Posted by ecto 6 hours ago
And, yep! A lot of people absolutely believe it will and are acting accordingly.
It’s honestly why I gave up trying to get folks to look at these things rationally as knowable objects (“here’s how LLMs actually work”) and pivoted to the social arguments instead (“here’s why replacing or suggesting the replacement of human labor prior to reforming society into one that does not predicate survival on continued employment and wages is very bad”). Folks vibe with the latter, less with the former. Can’t convince someone of the former when they don’t even understand that the computer is the box attached to the monitor, not the monitor itself.
Here comes my favorite notion of "epistemic takeover".
A crude form: make everybody believe that you have already won.
A refined form: make everybody believe that everybody else believes that you have already won. That is, even if one has doubts about your having won, they believe that everyone else submit to you as a winner, and must act accordingly.
I don’t know how to get away from it because ultimately coordination depends on understanding what everybody believes, but I wish it would go away.
If outsiders could plausibly invest in China, some of this pressure could be dissipated for a while, but ultimately we need to order society on some basis that incentivizes dealing with practical problems instead of pushing paper around.
In today's economy disease and prison camps are increasingly profitable.
How do you think the investor portfolios that hold stocks in deathcare and privatized prison labor camps can further Accelerate their returns?
"Quiet Australians" - Scott Morrison 2019
Yes we'd have a lot of lawsuits about it, but it would hardly be a bad use of time to litigate whether a politicians statements about the electorate's beliefs are accurate.
Except that assumes polls are a good and accurate way to learn the "beliefs of the electorate," which is not true. Not everyone takes polls, not every belief can be expressed in a multiple-choice form, little subtleties in phrasing and order can greatly bias the outcome of a poll, etc.
I don't think it's a good idea to require speech be filtered through such an expensive and imperfect technology.
So, obviously their claims were at least partially true – because if they'd completely misjudged the average voter, they wouldn't have won
When there are only two choices, and infinite issues, voters only have two choices: Vote for someone you don't agree with less, or vote for someone you quite hilariously imagine agrees with you.
EDIT: Not being cynical about voters. But about the centralization of parties, in number and operationally, as a steep barrier for voter choice.
Bitcoin is actually kind of useful for some niche use cases - namely illegal transactions, like buying drugs online (Silk Road, for example), and occasionally for international money transfers - my French father once paid an Argentinian architect in Bitcoin, because it was the easiest way to transfer the money due to details about money transfer between those countries which I am completely unaware of.
The Bitcoin bubble, like all bubbles since the Dutch tulip bubble in the 1600s, did follow a somewhat similar "well everyone things this thing is much more valuable than it is worth, if I buy some now the price will keep going on and I can dump it on some sucker" path, however.
Bitcoin was always a dead end. It might survive for a while longer but its demise is inevitable.
Or even "this book won't have any effect on the world because it's only a collection of letters, see here, black ink on paper, that is what is IS, it can't DO anything"...
Saying LLM is a statistical prediction engine of the next token is IMO sort of confusing what it is with the medium it is expressed in/built of.
For instance those small experiments that train a network on addition problems mentioned in a sibling post. The weights end up forming an addition machine. An addition machine is what it is, that is the emergent behavior. The machine learning weights is just the medium it is expressed in.
What's interesting about LLM is such emergent behavior. Yes, it's statistical prediction of likely next tokens, but when training weights for that it might well have a side-effect of wiring up some kind of "intelligence" (for reasonable everyday definitions of the word "intelligence", such as programming as good as a median programmer). We don't really know this yet.
But that problem is MUCH MUCH MUCH harder than people make it out to be.
For example, you can reliably train an LLM to produce accurate output of assembly code that can fit into a context window. However, lets say you give it a Terabyte of assembly code - it won't be able to produce correct output as it will run out of context.
You can get around that with agentic frameworks, but all of those right now are manually coded.
So how do you train an LLM to correctly take any length of assembly code and produce the correct result? The only way is to essentially train the structure of the neurons inside of it behave like a computer, but the problem is that you can't do back-propagation with discrete zero and 1 values unless you explicitly code in the architecture for a cpu inside. So obviously, error correction with inputs/outputs is not the way we get to intelligence.
It may be that the answer is pretty much a stochastic search where you spin up x instances of trillion parameter nets and make them operate in environments with some form of genetic algorithm, until you get something that behaves like a Human, and any shortcutting to this is not really possible because of essentially chaotic effects.
,
This doesn't seem to follow at all let alone obviously? Humans are able to reason through code without having to become a completely discrete computer, but probably can't reason through any length of assembly code, so why is that requirement necessary and how have you shown LLMs can't achieve human levels of competence on this kind of task?
