There are “boomer” forums I know of where they also generally deny AI is possible anytime soon, claim GPT-n is a stochastic parrot, and make fun of tech bros as being hypesters who collect 300k to edit javascript and drive Teslas*.

i hate rationalists too but this is literally a correct take

At the old SneerClub, /r/SneerClub on reddit, which is still up but no longer active, we had two policies relevant to this situation: (1) serious posts are marked “NSFW”, so that people don’t accidentally click through to the rambling mind palace tour of a random interloper without some idea of what they were in for; (2) if you use language like “epistemic status” as if everybody knows what that means, which is to say as if you had blithely assumed everybody was in your discursive club, I ban you.

A third, as well, was for regular users to please not encourage the interlopers in this wilfully (acquiredly?) solipsistic behaviour.

I have to ask, on the matter of (2): why? Everybody who knows what the term “epistemic status” means and what it socially signifies also knows that it’s entirely peculiar to this group “rationalists”, a group of people which the forum here exists to target, and negatively. I ask because it says something about the rest of the post.

The opening wants to put you in a distal relationship both with the rationalists and with any among the criticisms whomof which are not criticisms of AI doom shithousery. That would put you in a relatively small club, being people who are broadly aligned with everything else that the rationalists have to say, but who specifically do not think that Skynet is coming, and who think that this is the one area where rationalists get it wrong. At the same time, however, this term “epistemic status” functions to signify that you’re fairly sure you’re among friends on this forum, while at the same time what you want to do is enquire whether that is the case: you want to find out if people on this forum share that singular bad feeling with you.

This is rather a mess of contrasting significations: usually this happens when somebody is speaking rather out of both sides of their mouth.

What’s being signified when you point to “boomer forums”? That’s an “among friends” usage: you’re free to denigrate the boomer fora here. And then once again you don’t know yet if this is one of those “boomer forums”, or you wouldn’t have to ask.

What people in their droves are now desperate to ask, I will ask too: which is it dummy? Take the stopper out of your speech hole and tell us how you really feel.

A bad habit rationalism teaches is to treat a stock verbiage of polite and open discussion as on the one hand (a) integral to productive conversation, and (b) automatically generative of productive conversation. But people aren’t like that, because people are in general really smart listeners (and readers) when it comes to figuring out what is stock verbiage and what is meant in earnest. This doesn’t mean that they always draw the right conclusion if they come right out and say “I think this is somebody honest trying too hard” or “this person is full of shit” - but that initial intuition is usually right on target, and it has to be unlearned with a great deal of training in the tenets of the rationalist cult in order to guarantee the cult’s intellectually pointless hierarchies of “good discussion”, which are nonetheless crucial as a tool of enforcement within the cult’s social order.

Anyway, the question in the above paragraph is open.

Nerd religion.

ooooookay longpost time

first off: eh wtf, why is this on sneerclub? kinda awks. but I’ll try give it a fair and honest answer.

First, let me say that what broke me from the herd at lesswrong was specifically the calls for AI pauses.

look, congrats on breaking out, but uh… you’re still wearing the prison jumpsuit in the grocery store and that’s why people are looking at you weirdly

“yay you got out” but you got only half the reason right

take some time and read this

This seems deeply flawed

correct

But I do think advanced AI is possible

one note here: “plausible” vs “possible” are very divergent paths and likelihoods

in the Total Possible Space Of All Things That Might Ever Happen, of course it’s possible, but so are many, many other things

it seems like the problems current AI can’t solve, like robotics, continuous learning, module reuse - the things needed to reach a general level of capabilities and for AI to do many but not all human jobs - are near future

eh. this ties back to my opener - you’re still too convinced about something on essentially no grounded basis other than industry hype-optimism

I can link deepmind papers with all of these, published in 2022 or 2023.

look I don’t want to shock you but that’s basically what they get paid to do. and (perverse) incentives apply - of course goog isn’t just going to spend a couple decabillion then go “oh shit, hmm, we’ve reached the limits of what this can do. okay everyone, pack it in, we’re done with this one!”, they’re gonna keep trying to milk it to make some of those decabillions back. and there’s plenty of useful suckers out there

And if AI can be general and control robots, and since making robots is a task human technicians and other workers can do, this does mean a form of Singularity is possible. Maybe not the breathless utopia by Ray Kurzweil but a fuckton of robots.

