Big Tech is vocally betting the farm on soon achieving human-comparable AI, while doing absolutely nothing about the consequent societal earthquake. It's like they're saying they're on track for faster-than-light travel and are talking exclusively about faster grocery deliveries - ThreadSky

maosbot.bsky.social • 13 days ago

Big Tech is vocally betting the farm on soon achieving human-comparable AI, while doing absolutely nothing about the consequent societal earthquake. It's like they're saying they're on track for faster-than-light travel and are talking exclusively about faster grocery deliveries

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maosbot.bsky.social•13 days ago

1. I know many working in Big Tech who genuinely do think that AGI is just years away
2. I don't think AGI is so close, but I do think it's possible (I'm very uncertain)
3. I don't see any way that we invent AGI without completely changing almost everything about our society and world

cpaxton.bsky.social•13 days ago

We definitely seem just a few advances away from human-level AI for many tasks. Although I'm relatively skeptical we'll get to HLAI for *all* tasks or anything insane like that.I think we'll just find out there's a certain set of "knowledge worker" tasks that aren't actually that hard to automate

sharky6000.bsky.social•12 days ago

With my optimist hat on, let's say AGI is "just a few years away".

The way it is often phrased: one day we will wake up and suddenly have AGI, where we didn't the day before it.

But that's not how it will happen. It will be a knob gradually starting at zero moving to 1, not the flick of a switch.

sharky6000.bsky.social•12 days ago

The event that triggers "AGI is here" will be the move from zero to 0.00001 and (probably) the resulting widespread confidence that this AGI factor will go up over time. But, it will take years (maybe decades) to reach 1.

sharky6000.bsky.social•12 days ago

It's that AGI factor reaching 1 where society will be entirely different to what we know now. It is not catastrophic because it will not go from 0 to 1 overnight. We have time to look into appropriate societal responses as the new tech develops and gets used/adopted and slowly becomes widespread.

cpaxton.bsky.social•13 days ago

I actually think companies like OpenAI repeatedly saying "this is coming, AGI is close" is the correct thing for them to do. In the end, what SHOULD a private company do other than try to raise awareness? if our elected officials won't act, that's, well, kind of on us

perceptions420.bsky.social•13 days ago

This bothers me because others are also trying to downplay this rate of improvement as "nothing but hype." This creates a disparity, and those who have a better view of the actual rate of improvement stand to benefit.

I think where we can we should try to broadcast what's coming.

jason.revolutionarygames.co•13 days ago

Because they know full damn well that what they’re working on will never be comparable to humans. It’s all hype to drive up investment. The part that more folks should understand is how this hype (grift) cycle in tech has become load-bearing for our optimism-based economy.

ph-ph-ph.bsky.social•12 days ago

🤔

https://bsky.app/profile/perceptions420.bsky.social/post/3lihm22zphs2q

jason.revolutionarygames.co•12 days ago

What rate or improvement? I use AI most days and have for more than a year, and honestly I don’t see it.

ph-ph-ph.bsky.social•12 days ago

What is it most useful for?

jason.revolutionarygames.co•12 days ago

IME, coding, but even there it's only as good as StackOverflow used to be. If its rise didn't coincide with SO's deterioration, I probably would've stopped using it a long time ago. Every coder I've worked with who ever said "it increased my productivity 10x!" was a pretty bad coder.

jason.revolutionarygames.co•12 days ago

Got some use out of it writing cover letters (because the BS-generating machine is good at generating BS). I also got some limited use out of it helping me flesh out random tables for TTRPGs. https://bsky.app/profile/jason.revolutionarygames.co/post/3lggfsbpud224

adybee.bsky.social•13 days ago

🎯

norsedog.bsky.social•13 days ago

Big tech is also actively delusional about how far away we are from AGI and hasn't even begun thinking through "if we had it, how would we use it productively" other than "we'll replace all the workers" (magic handwave).

norsedog.bsky.social•13 days ago

And, to double down on my anger about just how stupidly the people driving this idea behave: it is conceivable that an effective AI for the current state of the business could be trained by observing workers and copying their actions.
Firing experts before such an AI model has been built is insane.

tedunderwood.me•13 days ago

Two responses: 1) What would you do about it, really, as a private firm?

2) I think the societal earthquake looks biggest to nerds like us. Hair stylists, plumbers, farmers, and probably middle managers do not need to be very anxious.

adybee.bsky.social•13 days ago

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