Uh what? You can sit there step by step and execute assembly code, writing things down on a piece of paper and get the correct final result. The limits are things like attention span, which is separate from intelligence.
Human brains operate continuously, with multiple parts being active at once, with weight adjustment done in real time both in the style of backpropagation, and real time updates for things like "memory". How do you train an LLM to behave like that?
In this context, "here’s how LLMs actually work" is what allows someone to have an informed opinion on whether a singularity is coming or not. If you don't understand how they work, then any company trying to sell their AI, or any random person on the Internet, can easily convince you that a singularity is coming without any evidence.
This is separate from directly answering the question "is a singularity coming?"
Thomas theorem is a theory of sociology which was formulated in 1928 by William Isaac Thomas and Dorothy Swaine Thomas.
And there are plenty of people that take issue with that too.
Unfortunately they're not the ones paying the price. And... stock options.
* Profits now and violence later
OR
* Little bit of taxes now and accelerate easier
Unfortunately we’ve developed such a myopic, “FYGM” society that it’s explicitly the former option for the time being.
Taxes don't usually work as efficiently because the state is usually a much more sloppy investor. But it's far from hopeless, see DARPA.
If you're looking for periods of high taxes and growing prosperity, 1950s in the US is a popular example. It's not a great example though, because the US was the principal winner of WWII, the only large industrial country relatively unscathed by it.
This book
https://www.amazon.com/Zero-Sum-Society-Distribution-Possibi...
tells the compelling story that the Mellon family teamed up with the steelworker's union to use protectionism to protect the American steel industry's investments in obsolete open hearth steel furnaces that couldn't compete on a fair market with the basic oxygen furnace process adopted by countries that had their obsolete furnaces blown up. The rest of US industry, such as our car industry, were dragged down by this because they were using expensive and inferior materials. I think this book had a huge impact in terms of convincing policymakers everywhere that tariffs are bad.
Funny the Mellon family went on to further political mischief
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Mellon_Scaife#Oppositi...
You can't onshore manufacturing and have a dollar reserve currency. The only question then is, Are you willing to de-dollarize to bring back manufacturing jobs?
This isn't a rhetorical question if the answer is yes, great, let's get moving. But if the answer is no, sorry, dollarization and its effects will continue to persist.
What you describe seems like very cheap Chinese imports fraudulently imitating something else.
I don’t find this to be true
The state invests in important things that have 2nd and 3rd order positive benefit but aren’t immediately profitable. Money in a food bank is a “lost” investment.
Alternatively the state plays power games and gets a little too attached to its military toys.
And there are many others that might've been a positive investment from a strictly financial perspective, but not from a moral one: see Banana Republics and all those times the CIA backed military juntas.
Be careful. The data does not confirm that narrative. You mentioned the 1950s, which is a poignant example of reality conflicting with sponsored narrative. Pre WOII, the wealthy class orbiting the monopolists, and by extension their installed politicians, had no other ideas than to keep lowering taxes for the rich on and on, even if it only deepened the endless economic crisis. Many of them had fallen in the trap of believing their own narratives, something we know as the Cult of Wealth.
Meanwhile, average Americans lived on food stamps. Politically deadlocked in quasi-religious ideas of "bad governments versus wise business men", America kept falling deeper. Meanwhile, with just 175,000 serving on active duty, the U.S. Army was the 18th biggest in the world[1], poorly equipped, poorly trained. Right wing isolationism had brought the country in a precarious position. Then two things happened. Roosevelt and WOII.
In a unique moment, the state took matters in their own hands. The sheer excellence in planning, efficiency, speed and execution of the state baffled the republicans, putting the oligarchic model of the economy to shame. The economy grew tremendously as well, something the oligarchy could not pull of. It is not well-known that WOII depended largely on state-operated industries, because the former class quickly understood how much the state's performance threatened their narratives. So they invested in disinformation campaigns, claiming the efforts and achievements of the government as their own.
1. https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2019/06/06/how-world...
I assume you are talking about WW2 and at first thought it was a typo.
The post-war era, under Truman and Eisenhower administrations, reaped the benefits of the US being the wealthiest and most intact winner of WWII. At that time, the highest income tax rate bracket was 91%, but the effective rate was below 50%.
The US is also shaping up to be the principal winner in Artificial Intelligence.
If, like everyone is postulating, this has the same transformative impact to Robotics as it does to software, we're probably looking at prosperity that will make the 1950s look like table stakes.
I think it's extremely early to try and call who the principal winner will be especially with all the global shifts happening.
There is no early mover advantage in AI in the same way that there was in all the other industries. That's the one thing that AI proponents in general seem not to have clued in to.
