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Posted by kschaul 2 days ago

AI 2040: Plan A(ai-2040.com)
362 points | 447 commentspage 3
looksjjhg 15 hours ago|
Why are they obsessed with China?! Actually most of the US are. I guess if you’ve been a colonizer, your biggest fear is to be colonized.
andy99 5 hours ago||
The AI narrative requires an enemy and a “race” that the US has to win. It’s a pretext for justifying spending, rules, urgency, etc and making it sound more important.
talon8635 14 hours ago||
Perhaps it’s because they are #2 strongest entity? Or maybe they are number 1, no one can say for sure.

Your comment also implies that those who haven’t participated in colonization might not fear being colonized. Seems… off.

looksjjhg 14 hours ago||
I’m not saying that … my point is if you treat someone like you’re enemy they will become your enemy
po1nt 2 days ago||
This is whole a slippery slope. Always building on assumption of infinite exponential growth. But every exponential is at a certain point a sigmoid.
icandoit 1 day ago||
Nothing follows from this empty platitude though, right? It can't inform you choices or decisions? It's just a disempowering thought?

They are buying up all the RAM today. Do you think "this is fine because in 5 years post-crash I can buy some cheap RAM"? If everyone with money is betting differently, do you have some information they don't, or is the whole economy just slipping away from you?

You experience luxuries today, that no king 1000 years ago could afford. Instant access to communication, food, medicine for the right price of course.

The consumer economy was great while it lasted but it's over now. We have machines that do useful mechanical work (engines) and useful intellectual work (llm-computers). Capital will move productive work from people to machines(if we let them), and the only jobs left will be delivery driver and warehouse, and then those will be gone too.

Human population was exponential and now its flat, but that's a function of what exacly? It could go back down to 1 billion or less. When jobs demanded a person supply was ready to match it. When jobs dont demand a person? Go to a degrowth rally take the temperature (and average age and child-per-person ratio) to get a taste of the future shape of supply and demand in a pessimistic world of sentences that don't have subjects just vague plattitudes. Are they net shutting down grade schools or building them in your neck of the woods?

nozzlegear 1 day ago|||
Degrowth is a deeply unpopular policy around the world. Where would one even go to find a degrowth rally? I have to imagine everyone there would be there ironically.

> * they net shutting down grade schools or building them in your neck of the woods?*

My area (rural Iowa) has had several new schools built in the last 10 years. Net gain for sure.

po1nt 1 day ago|||
AI is just a tool. It will be a tool as we constantly push the requirements of what qualifies as consciousness. Therefore I'm not worried about it. Almost all the predictions about future growth of technology were incorrect. We don't have flying cars, hoverboards, fusion, the matrix and so on. The goal of each of us is to live a better life. It always be and forcing people to give up luxuries for some external agenda based on slippery slopes is cruel and selfish.

We should have been under water, hunted by AI, overpopulated, killed by terrorist, smitten by god for our sins and so on. Luckily all it took was our privacy and a lot of tax money to survive.

timmytokyo 1 day ago|||
Whenever I encounter these people I'm reminded of the meme about the baby who has doubled his weight in the three months since birth. At that growth rate, he'll weigh trillions of pounds by age 10.
sometimelurker 17 hours ago||
> But every exponential is at a certain point a sigmoid.

strongly, no. its just hard to distinguish them. for example, radioactive decay. cmon

timmytokyo 16 hours ago||
Point taken. But it's interesting that the example you give is one of exponential decay rather than exponential growth, which is the context of this discussion. Where in nature has anything ever grown exponentially in perpetuity? Bacteria in a petri dish multiply exponentially. Until they don't.
sometimelurker 6 hours ago||
> Where in nature has anything ever grown exponentially in perpetuity?

you could make the argument for human total GDP, which looks like https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/global-gdp-over-the-long-..., but then again, you could say we just haven't reached the sigmoid in it. I personally doubt we will

mattwiese 3 hours ago||
Ironically, the origin of "cognitive dissonance" as a concept is attributable to Leon Festinger who (with others) studied a UFO cult called The Seekers in the 1950s who believed in imminent apocalypse. As other commenters have noted, pushing the date back was inevitable. Time is a flat circle and we repeat the mistakes of our ancestors just with different coats of paint...
paradox242 15 hours ago||
It's telling that even Plan A describes a world I don't want to live in.

One where humans are increasingly pushed to the periphery to make room for data centers and the human population is subsumed by robots.

Who is this future serving? Not me. Fuck this.

silver_silver 10 hours ago|
I’m not a booster by any stretch but I had a more positive read. To me it seems to describe a post scarcity society where ultimately the data centres are in e.g. the middle of the ocean and the robots’ labour replaces ours while still leaving us with the rewards.

I am extremely skeptical about whether this is even possible and even less convinced it’s a likely scenario but it seems like a good path.

wronex 10 hours ago||
Remember people. We didn’t die form the 2k bug. We didn’t die when the Maya calendar ran out. We didn’t die from that asteroid or the other. Spreading fear is a very old pastime. How is to say AI won’t hit a wall in 6 months and we’re left with barley passable code parrots forever?
sajithdilshan 8 hours ago|
Exactly, this article is fear mongering at its best for click baits. I’m pretty sure they will publish another one next summer for AI 2028 with same narrative
bloppe 18 hours ago||
This is follows the classic AI policy influence playbook: enumerate a small handful of potential outcomes that make your preferred policy seem obviously correct, ignoring the fact that there are literally infinite more "plans" that could be reasonably predicted that would support wildly different policy prescriptions.
myk9001 10 hours ago||
Here's my prediction. Plot the publication dates of Daniel et al.'s two existing works and future ones against the years in the titles, and you'll get a hockey stick curve.

Fascinating reads, Daniel! Keep 'em coming!

kordlessagain 12 hours ago||
There's a good story about this, in Star Wars. The clones vs. the droids, basically. Droids being somewhat sovereign, not one large intelligence like the clones.

The only choice here is to go to sea and get away from the crowds and the bots. Bots don't like salt water much, so I'll see you out there.

0xbadcafebee 11 hours ago|
1) Star Wars is fictional 2) There are autonomous boats.
oezi 1 day ago|
Forecasting that the GPU build-out will reach 100 trillion USD in 2034 is wild (that's triple the US GDP in 8 years). And another 10x within 2 years.

I am not sure where they believe that amount of capital could come from. It would require central bank level money printing never seen before.

https://ai-2040.com/supplements/compute-supplement

geraneum 19 hours ago||
The article reads like a compilation of online chatter, social media post, etc. on AI. Not surprising to find unsubstantiated imaginary numbers there.
mfitton 13 hours ago||
Well... yes, it would. In theory, efficiency gains are deflationary. Huge efficiency gains are hugely deflationary.

If we're producing 10x as much, why not print 10x as much money? The goods and services each dollar could buy would remain similar.

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