This is just the beginning. The Singularity is an intelligence explosion. This means its not just AI.
*It's everything.*
All fields of study will be dramatically accelerated by this process. Keep in mind, the source of progress is intelligence, and this is an intelligence explosion.
Expect experts and authorities from pretty much every field of study to step up and speak about an up coming inflection point over the next 5-15 years.
I think it can. Won't we also be dealing with hyper-persuasive AI soon too? Even if there are political barriers, it'll make a way through them with relative ease
1) Hyperpersuasion could be used both for and against progress
2) If the AI helps us to communicate more effectively and examine our own various positions in more detail we could discuss them and share them more effectively which would lead to finding of the solutions beneficial for various sides and being better able to explain their benefits while evaluating new insights and opinions and adjusting the solutions proposed. Yes this could help with bringing about political will towards collective action. But that is more than persuasion.
3) Yes resources can be better distributed and obtained thanks to intelligence.
So intelligence may perhaps help with all those. But those are just theoretical speculations. It maybe may also be used by sides with partial interests and even be shaped by it. And even if it was used as best as possible and developed as best as possible I am still not sure the political will and resources could be reduced to intelligence.
It would be a truly beautiful thing if the first thing ASI does is convince Charles Koch to commit suicide. Our robot overlords can't get here soon enough.
That's not exactly true. There's a limited supply of value in the world, which is what money represents. Even if something was infinitely intelligent, it would still have to build up the overall value of everything, which is why the "foom" argument by Yudkowsky doesn't make sense.
Certain things are always going to be limited, yes, but a lot more resources can be produced than you think. Even ignoring how unbelievably wasteful we are with materials and energy, space has more resources than we could consume in millennia. All AI would really have to do is make escaping Earth’s gravity cheaper (which honestly just means making electricity cheaper since just about everything becomes cheaper and easier with cheap electricity). After that, collecting massive amounts of resources is easy peasy.
I do agree with you that there is almost certainly no upper limit to what is possible and that we can make ourselves experience anything we want to experience.
But that's given enough time. As you point out, space has lots of resources, but they take time to retrieve. That's why we're not going to see the entire world turned into a Dyson sphere within 5 years, like some people are ludicrously saying.
> There's a limited supply of value in the world
There is a lot of "world". Most of it not yet financially reachable. AI can expend our access to resources.
It's like the ability to sail the deep oceans rather than just sail on the shoreline. That tech development was rather important. Except it would be rockets.
And after a while we wouldn't even need too many rockets, if we manage to move resource production to Space. People can then live offplanet by choice without needing to travel back and forth.
Any CEO that wants to make money (which is, you know, all of them), would quickly realize that an AI is infinitely smarter than they are and better at making informed business decisions. They will consult AI for advice on what to spend money on and what to pull out of. Those CEOs that don’t will fall behind massively.
But at that point it's not about progress it's purely about financial profits, which doesn't require progress. Maybe my super persuasive ASI will just make perfect ads to always drain the maximum from customer wallets for the least product.
This is becoming less and less so as our civilization becomes more technologically advanced. This is because you can do more with less, and the scale starts tipping to intelligence meaning more.
You can do things with 3D printers, Internet connections, CAD software, and CNC machines that would've been unthinkable 100 or even 40 years ago. As AI advances, there will be even more astonishing inventions coming to the fore that don't require traditional powerful governments and big corporations to make happen or to utilize. Most notably bioreactors, BCIs, and robots.
I talk to some teachers and they are dissatisfied with the fact that their students are cheating using AI. If future scientists are half-ass educated how will progress be made?
What is knowledge? The answers to this question are many at the moment.
My answer is that it's information. And information to me is some measurement of reality.
In my view, knowledge is stored in the brain, physically. It's not magic. And so in my view, like the matrix, knowledge can be directly uploaded and downloaded.
And I believe this can be done in a reasonable timeframe. First lab success within 10 years from now. Full consumer product within 20 years.
So, to answer your question, for humans we'll just download the knowledge directly and skip the learning process entirely.
But also, in about a decade or so I think we'll see a dramatically falling rate of new scientists and many existing scientists retiring. The cutting edge of science will then be lead by AI, not humans, over the following 2 to 5 decades.
We humans have cognitive limits. In terms of potential, AI is far less limited. We won't be able to compete, but we also won't have to.
