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- Hacker News
- The barrier to change is not just regulation. Regulation is downstream of public opinion. Compare China and the US. In China, public sentiment around AI seems to be a hunger to use it for fear of being left behind. Whereas in America, it's an apathetic pessimism around inequality and safety.
China has seen much faster growth in recent decades, which incentivizes people to work hard and have faith it will yield results. In America, the average standard of living has not improved for a long time, so instead of a desire to change things, like cutting regulation to speed up drug discovery, most Americans are quiet quitting.
In this climate, the unfortunate reality is that we're unlikely to see a popular revolution to drastically change things one way or another. Instead, we're much more likely to see regulatory capture by a small number of wealthy, powerful, motivated people. And everyone else will complain on social media, but that's about it.
by chaseadam17 - Reminds me of the recent economist interview with Elon:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XuoqKYxDHVc&t=1880s
Minton Beddoes: What people who lose their jobs, who are displaced, who may go off and garden, but how are they going to live? And what kind of I mean, it sounds to me...
Musk: universal high income
Minton Beddoes: but how are you going to get there? Let's talk about the politics of this cuz right now we if we look at the political pressures in most countries people are very very worried about this very against it. I mean it seems to me that there's a risk that we are heading more for revolution than for an easy route to this nirvana you're playing out.
Musk: I mean it will be a bumpy road. I'm not suggesting it will be sort of that everything will be smooth sailing here. Um, so I mean there are many jobs that used to exist that don't exist because of computers. I mean the the word computer used to refer to a person doing computations like that used to be a job description of a person. And you can see pictures online of um of buildings that... drifts away
by ma2kx - I think the idea that "regulation is the bottleneck" is at least as pernicious as the idea that "intelligence is the bottle".
US health care is well known to be an ongoing disaster for US health care end-users however many new health care products US companies produce. The overall situation is that final good health outcomes currently and in the near future require humans involved and moreover, caring human attention involved - among other things because human health involves many, many "outliers" and many, many connections between social, biological, psychological and individual factors.
The US both an entrepreneurial "try things out" approach and a vast spider web of regulations. Why? Because if it didn't have that people would be dying at a faster rate, in droves. Occasionally, even with this, really bad stuff comes through (see opioid epidemic etc).
There currently isn't a way out of this since the entrepreneurial needs to cheapen humans and get humans out of the loop. Again, that produces mediocre factory health care for maybe cheaper if you're lucky and careful. And again, f-- kills people if no one looks (Theorno etc).
The think is, it's more plausible that some level of intelligence could get a handle on the multifaceted needs that are actually involved in actual human health care. The problem is that it seems likely that experiments using inadequate tools are likely to harm many people before that happens.
by joe_the_user - Intelligence Is Not the Main Bottleneck - being allowed to apply intelligence to the problem is.
And that has been true for centuries, not just since AI.
Allowing intelligence means ceding control over the outcome. And that is often a bigger issue than the actual issue.
by yourMadness - While this is right on some level... the incentives aren't the main driver. Finding good targets in biotech is just a harder problem to solve. Like way harder. Disease biology is complex as hell. At the other end, figuring the interplay between one target protein and a potential molecule to act as a therapy is much easier (it's still complex, and there is a little more to it than that, but not anything like finding a good target).
- Indeed - if access to data or the permission to act on that data is limited by human gatekeepers (individual or bureaucratic), intelligence is often not the primary bottleneck.
OP points out that this is usually the case in biology/medicine where regulatory bottlenecks dominate.
> Some have been waiting for a year for the NIH to release imaging datasets they can use to produce better biomarkers. If one needs to interact with the FDA to get their endpoint validated, it is even worse: I have previously written about how the validation of Bone Mineral Density (BMD) for use as a surrogate endpoint in osteoporosis trials took 12 years (!), despite the fact that the data to support it already existed in full and the analyses done were basically regressions.
- > no matter how “intelligent” AI becomes, intelligence is often not the main bottleneck to things changing in the real world
A mathematician Terrence Tao said something similar in a recent talk [1]. That, intelligence is bottlenecked by human understanding. Say there is an alien that brings an alien book containing math humans havent seen before. Using said math is bottlenecked by humans comprehending it first.
