commonturtle

The simple answer: those companies aren't evil. They're not selling your data, or bringing the financial system down, or emptying the wallets of the poor. They're not god's gift to mankind or finding the cure to pancreatic cancer either. They're just fine.

> simply because that's also not how humans write novels.

Planes don't fly by flapping their wings either. It's totally possible we will construct a super capable artificial system that only vaguely resembles the human brain.

Personally I think if we managed to create a 10 times more sophisticated GPT-3 (instead of 2048 tokens it looked back 10k+ tokens) we might get pretty close to a novel writing AI.

Really curious to see what comes out of this.

Very inspiring. And here I am at the age of 28, wondering if I'm too old to get a PhD.

Yup that's a good recommendation. I've read it and some of the AI Safety work that a small portion of the AI community is working on. At the moment there seems no reason to believe that we can solve this.

This is simultaneously amazing and depressing, like watching someone set off a hydrogen bomb for the first time and marveling at the mushroom cloud it creates.

I really find it hard to understand why people are optimistic about the impact AI will have on our future.

The pace of improvement in AI has been really fast over the last two decades, and I don't feel like it's a good thing. Compare the best text generator models from 10 years ago with GPT-3. Now do the same for image generators. Now project these improvements 20 years into the future. The amount of investment this work is getting grows with every such breakthrough. It seems likely to me we will figure out general-purpose human-level AI in a few decades.

And what then? There are so many ways this could turn into a dystopian future.

Imagine for example huge mostly-ML operated drone armies, tens of millions strong, that only need a small number of humans to supervise them. Terrified yet? What happens to democracy when power doesn't need to flow through a large number of people? When a dozen people and a few million armed drones can oppress a hundred million people?

If there's even a 5% chance of such an outcome (personally I think it's higher), then we should be taking it seriously.

Human's want health insurance and 40 hours work-weeks. The super-smart AGI that will exist 20 years from now won't.

> You'll still need humans to make anything novel or interesting, and companies will still need to hire engineers to work on valuable problems that are unique to their business.

Give it 10 years :) GPT-10 will probably be able to replace a sizeable proportion of today's programmers. What will GPT-20 be able to do?

Yes he's a little more free-market than I am. But I like that he's at least willing to consider the other side's position and invites guests who don't agree with his positions often.

Machiavelli's The Prince :)

EconTalk is my current favorite. Around 700 episodes since 2006 on a variety of subjects: education, healthcare, public debt, etc. The host dives quite deep into each subject and asks the interviewees tough questions. I always feel like I've learnt something from each episode.

Apps and the associated infrastructure (driver background checks, payments processing, customer support, etc.) are much harder to build than they look. I'm willing to bet against a worker-owned app taking >= 10% of Uber and Lyft market-share in >= 10 mid-size American cities.

German tech salaries are quite low compared to US and UK last time I checked.