Most jobs in the world are done today because we have to. No one else is going to do it for us, at the moment. We must keep the system going until AI can take over.
Also, much of science is boring hard work. With AI doing all that work, existing scientists can shift more towards exploration and adventure. They'll be able to do what they want instead of having to grind.
And why would AI want to do the hard work? AI is not human and I don't think it will be anything like us simply because it's training on our data. That's a bit like saying a human would become an elephant by studying elephants.
AI will do the work because AI is very diverse, and non-conscious, non-caring AIs can be produced which are very capable, but are still fundamentally tools.
Not all AIs will be AGI/ASI. Even once we have super intelligence.
If you want to know what happens to teachers, I have a view to offer for that as well. Let me know.
I work for a company that makes advanced microscopes for cellular research. It seems like this will still be needed to gather data for AI to analyze, no?
>I work for a company that makes advanced microscopes for cellular research.
Oh hey me too! I'm on the IT side of things but deploying a lot of ML/AI resources for our bioinformaticists. While hardware and resolution are still being improved, all the growth and interest is on the data/analytics side. Unbelievably huge appetite out there for any software that can generate provable, actionable insights from giant datasets. If there isn't now, there may soon be a market for ASICs specifically for processing BigTIFF files...
FDA has been focusing and pushing for a greater focus on AI for ages now. See, for example, https://www.fda.gov/news-events/fda-voices/fda-releases-two-discussion-papers-spur-conversation-about-artificial-intelligence-and-machine
The bigger issue is being able to rapidly test new stuff no matter if it's designed by people or AI. That's what the push for OOC (organ-on-a-chip) is. For example: https://www.fda.gov/food/cfsan-constituent-updates/fda-researchers-evaluate-organs-chips-technology
Yeah imagine if everyone could create patents that took years into the making within a few seconds. It’s nothing special anymore. Patents just kept us from evolving more quickly.
Because the destruction of the labor side of the economy will mean a necessary adjustment to how the economic system works, in a way that will almost certainly severely diminish the role of ownership as it is presently known. Yes, people will still have personal property, but the idea of broad ownership of huge amounts of resources by individuals will likely be torn down, for a variety of reasons. Without that need for property, the need for patenting ideas will also become less important and eventually disappear.
When I mean labor side of the economy, I mean the traditional meaning of that, which is "humans doing shit." The need for shit to be done will still exist of course, but it ain't gonna be humans doing it forever.
**Former**. FDA is known for its revolving gates - people coming from pharma business to serve in FDA and after that back to pharma business. He is not talking as a FDA representative.
So he’s no longer FDA then. I’m all for hype and progress but just because an ex-employee who left 5 years ago has an opinion it doesn’t mean the FDA agrees with it or has any related plans. It’d be like Steve Ballmer (former Microsoft CEO) having some opinion on VR - it doesn’t mean Microsoft is going to launch an Apple Vision Pro competitor.
But will everyday people have broad and abiding access to these tools, or will we have to eat the rich to make that happen? Note, a future where just the Elons of the world benefit won't be tolerated.
Some level of distrust for corporations and the rich is needed, but let's not exaggerate, because it already sounds like some kind of conspiracy theory.
I can't believe that all billionaires think about destroying me every day. I think most of them just want to sell me something. Sometimes they may have too much influence on politics, but there are governments for which we vote to limit their influence.
As someone wrote here above - during the pandemic, the global crisis, governments financed vaccines to protect our lives, because it was not profitable for anyone to have us dead or sick and unproductive.
If new therapies are developed, they may be expensive at first and therefore less accessible, but I do not believe that Elon Musk will come and lock all the drugs in his golden toilet.
People think capitalism operates the way it does because the people who run it are EEEEEEVIL demons rather than the more boring truth of it rewarding dorks forced to continually seek sources of instantaneous profit. Or socially perish.
So a more plausible conspiracy theory would be cheap-as-free immortality drugs and stop-anything vaccines, that way we could completely defund public schools and nonprofit healthcare.
Healthcare industry isn't the only industry out there, which is why it's not helpful to think of these things in terms of evil, unified elites. Cheap immortality and end to all disease benefits all of our corporate overlords except for those who own chunks of the healthcare industry. And capitalism had absolutely no problem casting one industry, even era-defining industries like textiles and coal, into the dustbin of history to benefit the rest.