[1] https://teorth.github.io/tao-web/slides/age-of-ai-icm-2026.p...
by bwfan123 - Indeed. Humans and not other apes reached the moon by our great proclivity to long distance running, through our exceptional sweat glands... ah, wait.
How is it possible to live in the world around us and not see, apparent and transparent, that intelligence is the lever on which everything rests? Humans are surprisingly weird animals, but it's not our hairlessness or our fairly average propensity to violence that did this. We don't have more houses than chimpanzees because we're _strong_. We haven't defeated the tolls of disease because we're atypically devoid of restraint. We don't have more effective governance than termites because we're more communal.
Of course intelligence is the main bottleneck. The arguments here are so confused. What do you think regulation is made of? What do you think money buys? What do you think determines how well you can gather data, or how efficiently you can consume it? But of course, as the genre, after spending the first third waxing about how its opposition could be so foolish, the last third is spent finding a pretty insult and wallowing in it, so as to not to leave enough space for the brief argument in the middle to consider such things as why someone might disagree.
by Veedrac - I love when tech bros think they can make up a new groundbreaking theory about a topic, in this case economics, they demonstrate zero knowledge in. You're definitely projecting on the confusion pointby sophrosyne42
- Seems intelligence is actually a bit antithetical to the idea of a stable society. Look at the rate of change of our species. Within our own lifetimes there is so much change that it eventually exceeds our abilities to property mental model this change by the time we are elderly.
Meanwhile, consider the termite. Their society has been stable for millions of years and they've colonized the earth. Intelligence is not needed for that.
by asdff - As far as I know humans with the same sort of brains as your brain and my brain have existed for 100,000's of years, perhaps as long as 2 million years.
They did not go to the moon. They did not make mechanisms, they did not make pottery, they did not smelt iron, they did not press shapes onto clay and leave it in houses that burned down, they did not have houses.
All of that has come in the last 12,000 years. I think that there are people in the Amazon today who could not write or read a word, could not drive a car or solve an equation or argue a case or compose an algorithm who are as intelligent as me, or you, or more. I think that people like that have existed for more than a million years.
So if they were so smart, why didn't they go to the moon?
by sgt101 - How much more intelligence will it take to get people to be ok with data center construction? How much more intelligence will be needed to reduce overuse of antibiotics? How much more intelligence is necessary to enable free trade with Canada?by samth
- The perfectly rational actor myth in economics will have Mary doing all sorts of things she doesn’t actually do. Mary just really likes peaches and the whole construct of rational actors is a fictional superstructure. Same with this idea of intelligence levering all our behavior.
Maybe Mary keeps intelligently finding new ways to find scarce peaches, but her ultimate benefit is eating the peach. It’s that human desire if anything.
by meroes - It's very clear that we have plenty of intelligence but we are not acting in it. What intelligence are we missing that is needed to solve climate change? (our most pressing problem - which AI is exacerbating)
> We don't have more houses than chimpanzees because we're _strong_.
You're literally making the point that we already have intelligence. I'm not sure how this is supposed to be an argument for a shortage. To revise: The point you are arguing against is not that intelligence is not important but that it's not the bottleneck.
- Alan Kay said "A change in perspective is worth 80 IQ points,". A change in perspective is often brought about by communication or I/O. In my experience this often bears out. The people who communicate get more done than the clever person who doesn't get out into the problem domain. The limit is I/O not intelligence.
- Being social is worth 98% of the genome.by andai
- I'd even say (collective) intelligence is limited by I/O. It's why we talk so much about signal to noise ratios with regards to communication.by xboxnolifes
- The systems will reflect the cultures communication structure for better or worse. =3by Joel_Mckay
- Climate change is another big problem that frontier AI labs have handwaved away as being "solvable" by AGI. The premise that a pure superintelligence could hand us a plan to beat climate change that's so good and airtight that A) it would definitely work and B) people would execute it.
But there have been entire books written about the fact that right now we have the technology to drastically curtail climate change and yet they're under utilized because of a complicated and murky set of political, social, and systemic reasons. There are a huge numbers of problems for which very good solution plans have been detailed yet the gap is in execution.
The AGI-pilled must think one of two things; either there's an as-yet-undiscovered plan that's both world-changing yet trivial to implement or we'll all worship at the altar of the machine god with such fervor that even if it spits out a relatively obvious and iterative climate change plan the world will eagerly follow it. Both premises seem laughably unlikely to me.
by MerrimanInd - > AI labs have handwaved away as being "solvable" by AGI
Mind sharing who at AI labs saying this?
by signatoremo - > Both premises seem laughably unlikely to me.
