Wealth  Existential Dread/Hope With AI

TheEcho

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Then why are those technologies not readily available for the masses nor fully integrated?
Similar to why it took 20 years for mRNA vaccines. There were some fundamental issues to solve to make it work, but we’re crossing that threshold. (Worked in biotech and my ex worked on developing a vaccine; no she wasn’t at a big name company)
 

rr2021 aka DEVENCI

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Oh sure, 10K+ highly skilled engineers replaced in full by a mysterious AI that performs their tasks perfectly.

Market forces have nothing do… for sure.

Dude, honestly stop talking about things you can’t understand.

giphy-downsized-large.gif
 

ulrich

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Similar to why it took 20 years for mRNA vaccines. There were some fundamental issues to solve to make it work, but we’re crossing that threshold. (Worked in biotech and my ex worked on developing a vaccine; no she wasn’t at a big name company)
Well, I am an engineer by profession with experience in big tech (software and electronics)… I can tell you there fundamental issues to solve (although in this world 20 years is like a millennia, though… I’m thinking more in terms of 5-10 years)
 

TheEcho

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Why do you think transformers somehow can’t “solve” doctors’ role? It’s really right up their alley. You present the “question” in the form of images and tests, and it runs through everything it has access to (which could be everything)

Ray Kurzweil still projects 2029 for the full singularity, so that 6 year timeline could hold, but it’ll take far less to fulfill the needs of most “intelligent” work. We’ll see how rapidly real world bots learn, as well, they may blow past humans when augmented by ever more powerful learning tools. Having all bots share all learning experiences is nightmare fuel for human labor
 
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ulrich

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Why do you think transformers somehow can’t “solve” doctors’ role? It’s really right up their alley. You present the “question” in the form of images and tests, and it runs through everything is has access to (which could be everything)

I think there are many factors outside of “intelligence” that limit the ability of the computer to analyze truthful or complete information… most of them being economical in nature.

For a computer to perform blood tests, image analysis of your face, basic reflex tests, etc… you are reaching a point where it simply is cheaper to have a person do it.

Then there’s the quality of information… “beginner” or “common” level knowledge points tend to outnumber “advanced” knowledge which will end up introducing bias to the algorithm.

Then there’s the bias set into the algorithm by the programmers themselves.

And finally the completeness of information.
It is my experience that people can’t tell the full suite of their symptoms… an inquisitive eye is indeed a bonus in diagnosis (one that is yet not available through AI as far as I have seen).

For example, have you ever had referred pain?
I have a pain in my arm that actually comes from my neck… go figure.

Where AI is going to shine is wherever the input and the output are text (contracts, content, customer service…)
At least with ChatGPT.

We may see a breakthrough in computer vision or programmatic psychology soon… but that is not ChatGPT.
 

rr2021 aka DEVENCI

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Troll: this post has been rated a "Troll post" by forum members
For a computer to perform blood tests, image analysis of your face, basic reflex tests, etc… you are reaching a point where it simply is cheaper to have a person do it.
hahahahahahaha

omg dude.

dude.

please stop.

are you really an engineer?

what type of engineer is so lost?

cheaper?

hahahahha

what kind of engineer is unaware of moores law?

cost?

you are talking about costs when discussing computing power?

hahahahha omg.

hahahahahahahaahaha
 

TheEcho

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Right, my outsider self isn’t versed enough to know which ai suite fits best where yet. It’s just a general anticipation of connecting aspects of different existing forms of AI that seem to be on the edge of “solving” most things
 

ulrich

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Having all bots share all learning experiences is nightmare fuel for human labor

This is quite a nice point to discuss.

When the singularity comes and everyone finds most of their needs covered by our intelligent machine helpers, do you think people will work less or will they find things to work on?

Because from a history perspective, the tendency has been to keep on working.

There are studies that say that people used to work even less on more agrarian cultures.

I’m betting we will find things to do and the 8-5 grind will survive.
 

TheEcho

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Like what, though? When everything intellectual can be crunched in a second, everything physical can have a bot adroitly handle it.

We’re entering Alan Watts “endless dream” territory, where you make things hard and unknown just to keep things exciting.
 

ulrich

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you are talking about costs when discussing computing power?

Equipment costs.

Like what, though? When everything intellectual can be crunched in a second, everything physical can have a bot adroitly handle it

“Art” I guess… competition… research… religion, maybe.
Things that sound banal on these times.
 

TheEcho

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Was talking to my brother about how harems literally might return as huge numbers of men check into a cushy virtual reality and women most likely don’t. Guess there’s that potential activity.

The reasoning? Men be unga bunga, and women not so much lol
 

ulrich

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Was talking to my brother about how harems literally might return as huge numbers of men check into a cushy virtual reality and women most likely don’t. Guess there’s that potential activity.

