Wealth  Existential Dread/Hope With AI

rr2021 aka DEVENCI

Space Monkey
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how can someone be informed of something that is yet to have passed?
that has been my point from the start of this hilarious comedy filled thread.

as i said from the start, most people have no idea how much ai/machine learning/automation,etc...

most people have no idea how much these things ALREADY control several aspects of their day to day life RIGHT NOW

not in the future

RIGHT NOW

if the clueless people in this thread where aware of this and knew anything about exponential growth then its OBVIOUS ai will change everything

again, this has been one of the most hilariously unhinged and cringe filled threads of my life
 

StrayDog

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that has been my point from the start of this hilarious comedy filled thread.

as i said from the start, most people have no idea how much ai/machine learning/automation,etc...

most people have no idea how much these things ALREADY control several aspects of their day to day life RIGHT NOW

not in the future

RIGHT NOW

if the clueless people in this thread where aware of this and knew anything about exponential growth then its OBVIOUS ai will change everything

again, this has been one of the most hilariously unhinged and cringe filled threads of my life
Dude AI has been around for quite some time, I think anyone who pays attention understands AI has already shaped our society. I am not sure I see anyone saying it has not or that it will not continue to shape our world. Just cause someone doesn't get a boner every time a computer beats a human at chess doesn't mean they are hopelessly misinformed.

The point was never that AI is not going going to continue to change our world. Perhaps so at a rather rapid rate (though that metric would be somewhat relative, now wouldn't it?). The point is how that will all take place, is to be seen. And anyone selling promises of what that will look like is doing so because one they have a personal vested interest in that particular vision. What the reality is is to be seen.

If you can't sense the irony in a statement like "AI will change the world forever, don't believe the hype" I don't know what to tell you other than saying you are about as fun to have a conversation with as chatgpt. I'll let you guess how fun I think that actually is. Or maybe you can use an AI to figure it out.
 

James D

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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…



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
Do you think AI will replace copywriters?
 

Teevster

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Fun fact:

Communism, as in Marxism, was popularized during the industrial revolution. The claim was that human labor wouldn't be required anymore (or much less so) due to automatism (machine). Thus many communist thinkers thought "let the machines do the work, let humans chill and do human things, and let the produce be shared (the money, as in the value generated by the machines would be redistributed)". With the emergence of AI and robots this is not far fetched. They can du all the work. What is capitalism without "labour"?

Personally, I am not a communist, but this ideology doesn't seem that far fetched anymore - and communism seems more appealing now than say 15 years ago. But this requires a democratization of AI. There will either be a democratization of AI (making it accessible to all) or we will end up with capitalism on steroids (imagine the power of those corporations controlling the AI's)... and if so, perhaps it triggers a form of "proletarian" counter-revolution.

Just toying with some ideas. Anyway, already back then, Marx was ahead of his time in many regards. He may have been even more ahead on many more things than we originally though.

However, again, I need to stress though that Marx never liked the state and I doubt the state (as in, the public sector)n as we know it will disapear anytime soon. in fact it may turn (even more) authoritarian and totalitarian (whether capitalist or communist) thanks to surveillance tech etc.

-Teevster
 
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MarioTheDom

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why did it take DECADES for seatbelts to be made available to the masses and be fully integrated?

If you read Lee Iacocca biography, in which he states he was advocate for it, simply it was the lobbying by some

"Opponents have objected to the laws on libertarian principles.[50] Some do so on the grounds that seat belt laws infringe on their civil liberties. For example, in a 1986 letter to the editor of the New York Times, a writer argued that seat belt legislation was "coercive" and that "a mandatory-seat-belt law violates the right to bodily privacy and self-control".[51]" source Wikipedia

When you force people to do something, you will always have push back - and politics take their time because it is simply how democracy works, people gather facts, alliances, soft power and then you slam bureaucracy on top of it. you have a ten year time frame window for changes

Et voilà
 

TheEcho

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Added a bit to the end of the OP I posted elsewhere yesterday. Also, the reason this feels like it will be a tsunami is those that use AI well will be massively more effective than traditional competitors. I'm constantly thinking of selling points for why brokers would use me versus others, and there's a lot of tangible benefits to them to drop others and switch to me (and I will have the capacity to handle what would normally be the work of dozens of traditional guys). Then the people empowered by my benefits will be much more effective than their peers that are sticking to traditional means, and the money will flow to the top.

Cutting down a strenuous 4 hour research project to 10-30 minutes of mostly QA means I'm working a good 10x faster than others, and thanks to visual aids I plan to build in, it will be even easier to review my final result and make sure it's perfectly accurate. This will be step 2 out of 4 I can think of currently, with 4 cutting me out and opening up my services to mass scale. Those who use me will also get their results back within the hour, versus within the day, and can get to work with the next steps.