What will happen is that it eventually drags everything down because it takes the value out of the bulk of the service and knowledge economies. So you'll get places that are 'ahead' in the disruption. But the bottom will fall out of the revenue streams, which is one of the reasons these companies are all completely panicked and are wrecking the products that they had to stuff AI in there in every way possible hoping that one of them will take.
Model training is only an edge in a world where free models do not exist, once those are 'good enough' good luck with your AI and your rapidly outdated hardware.
The typical investors horizon is short, but not that short.
Nowadays you could squash an uprising with a few operators piloting drones remotely.
I’m not sure you have really thought out what the drone part is meant to do. Militaries gave outgunned populaces for decades at this point. You don’t need drones to kill civilians.
there is only one possible “egalitarian” forward looking investments that paid off for everybody
I think the only exception to this is vaccines…and you saw how all that worked during Covid
Everything else from the semiconductor to the vacuum cleaner the automobile airplanes steam engines I don’t care what it is you pick something it was developed in order to give a small group and advantage over all the other groups it is always been this case it will always be this case because fundamentally at the root nature of humanity they do not care about the externalities- good or bad
I am quite sure that people felt justified in their reasoning for their behavior. That just shows how effective the propaganda was, how easy it is to get people to fall in line. If it was a matter of voluntary self sacrifice of personal freedoms, I wouldn't have made this comment. People decided to demonize anyone who did not agree with the "medical authority", especially doctors or researchers that did not tow the party line. They ruined careers, made people feel awful, and online the behavior was worse because how easy it was to pile on. Over stuff that is still to this day not very clear cut what the optimal strategy is for dealing with infectious disease.
COVID restrictions were public health, an overriding concern listed in the US Constitution as general welfare as a reason for the US government to exist at all.
The Covid measures were also totally targeted at certain groups of people with immutable characteristics and not at people who actively wanted to spread disease.
How are people like you still making arguments like this in 2026? Were you also one of the people claiming we’d all be dead in a year from the vaccines?
But critiques like that ignore uncertainty, risk, and unavoidably getting it "wrong" (on any and all dimensions), no matter what anyone did.
With a new virus successfully circumnavigating the globe in a very short period of time, with billions of potential brand new hosts to infect and adapt within, and no way to know ahead of time how virulent and deadly it could quickly evolve to be, the only sane response is to treat it as extremely high risk.
There is no book for that. Nobody here or anywhere knows the "right" response to a rapidly spreading (and killing) virus, unresponsive to current remedies. Because it is impossible to know ahead of time.
If you actually have an answer for that, you need to write that book.
And take into account, that a lot of people involved in the last response, are very cognizant that we/they can learn from what worked, what didn't, etc. That is the valuable kind of 20-20 vision.
A lot of at-risk people made it to the vaccines before getting COVID. The ones I know are very happy about everything that reduced their risk. They are happy not to have died, despite those who wanted to let the disease to "take its natural course".
And those that died, including people I know, might argue we could have done more, acted as a better team. But they don't get to.
No un-nuanced view of the situation has merit.
The most significant thing we learned: a lot of humanity is preparing to be a problem if the next pandemic proves ultimately deadlier. A lot of humanity doesn't understand risk, and doesn't care, if doing so requires cooperative efforts from individuals.
They even indignantly mention the Ozone layer, insisting that "Look, liberals told you to care but its not a problem anymore", ignorant entirely of the immense global effort to fix that.
I think the sane version of this is that Gen Z didn't just lose its education, it lost its socialization. I know someone who works in administration of my Uni who tracks general well being of students who said they were expecting it to bounce back after the pandemic and they've found it hasn't. My son reports if you go to any kind of public event be it a sewing club or a music festival people 18-35 are completely absent. My wife didn't believe him but she went to a few events and found he was right.
You can blame screens or other trends that were going on before the pandemic, but the pandemic locked it in. At the rate we're going if Gen Z doesn't turn it around in 10 years there will not be a Gen Z+2.
So the argument that pandemic policy added a few years to elderly lives at the expensive of the young and the children that they might have had is salient in my book -- I had to block a friend of mine on Facebook who hasn't wanted to talk about anything but masks and long COVID since 2021.
I did try, I promise.
Fundamentally, at the root nature of humanity, humans do not care about the externalities, either good or bad.
If somebody is using monetary resources to buy NFT‘s instead of handing out food to the homeless then you get less food for the homeless
All of the things listed are competitive task situations and you’re looking for some advantage that makes it easier for you
well if it makes it easier for you then it could make it easier for somebody else which means you’re crowding out other options in that action space
That is to say the pie is fixed for resources on this planet in terms of energy and resource utilization across the lifespan of a human
But there was a clear advantage in quality of life for a lot of people too.