The reasoning? Men be unga bunga, and women not so much lol
Lol, I have to agree on that.
 

StrayDog

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Was talking to my brother about how harems literally might return as huge numbers of men check into a cushy virtual reality and women most likely don’t. Guess there’s that potential activity.

The reasoning? Men be unga bunga, and women not so much lol
Be prepared to be harvested for your seed, players. A reckoning is upon us
 

Chase

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AI is disruptive. But the most helpful way to think about it as as a tool.

Every time a new, disruptive tool comes along, people who can use the tool reap big dividends, while people replaced by the tool get left behind. I can tell you the people I am replacing with AI tools right now are third world freelancers doing things like cleaning up audio for us or doing transcription. A little later down the line it will probably be people writing computer code. A little later from that it will be something else.

It is unfortunate when folks lose work — but think about this: those third world freelancers are ALREADY recipients of disruptive tech: the Internet enabled me to hire them, despite their remoteness from me. 30 years ago I would’ve had to have had an office and hired locally. Folks in the third world got a brief opportunity to take over work from domestic workers, but now AI is going to take that over.

After the first wave of creative destruction though (i.e., the destruction), you then get the creation. With new tools come new opportunities. Sure, I, as the business owner, suddenly free up a lot of resources by using AI… now I can put those resources somewhere else. But in addition to that, many MORE people can do things now who could not before, because AI puts those things in reach.

Want to start your own XYZ company, but you couldn’t before, because you’d have had to have hired a dozen people and paid them $NNNNN/mo? Now you can use AI, hire 3 people, and suddenly your business idea is feasible. Before, that company didn’t get started at all, and neither the dozen nor the three people got hired. Now, it does get started, and three people have a job, and you have a company.

There is no way I could’ve run Girls Chase in the pre-Internet days. I would’ve had to have rented an office, hired people to work on-site working a 9-to-5 schedule, and there is simply no way we could’ve covered the expense with the amount of money we made the first few years. It wouldn’t have been feasible (and few angel investors want to provide seed funding for a pickup company). The Internet disrupted many industries… but it also enabled a new generation of entrepreneurs who could not have existed without it, and many new kinds of businesses unfeasible or impractical before it.

The rule of thumb is, the cheaper it gets to do all kinds of things, the more of all kinds of things you will have.

Probably the biggest part of human activity is what we might dub “wasteful display.” Only 5.4% of the US GDP goes to food and textiles — the necessities of life. Even a lot of that is going to restaurant meals, processed foods, fashionable clothing, multiple outfits, etc. — stuff you don’t need to survive. For most of human history you had one set of clothes. When they got worn out, you patched them up. In the Middle Ages in Europe, bedsheets were an incredibly expensive luxury item passed down as heirlooms from parents to children. Now most people have multiple sets of bedsheets they bought on the cheap, and change every however many years.

What about the rest of the GDP? We have multi-billion dollar electronics (Apple, Microsoft) companies… multi-billion dollar entertainment companies (Disney)… multi-billion dollar “books and random merchandise” companies (Amazon, Wal-Mart)… this stuff is all completely unnecessary for survival (some of it we need to sustain the supply chains and logistics of our current economy. But most we can do totally without). Social media companies are worth billions of dollars! Billions of dollars for looking at pictures people took of their food and goofy poses in front of monuments that hundreds of thousands of other people visit per year to snap goofy poses in front of!

The rule of thumb is, the cheaper it gets to do stuff, the more the economy fills up with people using all the cheap new tools to produce unnecessary wasteful displays that become worth lots of money.

The more AI can do, the more people can find wasteful displays to use it for, that other people will pay money for.

There’s another consideration with the AI revolution too. When AI becomes cheap, easy, and ubiquitous, and gets to the point where it can do virtually any job, what role do humans have? That is very simple: humanity becomes a luxury item.

Imagine you can go to McSpeedy’s, press a button, and get a meal instantaneously. No waiting, and there aren’t even people working there. You just sit down and eat. It is dirt cheap and super fast. Want to take your girlfriend there to give her an amazing experience? Or are you taking her to Chez Paris, that high-end restaurant that has real people working the front desk, real waiters, and food prepared by a real chef? McSpeedy’s might be faster and cheaper — the food might even be objectively better in a blind taste test. But subjectively, everyone is going to claim that the food at Chez Paris is WAY better, because it is made by real people. People will brag about getting a reservation at Chez Paris, and talk about what it was like being waited on by a real human. “Sure, it costs 10x as much as McSpeedy’s, but it is the HIGH-END of HIGH-END!”