I'm going for the throat (as usual 😉)
 

ulrich

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@TheEcho, make sure to cash your advantage as soon as possible.
If the technology is publicly available (as ChatGPT is currently to anyone with sufficient coding skills), it is just a matter of time for competitors to flood the opportunity and force the market into a correction.

Time is of the essence.
 

TheEcho

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Exactly the reason for the sense of "terror" to get this together, since it's going to eat up what I'm trained for with me or without me. Have to fight to ride the wave and not be drowned by it.
 
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rr2021 aka DEVENCI

Space Monkey
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Dude AI has been around for quite some time, I think anyone who pays attention understands AI has already shaped our society. I am not sure I see anyone saying it has not or that it will not continue to shape our world. Just cause someone doesn't get a boner every time a computer beats a human at chess doesn't mean they are hopelessly misinformed.

The point was never that AI is not going going to continue to change our world. Perhaps so at a rather rapid rate (though that metric would be somewhat relative, now wouldn't it?). The point is how that will all take place, is to be seen. And anyone selling promises of what that will look like is doing so because one they have a personal vested interest in that particular vision. What the reality is is to be seen.

If you can't sense the irony in a statement like "AI will change the world forever, don't believe the hype" I don't know what to tell you other than saying you are about as fun to have a conversation with as chatgpt. I'll let you guess how fun I think that actually is. Or maybe you can use an AI to figure it out.
giphy.gif


serious question.

did you graduate high school?
 

TheEcho

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I don't think there's any good reason to not think everything will be completely changed. Bots that can learn every skill rapidly and AI that can crunch/diagnose anything nearly instantly don't leave much room for humans in labor. I was getting in deep today with asking for the "hard" aspects to make my business idea work, and it just spat out nearly complete code for me... it's nuts.
 

HoofHearted

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Why is this thread not moderated? Basic lines of discourse crossed, ad hominem strategies for the purpose of dickishness?

As for automation, I've watched it for a decade across several fields that require higher level thinking. Yes, it has changed those fields and reduced front line workforce. 1 scientist can do the work of 4.

Things are changing. What doesn't get talked about is what gets opened up. Automation creates different spheres, and allows humanity to focus on more abstract things, rather than rote but necessary tasks.

It is sad to see cultures around these tasks or careers die. But what gets lost in the discussion is the new cultures that get born.

This is all from firsthand experience across more than 10yrs. This is *not* commentary on whatever the fuck ChatGPT is, but automation in the practical, actual sense of the concept as it is used in industry today.

As someone who has peaked into the world's largest transactional systems, what is new and shiny often really isn't, and takes legions of humans to support, maintain and troubleshoot. I suspect AI is a long ways off from this, because the concept scales. Nothing is ever *smooth*, no matter how intellectually graceful its intentions are.
 

Teevster

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can we ban this dude already? he’s been like this on so many threads

I will not do this because I am not to use moderating power, however what I can do is remove his derailing from this thread and create a new.

On my end, his behaviour does not bother me (not my first day on a forum!) but I can understand the derailing may annoy others. I will clean up the thread.

EDIT: Subthread moved to a new thread.

-Teevster
 
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rr2021 aka DEVENCI

Space Monkey
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I suspect AI is a long ways off from this,
so you know more then google,ray dalio, elon musk,meta,

all disagree with this statement.

see my point.

do you seriously think you have a better understanding then them?

its hilarious this is even an argument.

ai will impact the world 100x more then the internet in the NEAR FUTURE

anyone who disagrees is hilariously misinformed.
 

HoofHearted

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It isn't an argument. It's perspective, worth its weight in gold around here. but since i came to this forum is to learn how to laid, i'll shut the fuck up now.

I hope you shut the fuck up, too.
 

HoofHearted

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Ah so my doubts as to whether current state of AI can troubleshoot, maintain or make decisions about itself within an enterprise infrastructure are comparable to an immutable law of gravity.

Keep em coming, i love flushing out boring, useless perspectives. Just kidding, would never actually seek exchange here. Two of us are shutting the fuck up, feel free to join.
 

HoofHearted

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I can't believe I was talking the same dummy twice. But then again, project work used to feel that way every day...

Anyways, lets all get back to tryin to get laid
 

ShioriGC

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We are the Omega and we walk with the Alpha (AI). Where one ends, another begins.
When I look at it like that, all existential dread leaves my body.

It's simply a tool for us to evolve.
 
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