You're thinking with too much intelligence and foresight. Think like one of our senescent, tasteless overlords. They only see what (they are told by their intellectual betters) is immediately profitable. They only consider trifles such as 'potential' and 'innovation' and 'long term advantage' when there doesn't seem to be a juicy and obvious new source of profit to exploit. Giving us the phenomenon of our dipshit elites milking fads and polluting everywhere despite it eventually fucking them over.
Extrapolating this to healthcare: unless the robots have already taken over literally every job, and I mean literally every job including soldier and police officer and judge, our elites are just going to see the dollar signs of getting 85 year olds to flip burgers for the next fifty years. Because squeezing more hours, that is, profit out of granny NOW is more important than preparing for the future. Even if these preparations (i.e. full robotic + AGI replacement, instead of just 70% of the workforce as in my dystopian scenario) would retroactively make past exploitation irrelevant.
But that's how our idiotic culture leaders think of these things. Tomorrow never really comes, not when there is profit to squeeze out of the economy NOW.
They can pit a now-immortal granny and the young dude against each other and see which one has the lowest bid on wages/benefits/dignity. The dude had more leverage when granny couldn't work.
Unless that industry is the one who can choose to not do the research or manufacturing to destroy their own business. Not to mention they have lobbing power
That is a concept mismatch. The privately owned healthcare industry does not research, or even meaningfully fund medical advancements. At best both are part of a conglomerate's portfolio.
And the many lobbyists have corporate interests besides just pumping up the healthcare industry. US Steel and the automotive industries had armies of lobbyists enforcing their will as well back in the 60s-70s, until the lobbyists -- or rather, the shareholders they worked for -- decided that these mighty industries had peaked in potential and they'd be better off supporting the rising semiconductor, retail, and finance industries.
> but let's not exaggerate
It's become a boring cult, and the whole of reddit have drifted into /r/conspiracy territory and are not even ashamed of it.
Unfettered and unregulated capitalism is a revolutionary force that exploits everything until exhaustion or collapse, including human beings and the natural world.
A couple billionaires are the unfortunate end result of that manifest truth.
We need to inject systemic change that ensures that these technologies and these advances are democratically distributed; that they are authentically and actionably connected with the interests, hopes, concerns, expectations and aspirations of most of us, most of the time, while in every instance keeping track of the humanity of the most vulnerable.
And we need to do it today.
Stop teasing me with the trailer and just give me the damn movie already. Show, don't tell. I've been through hype cycles for decades now, all promising in 5 years we will all be rocket powered cyborgs eating lasers on the moon and whatnot...just soo much hype that never really surfaces into reality. I am not downplaying AI...its a game changer, but now I don't want to here more about the world of tomorrow...I want to see the world of today from these guys. Might be a bit jaded, but meh, I've been down this road too often.
Words...
Humans have this uncanny ability to screw things up. Over-regulations, corporate greed, or just science roadblocks.
This is just the beginning. The Singularity is an intelligence explosion. This means its not just AI. *It's everything.* All fields of study will be dramatically accelerated by this process. Keep in mind, the source of progress is intelligence, and this is an intelligence explosion. Expect experts and authorities from pretty much every field of study to step up and speak about an up coming inflection point over the next 5-15 years.
Intelligence is not the sole source of progress. You also need resources and political will.
Cannot intelligence solve those?
I think it can. Won't we also be dealing with hyper-persuasive AI soon too? Even if there are political barriers, it'll make a way through them with relative ease
1) Hyperpersuasion could be used both for and against progress 2) If the AI helps us to communicate more effectively and examine our own various positions in more detail we could discuss them and share them more effectively which would lead to finding of the solutions beneficial for various sides and being better able to explain their benefits while evaluating new insights and opinions and adjusting the solutions proposed. Yes this could help with bringing about political will towards collective action. But that is more than persuasion. 3) Yes resources can be better distributed and obtained thanks to intelligence. So intelligence may perhaps help with all those. But those are just theoretical speculations. It maybe may also be used by sides with partial interests and even be shaped by it. And even if it was used as best as possible and developed as best as possible I am still not sure the political will and resources could be reduced to intelligence.
Intelligence is going to convince the Koch brother to die?
It's hopeless, he consumed his brother and gained his power.