The reality is, we are still pretty far from AI replacing everything.

I hope we get there. I’d love to be able to replace myself producing content, sales copy, or coaching. It would free up SO much time I could spend on other business activities. I wouldn’t even worry about competition, because as soon as I didn’t have to make the content, there are a million other things I could focus on instead. I need about 40 hours in a day right now; if AI could shave half that off my plate, I’d be on Cloud Nine. Of course as soon as that happened I would probably find another 20 more hours’ worth of things to do and be right back at 40. We create our own realities and keep returning to them…

Well, that has been said a thousand of times before…

Who knows? Maybe this time, it is true… I’m just placing my bet on “it will turn out not as impressive as everyone thinks”

Yeah. Every time there is a new thing the media goes crazy promoting (FYI, AI is the new trendy thing) everyone goes absolutely bleeding NUTS talking about how it is the future.

That’s how you know you’re in a gold rush: people start panicking, dreading, going wild, trying to buy in before it is too late, especially as the bubble expands, etc.

This round of AI’s going to turn out pretty much like the late-1990s Internet boom I think: giant bubble of people talking about how it will change everything, massive valuations for AI stuff, then at some point the reality of how limited the existing technology is sets in, the bubble bursts, a lot of speculative wealth and smoke-and-mirror AI startups get wiped out, but once all the speculation’s swept aside you continue to have the quiet forward march of the actually sound underlying tech, which will continue getting better and better, just never as fast as the most starry-eyed optimists expect. (rule of thumb: the closer you are to the poles of optimism or pessimism on a thing, the more skeptical of your own accuracy it is wise to be)

As it stands right now, the AI available to the general public is useful for some things, but woefully far behind for most. I hope it gets better. Right now it’s often just novelty. I have tried using AI to write blog articles and sales copy, even with prompts and structures from various paid gurus in the space who have this stuff all structured out, and it just produces the most inane drivel — this stuff is trained on the whole Internet, and is automated to look for whatever is most popular and repeat that back. There is no “Figure out what is actually insightful to people and will cause them to have epiphanies and feed that back to them” button. So you get a bunch of platitudes and generic advice.

We have our One Date audio in the video course that is too quiet with a lot of background noise that I have been waiting for 7 years for an AI to come along that can algorithmically clean that up and make it pristine. I tried the new Adobe Enhance on that, and unfortunately it is just not there yet. It chews up the music on the bookends of the audio, makes some of the voices sound tinny/robotic, and completely drops words spoken a little too quietly. Some parts are greatly improved! So it is getting there. But it is still going to be a few years.

(that said, if you have One Date, if you watched the videos in the past you may want to check them out again — we just finished updating them with algorithmically improved video quality versions using FPSKA. You need to compare side by side to really see it, but the improvement is fairly dramatic… we had an amateur cinematographer on it who recorded at a too-low frame rate, messed up the shutter speed, etc. FPSKA fixed it a fair bit. There was another option to use DAIN to improve that was even more dramatic, and basically made the video look pristine, but it would’ve cost $20K to do the entire 40 hours of One Date + TDA and I’m not ready to go that buck wild on it. FPSKA cost 10x less. When the cost comes down in a few years we will do it — by then we’ll probably be able to do even better than what DAIN can do, too, and hopefully get rid of all the motion blur the video has now, which is also on my algorithmic improvements wish list)

On a lighter note, I talked to Tony Depp the other day, who is totally in the AI gold rush bandwagon everybody’s on right now. He had ChatGPT tell me AI was going to replace me. So I sent him @brokenheartlover1’s field report about the date in the coffee shop and asked him to have it give its advice for @brokenheartlover1 to do better with girls. Its reply was that he needed to be more respectful of women, give his dates more of a chance, try to be more open minded about his standards, and just be himself.

The pattern recognition is going to keep getting better. AI is going to create a TON of opportunities for anyone and everyone who is even remotely enterprising. By the same coin, it is very, very far from anything approaching creative, original intelligence — we would need a categorically different type of computing to even achieve that. We are not even really certain how the brain actually completes many of its functions. I suspect what we are ultimately going to end up doing is growing actual (modified; perhaps lobotomized for ethical reasons?) brains to run machines in the future. There won’t be so many ethical issues with that since you won’t be bombarding them with hormones or linking them up to bodies that are, so they do not have the same drives and urges that brains connected to bodies do. But the combination of AI research plus regenerative medicine I suspect is going to be where the next big breakthrough in computing power comes from — using the best computers on the planet (the human brain) to do the actual processing. It is only a matter of time until someone makes a brain-based computer, then after the initial shock and condemnation comes the justifications for how it is actually ethical (assuming it is useful, and I suspect it will be), and then it becomes accepted and ubiquitous.

