We've been "moving too fast" since we figured out agriculture. It's fine. The world as you know it will change irreversibly; you'll long for the simplicity of youth; you will bemoan the state of the world we have left for our children... just like every generation before us did. It'll all be fine. Enjoy the ride, it's called life, and it's better than it ever has been.

These rah rah comments aren't illuminating or helpful. There are immense costs - societal and ecological - to progress that a lot of people seem to be blind to, whether willfully or not.

One can reasonably argue that the printing press was responsible for the speed and violence of the reformation. But the alternative of an illiterate world is hardly a panacea. Most large-scale advancements have the same flavor.

What are we to do, then? No snark, honest question.

We should have had a moratorium on potatoes, look at us now.

Maybe a moratorium on the Haber process though.

Past performance is not indicative of future results.

The power to seriously harm nations may be in the hands of tens of thousands of individuals within a few years. Things might just be different this time.

It will be different this time, just like it was every other time. It still doesn't matter. The epoch of earth's history that happens to overlap with your own lifespan isn't inherently more interesting or important than any other time, except to you. But sure, what good is an exciting new frontier without a gaggle of doomers worried about what's on the other side? Same as it ever was.

>The epoch of earth's history that happens to overlap with your own lifespan isn't inherently more interesting or important than any other time, except to you

Earth's history, sure. Humanity's history though? Living during the Apollo program is clearly more interesting than living in a period of relative stasis. Living during the AGI revolution could be more interesting still, we'll have to see.

That's already the case

Someone born in 1885 who lived to be 70 was brought into a world where it took weeks to get from the US to Europe, and died in a world where it took hours. TNT was the hottest in explosives at their birth, and we’d seen the spread of city ending explosives by their death. I personally feel nuclear proliferation is still orders of magnitude more frightening than anything AI has done.

Someone born in 1985 who is now 37-38 was brought into a world where the internet barely existed, and was barely an adult when the iPhone launched. There’s still a lot more that can happen.

Don’t listen to pessimists: the world will look very different, but we apes have a way of adapting.

Being terrified doesn’t serve much purpose at this point.

We are going too fast. Have been for years. This is just the first clear indication.

Braking is fatal, but some seem pretty hell-bent.

Deceleration is complicated, and it seems highly unlikely that there would be sufficient consensus for true deceleration. Local deceleration is simply waiting for the acceleration occurring somewhere else to overcome your efforts.

The math hasn’t really changed for most individuals. At some point something big will happen.

Singularity.

Be excited and put your efforts towards what you value. One way or another, there is very little time left for wasting.

I disagree. ChatGPT is a clear turning point. We have not been going too fast before, at least not outside LLMs.

Singularity is a belief system, it has very little to do with AI.

edit: I also think if we would ever get to a point where AI gets close to a point of possibly getting out of control as you imply it would simply be banned in the US/Canada/EU/Australia. Furthermore Latin America and Africa could and would be pressured to go along if needed. Which leaves some parts of Asia. China, maybe India and Russia. Probably only China. It could be cut off from the Internet if needed. We could build up a wall just like in the Cold War. My point being: This will not happen just because it happens. It will be a choice.

Kind of like how we could just ban fossil fuels if they ever start to become a problem.

Or drugs!

Gpt plus langchain agents is quite scary

It will use every tool you give it to reach the goal you give him. It will try forever if needed.

I bet state actor are already plugging in tooling to register social account and automate credible propaganda. Maybe not with gpt itself, but privately hosted fine tuned models.

This can win elections.

You can plug wordpress and build infinite blogs with infinite post with the unique scope of building mass around a topic.

This can alter Wikipedia, many people don't ever check sources and take it at face value.

You can not only build fake research paper, but fake the whole research team and their whole interactions with the community and investor.

This can fraud millions.

Tools enable this today.

Humans have been doing all of this and more, for a very long time.

This simply exposes all of the cracks in the foundations of our society. There are severely exploitable issues, and we may wind up with a planet-level chaos monkey.

Ghostbusters had the stay-puft marshmallow man. Will the form of our destroyer be the woot monkey?