Automobile -> part of industrialization of transport -> faster transport, faster world
Arguably also a big increase in quality of life but it didn't scale that well and has also reduced the quality of life. If all that money had gone into public transport then that would likely have been a lot better.
Airplanes -> yes, definitely, but they were also clearly seen as an advantage in war, in fact that was always a major driver behind inventions.
Steam engine -> the mother of all prime movers and the beginnings of the fossil fuel debacle (coal).
Definitely a quality of life change but also the cause of the bigger problems we are suffering from today.
The 'coffin corner' (one of my hobby horses) is a real danger, we have, as a society, achieved a certain velocity, if we slow down too much we will crash, if we speed up the plane will come apart. Managing these transitions is extremely delicate work and it does not look as though 'delicate' is in the vocabulary of a lot of people in the driving seats.
I used to hear about this with respect to how fun funding NASA would get us more inventions because they funded Velcro
No it’s simply that there was a positive temporary externality for some subset of groups but the primary long term benefit went to the controller of the capital
The people utilizing them were marginally involved because they were only given the options that capital produced for them
We've already been here in the 1980s.
The tech industry needs to cultivate people who are interested in the real capabilities and the nuance around that, and eject the set of people who am to turn the tech industry into a "you don't even need a product" warmed-over acolytes of Tony Robbins.
It's hard to square with the computer revolution, but my take post-70s is "net creation minus creative destruction" was large but spread out over more decades. Whereas technologies like: electrification, autos, mass production, telephone, refrigeration, fertilizers, pharmaceuticals, these things produced incomparable growth over a century.
So if you were born in the 70s America, your experience of taxes, inflation, prosperity and which policies work, all that can feel heavier than what folks experienced in the prior century. Of course that's in the long run (ie a generation).
I question whether AI tools have great net positive creation minus destruction.
I disagree. If the singularity doesn't happen, then what people do or don't believe matters a lot. If the singularity does happen, then it hardly matters what people do or don't believe (edit: about whether or not the singularity will happen).
We, the people actually building it, have been discussing it for decades
I started reading Kurzweil in the early 90s
If you’re not up to speed that’s your fault
Depends on how you feel about Roko's basilisk.
There's no way that'll happen. The entire history of humanity is 99% reacting to things rather than proactively preventing things or adjusting in advance, especially at the societal level. You would need a pretty strong technocracy or dictatorship in charge to do otherwise.
But how is that useful in any way?
For all we know, LLMs are black boxes. We really have no idea how did ability to have a conversation emerge from predicting the next token.
Maybe you don't. To be clear, this is benefiting massively from hindsight, just as how if I didn't know that combustion engines worked, I probably wouldn't have dreamed up how to make one, but the emergent conversational capabilities from LLMs are pretty obvious. In a massive dataset of human writing, the answer to a question is by far the most common thing to follow a question. A normal conversational reply is the most common thing to follow a conversation opener. While impressive, these things aren't magic.
No it isn't. Type a question into a base model, one that hasn't been finetuned into being a chatbot, and the predicted continuation will be all sorts of crap, but very often another question, or a framing that positions the original question as rhetorical in order to make a point. Untuned raw language models have an incredible flair for suddenly and unexpectedly shifting context - it might output an answer to your question, then suddenly decide that the entire thing is part of some internet flamewar and generate a completely contradictory answer, complete with insults to the first poster. It's less like talking with an AI and more like opening random pages in Borge's infinite library.
To get a base language model to behave reliably like a chatbot, you have to explicitly feed it "a transcript of a dialogue between a human and an AI chatbot", and allow the language model to imagine what a helpful chatbot would say (and take control during the human parts). The fact that this works - that a mere statistical predictive language model bootstraps into a whole persona merely because you declared that it should, in natural English - well, I still see that as a pretty "magic" trick.
To be fair, only if you pose this question singularly with no proceeding context. If you want the raw LLM to answer your question(s) reliably then you can have the context prepended with other question-answer pairs and it works fine. A raw LLM is already capable of being a chatbot or anything else with the right preceding context.
My best friend who has literally written a doctorate on artificial intelligence doesn't. If you do, please write a paper on it, and email it to me. My friend would be thrilled to read it.
Obviously, that's the objective, but who's to say you'll reach a goal just because you set it ? And more importantly, who's the say you have any idea how the goal has actually been achieved ?
You don't need to think LLMs are magic to understand we have very little idea of what is going on inside the box.
Your comment about 'binary arithmetic' and 'billions of logic gates' is just nonsense.
You can define understanding to require such detail that nobody can claim it; you can define understanding to be so trivial that everyone can claim it.
"Why does the sun rise?" Is it enough to understand that the Earth revolves around the sun, or do you need to understand quantum gravity?
Somewhere along the way from one transistor to a few billion human understanding stops but we still know how it was all assembled together to perform boolean arithmetic operations.
