AGI isn't going to spawn out of nothing, it might end up being the AI that integrates with all the sub-AI's.

Shit's going to get weird.

It feels like people are arguing that electricity isn't useful unless your blender, electric mixer and table saw are sentient.

AI as an unwieldly tool is still way more useful, even if it's as dumb as your toaster it can still do things 100x faster than before which is going to revolutionize humanity.

And all those pictures of your kids Grandma emailed you.

But you kept all the marketing emails about "Spring Sale 2017!"

(damn it, my brain did the "6 years ago" quick math and came up with 2014. 2017 wasn't 6 years ago, was it?)

I don't think we can out-think the singularity. Just like a single human can't out-spin a ceiling fan, the singularity will be fast enough to be beyond humans containment attempts.

What happens next though? I guess we can try to build 'friendly' AI's that tend toward not ending society, but I don't think true containment can happen.

I think it's much less.

Give me a piece of graph paper, laid out like the game Battleship.

Now, you want me to draw all the roads around your house. You could tell me to draw a road that goes through A1, A2, A3, A4, A5. But what if your road goes all the way to 100, you'd quickly switch to "Draw a road from A1 to A100"

I think this is where you can cut corners with the code generation as well.

"Make me a person object with a name and age. They can have friends who are also people" "Store this in a database that has scaling and load balancing based on X parameters"

I think the number of tokens required to generate software are much lower than you'd expect - but having the LLM understand the previous context and tailor it's response to what was previously generated would need to change from what we see today.

Handmade by humans. AI free spaces. Handcrafted without AI assistance. Made by humans for humans. Made with love not silicone.

"Did you make that, or is it a Rec?" short for recreation

I think we'll have a word or shorthand for AI generated stuff since there will be so much of it.

Like how Text is a verb or Google is a verb, we'll have a quick way to say something is AI vs Human generated.

Maybe a focus on doing things with real humans is too much, but I think non-AI interactions will be valued higher. If I mailed you a handwritten letter you'd value that more than this comment or even a personal email.

Reddittors are likely to embrace the full digital spectrum of AI, but I don't think that sentiment is universal. As Styx said in their song "Domo Arigato" (Mr. Roboto) in 1983...

"Machines to save our lives; machines dehumanize."

In the 1920's as recorded music became popular, the musicians protested as, in all the previous years, music was only ever heard if a human played it for you. Music used to always be a social event, you needed to be skilled yourself, or have skilled friends or others to play it for you, otherwise you'd never hear music.

Hopeful thoughts.

AI can speak protein coding languages. Sample your blood and generate the protien structure that kills only your cancer. Or fixes your degenerative disease. Or improves photosynthesis to a level where we can sequester carbon out of the atmosphere, and make it into wood or hack algea to make fuel for us so that we only burn atmospheric carbon and half global warming.

When enough jobs are eliminated governments are forced to implement universal basic income to keep society stable. You will have a place to live and food to eat. AI will keep you endlessly entertained and people using AI to generate all forms of media will allow you to listen to "new" Beatles songs on demand.

Less hopeful thoughts.

AI will be used as a propaganda generator. I read the liked tweets of a Christian pastor I knew. 15 minute cities - so a city that has everything you need, within a 15 minute walk - are a government control plot.

That level of thinking won't go away, pushback on improving society for "the others" won't be accepted by everyone. Humans are going to human, the most selfish among us are going to continue to make sure they get theirs and can play their power games over others.

Either way, it's going to get weird. Today we have a shared, global media environment (for better or worse). We all watch the World Cup of soccer, we watch marvel movies. When you can generate a custom marvel movie faster than I can type all this, we'll lose those connections between you and the stranger at the grocery store.

Humanity "survived" the taming of electricity. Jobs changed, new places were created, new jobs were made, new art, new foods, new objects. I think AI is of the scale of electricity being tamed, but will happen on a month's to years timescale instead of decades it took to build out the electrical infront.

The next society level changes after AI will happen at an even faster speed. Maybe AI will become sentient, or, it will be harmful while not being intelligent, it will just have or take control of systems that humanity relies on. An AI that can do stock trades vs a competing AI will have unintended consequences.

If we can't easily predict what poem will come out if ChatGPT, how can we predict what it will do when AI is in control of something more important.

The world is going to get weird.

Everyone will make their own culture, or cultures will develop that don't relate to any others - at least not in the same social structure rules that exist.

It will be like how North American TV culture and Japanese Anime is wildly different in their story telling and art styles.

AI generated art, AI generated stories, all custom made on your phone.

Hopefully a pushback of doing real things with real people will emerge.