Yes it was possible. Steel was also available before the industrial revolution... but guess what, it's called a revolution for reason? It become cheap enough to upend preexisting social status quo. It was a social phase transition caused by technology.

We're dealing with a very nascent AI revolution right now. A social phase transition has already started: on the forefront there are graphic artists (midjourney v5 is literally revolutionizing the industry as we speak) and NLP researchers (GPT-4 has reduced the need for applied NLP to basically zero), but it's only a start. The cheapness and availability changes everything.

Except this isn’t a revolution. Think bigger.

The industry was a joke prior to this. No offense.

An AI API marketplace is going to be amazing. But each API is going to need parameters that you can run gradient descent on to tune.

This needs to be the foundation

I wasn’t limiting my comment to AI development.

Humanity has been going too fast for a long time.

Tell me about this singularity belief system. I simply meant something stronger than an inflection point, closer to the mathematical sense than what you must be assuming, but that word must mean something more for you.

Have to reply a second time: It does serve a purpose. There is a purpose in fear and the purpose is to either get us moving if we are complacent or to prevent us from doing things that are not good for us. So the fear may be justified. Maybe.

Time to do something more than respond to cortisol. Before something smarter than the monkey decides to guide the monkey effectively.

"I think it'd be crazy not to be a little bit afraid, and I empathize with people who are a lot afraid." —Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI

An AI API marketplace is going to be amazing. But each API is going to need parameters that you can run gradient descent on to tune.

This needs to be the foundation

What things can this tech do which scare you?

It not that this tech does things now that scare me. Now I am mostly exited.

I believe my uneasiness stems from the unknown potential of this technology.

Now, one could argue that that’s always the case for technology, so why do I feel uneasy now?

I believe that this particular type of technology has a very large potential. I think most HN readers would agree.

But I am not scared, yet. I’ll be scared when I know the technology will do serious damage, until then it’s an uneasy feeling. Then I’ll probably be terrified.

I think part of it is you have a lot of idiots whoa re saying this is AGI. It isn't, and it isn't anywhere close to it.

Everyone can see the writing on the wall that they need to be a part owner of the production, because the worker will not be needed. So its a land grab in every direction right now for the thing that is going to co-opt the means of production.

what do the owners of production do when the 6 billion workers decide they don't like not being able to eat?

What would they care? 6 billion people is probably too many for the planet anyway.

Also they dont need to raise and feed an army if AI powered drones are able to do the same job. When AI is able to replace jobs en masse its pretty transparent to expect AI armies to be built en masse as well.

Owning production buys you a lot of weapons with which you can enforce your property ownership on others.

Not if, but when, we get around to AI law enforcement with lethal weapons, it's over. There's no going back from that.

I wonder if the physical workers join especially for services. Perhaps not, since they may be needed.

so bring it down to 3 billion people who know how to find datacentres on google maps

Good point.

the point is to survive a little longer so you don't wind up being the 2 billion that starved to death waiting for an AI-output tax to form universal basic income or the uprising to start.

bake cookies just like the nice old grandma does for the local teenage gangs. its a survival mechanism so that nobody messes with you.

Give them a bit of food and a lot of entertainment...

There's plenty of cake to go around. If you say this while handing out cake it will go quite I well I suspect.

> because the worker will not be needed.

I'm pretty sure this is not obvious.

I think we are at, or very near, the inflection point in that picture of that graph that is rising linearly for centuries and then suddenly goes exponential.

https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/G1.jpg

the problem is that the chart is also accurate if the x axis starts 100,000 years ago. the inflection point might be 2000 years or it might be 50 years.

'buzz' doesn't usually come with examples!

I’d say we’ve been going slower than I thought. Evolution is exponential. Honestly it’s about time we find a cure for cancer, for example. I’m extremely excited about this and can’t wait for this to get better and better. My biggest hope is anti-aging through cellular regeneration or reprogramming or similar.

Reminds me of the Three Body Problem book. SPOILER - the Alien civilization is terrified of us moving fast and try to stop our development before they can reach us via thier inter stellar travel methods.