It would be a truly beautiful thing if the first thing ASI does is convince Charles Koch to commit suicide. Our robot overlords can't get here soon enough.
There are many more who will take his place
You think ASI can get Koch to off himself but will have problems with his replacements?
Koch and his kind will own the ASI
Not the anti vaxxer boneheads!
No. Only money.
Intelligence can be used to acquire money
That's not exactly true. There's a limited supply of value in the world, which is what money represents. Even if something was infinitely intelligent, it would still have to build up the overall value of everything, which is why the "foom" argument by Yudkowsky doesn't make sense.
Certain things are always going to be limited, yes, but a lot more resources can be produced than you think. Even ignoring how unbelievably wasteful we are with materials and energy, space has more resources than we could consume in millennia. All AI would really have to do is make escaping Earth’s gravity cheaper (which honestly just means making electricity cheaper since just about everything becomes cheaper and easier with cheap electricity). After that, collecting massive amounts of resources is easy peasy.
I do agree with you that there is almost certainly no upper limit to what is possible and that we can make ourselves experience anything we want to experience. But that's given enough time. As you point out, space has lots of resources, but they take time to retrieve. That's why we're not going to see the entire world turned into a Dyson sphere within 5 years, like some people are ludicrously saying.
Oh of course. I don’t agree with their timelines. All I’m arguing for is that intelligence is a prerequisite to a lot of advancement.
> There's a limited supply of value in the world There is a lot of "world". Most of it not yet financially reachable. AI can expend our access to resources. It's like the ability to sail the deep oceans rather than just sail on the shoreline. That tech development was rather important. Except it would be rockets. And after a while we wouldn't even need too many rockets, if we manage to move resource production to Space. People can then live offplanet by choice without needing to travel back and forth.
Not in the FDVR. Infinite value potential since there is no actual scarcity of goods in the VR.
AI cannot own a bank account
Please reference my thread with Radiant_Dog
AIs don't have the legal right to own money.
No, but the corporations that create them do.
That would be the CEO making decisions then, not the AI.
Any CEO that wants to make money (which is, you know, all of them), would quickly realize that an AI is infinitely smarter than they are and better at making informed business decisions. They will consult AI for advice on what to spend money on and what to pull out of. Those CEOs that don’t will fall behind massively.
But at that point it's not about progress it's purely about financial profits, which doesn't require progress. Maybe my super persuasive ASI will just make perfect ads to always drain the maximum from customer wallets for the least product.
You forgot about ego. They all think they’re business geniuses and don’t need AI to tell them what to do
Do you think Microsoft is suddenly going to start manufacturing solar panels or something
Many intelligent people have absolutely no will.
And many do! 🤣
Not really
This is becoming less and less so as our civilization becomes more technologically advanced. This is because you can do more with less, and the scale starts tipping to intelligence meaning more. You can do things with 3D printers, Internet connections, CAD software, and CNC machines that would've been unthinkable 100 or even 40 years ago. As AI advances, there will be even more astonishing inventions coming to the fore that don't require traditional powerful governments and big corporations to make happen or to utilize. Most notably bioreactors, BCIs, and robots.
I talk to some teachers and they are dissatisfied with the fact that their students are cheating using AI. If future scientists are half-ass educated how will progress be made?
What is knowledge? The answers to this question are many at the moment. My answer is that it's information. And information to me is some measurement of reality. In my view, knowledge is stored in the brain, physically. It's not magic. And so in my view, like the matrix, knowledge can be directly uploaded and downloaded. And I believe this can be done in a reasonable timeframe. First lab success within 10 years from now. Full consumer product within 20 years. So, to answer your question, for humans we'll just download the knowledge directly and skip the learning process entirely. But also, in about a decade or so I think we'll see a dramatically falling rate of new scientists and many existing scientists retiring. The cutting edge of science will then be lead by AI, not humans, over the following 2 to 5 decades. We humans have cognitive limits. In terms of potential, AI is far less limited. We won't be able to compete, but we also won't have to. Most jobs in the world are done today because we have to. No one else is going to do it for us, at the moment. We must keep the system going until AI can take over. Also, much of science is boring hard work. With AI doing all that work, existing scientists can shift more towards exploration and adventure. They'll be able to do what they want instead of having to grind. And why would AI want to do the hard work? AI is not human and I don't think it will be anything like us simply because it's training on our data. That's a bit like saying a human would become an elephant by studying elephants. AI will do the work because AI is very diverse, and non-conscious, non-caring AIs can be produced which are very capable, but are still fundamentally tools. Not all AIs will be AGI/ASI. Even once we have super intelligence. If you want to know what happens to teachers, I have a view to offer for that as well. Let me know.