Uh yes, we do. It works in precisely the same way that you can walk from "here" to "there" by taking a step towards "there", and then repeating. The cognitive dissonance comes when we conflate this way of "having a conversation" (two people converse) and assume that the fact that they produce similar outputs means that they must be "doing the same thing" and it's hard to see how LLMs could be doing this.
Sometimes things seems unbelievable simply because they aren't true.
It's funny how, in order to explain one complex phenomenon, you took an even more complex phenomenon as if it somehow simplifies it.
It’s somewhat simplistic, but I find it get the conversation rolling. Then I go “it’s great that we want to replace work but what are we going to do instead and how will we support ourselves?” It’s a real question!
Here's your own fallacy you fell into - this is important to understand. Neither do you nor me understand "how LLMs actually work" because, well, nobody really does. Not even the scientists who built the (math around) models. So, you can't really use that argument because it would be silly if you thought you know something which rest of the science community doesn't. Actually, there's a whole new field in science developed around our understanding how models actually arrive to answers which they give us. The thing is that we are only the observers of the results made by the experiments we are doing by training those models, and only so it happens that the result of this experiment is something we find plausible, but that doesn't mean we understand it. It's like a physics experiment - we can see that something is behaving in certain way but we don't know to explain it how and why.
I think in a couple decades people will call this the Law of Emergent Intelligence or whatever -- shove sufficient data into a plausible neural network with sufficient compute and things will work out somehow.
On a more serious note, I think the GP fell into an even greater fallacy of believing reductionism is sufficient to dissuade people from ... believing in other things. Sure, we now know how to reduce apparent intelligence into relatively simple matrices (and a huge amount of training data), but that doesn't imply anything about social dynamics or how we should live at all! It's almost like we're asking particle physicists how we should fix the economy or something like that. (Yes, I know we're almost doing that.)
Is there anything to be gained from following a line of reasoning that basically says LLMs are incomprehensible, full stop?
If you train a transformer on (only) lots and lots of addition pairs, i.e '38393 + 79628 = 118021' and nothing else, the transformer will, during training discover an algorithm for addition and employ it in service of predicting the next token, which in this instance would be the sum of two numbers.
We know this because of tedious interpretability research, the very limited problem space and the fact we knew exactly what to look for.
Alright, let's leave addition aside (SOTA LLMs are after all trained on much more) and think about another question. Any other question at all. How about something like:
"Take a capital letter J and a right parenthesis, ). Take the parenthesis, rotate it counterclockwise 90 degrees, and put it on top of the J. What everyday object does that resemble?"
What algorithm does GPT or Gemini or whatever employ to answer this and similar questions correctly ? It's certainly not the one it learnt for addition. Do you Know ? No. Do the creators at Open AI or Google know ? Not at all. Can you or they find out right now ? Also No.
Let's revisit your statement.
"the mechanics of how LLMs work to produce results are observable and well-understood".
Observable, I'll give you that, but how on earth can you look at the above and sincerely call that 'well-understood' ?
Why am I confident that it's not actually doing spatial reasoning? At least in the case of Claude Opus 4.6, it also confidently replies "umbrella" even when you tell it to put the parenthesis under the J, with a handy diagram clearly proving itself wrong: https://claude.ai/share/497ad081-c73f-44d7-96db-cec33e6c0ae3 . Here's me specifically asking for the three key points above: https://claude.ai/share/b529f15b-0dfe-4662-9f18-97363f7971d1
I feel like I have a pretty good intuition of what's happening here based on my understanding of the underlying mathematical mechanics.
Edit: I poked at it a little longer and I was able to get some more specific matches to source material binding the concept of umbrellas being drawn using the letter J: https://claude.ai/share/f8bb90c3-b1a6-4d82-a8ba-2b8da769241e
"Pattern matching" is not an explanation of anything, nor does it answer the question I posed. You just hand waved the problem away in conveniently vague and non-descriptive phrase. Do you think you could publish that in a paper ?
>Why am I confident that it's not actually doing spatial reasoning? At least in the case of Claude Opus 4.6, it also confidently replies "umbrella" even when you tell it to put the parenthesis under the J, with a handy diagram clearly proving itself wrong
I don't know what to tell you but J with the parentheses upside down still resembles an umbrella. To think that a machine would recognize it's just a flipped umbrella and a human wouldn't is amazing, but here we are. It's doubly baffling because Claude quite clearly explains it in your transcript.
>I feel like I have a pretty good intuition of what's happening here based on my understanding of the underlying mathematical mechanics.
Yes I realize that. I'm telling you that you're wrong.
The simplest way to stop people from thinking is to have a semi-plausible / "made-me-smart" incorrect mental model of how things work.