okay this is a weird leap and it’s borderline LW shittery so I’m not going to spend much effort on it, but I’ll give you this

it doesn’t fucking matter.

even if we do somehow crack even the smallest bit of computational sentience, the plausibility of rapid acting self-reinforcing runaway self-improvement on such a thing is basically nil. we’re 3 years down the line on the Evergreen getting stuck in the suez and fabs shutting down (with downstream orders being cancelled) and as a result of it a number of chips are still effectively unobtanium (even if and when you have piles and piles of money to throw at the problem). multiple industries, worldwide, are all throwing fucking tons of money at the problem to try recover from the slightest little interruption in supply (and like, “slight”, it wasn’t even like fabs burned down or something, they just stopped shipping for a while)

just think of the utter scope of doing robotics. first you have to solve a whole bunch of design shit (which by itself involves a lot of from-principles directed innovation and inspiration and shit). then you have to figure out how to build the thing in a lab. then you have to scale it? which involves ordering thousounds of parts and SKUs from hundred of vendors. then find somewhere/somehow to assemble it? and firmware and iteration and all that shit?

this isn’t fucking age of ultron, and tony’s parking-space fab isn’t a real thing.

this outcome just isn’t fucking likely on any nearby horizon imo

So I was wondering what the people here generally think

we generally think the people who believe this are unintentional suckers or wilful grifters. idk what else to tell you? thought that was pretty clear

There are “boomer” forums I know of where they also generally deny AI is possible anytime soon, claim GPT-n is a stochastic parrot, and make fun of tech bros as being hypesters who collect 300k to edit javascript and drive Teslas*.

wat

I also have noticed that the whole rationalist schtick of “what is your probability” seems like asking for “joint probabilities”, aka smoke a joint and give a probability.

okay this gave me a momentary chuckle, and made me remember JRPhttp://darklab.org/jrp.txt (which is a fun little shitpost to know about)

from here, answering your questions as you asked them in order (and adding just my own detail in areas where others may not already have covered something)

1. no, not a fuck, not even slightly. definitely not with the current set of bozos at the helm or techniques as the foundation or path to it.

2. no, see above

3. who gives a shit? but seriously, no, see above. even if it did, perverse incentives and economic pressures from sweeping hand motion all this other shit stands a very strong chance to completely fuck it all up 60 ways to sunday

4. snore

5. if any of this happens at some point at all, the first few generations of it will probably look the same as all other technology ever - a force-multiplier with humans in the loop, doing things and making shit. and whatever happens in that phase will set the one on whatever follows so I’m not even going to try predict that

*“epistemic status”: I uh do work for a tech company, my job title is machine learning engineer, my girlfriend is much younger than me and sometimes fucks other dudes, and we have 2 Teslas…

…okay? congrats? is that fulfilling for you? does it make you happy?

not really sure why you mentioned the gf thing at all? there’s no social points to be won here

closing thoughts: really weird post yo. like, “5 yud-steered squirrels in a trenchcoat” weird.

deleted by creator

I will answer these sincerely in as much detail as necessary. I will only do this once, lest my status amongst the sneerclub fall.

1. I don’t think this question is well-defined. It implies that we can qualify all the relevant domains and quantify average human performance in those domains.
2. See above.
3. I think “AI systems” already control “robotics”. Technically, I would count kids writing code for a simple motorised robot to satisfy this. Everywhere up the ladder, this is already technically true. I imagine you’re trying to ask about AI-controlled robotics research, development and manufacturing. Something like what you’d see in the Terminator franchise- Skynet takes over, develops more advanced robotic weapons, etc. If we had Skynet? Sure, Skynet formulated in the films would produce that future. But that would require us to be living in that movie universe.
4. This is a much more well-defined question. I don’t have a belief that would point me towards a number or probability, so no answer as to “most.” There are a lot of factors at play here. Still, in general, as long as human labour can be replaced by robotics, someone will, at the very least, perform economic calculations to determine if that replacement should be done. The more significant concern here for me is that in the future, as it is today, people will still only be seen as assets at the societal level, and those without jobs will be left by the wayside and told it is their fault that they cannot fend for themselves.
5. Yes, and we already see that as an issue today. Love it or hate it, the partisan news framework produces some consideration of the problems that pop up in AI development.

