market in AI generated art but the big money wants authentic art.
So now you have art and publishing flooded with dreck that no one really wants.
While the servers are running day and night.
I don't know what the killer app is for AI but I'm pretty sure it's not going to be fiction and art.
I'd be more worried if I were a game designer.
And if it creates new sounds or a new scale, musicians might also have to look for new jobs.
This is not how it works. You can replace a lot of what you said with "authentic food" and note the dominance of "highly palatable food" made by mechanization often with toxic chemicals as well as the general negative externalities like pollution and microplastics.
Now update specifically on AGI as a labor replacement for the human and the idea of the market matters much less. Far from being GIGO, synthetic data is heavily used now.
Look up AlphaGo if you feel that synthetic data has no use.
Who buys the food? If human beings don't have access to funds, what are they buying the food with?
If there is no market for food, why are they making it?
What product can AI produce which will support the cost of AI but does not require people to purchase or use it?
Money is a marker for human economic activity. Sometimes, like in modern financial scams, that activity is basically churning the cream at the top.
But without markets (and no, I don't just mean the stock market) there is no wealth. And without human beings, there are no markets.
If supervillain trillionaires could have created a world that didn't depend on other humans, they'd fold up their companies and buy islands. But their power is dependent on their wealth and their wealth is dependent on human economic activity.
AI could be cosmic -- the way personal cars were cosmic. But it will need its own economic purpose to sustain its use of resources.
Writing novels and cheap term papers isn't going to cut it.
In the 1960s, the assumption is that in the future, people will have a computer terminal in their homes and offices which they will use to access an IBM super computer in some enormous facility miles away.
Because no one will ever be able to afford an IBM mainframe except the government or the Fortune 100.
But the economics don't work for kids who want to hack so Gates and Woz and Jobs and a hundred other hobbyists create a small computer where the economics do work.
It's not that I want to be the Pollyanna here. In many ways, because I don't trust human beings to make sensible decisions, I'm more worried about gene editing. But long term, I don't see how destroying the human race makes a profit.
Worse?
When my mother was born, Lindbergh had just crossed the Atlantic.
My grandparents who had left Ireland five years before could only write a letter and wait for it to make its way across the Atlantic to Dublin to Donegal to the village postmistress hopefully to be picked up when one of their families came down on Sunday for church.
There are no antibiotics. There is no running water. There is no electric. Both of their families are still using donkey and cart. When my great uncles got the flu in 1918, my grandmother sat with them until they died - neither one of them had seen 21.
I am the grandchild of people who believed it always gets better if you make it better. I have yet to find that to be untrue.
And you will never die because you have not died yet, by the same logic.
I remember my 20s and 30s. All of them held more hope than now. My children may not even get to grow up because of AGI.
When I was in Bavaria, I briefly stayed at a religious community that barely used electricity. I missed some things but much was beautiful - the feel of community, the nightly gathering by the inn fire, the morning crispness of animals and farmers.
I have heard the saying that life on the body is easier, but easier on the spirit. I find it to be true.
Sean, I'm 65.
And as you may have guessed, Irish American. I'm pretty sure someone was whispering to me in my crib -- "Welcome to the world, baby girl! Now, let's talk about how you plan a funeral."
Dying is familiar to me.
Again, read science fiction from the 1930s-1950s. There's a great fear of super computers - except what they were talking about was an IBM style machine. You have more computing power in your phone.
Before you worry about AGI, think about the resources it will require. What will generate those resources? If it makes human beings irrelevant, where's their market?
Then remind yourself that the self proclaimed boy genius took a company worth $45B and pretty much burnt it to the ground. If AI is actually going to be taking over, the first thing it will do is make Elon Musk obsolete.
Do you camp? It sounds like you could use some nature.
I am not sure why you are equating Elon with AI - he spent most of 2017 and even now trying to campaign against it.
But the entire point of AGI is a full replacement of humanity, wherein the entire notion of resources can be indicated.
I implore you to keep an open mind, even at 65. Technology was good for the horse until it wasn't; the same could be said of the human. But AGI is predicated on the mimic of humanity and it has already brought a lot of misery with the AI as is and many artists and writers - the best people of humanity, would relate.
Now if you dont care about human extinction, that is another story.
Peace.
AI has s a GIGO problem.
It is a resource hog.
And like many other technologies, I'm not sure the economics are going to work out the way proponents believe they will.
What happens if artists and writers can't make a living doing their craft?
Then they'll find other work.
But if AI is creating new art and new writing, who's the market? Readers won't find anything new -- just rehashes of old plots. AI is already generating garbage books and they're going unread.
Art? Speculators will make a market in AI generated art but the big money wants authentic art.
So now you have art and publishing flooded with dreck that no one really wants.
While the servers are running day and night.
I don't know what the killer app is for AI but I'm pretty sure it's not going to be fiction and art.
I'd be more worried if I were a game designer.
And if it creates new sounds or a new scale, musicians might also have to look for new jobs.
This is not how it works. You can replace a lot of what you said with "authentic food" and note the dominance of "highly palatable food" made by mechanization often with toxic chemicals as well as the general negative externalities like pollution and microplastics.
Now update specifically on AGI as a labor replacement for the human and the idea of the market matters much less. Far from being GIGO, synthetic data is heavily used now.
Look up AlphaGo if you feel that synthetic data has no use.
https://syncedreview.com/2024/07/01/achieving-8x-performance-gains-with-reinforcement-learning-on-synthetic-data-in-large-language-models/
Its good to keep an open mind. Things can get worse. And I neither wish my children to die, or to be useless.
Let's replace it with food.
Who buys the food? If human beings don't have access to funds, what are they buying the food with?
If there is no market for food, why are they making it?
What product can AI produce which will support the cost of AI but does not require people to purchase or use it?
Money is a marker for human economic activity. Sometimes, like in modern financial scams, that activity is basically churning the cream at the top.
But without markets (and no, I don't just mean the stock market) there is no wealth. And without human beings, there are no markets.
If supervillain trillionaires could have created a world that didn't depend on other humans, they'd fold up their companies and buy islands. But their power is dependent on their wealth and their wealth is dependent on human economic activity.
AI could be cosmic -- the way personal cars were cosmic. But it will need its own economic purpose to sustain its use of resources.
Writing novels and cheap term papers isn't going to cut it.
The problem in all of this is that you keep assuming humans will matter. You need to feel the AGI.
I don't actually assume humans will matter.
I assume money will matter.
In the 1960s, the assumption is that in the future, people will have a computer terminal in their homes and offices which they will use to access an IBM super computer in some enormous facility miles away.
Because no one will ever be able to afford an IBM mainframe except the government or the Fortune 100.
But the economics don't work for kids who want to hack so Gates and Woz and Jobs and a hundred other hobbyists create a small computer where the economics do work.
It's not that I want to be the Pollyanna here. In many ways, because I don't trust human beings to make sensible decisions, I'm more worried about gene editing. But long term, I don't see how destroying the human race makes a profit.
And the guys funding this like profits.
You are going in the right direction. Now why does money matter? Because it is power to affect the world.
And if you create AI that can affect the world via prediction and robots, you get power right away.
The incentives do not align well for humanity, my friend
Kings had power.
Merchants had money.
Who won that debate?