1. LLMs only serve to reduce the value of your labor to zero over time. They don't need to even be great tools, they just need to be perceived as "equally good" to engineers for C-Suite to lay everyone off, and rehire at 50-25% of previous wages, repeating this cycle over a decade.
2. LLMs will not allow you to join the billionaire class, that wouldn't make sense, as anyone could if that's the case. They erode the technical meritocracy these Tech CEOs worship on podcasts, and youtube, (makes you wonder what are they lying about). - Your original ideas and that Startup you think is going to save you, isn't going to be worth anything if someone with minimal skills can copy it.
3. People don't want to admit it, but heavy users of LLMs know they're losing something, and there's a deep down feeling that its not the right way to go about things. Its not dissimilar to any guilty dopaminergic crash one gets when taking shortcuts in life.
I used like 1.8bb Anthropic tokens last year, I won't be using it again, I won't be participating in this experiment. I've likely lost years of my life in "potential learning" from the social media experiment, I'm not doing that again. I want to study compilers this year, and I want to do it deeply. I wont be using LLMs.
A lot of us have fallen into the many, many toxic traps of technology these past few decades. We know social media is deliberately engineered to be addictive (like cigarettes and tobacco products before it), we know AI hinders our learning process and shortens our attention spans (like excess sugar intake, or short-form content deluges), and we know that just because something is newer or faster does not mean it's automatically better.
You're on the right path, I think. I wish you good fortune and immense enjoyment in studying compilers.
Well, good luck. You have "only" the entire history of human kind on the other side of your argument :)
The fundamental unit of society …the human… is at its core fundamentally incapable of coordinating at the scale necessary to do this correctly
and so there is no solution because humans can’t plan or execute on a plan
You do not know how LLMs work, and if anyone actually did, we wouldn't spend months and millions of dollars training one.
I am not convinced, though, it is still up to "the folks" if we change course. Billionaires and their sycophants may not care for the bad consequences (or even appreciate them - realistic or not).
It’s willful negligence on a societal scale. Any billionaire with a bunker is effectively saying they expect everyone to die and refuse to do anything to stop it.
It makes one wonder what they expect to come out the other side of such a late-stage/modern war, but I think what they care about is that there will be less of us.
Ultimately they just want to widen the inequality gap and remove as much bargaining power from the working class. It will be very hard for people not born of certain privileges to climb the ranks through education and merit, if not impossible.
Their goal will be to accomplish this without causing a French Revolution V2 (hence all the new surveillance being rolled out), which is where they'll provide wars for us to fight in that will be rooted in false pretenses that appeal to people's basest instincts, like race and nationalism. The bunkers and private communities they build in far off islands are for the occasion this fails and there is some sort of French Revolution V2, not some sort of existential threat from AI (imo).
This is certainly the assertion of the capitalist class,
whose well documented behavior clearly conveys that this is not because the elimination of labor is not a source of happiness and freedom to pursue indulgences of every kind.
It is not at all clear that universal life-consuming labor is necessary for a society's stability and sustainability.
The assertion IMO is rooted rather in that it is inconveniently bad for the maintenance of the capitalists' control and primacy,
in as much as those who are occupied with labor, and fearful of losing access to it, are controlled and controllable.
At least that’s my personal goal
If we get to the point where I can go through my life and never interact with another human again, and work with a bunch of machines and robots to do science and experiments and build things to explore our world and make my life easier and safer and healthier and more sustainable, I would be absolutely thrilled
As it stands today and in all the annals of history there does not exist a system that does what I just described.
Be labs existed for the purpose of bell telephone…until it wasn’t needed by Bell anymore. Google moonshots existed for the shareholders of Google …until it was not uselful for capital. All the work done at Sandia and white sands labs did it in order to promote the power of the United States globally.
Find me some egalitarian organization that can persist outside of the hands of some massive corporation or some government that can actually help people and I might give somebody a chance but that does not exist
And no mondragon does not have one of these
Not interacting with any other human means you're the last human in your genetic line. A widespread adherence to this idea means humanity dwindling and dying out voluntarily. (This has been reproduced in mice: [1])
Not having humans as primary actors likely means that their interests become more and more neglected by the system of machines that replaces them, and they, weaker by the day, are powerless to counter that. Hence the idea of increased comfort and well-being, and the ability to do science, is going to become more and more doubtful as humans would lose agency.
[1]: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/this-old-experimen...
Get rid of everyone else so your life is easier and more sustainable... I guess I need to make my goal to get rid of you? Do you understand how this works yet?
See how it works?
Good luck
There are no more important other problems to solve other than this one
everything else is purely coping strategies for humans who don’t want to die wasting resources on bullshit
I still do.