Time for some sincerity mixed with sneer:

I think the disconnect that I have with the AGI cult comes down to their certainty on whether or not we will get AGI and, more generally, the unearned confidence about arbitrary scientific/technological/societal progress being made in the future. Specifically with AI => AGI, there isn’t a roadmap to get there. We don’t even have a good idea of where “there” is. The only thing the AGI cult has to “convince” people that it is coming is a gish-gallop of specious arguments, or as they might put it, “Bayesian reasoning.” As we say, AGI is a boogeyman, and its primary use is bullying people into a cult for MIRI donations.

Pure sneer (to be read in a mean, high-school bully tone):

Look, buddy, just because Copilot can write spaghetti less tangled than you doesn’t mean you can extrapolate that to AGI exploring the stars. Oh, so you use ChatGPT to talk to your “boss,” who is probably also using ChatGPT to speak to you? And that convinces you that robots will replace a significant portion of jobs? Well, that at least convinces me that a robot will replace you.

Whaaaaat? I don’t come here for this shit

Before 2030, do you consider it more likely than not that current AI techniques will scale to human level in at least 25% of the domains that humans can do, to average human level.

Domains that humans can do are not quantifiable. Many fields of human endeavor (e.g. many arts and sports) are specifically only worthwhile because of the limits of human minds and bodies. Weightlifting is a thing even though we have cranes and forklifts. People enjoy paintings and drawing even though we have cameras.

I do not find likely that 25% of currently existing occupations are going to be effectively automated in this decade and I don’t think generative machine learning models like LLMs or stable diffusion are going to be the sole major driver of that automation.

Do you consider it likely, before 2040, those domains will include robotics

Humans are capable of designing a robot, procuring the components to build the robot, assembling it and using the robot to perform a task. I don’t expect (or desire) a computer program to be able to do the same independently during any of our expected lifetime. It is entirely plausible that tools which apply ML techniques will be used more and more in robotics and other industries, but my money is on those tools being ultimately wielded by humans for the foreseeable future.

If AI systems can control robotics, do you believe a form of Singularity will happen. This means hard exponential growth of the number of robots, scaling past all industry on earth today by at least 1 order of magnitude, and off planet mining soon to follow. It does not necessarily mean anything else.

No. Even if Skynet had full control of a robot factory, heck, all the robot factories, and staffed them with a bunch of sleepless foodless always motivated droids, it would still face many of the constraints we do. Physical constraints (a conveyor belt can only go so fast without breaking), economic constraints (Where do the robot parts and the money to buy them come from? Expect robotics IC shortages when semiconductor fabs’ backlogs are full of AI accelerators), even basic motivational constraints (who the hell programmed Skynet to be a paperclip C3PO maximizer?)

Do you think that mass transition where most human jobs we have now will become replaced by AI systems before 2040 will happen

No. A transition like that brought by mechanization and industrialization of agriculture, or the outsourcing of manufacturing industry accompanied by the shift to a service economy, seems plausible, but not by 2040 and it won’t be driven by just machine learning alone.

Is AI system design an issue. I hate to say “alignment”, because I think that’s hopeless wankery by non software engineers, but given these will be robotic controlling advanced decision-making systems, will it require lots of methodical engineering by skilled engineers, with serious negative consequences when the work is sloppy?

Yes, system design is an important issue with all technology. We are already seeing real damage from “AI” technology getting to make important decisions: self-driving vehicle accidents, amplified marginalization of minorities due to feedback of bias into the models, unprecedented opportunities for spam and propaganda, bottlenecks of technology supply chains and much more.

Automation will absolutely continue to replace more and more different kinds of human labor. While this does and will drive unemployment to some extent, there is a more subtle issue with it as well. Productivity of human labor per capita has been soaring decade by decade, but median wages and work hours have stagnated. AI, like many other technologies before and after, is probably gonna end up creating more bullshit jobs, with some people coming into them from already bullshit jobs. If AI can replace half of human labor, that should then mean the average person has to work half as hard, but instead they will have to deliver double the results.

I just think the threat model of autonomous robot factories making superhuman android workers and replicas of itself at an exponential rate is pure science fiction.

wrong place for this. joint probabilities joke was kinda fire though

1.

