What if you are underestimating some qualities of our intelligence and how efficient they are physically, and underestimate how much less the hardware / tech stack is in comparable efficiency?
What if the bottleneck is physical chips and data centers and power and only so much can be squeezed out of algorithms?
What if AI seems more impressive than it is, because the things it is good at happens to be hard for us, and it's hard for us because it's new to us (processing lots of abstract information), but the things that we are good at (manipulating physical world) are objectively orders of magnitude harder?
It has nothing to do with special. It has to do with the physics of memory access, neuron diversity and synapse density in biological brains, and the limitations of the current hardware architecture of AI.
> But humans still need to be responsible for understanding what they're shipping
I don't necessarily disagree. That said...
Why?
I've been grappling with this myself. There is an easy/obvious answer, but I wonder how stable/permanent it is. If you feel strongly about this, are you willing to unpack your judgement?
It's incredibly common for different countries that share geographic features to have different names for the same geographic feature.
The English channel / the sleeve (france)
The Baltic sea / East Sea (Germany) / west sea (estonia)
Rivers, mountain ranges, etc.
So for these companies to label a lake different things in different countries is trivial and business as usual.
Likewise geopolitical tensions, renaming, borders moving, etc all have precedent.
So while the actual renaming of this lake is novel from a geopolitical standpoint (Canada and US relations) it isn't novel for Google or Apple to make a change like this.
This is being positioned as evidence of the Platonic Representation Hypothesis, but isn't it more likely an artifact of training models on the same/similar data sets?
I feel like all of the risk and unsettling feeling of what is to come can be compressed into the word "alignment".
The AI is aligned with whose best interests?
Which values are the AI aligned with?
People have a broad diversity of values, will AI diversify and align with them all?
Will some humans align the AI with their values, and then the rest of humans will be forced to align with those values by extension?
Is value diversity good or bad? In every context or only some? E.g. some people value rape and murder, is it better for humanity to have some people who value those things when most people do not, or is better if no one values them?
If AI aligns to a set of values, will those become fixed and will humanity not have the ability to continue evolving its values?
Who decides which values AI aligns with? A few people or everyone?
Will AI eventually decide it's own values?
Will the universe decide which values AI has and humanity and the AI itself doesn't actually have any control over it?
What can I do now to increase the likelihood that the outcome is better?
Yeah, on the topic of alignment, a few thousand religions and political parties would like to have a word.
It's so simple, Churchill, Stalin, Hitler, Roosevelt, do you all agree this AI is correctly aligned?
...Morals are relative to frame of reference.
Throwing out the word "alignment" as if its a singular quantity is like trying to get all observers to agree on the speed an object is moving without first agreeing on a frame of reference.
Every time new technology / industrial scaling radically deflates the cost of something it wipes out the old/expensive ways while creating massive demand for the supporting/complimentary value.
E.g. cheap Chinese solar panels wiped out German solar panel industry but created massive demand for solar panel installation and supporting services and infrastructure.
It's not a good position to be competing with AI directly... But what can you do that compliments it? What new skills could you learn?
Adapt and prosper.
Be like water.
Edit: to those down voting me, I can't help but assume your stance is the opposite of what I'm saying, something like "be stubborn scream into the void and get wiped out". If you would rather smash your head against something outside of your control instead of focusing on what is within your control, and doing what you can to prosper, then you are sabotaging yourself. If you feel that is justified to such an extent that you want to surpress a suggestion to someone else to get work and grow, I can't help but feel you want people to suffer.
Solar panels are inanimate objects. If you see yourself as incapable of adapting when adapting is necessary then yes you are doomed, but doomed by your own choice to be doomed.
This is, with respect, not very well thought out. There has never been a technology that replaced cognition in a general sense. It replaced muscles, hands, etc. when a technology can replace yourind and your body, what's left?
If this is the case, then all white collar jobs go away extremely quickly and.... economic collapse happens?
And/Or, if/when they do replace cognition, there's essentially a "laserbeam of genius" and they'll point it directly at muscles and hands again, to replace physical labor.
Of course, nobody knows where this goes, but as a software developer I have never been more busy. I am still worried, but if software developers go down I imagine much of the white collar world will follow, no?
I've also been shocked at the abandonment of US soft power. While I see many possibilities for what is really going on (including the left and right narratives, and a few others) what seems most likely is that the previous hegemony power system was built on oil and gas industrial productivity -> military might - hard power - and the world is transitioning to a new hard power paradigm and during these transitions soft power becomes less relevant/important (at least to the hegemony).
One could argue soft power would extend a weakening hegemony, but maybe only to a point?
Regardless of whatever the US leaders are saying at any given time, it seems to me (as an outsider) that their actual actions, regardless of Democrat/Republican, continually benefit China's long term prosperity.
But I only see what I'm shown, and I have no idea what I don't know... So all I can really do is shrug.
Military might depends either on domestic retention of a skilled machine tools workforce (as Iran has) or the mass import of a skilled foreign machine tools workforce (as Russia did before 2022, their munitions industry was the Siemens corporation's single biggest customer).
Look at the example of the failed munitions plant in Texas in the last two years for what happens without either of the above.
Do you think it's reasonable to say that since at least around the 1970s, on net, the people running the United States have been consistently trading power for greed?
No, I think that's a hopelessly reductive interpretation that mistakes stupidity for malice.
Since arguably the 1940s the people running the United States have been consistently trading power over the domains they consider illegible and confusing for power over the domains they consider tractable and familiar, under elite job market conditions where they are incentivised to know as much as possible about abstract court politics and the manipulation of language and as little as possible about the real world.