Anyway, there: now you have my predictions for the near-term future of intelligent computing ;)

But yeah, whatever form it takes it is a tool, and tools are good for everyone who is a tool user. Obviously they are bad if you are just the tool and you are getting replaced.

Solution: don’t be a tool!

Be a user.

Chase
 

StrayDog

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Yeah. Every time there is a new thing the media goes crazy promoting (FYI, AI is the new trendy thing) everyone goes absolutely bleeding NUTS talking about how it is the future.
Every time a new tech comes around humans naturally create myths about where that tech will take us and how it will redefine exactly what it means to be human. Redefine our relationship with a material world, and all of its inhabitants. There will be camps of people who see visions of the apocalypse, or camps who dream of techno utopias, or camps in the middle who nonetheless project some faulty vision into the future. Grasping at exactly what we might be facing. While we can get some sense of how our creations will come to shape us we can never know exactly what the reality will be. It is in this sense that technology necessarily coaxes us into unknown realms with the power of our imagination. As much as we like to believe that our drive towards technological advancement is a purely rational endeavor, it is greatly driven by unconscious and subconscious drives. It is only once we have come to live with technology long enough that we come to understand with more lucidity how that technology has come to shape. us. And even then, the road that tech paved for us gives way to new innovation and we are left to live with the reality of another one of our creations. Those of us with a vested interest in the propagation of new tech will always speak of all the great potential. While those of us who feel our values or ways of life threatened will cry hellfire. Neither camp is particularly right nor wrong, but the truth is often way more mundane and somewhere in the middle.

As for AI, it will no doubt have an impact on how we live our lives but I am personally skeptical of many of the promises I hear so many of it's mega fans going on about. Chatgpt has "emotional" meltdowns when you push it too far and people are out here saying "before we know it AI will replace therapists." Seems like the modern version of the 1950's flying cars. Not only does it seem far off from where we are at, but it also presupposes that that is something that we as humans will come to need or value. I mean, look at cars. Sure they have advanced SOME, but not really all that much. And do we even need them to fly? is that really a pressing development that will change transportation forever? Or maybe that dream is a pale smoke hanging in the air from a time when we knew less about what our world would be what it is now.

So much of how our societies have developed around technology is driven by those with a vested interest in that form of development. In a sense, we all have a vested interest as technology stands to shape all of our lives. But someone like Henry Ford certainly had more of a vested interest in a world built around cars, than the average person. The dreams these people sell, those who are driving a specific industry's progress, often end up being gathered flawed with great unseen (or seen and wilfully ignored) consequences. We are then left to deal with the reality of those visions. A great many benefits as well as deep flaws. I can't help but wonder what our societies would look like, and how the world would function if city planners had largely taken into account a different set of principles and values than those of the automotive industry.

Here is a great little video about all of the propaganda that was pushed by GM in the 50s as a means of creating a world that was more accommodating towards its industry. It was a vision that painted a car-oriented world as necessary for progress. This basically became a self-fulfilling prophecy and cars became more "necessary" but how necessary are they really? Perhaps the societal function of the car would have been way different if not for these automotive dream sellers and our desire to believe in the dream they were selling.

I mean, we have to believe in something. Somebody has to steer the course of things. It is all uncharted territory after all. We never truly know what we will get. Of course, those with the most power and resources, along with a personal vested interest in their vision of things, are going to be the ones to set the first course of navigation. Then we all live in the wake of it.

There is a lot of talk about have AI is in it's infancy stage, which is somewhat true in the big scheme of things, but this is not entirely accurate. These technologies that are just now hitting the consumer market have been in development for a solid moment now. To speak of them as "just beginning" (as many hype beasts do) is somewhat disingenuous to me. It has taken a great deal for us to get to the moment, and exactly how fast the technology will develop at this point is to be seen. Thus far AI is a great tool for basic pattern recognition, as well as a great tool for synthesizing CERTAIN sets of patterns. Whether AI will ever be able to synthesize true innovation and creativity is to be seen. Whether that is something we will even come to value from this sort of tech is to be seen.

So yeah, AI is here and has a great number of uses, and a great number of limitations. So to everyone jizzing their pants, and to everyone losing their heads with terror: AI will change our world forever, don't believe the hype
 
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StrayDog

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giphy.gif


AI will have an impact on the world that will be 100X greater then the internet

anyone who disagrees is hilariously misinformed.

good luck.
how can someone be informed of something that is yet to have passed?

Also, if AI is founded on the internet how can it have an impact that is "100x greater"? Wouldn't that mean that AI's impact is also the impact of the internet? Where are you getting these future stats my man? Surely not the same place you got that condescending attitude
 
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