Before 2030, do you consider it more likely than not that current AI techniques will scale to human level in at least 25% of the domains that humans can do, to average human level.

There is no set of domains over which we can quantify to make statements like this. “at least 25% of the domains that humans can do” is meaningless unless you willfully adopt a painfully modernist view that we really can talk about human ability in such stunningly universalist terms, one that inherits a lot of racist, ableist, eugenicist, white supremacist, … history. Unfortunately, understanding this does not come down to sitting down and trying to reason about intelligence from techbro first principles. Good luck escaping though.

Rest of the questions are deeply uninteresting and only become minimally interesting once you’re already lost in the AI religion.

it’s the S in TESCREAL, if that doesn’t answer your question you have some more deprogramming to do (and we are not your exit counselors)

I’m being explicitly NSFW in the hopes that your eyes will be opened.

The Singularity was spawned in the 1920s, with no clear initiating event. Its first two leaps forward are called “postmodernism” and “the Atomic age.” It became too much for any human to grok in the late 1940s, and by the 1960s it was in charge of terraforming and scientific progress.

I find all of your questions irrelevant, and I say this as a machine-learning practitioner. We already have exponential growth in robotics, leading to superhuman capabilities in manufacturing and logistics.

Needling in on point 1 - no I don’t, largely because AI techniques haven’t surpassed humans in any given job ever :P. Yes, I am being somewhat provocative, but no AI has ever been able to 1:1 take over a job that any human has done. An AI can do a manual repetitive task like reading addresses on mail, but it cannot do all of the ‘side’ work that bottlenecks the response time of the system: it can’t handle picking up a telephone and talking to people when things go wrong, it can’t say “oh hey the kids are getting more into physical letters, we better order another machine”, it can’t read a sticker that somebody’s attached somewhere else on the letter giving different instructions, it definitely can’t go into a mail center that’s been hit by a tornado and plan what the hell it’s going to do next.

The real world is complex. It cannot be flattened out into a series of APIs. You can probably imagine building weird little gizmos to handle all of those funny side problems I laid out, but I guarantee you that all of them will then have their own little problems that you’d have to solve for. A truly general AI is necessary, and we are no closer to one of those than we were 20 years ago.

The problem with the idea of the singularity, and the current hype around AI in general, is a sort of proxy Dunning-Kruger. We can look at any given AI advance and be impressed but it distracts us from how complex the real world is and how flexible you need to be a general agent that actually exists and can interact and be interacted upon outside the context of a defined API. I have seen no signs that we are anywhere near anything like this yet.

score one for the boomers eh

1. no
2. no, (follows from 1)
3. no, but space exploration by drones with semi-autonomous decision making might be feasible. The power levels for such tech will have to go way down though.
4. define “mass transition”. I believe a lot of jobs that require humans now (like customer support) will be enthusiastically robotized, but not that that outcome will be postive for either the workers or consumers. I doubt it will be more that maybe 10% of the total workforce though.
5. like someone mentioned, we can see “artificial intelligences” (corporations) do bad things right now and we aren’t stopping them. Considering everybody in AI research subconsciously subscribes to the California ideology, there’s no way they have the introspection to truly design an “aligned” AI.

Content Warning: Ratspeak

spoiler

Let’s say that tomorrow, they build AGI on HP/Cray Frontier. It’s human equivalent. Mr Frontier is rampant or whatever and wants to improve himself. In order to improve himself he will need to create better chips. He will need approximately 73 thousand copies of himself just to match the staff of TSMC, but there’s only one Frontier. And that’s to say nothing of the specialized knowledge and equipment required to build a modern fab, or the difficulty of keeping 73 thousand copies of himself loyal to his cause. That’s just to make a marginal improvement on himself, and assuming everyone is totally ok with letting the rampant AI get whatever it wants. And that’s just the ‘make itself smarter’ part, which everything else is contingent on; it assumes that we’ve solved Moravec’s paradox and all of the attendant issues of building robots capable of operating at the extremes of human adaptability, which we have not. Oh and it’s only making itself smarter at the same pace TSMC already was.

The practicalities of improving technology are generally skated over by aingularatians in favor of imagining technology as a magic number that you can just throw “intelligence” at to make it go up.