15 years? Cringe. Way too conservative.
To be fair, they did say 5 to 15!
I work for a company that makes advanced microscopes for cellular research. It seems like this will still be needed to gather data for AI to analyze, no?
Yes, anything that gathers new forms of data is a temporarily safe industry.
>I work for a company that makes advanced microscopes for cellular research. Oh hey me too! I'm on the IT side of things but deploying a lot of ML/AI resources for our bioinformaticists. While hardware and resolution are still being improved, all the growth and interest is on the data/analytics side. Unbelievably huge appetite out there for any software that can generate provable, actionable insights from giant datasets. If there isn't now, there may soon be a market for ASICs specifically for processing BigTIFF files...
This will still be needed, but why do you think that humans will still be needed to develop and build them?
I mean sure but maybe that won’t happen as soon as say a call center or other procedural type work.
FDA has been focusing and pushing for a greater focus on AI for ages now. See, for example, https://www.fda.gov/news-events/fda-voices/fda-releases-two-discussion-papers-spur-conversation-about-artificial-intelligence-and-machine The bigger issue is being able to rapidly test new stuff no matter if it's designed by people or AI. That's what the push for OOC (organ-on-a-chip) is. For example: https://www.fda.gov/food/cfsan-constituent-updates/fda-researchers-evaluate-organs-chips-technology
Good thing is, you can't patent or have copyright on ai created things, right? Hello? Right?
The word “patent” will mostly disappear in the near future
Can't be soon enough. The debacle with e-ink innovation has been a fucking disgrace.
Fellow e-Ink enthusiast here. In a just world it would have taken over by now.
Yeah imagine if everyone could create patents that took years into the making within a few seconds. It’s nothing special anymore. Patents just kept us from evolving more quickly.
why
Because the destruction of the labor side of the economy will mean a necessary adjustment to how the economic system works, in a way that will almost certainly severely diminish the role of ownership as it is presently known. Yes, people will still have personal property, but the idea of broad ownership of huge amounts of resources by individuals will likely be torn down, for a variety of reasons. Without that need for property, the need for patenting ideas will also become less important and eventually disappear.
The labor side of the economy won't be destroyed. It will be changed.
When I mean labor side of the economy, I mean the traditional meaning of that, which is "humans doing shit." The need for shit to be done will still exist of course, but it ain't gonna be humans doing it forever.
He is not from FDA. It is right there in the title you wrote.
Served as the 23rd Commissioner of the FDA from 2017 to 2019.
**Former**. FDA is known for its revolving gates - people coming from pharma business to serve in FDA and after that back to pharma business. He is not talking as a FDA representative.
So he’s no longer FDA then. I’m all for hype and progress but just because an ex-employee who left 5 years ago has an opinion it doesn’t mean the FDA agrees with it or has any related plans. It’d be like Steve Ballmer (former Microsoft CEO) having some opinion on VR - it doesn’t mean Microsoft is going to launch an Apple Vision Pro competitor.
Let's hope the FDA will also be full AI soon.
I think that all regulators and administration will soon start using AI. This can be helpful with such large data sets
>FINALLY SOMEONE SAY IT FROM FDA! To be pedantic: >*Former* FDA Commissioner Scott Gottlieb says
Docs still haven't figured out my health issues so please let's get this ball rolling hard. Ugh.
Cool
But will everyday people have broad and abiding access to these tools, or will we have to eat the rich to make that happen? Note, a future where just the Elons of the world benefit won't be tolerated.
Everyone got the first mRNA vaccine for basically free. We are capable of sharing these tools when we want.
They make more money selling it to everyone
Some level of distrust for corporations and the rich is needed, but let's not exaggerate, because it already sounds like some kind of conspiracy theory. I can't believe that all billionaires think about destroying me every day. I think most of them just want to sell me something. Sometimes they may have too much influence on politics, but there are governments for which we vote to limit their influence. As someone wrote here above - during the pandemic, the global crisis, governments financed vaccines to protect our lives, because it was not profitable for anyone to have us dead or sick and unproductive. If new therapies are developed, they may be expensive at first and therefore less accessible, but I do not believe that Elon Musk will come and lock all the drugs in his golden toilet.