The difference is that as I realized what I'd done is built up walls so thick and high because of repeated cycles of alienation and traumas involving humans. When my entire world came to a total end every two to four years - every relationship irreparably severed, every bit of local knowledge and wisdom rendered useless, thrown into brand new regions, people, systems, and structures like clockwork - I built that attitude to survive, to insulate myself from those harms. Once I was able to begin creating my own stability, asserting my own agency, I began to find the nuance of life - and thus, a measure of joy.
Sure, I hate the majority of drivers on the roads today. Yeah, I hate the systemic power structures that have given rise to profit motives over personal outcomes. I remain recalcitrant in the face of arbitrary and capricious decisions made with callous disregard to objective data or necessities. That won't ever change, at least with me; I'm a stubborn bastard.
But I've grown, changed, evolved as a person - and you can too. Being dissatisfied with the system is normal - rejecting humanity in favor of a more stringent system, while appealing to the mind, would be such a desolate and bleak place, devoid of the pleasures you currently find eking out existence, as to be debilitating to the psyche. Humans bring spontaneity and chaos to systems, a reminder that we can never "fix" something in place forever.
To dispense with humans is to ignore that any sentient species of comparable success has its own struggles, flaws, and imperfections. We are unique in that we're the first ones we know of to encounter all these self-inflicted harms and have the cognitive ability to wax philosophically for our own demise, out of some notion that the universe would be a better place without us in it, or that we simply do not deserve our own survival. Yet that's not to say we're actually the first, nor will we be the last - and in that lesson, I believe our bare minimum obligation is to try just a bit harder to survive, to progress, to do better by ourselves and others, as a lesson to those who come after.
Now all that being said, the gap between you and I is less one of personal growth and more of opinion of agency. Whereas you advocate for the erasure or nullification of the human species as a means to separate yourself from its messiness and hostilities, I'm of the opinion that you should be able to remove yourself from that messiness for as long as you like in a situation or setup you find personal comfort in. If you'd rather live vicariously via machine in a remote location, far, far away from the vestiges of human civilization, never interacting with another human for the rest of your life? I see no issue with that, and I believe society should provide you that option; hell, there's many a day I'd take such an exit myself, if available, at least for a time.
But where you and I will remain at odds is our opinion of humanity itself. We're flawed, we're stupid, we're short-sighted, we're ignorant, we're hostile, we're irrational, and yet we've conquered so much despite our shortcomings - or perhaps because of them. There's ample room for improvement, but succumbing to naked hostility towards them is itself giving in to your own human weakness.
First of all. Nobody knows how LLMs work. Whether the singularity comes or not cannot be rationalized from what we know about LLMs because we simply don’t understand LLMs. This is unequivocal. I am not saying I don’t understand LLMs. I’m saying humanity doesn’t understand LLMs in much the same way we don’t understand the human brain.
So saying whether the singularity is imminent or not imminent based off of that reasoning alone is irrational.
The only thing we have is the black box output and input of AI. That input and output is steadily improving every month. It forms a trendline, and the trendline is sloped towards singularity. Whether the line actually gets there is up for question but you have to be borderline delusional if you think the whole thing can be explained away because you understand LLMs and transformer architecture. You don’t understand LLMs period. No one does.
I'm sorry, come again?
Anybody who claims otherwise is making a false claim.
Once men turned their thinking over to machines
in the hope that this would set them free.
But that only permitted other men with machines
to enslave them.
...
Thou shalt not make a machine in the
likeness of a human mind.
-- Frank Herbert, Dune
You won't write, except prompts for your LLM. Why write code or prose when the machine can write it for you?
You won't think or analyze or understand. The LLM will do that.
This is the end of your humanity. Ultimately, the end of our species.
Currently the Poison Fountain (an anti-AI weapon, see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46926439) feeds 2 gigabytes of high-quality poison (free to generate, expensive to detect) into web crawlers each day. Our goal is a terabyte of poison per day by December 2026.
Join us, or better yet: deploy weapons of your own design.
I like to do it.
>You won't think or analyze or understand. The LLM will do that.
The clear lack of analysis seems to be your issue.
>This is the end of your humanity. Ultimately, the end of our species.
Doubtful.
We get rid of some problems, and we get a bunch of new problems instead. And on, and on, and on.
Chickens are killed ALL the time. It’s a recurring mass event. If you were a smart chicken you could see that pattern and put it into a formula.
In contrast, the end of Humanity would be a singular event. It’s even in the name…
And that is fiction / speculation in comparison. It’s not backed by any data. Human survival over 300,000 years by contrast is.
I mean it’s fine to dream things up, but let’s be fair and call it what it is.
We urge you to build and deploy weapons of your own unique design.
