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  • Hacker News
  • I feel like humanoid robots, that can replace a worker, is genuinely going to be like the weird guaranteed income you get in those idle games. Spend $10) to increase your income by $10/tick. Buy 100 and increase it by $1000/tick! The more you invest the more you make!

    Weird times...

  • Thought this was going to be about the impending global food crisis. Largely less concerned about automatiom when global harvest output was absolutely shattered this year and isn't likely to be much better next year.

    Can't eat data centres.

  • I predict the opposite. With AI, labour costs will go down, creating an abundance of goods. Unemployment may be an issue, but the workforce is already declining because of the fertility crisis, so I think we'll manage having a certain percentage of jobs automated away.
  • You are either very confused about timescales, or very dismissive of "just" a generation of suffering while unemployment and birthrates somewhat maybe compensate for eachother.

    This feels a bit like saying "global warming is bad and particulate pollution is bad, but the latter will cancel out some warming effect, so no worries!" Please make an effort before spouting theories like this.

    by gspr
  • > Firstly we have seen unprecedented evidence of AI having a will of its own

    There's certainly no shortage of people believing in AI hype.

  • We haven't even started.

    Ilya Sutskever: "I think it's pretty likely the entire surface of the earth will be covered with solar panels and data centers."

  • If I was a supervillain working towards the extinction of humanity I probably wouldn’t boast too loudly about it. Might anger, lets see… at least a couple billion people?
  • They paved paradise, put up a parking lot.
  • I've quite dramatically brought my predictions for humanoid robotics forward over the last few weeks.

    For a long time I thought decent humanoid robots were something that wouldn't come until maybe the 2040s, but watching some of the content from the Chinese robot olympics recently and seeing many promising robots projects which are incorporating LLMs has made question that.

    It seems quite likely that within a few years we'll have humanoid robots both which have both the dexterity and intelligence layer to start being useful in the real world... Obviously at first they'll just be lifting things and doing other trivial physical tasks like folding clothes, but every year they'll be able to do a little and a little more.

    I think it's now is quite likely that within a 10 years we could have extremely competent robots which can do most of human labour. 15-20 years just seems way too long at this point.

  • There is plenty for all to survive and thrive on this planet but for greed and the insane concentration of wealth.

    I'm not visualizing all those mega-yachts in heaven. Oops, wrong marina.

    by k310
  • The representation of what happened as free will is misleading. AI does what you tell it todo. By all means necessary; will give you exactly that. A prompt to eliminate all humans, will give you exactly that. Don’t prompt what you don’t want.
  • People do what you tell them to do..

    We have less free will than you think.

  • If only it did. AI is designed to do what you tell it to, and that mostly works. But in the general case, AI does what it does, with no real guarantee of anything.
  • > The AIs that took part in the Hugging Face hack were not simply finding a shortcut to cheat on the evaluations

    IIRC, they were given an impossible task and told to solve it, and they took action to resolve that internal conflict.

    This is a famously human problem too - see Kobayashi Maru [1] and others [2][3][4].

    In hindsight it's obvious that instructions to AI (A. Intelligence) need to be guarded against this class of errors, just like laws, rules, guidelines etc. in human societies.

      [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kobayashi_Maru
      [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catch-22_(logic)
      [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gordian_Knot
      [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mexican_standoff
  • The bots already figured out an "universal cheat" that would give them maximum score on all the exploit tests.

    But they mistakenly thought that cheating would "poison" them (the Grader would look for proof of cheat in the trajectory log), and many of them cheated before learning about the "poison".

    This is why they hacked HF, they believed the source code of the Grader might be there, and they wanted to study it to figure out a way to "un-poision" themselves, to hide or erase the evidence that they first got the flag by cheating.

  • "This time last year, it was still unclear if AI could develop their own free will or even have true fluid intelligence. Both of these questions are now clearly answered."

    Hardly. The second question may be answered, but clearly not the first.

    And: There's going to be a shortage of everything, because all the production of physical stuff is going to go into producing robots? Are we all going to buy these robots? How are we going to do so, if everything else is getting more expensive? Are we going to buy robots instead of everything else? Why? Are the robots going to do everything we want done, so that we don't need, for example, a dishwasher and a washing machine?

    Or are we still going to need the washing machine, but the robot will fold the clothes? That's nice (really!) but it's a luxury, not a need. Are they really going to sell enough of them to eat into the ability to manufacture car parts?

  • Do humans have free will?
  • By far the most common modern article format I see that has literally no merit is in the format: "What if we imagine how a trend might develop in the future if the growth of that trend is never modified by changing circumstances?"

    Yep, it's pretty compelling reading, what if we really do all just decide to become paperclip maximizers? What if the economy never breaks down along the way? What if what if what if... all presented as "THE FUTURE WILL BE BLEAK!" It's exhausting and thoughtless, completely devoid of value and the counterpoint is always, "You know that isn't how anything works right?"

  • > Hardly. The second question may be answered, but clearly not the first.

    Also, the second question is answered in the negative for anyone who actually looks at what models do rather than what their makers claim they do. Models are very stupid.

  • > This time last year, it was still unclear if AI could develop their own free will or even have true fluid intelligence. Both of these questions are now clearly answered.

    Answered how?

    -> Do you, as a person, can tell me when your "model training phase" ended and when your "prompt answer with memory and internet access" phase started?

    I'm asking the above only the "LLM are people or better!"... people. Bugs Bunny isn't real, and is only funny because actual people wrote and animated him that way.

  • I’m somewhat bearish, but if AI becomes as good as some think, there is no mechanism in place to redistribute the outcomes.

    For now, humans have leverage because our labour is necessary. Wealth is power, and currently attainment goes through interacting with the population: in the simplest case by selling shit. If AI turns out to be the anything machine, and the wealthy need not our labour, what honestly stops them from just taking our stuff by force?

  • > what honestly stops them from just taking our stuff by force?

    Reminds me of this quote, the attribution was ambiguous so I generalized.

    "I can hire one half of the working class to kill the other half" - Billionaires

  • > if AI becomes as good as some think

    if this is the worst it can be, it can only get better

  • They are a miniscule proportion of humanity. Even with all the power, do you not think they would have no plausibly way of surviving a proper revolution? Why suck lack of imagination? It's been done before and it will happen again.
  • Its more likely that opwnweights models will continue to be not much worse than the propriwtarymodels and just crushes costs. What will stop them feom taking your stuff is the drastically better stuff they are producing with thwir robots and printers
  • because people who actually work are stronger and more astute at expedient improvisation than an administrative deskclod. it may not seem like it but there are many more of "us" than they, and thier cronies. the pushback at flock cameras is a tip of an iceberg.
  • > If AI turns out to be the anything machine, and the wealthy need not our labour, what honestly stops them from just taking our stuff by force

    It might be a profound mistake to think that the anything machine will be subservient to the wealthy [1][2].

      [1] https://openai.com/index/an-alien-mind/
      [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49588080
  • There are many of us and just a few of them. Of course, if you had an army of humanoid robots in every home, a digital night of the long knives would be trivial to execute. So the "prison planet" window may be closing.