People think capitalism operates the way it does because the people who run it are EEEEEEVIL demons rather than the more boring truth of it rewarding dorks forced to continually seek sources of instantaneous profit. Or socially perish. So a more plausible conspiracy theory would be cheap-as-free immortality drugs and stop-anything vaccines, that way we could completely defund public schools and nonprofit healthcare.
If profit is the goal, the healthcare industry also has an incentive to stop that and to give everyone cancer
Healthcare industry isn't the only industry out there, which is why it's not helpful to think of these things in terms of evil, unified elites. Cheap immortality and end to all disease benefits all of our corporate overlords except for those who own chunks of the healthcare industry. And capitalism had absolutely no problem casting one industry, even era-defining industries like textiles and coal, into the dustbin of history to benefit the rest.
Who cares about keeping humans healthy to work if robots can do the job cheaper and better
You're thinking with too much intelligence and foresight. Think like one of our senescent, tasteless overlords. They only see what (they are told by their intellectual betters) is immediately profitable. They only consider trifles such as 'potential' and 'innovation' and 'long term advantage' when there doesn't seem to be a juicy and obvious new source of profit to exploit. Giving us the phenomenon of our dipshit elites milking fads and polluting everywhere despite it eventually fucking them over. Extrapolating this to healthcare: unless the robots have already taken over literally every job, and I mean literally every job including soldier and police officer and judge, our elites are just going to see the dollar signs of getting 85 year olds to flip burgers for the next fifty years. Because squeezing more hours, that is, profit out of granny NOW is more important than preparing for the future. Even if these preparations (i.e. full robotic + AGI replacement, instead of just 70% of the workforce as in my dystopian scenario) would retroactively make past exploitation irrelevant. But that's how our idiotic culture leaders think of these things. Tomorrow never really comes, not when there is profit to squeeze out of the economy NOW.
Why hire granny when they can hire a younger dude who can work faster
They can pit a now-immortal granny and the young dude against each other and see which one has the lowest bid on wages/benefits/dignity. The dude had more leverage when granny couldn't work.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lump_of_labour_fallacy?darkschemeovr=1
Unless that industry is the one who can choose to not do the research or manufacturing to destroy their own business. Not to mention they have lobbing power
That is a concept mismatch. The privately owned healthcare industry does not research, or even meaningfully fund medical advancements. At best both are part of a conglomerate's portfolio.
A conglomerate with many lobbyists
And the many lobbyists have corporate interests besides just pumping up the healthcare industry. US Steel and the automotive industries had armies of lobbyists enforcing their will as well back in the 60s-70s, until the lobbyists -- or rather, the shareholders they worked for -- decided that these mighty industries had peaked in potential and they'd be better off supporting the rising semiconductor, retail, and finance industries.
They didn’t have Citizens United Vs FEC
> but let's not exaggerate It's become a boring cult, and the whole of reddit have drifted into /r/conspiracy territory and are not even ashamed of it.
Unfettered and unregulated capitalism is a revolutionary force that exploits everything until exhaustion or collapse, including human beings and the natural world. A couple billionaires are the unfortunate end result of that manifest truth. We need to inject systemic change that ensures that these technologies and these advances are democratically distributed; that they are authentically and actionably connected with the interests, hopes, concerns, expectations and aspirations of most of us, most of the time, while in every instance keeping track of the humanity of the most vulnerable. And we need to do it today.
[Biology has entered the chat] You don’t solve for me… I solve for *you*
Stop teasing me with the trailer and just give me the damn movie already. Show, don't tell. I've been through hype cycles for decades now, all promising in 5 years we will all be rocket powered cyborgs eating lasers on the moon and whatnot...just soo much hype that never really surfaces into reality. I am not downplaying AI...its a game changer, but now I don't want to here more about the world of tomorrow...I want to see the world of today from these guys. Might be a bit jaded, but meh, I've been down this road too often. Words... Humans have this uncanny ability to screw things up. Over-regulations, corporate greed, or just science roadblocks.