Maybe this is tongue-in-cheek, but in case it's not.
No, nobody does. Consider that a person in their lifetime could have seen the Wright Brothers first flight in 1903, then the first jet engine in 1939, then commercial jet travel in the 1950s. That is an amazing 50 years for air travel. If you were living in 1950 and were to extrapolate where air travel would be by 2026, you would think we would be taking routine trips to Mars. Instead what we got was TSA, cramped seats, and better safety. But "progress" leveled off dramatically. Commercial air flight has looked pretty much the same for my entire life.
We have no idea how far transformers and LLMs will take us. It certainly isn't obvious where this is going.
The parent comment could be interpreted as frustration from a lack of imagination about how weird the future could be.
Perhaps we're not at the recursive self improvement yet, but it seems increasingly naive to believe that it isn't possible.
Also, I think you've set up a straw man. I haven't seen anyone arguing that this future isn't possible. What I see is resistance to the idea that we can have any certainty about the future by drawing a straight line from the past.
We think about starships and humans mining Mars, and it'll probably be nothing like that. It might just be humanoids or AI drones that actually end up colonizing the solar system, with the humans never really leaving earth except as mind uploads...
But at the end of the day, things are changing. Things are accelerating. And our mental models of what works or doesn't work will almost certainly break. I don't fear the future, nor do I project any confidence on what that's going to look like, but I know I want to be part of it.
I think you're right, my bad.
> What I see is resistance to the idea that we can have any certainty about the future by drawing a straight line from the past.
I'm arguing that if recursive self improvement happens, that the trend line will be reasonably predictable. (and that we are close enough to RSI that we should take this possibility seriously).
I guess it's a matter of education. People with a mathematics or computer science background know that unless the dynamics of a process are known to be linear, extrapolation is usually wrong. Since we don't know that the dynamics here are linear and have every reason to believe they aren't, extrpolation is unlikely to teach us anything valuable.
What reason? To me recursive self improvement seems credible, it's just a question of when. It seems obvious that given RSI, trend lines will be at least linear.
The disagreement could just be about if RSI is currently meaningfully happening, but that seems very difficult to tell given the lack of public data.
It's certainly plausible that improvements will continue, but the pace is completely unpredictable. It's also plausible that the training material is polluted and progress will not continue. I'm just saying that predicting the rate of technological progress is not easy, and historically, it's rarely been smooth in the long run.
There are many complicating technical factors, but also non-technical ones. Technological improvement in the short term will not necessarily yield commensurate economic gains, in which case, investment may not grow enough to sustain the progress.
As for the recursive part, currently it's either hypothetical or based on too few data points. Not saying it won't happen, but it's far from being the only plausible trajectory.
> Not saying it won't happen, but it's far from being the only plausible trajectory.
But if it does happen, then wouldn't expected outcome be at least linear?
I don't have any belief on the matter, but my scepticism isn't necessarily about RSI itself, but about how much it would matter even if it does happen soon. Too many things are limited by lack of resources that no brain in a jar can obtain. And if such a brain in a jar itself is very expensive to operate, it may not be easy for it to justify its existence. My point is that the technical aspect is uncertain, but it is also only a part of a larger system that's has many sources of uncertainty.
So RSI toward what prompted goal? Then, how can you be so sure that reaching that goal looks like the straight line you envision?
edit: more accurately, it's about incentives. We generally understand that encoding a goal in a complex system is about aligning incentives. So now it's the incentives that are proxies for intended outcomes. But as mentioned, we have a growing body of evidence for just how bad we are at aligning incentives with intended outcomes. And it makes sense because complex systems are not a straight line.
> how can you be so sure that reaching that goal looks like the straight line you envision?
Because the thing pursuing the goal would be able to improve it's ability to pursue the goal. Doesn't that follow from the premise of RSI?
> we have a growing body of evidence for just how bad we are at aligning incentives with intended outcomes.
We are terrible at it! I don't think that will stop us letting something rip in some unknowable direction (with unintended outcomes). I hope that aligned incentives are a prerequisite, but it seems increasingly likely that they are not.
But not necessarily without needing a huge amount of resources. It is a mathematical certainty that no intelligence can solve computationally intractable problems (including forecasting the weather, or the economy) without access to resources we simply don't have.
one end is luddites nothing to see here, and the other end is omg humanity is cooked because programming is solved! and consciousness is coding so -> gg
yes there’s a wide surface of emergent behavior we haven’t fully explored, but why do you get the pass to draw a straight line to a conclusion? the naysayers are doing the same thing.
all things decay on a curve. pretty much all things in life are not modeled by a straight line.
so you’re saying no theres still more UP. sure, but that’s a tale as old as time. when where and how much in how long is the reality piece.
We are already in the singularity. We’ve always been. It just gets faster at each step.
Human advancement is a story we tell ourselves. Agree. That it in any way looks like a straight line is just not true. If nothing else, it looks coherent after the fact... because it's an extremely lossy story our limited brains can comprehend. But it's not reality. No entity in the known Universe "comprehends" the march of progress. They weren't there when it started. So I just don't know what we're talking about anymore.
We’ve seen a lot of claims over the years substituting one metric (amount of code written) for another (useful code produced) to justify that AI are getting “better”. We just want a proper definition of better.
No, you don't have trends backing your claims that we are going to add 10,000 IQ points to the average person. Anymore than the S&P 500 is going to 100x in a decade years.
Presumably there are a lot of use cases that are essentially “solved” where more powerful models won’t matter.
You seem to be implying that there was nothing before. Obviously not true.
“AI may be a tool and add 50 IQ points to a 100 IQ person today but what happens when its adding 10000 IQ points.”
What is even IQ? What if it adds 50 now, 25 next month, 12.5 the month after, etc. You should check out Zeno.
The only thing we can do is look at the current state of things, and we still have the same problems we've always had with these models, they need proper direction and input.
> [...] we are living in a society [that is out] virtually to satisfy and gratify each and every human need, except for one need, the most basic and fundamental need operant in man, the need for meaning.
https://youtu.be/GTbliwS0gS4?t=153
Maybe the Amish had it right, after all.
The next paradigm will be similar. It might seem meaningless to us. For example, most of our identity is tied to our jobs in our current society. This will have to change. What does that look like? Do we create content and share our art? Do followers and attention become the new currency?
Yes. If it looks like 10000 iq is possible, then money will be thrown at whoever is most likely to achieve it first, and whoever has the most intelligent models right now strongly predicts who will be first.
This is driven by the belief that whoever gets to 10000 iq first will likely dominate the majority of all economic activity, since it will be more efficient to trade with them than with some less efficient (dumber).
This does not depend on traditional economic demand, at some point this becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Instead I can spend far less to use my 200 iq machine that already exceeds everything I could ever want. Im not ever going to personally fund a war of intellegence against other intellegences so anything more is of marginal value. The same reason I don't own a 2,000 horsepower truck or tractor, there are almost no uses for me to want it.
That's the fun part, there is none (in the traditional way of people buying things at least).
> Why would I invest my earning into sustaining a machine that ideally is extracting every cent possible without leeway and funneling it up the pyramid.
You shouldn't! Unfortunately everyone acting in their own self interest still results in this getting funded, since if such a machine were to exist, would it not be better to have a share of it?
I agree with your perspective! I just don't think that, as a species, we have a good track record of saying no to the existence of 2000hp trucks with ALMOST no use.
Take a step back and really take a look at what's going on. You are not thinking clearly.
(That posters can’t tell op is a low effort shitpost built on memes is concerning.)