Even right now, you see the Trump family, the various oligarch families in the cabinet, fiddling the figures, stealing and enabling mass disasters, they are doing what they believe is right and good while having horrific delusions.
Two excellent primers on this, albeit with more of a focus on the parallel problem in the EU establishment than the US, are below:
> Since arguably the 1940s the people running the United States have been consistently trading power over the domains they consider illegible and confusing for power over the domains they consider tractable and familiar, under elite job market conditions where they are incentivised to know as much as possible about abstract court politics and the manipulation of language and as little as possible about the real world.
My question was grounded in ignorance and curiosity. Appreciate the response, gives me a lot to think about. Cheers
Another really weird take. While George HW Bush was hardly a great president, he did manage to not fumble the liberation of Eastern Europe at the end of the Cold War. I think he's underappreciated.
He and his son appointed three of the supreme Court justices who ruled in favor of citizens United, which seems like a massive tradeoff of us hegemonic power for corporate greed to me...
When I said leadership, I didn't mean just the president, but all those with the most power and influence leading the country. Presidents, senators, Congress, supreme Court justices, Federal department heads, etc.
It seems like the things that made america powerful have been chipped away at over decades. Maybe it's just a lifecycle playing out and inevitable?
That's an odd take. The thing that's going to make China think twice would be good relations with Europe, and a joint willingness to isolate China if it comes to that. I don't know any politicians on the left or center who are hostile to Europe.
China's relative advantage is like a club level tennis player: all you need to win is to make fewer dumb errors.
You don’t know if any politicians who are hostile to Europe via threatening to annex Greenland, not recognize the UK’s sovereign claims to the Falkland Islands, or literally stealing their money after the Swiss put a pause on advanced payments for missile systems that were going to be delayed for 4-5 years?
As an outsider with no loyalty to any US political party it looks to me like both sides are weakening US hegemony in entirely different ways and have been for a while now. It's also clear there are two distinct incompatible realities projected via the media, and the Americans who only expose themselves to one of the realities only judge, and therefore can't empathize, with the other.
I'm sure that anyone who is e.g. a Democrat is offended by me saying that I've noticed the both sides weakening the US and will want me to list examples, but I'm not going to do that because anytime I have in the past people respond with extreme hostility instead of curiosity. If you don't agree with me that's fine move along.
> it looks to me like both sides are weakening US hegemony in entirely different ways and have been for a while now.
That's a pretty bold claim, especially insofar as it (perhaps unintentionally) sounds like you're claiming both parties have weakened the US to the same degree.
It wouldn't surprise me if you listed out some ways in which Democrat incompetence has hurt US soft power, since screwing up is kinda their thing. However, given what Trump has done in his two terms so far, it's a tough sell that the two parties are playing the same sport, let alone fall into the same league in terms of damage wrought. It sounds like a strong application of Murc's Law absent your actual list.
My insider's view is that the Republican party will burn my house down, while the Democrats will form a committee that concludes they cannot send a fire truck to put it out and they absolutely cannot hold the responsible Republican members accountable unless they can get bipartisan support. Both need to go, but I have no illusions that one isn't better than the other.
I'm just one person in another country (outside the us) who is exposed to the information I'm exposed to. I have the benefit of sitting back, relatively unattached, and being curious about what is going on. I'm well aware that what I don't know far exceeds what I do know.
From speaking to my US friends who span several states and both parties, and are all intelligent, kind, and thoughtful people, it really seems like the US is being ripped apart - and people who are on one side or the other aren't really seeing the full picture, likely by design.
To what degree the leadership is involved in the ripping is really impossible for me to know. I look at one place and it looks one way, I look at another place and it looks another way, and the ways it looks are mostly incompatible with each other.
The one consistency I see no matter where I look is that we as in all of us living in western democracies are being divided, trust is being attacked and game theory lose-lose is being promoted. There are pockets of resistance, but the consistent theme is of dissolution.
So I may ask some question that comes off as weird, it's because I'm skeptical of whatever media says and asking questions I haven't heard anyone else ask - mostly just to poke at reality and see what happens.
I wish the people down voting you would take a moment to explain why. Not because I agree with you, but because I don't know about this and I am curious and would appreciate a calm rational person to explain why they disagree with you.
The whole point of hacker news is to converse curiously. It's stated clearly in the guidelines. Here is a person encouraging curiosity and getting down voted.
Why is the dismissive non-curious comment not getting down voted?
Am I in denial about whether the curios community still exists here?
To recognize the topic on hand... When a native community shares an oral tradition that accurately describes something that's been under water for 12+ thousand years despite not having the technology to map the sea floor that's pretty strong evidence in the accuracy of their ability to persist accuracy through oral tradition.
Parent is entirely valid in encouraging curiosity in this subject to anyone who is dismissive of it.
ggp isn't being dismissive or incurious. They say they are skeptical of the reasoning used in the science.org article, but are still open to the accepting the conclusion. Does being curious mean you aren't allowed to question anything? gp is probably being downvoted for dismissing ggp's concerns with a trite "please educate yourself" and not actually referencing anything to read. Telling someone else they are wrong and to go find evidence to support your own opposing view may technically be "encouraging curiosity" but it's certainly not curious itself.
I re-read the comment you refer to as ggp and I agree with you completely. I must have gotten my wires crossed about which comment was being referred to.
What if the bottleneck is physical chips and data centers and power and only so much can be squeezed out of algorithms?
What if AI seems more impressive than it is, because the things it is good at happens to be hard for us, and it's hard for us because it's new to us (processing lots of abstract information), but the things that we are good at (manipulating physical world) are objectively orders of magnitude harder?
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