Gorgon - Tony Hoagland

Now that you need your prescription glasses to see the stars

and now that the telemarketers know your preference to sexual positions

Now that corporations run the government

and move over land like giant cloud formations

Now that the human family has turned out to be a conspiracy against the planet

Now that it’s hard to cast stones

without hitting a cell phone tower that will show up later on your bill

Now that you know you are neither innocent, nor powerful,

not a charter in a book;

You have arrived at the edge of the world

where the information wind howls incessantly

and you stand in your armor made of irony

with your sward of good intentions raised—

The world is a Gorgon.

It holds up its thousand ugly heads with their thousand writhing visages

Death or madness to look at too long

but your job is not to conquer it;

not to provide entertaining repartee,

not to revile yourself in shame.

Your job is to stay calm

Your job is to watch and take notes

To go on looking

Your job is to not be turned into stone.

The British Monarchy is an old business that just integrated itself so much that it seems part of a countries fabric.

Ya, I think that's it. Thanks!

There's a scenario I've read where AI takes over the global stock markets - not directly intentionally though. They instruct the AI to make fabric as cheap as possible (or some product, I can't remember which).

The AI learns where fabric comes from and starts to take over the needed resources so that it can optimize it's fabric - but it eventually just grows and grows until it 'attacks' the entire global market to achieve it's goal of making cheaper fabric....

Anyone know what I'm talking about?

Electricity just got invented...

Was there a point to being a woodworker or carpenter after electricity was invented?

Was there a point to being a baker after electricity was invented?

Was there a point to being a factory assembly worker after electricity was invented?

Was there a point to being a clothing tailor after electricity was invented?

---

Electricity can do 'unlimited' work. So can AI. What AI needs is a human to guide it, explain what other humans want, and restrict it from it's 'unlimitedness' into a product that meets a need.

AI is a tool, and we'll still need humans who can wield that tool. We'll need to learn how to use it best, but the 'human who can use a tool and make something' skill will still be useful.

Thought Experiment:

Can humanity find purpose in a world where electricity is more capable than humans?

AI is electricity.

We live with electricity that can do certain things faster and better than we can.

We'll live with AI that can do certain things faster and better than we can.

Maybe that's why ChatGPT isn't allowed on the internet.

ChatGPT feeding Dall-e image prompts would be a fountain of AI shit spreading across the internet.

We convinced sand, rocks and electricity to write an 'ok' story.

Louis CK Everything Is Amazing And Nobody Is Happy

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nUBtKNzoKZ4

I mean, you can't blend as fast as the blender in your kitchen. You can do the same motion and number of repetitions, but the machine is much better than you at it.

I think we're at the same step in the industrial/data revolution.

Humans CAN do things, but AI can do them much quicker and faster.

A blender still needs human input, and a human to decide what and when to blend something.

A blender or Roomba wasn't envisioned when electric appliances started to be invented, maybe the world will be a better place with AI tools that we can't envision yet? Here's hoping.

---

AI assisted chemistry so that we can refine oil out of the atmosphere?

AI modified plants/photosynthesis to create oil/sugars/plastic out of the atmosphere?

We already have AI that can model proteins folding sequences, and protein language is just another thing for the language models to learn. Here's hoping for a better world.

December 2022 to today has been insane.

Insane doesn't cover it. Neither does mind-blowing....

AI, I need a new word for your progress...

General AI is a mountain range.

From far away it's easy to point at it and say 'that's it!'

As you get closer though it gets harder and harder to determine when you're actually on or at the top of the mountain, because you're surrounded by other smaller mountains.

I think the same will happen with AI. We're obsessed with the only 3-5 AI's currently available, but by the end of the year there will be multiple AI's doing multiple things very very well.

The AI landscape is going to change, and we'll be so surrounded by AI's that it will be hard to determine which one, by itself, becomes the general AI of our dreams.

Maybe the General AI is just one that knows which sub-AI model is best for the task you request and farms it out to that one in particular? Kind of like a general contractor and sub-contractors when you do home renovations..

All our systems that a slow human in the process are ripe for AI. AI probably won't take over completely but if AI can do the job 10 to 100x faster, the number of people you need to do a job shrinks dramatically.

Ya, the level of education we give our kids probably isn't required anymore just like we didn't always have these schooling systems setup to the levels the exist at today.

This sounds like a ChatGPT response.

Good scenario: AI allows humans to focus on enjoyment of life and leisure activities while AI handles the information and physical requirements of life.

Bad scenario: Someone or some group commandeers AI to enslave, abuse, harass, eliminate(?) vast swathes of humanity to preserve the resources for themselves. What if a middle-eastern country no longer needs imported workers and deports them. What do we do if 5, 10, 15, 20 percent of knowledge-based workers - globally - are no longer required (or we only need 1-2 percent to do the job that's done by 20% today...)

Given humanities past, the bad scenario seems more likely.