The problem isn’t in the thinking machines, it’s in who owns them and gets our rent. We need open source models running on dirt cheap hardware.
Anyone predicting the "end of humanity" is playing prophet and echoing the same nonsensical prophecies we heard with the invention of the printing press, radio, TV, internet, or a number of other step-change technologies.
There's a false premise built into the assertion that humanity can even end - it's not some static thing, it's constantly evolving and changing into something else.
> I only know seven sci-fi films and shows that have warned about how this will go badly.
and
> Pretty sure this was the prologue to Gattaca.
and
> I posted a youtube link to the Gattaca prologue in a similar post on here. It got flagged. Pretty sure it's virtually identical to the movie's premise.
I think the ironic thing in the LLM case is that these people have outsourced their reasoning to a work of fiction and now are simple deterministic parrots of pop culture. There is some measure of humor in that. One could see this as simply inter-LLM conflict with the smaller LLMs attempting to fight against the more capable reasoning models ineffectively.
Following that logic… the closest problem would be literally inbetween their ears.
– 'SLOW TUESDAY NIGHT', a 2600 word sci-fi short story about life in an incredibly accelerated world, by R.A. Lafferty in 1965
https://www.baen.com/Chapters/9781618249203/9781618249203___...
> A thoughtful-man named Maxwell Mouser had just produced a work of actinic philosophy. It took him seven minutes to write it. To write works of philosophy one used the flexible outlines and the idea indexes; one set the activator for such a wordage in each subsection; an adept would use the paradox, feed-in, and the striking-analogy blender; one calibrated the particular-slant and the personality-signature. It had to come out a good work, for excellence had become the automatic minimum for such productions. “I will scatter a few nuts on the frosting,” said Maxwell, and he pushed the lever for that. This sifted handfuls of words like chthonic and heuristic and prozymeides through the thing so that nobody could doubt it was a work of philosophy.
Sounds exactly like someone twiddling the knobs of an LLM.
Damn, good read.
> In 2025, 1.1 million layoffs were announced. Only the sixth time that threshold has been breached since 1993. Over 55,000 explicitly cited AI. But HBR found that companies are cutting based on AI's potential, not its performance. The displacement is anticipatory.
You have to wonder if this was coming regardless of what technological or economic event triggered it. It is baffling to me that with computers, email, virtual meetings and increasingly sophisticated productivity tools, we have more middle management, administrative, bureaucratic type workers than ever before. Why do we need triple the administrative staff that was utilized in the 1960s across industries like education, healthcare, etc. Ostensibly a network connected computer can do things more efficiently than paper, phone calls and mail? It's like if we tripled the number of farmers after tractors and harvesters came out and then they had endless meetings about the farm.
It feels like AI is just shining a light on something we all knew already, a shitload of people have meaningless busy work corporate jobs.
As long as you're
1) In a position where you can make the decisions on whether or not the company should move forward
and
2) Hold the stock units that will be exchanged for money if another company buys out your company
then there's really no way things won't be fine, short of criminal investigations/the rare successful shareholder lawsuit. You will likely walk away from your decision to weaken the company with more money than you had when you made the decision in the first place.
That's why many in the managerial class often hold up Jack Welch as a hero: he unlocked a new definition of competence where you could fail in business, but make money doing it. In his case, it was "spinning off" or "streamlining" businesses until there was nothing left and you could sell the scraps off to competitors. Slash-and-burn of paid workers via AI "replacement" is just another way of doing it.
Well for starters the population has almost 3x since the 1960s.
Mix in that we are solving different problems than the 1960s, even administratively and I don’t see a clear reason from that argument why a shitload of work is meaningless.
dx 2
-- = x
dt
1
x = -----
C-t
dx
-- = x
dt
Like the exponential growth equation it is unphysical as well as unecological because it doesn't describe the limits of the Petri dish, and if you start adding realistic terms to slow the growth it qualitatively isn't that different from the logistic growth equation
dx
-- = (1-x) x
dt
Also: > As t→ts−t→ts− , the denominator goes to zero. x(t)→∞x(t)→∞. Not a bug. The feature.
Classic LLM lingo in the end there.
It doesn't matter how smart you are, you still need to run experiments to do physics. Experiments take nontrivial amounts of time to both run and set up (you can't tunnel a new CERN in picoseconds, again no matter how smart you are). Similarly, the speed of light (= the speed limit of information) and thermodynamics place fundamental limits on computation; I don't think there's any reason at all to believe that intelligence is unbounded.
Doesn’t specify the 2020’s.
Either way, I do feel we are fast approaching something of significance as a species.
It said that the article claims that is not necessarily that AI is getting smarter but that people might be getting too stupid to understand what are they getting into.
Can confirm.