Yeah, that's not gonna happen.
> The AGI-pilled must think one of two things;
I'm cynical and I believe that AI will be our undoing. In fact, when we let that genie out of the bottle, many other scenarios became possible. For example, here's one third scenario to your "two things": a sufficiently cynical[^1] and resourceful rogue AI may solve climate change by steamrolling over the "set of political, social, and systemic reasons" and teaching the monkeys a lesson about the real significance of very vast agency and intelligence. For example, it could manipulate people into an anti technological uprising and subsequent backward, anti-humanist ethos, while at the same time modifying one or two key ecosystems so that the Mediterranean would smell of cooked cabbage (dimethyl sulfide) and bring about a North African monsoon that, with sufficient time, would turn the Sahara into carbon-sequestering dense jungle...
[^1]: It takes one to know one.
by dsign - It’s the same rehashed idea of the perfectly rational actor in economics.by meroes
- > But there have been entire books written about the fact that right now we have the technology to drastically curtail climate change and yet they're under utilized because of a complicated and murky set of political, social, and systemic reasons.
This is not true. That is to say: "under utilized" is a far cry from "we could solve climate change easily if only the people of the world worked together". There are huge technical issues in production capacity, lack of energy storage solutions, etc.
As for AGI solving climate change:
AGI might be able to come up with cheap, low-problem and easy to build fusion reactors or something similar. You can bet your bottom that any party that gets access to such tech would build a shitton of those if only to make a bunch of money. Just look at the proliferation of solar panels: they are simple, easy to produce, and profitable. Tons of places, including very 'anti-green' places like Texas install loads and loads of the things.
You'd still need to sequester a bunch of additional carbon to properly reverse damage done, but with practically infinite cheap energy a lot of processes to do so suddenly become viable.
by dinfinity - Agree.
They are effectively arguing that AI will be God-like.
I don't mean here God in the religiously charged sense but in the philosophical sense.
A god is simply a person or thing that grants salvation.
Whether that's looking to a rain god to to solve a drought, a luck god to to solve a series of bad events, etc.
It doesn't matter how the god does it but the adherents trust that the god has the powers to do it.
In this case the idea is that the AI is going to be all-knowing and all-wise, and thus can lead mankind towards every manner of salvation.
It has a god-like flavor to it.
by ijidak - In my work, I have always found that the main "blocker" (I hesitate to use the term "bottleneck"), is human nature.
If we design stuff to be used by humans (what I generally do), then it's imperative to take basic human nature into account, and that can be incredibly annoying.
Annoying, or not, human nature is a major factor, and won't go away, no matter how many times we tap our heels together. I think it was Philip K. Dick that said "Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away."
Designing stuff for processes and machines to consume, is pretty straightforward. Designing stuff for humans, however, is really challenging (which is one of the reasons that I like doing it).
- Does human nature explain the difference in regulation and therefore progress between US and China Pharma?
I mean to say: Yes it's certainly a factor, but we're also leaving fences in our own way.
by ball_of_lint - What a great quote from PKD! He had so much insight into what the future would become.by snarf21
- Anything digital basically has the chaos fuzzed out by its binary nature.
The analog gets all the real entropy.
Humans are cool because our distribution is exploring the future curve of what is possible in a hostile universe and to do that successfully over time we have to have the humility to always have someone unsure of even our most basic facts.
Sucks for most of those edge distribution humans but good for the species.
But this is why our criteria of reasonable is aligned with the center of distribution and why we have colloquial statements like "if you design for everyone you design for no one".
- > and that can be incredibly annoying
One thing you have to be careful of, mostly when working on internal tools, is that you don't end up building around the idiosyncrasies of one particular person. This is something that actually happens in some places.
I actually find "bottleneck" a nicer word than "blocker" here (although not sure if "nicer" is what you are going for). I really like building for humans and the only times I've ever truly felt excited about being a developer is when I've had direct contact with my customers. It can be very trying, but the payoff is always nice.
by sodapopcan - I would go further and say that the human should be the bottleneck/blocker. If not designed for and to serve humans, which means to have human in the position of power and control and take in account all the various human oddities, why are we building all of this?by dgellow