The way humans beat AI, at least until AGI, is to innovate conceptually. If what you do is simply rearrange existing concepts then your work will likely get replaced by AI. Coding is a good example of this, you put documented commands, with known behaviours, in sequences that produce defined outcomes. That is the perfect job for AI, if we can solve their irrational desire to please and hallucinate along the way.
I have Instagram installed, and it has a self-regulating feature for me. I sometimes load it up and see if any posts from the dozens of accounts I follow show up in the first 10.
When they do not, and I just get 10 random tiktok style slop videos from accounts I do not follow, I close the app and try again in a few months.
I am so glad they put in this feature that stops me scrolling further.
I note for premise 2 that the people who doubt the premise are the very stupid, but more importantly the very smart.
The former is no challenge to the premise, but the latter? That is a different story.
EDIT : For S&G I asked Claude about it. It replied :
The talk groups Penrose with the religious doubter, as if the two objections were the same species and could be dispatched by the same gesture: most of us find this easy to accept. But that's a headcount, not an argument. The religious objection can be set aside because it rests on a premise (the soul) the materialist simply doesn't share. Penrose's can't, because it's pitched entirely inside the materialist frame — Gödelian limits on algorithmic understanding, non-computable physics in the substrate. You don't get to wave that away; you have to show it's wrong. The talk does the former and pretends it's done the latter.
The entire superintelligence thesis is a wager on the authority of intelligence — that smarter minds see further, judge better, and that this is precisely why we should fear or defer to them. If you take that seriously, then dissent from the very smartest humans on the exact question of whether minds are substrate-independent is the most expensive dissent available. You can't venerate intelligence as the thing that settles everything and then file your most intelligent objector under "outliers, moving on." The move is self-undermining on the argument's own terms.
Idk whether I fall into the former or latter bucket, but "smarter minds see further, judge better" and "there is a soul that taps into a cosmic godhead" are one and the same statement to me
So you think "smarter minds see further, judge better" == "there is a soul that taps into a cosmic godhead"
Good golly, that's the silliest statement completely ignoring that our ancestors wiped most large mammals off the planet by seeing further and judging better by using tools, traps, and the environment around them because of their larger brain size.
Humans have "wiped off the planet" maybe a few hundred mammal species over the last 300K years. Meanwhile we are discovering 30-60 new mammal species every year.
Right, maybe in a million years they'll evolve into the large animals we wiped out. Unless you're just fine with anything larger than a dog being dead.
I would propose that it is very likely to have zero effect. Your argument supposes they are all working together, like many connected computers calculating primes.
It only takes one of them to do it and they are not sharing information. If the 1 you remove from N is the one that will discover it, then it will dramatically affect when AGI happens. If it is not, then it will have zero effect.
I’m developing three codebases right now where all of the code is written by AI (Swift, Python, Rust) and the Rust codebase requires the least pruning and has the fewest wtf moments.
One thing that will have thrown the author off the trail is that he is holding a fossil of the organic parts of the snail and that is essentially a cast of the animal, not the shell. They are known as Steinkerns (stonecore).
The insides get replaced by minerals, which harden, the shell dissolves, then the only fossil remaining is a mould of the inside of what used to be the shell.
So on a fundamental level, the headline is wrong. He did not find any sort of shell...
I've been told by a friend -- a wierd thing -- in many places you can dig a hole and it will fill with water. And at some point in the future fish will be swimming in it.
with a "pond sized" hole, I have read that fish eggs arrive on the feet of ducks and other waterfowl attracted to the new pond. (I have never looked up whether this is a myth)
True, but I actually had no idea that it was the soft parts rather than the hard parts that had been fossilized. (I haven’t verified it yet.) Either way, it didn’t read like a bad faith interpretation/comment.
It wasn't written to be one. If the author went to the trouble of making a 3D space filled with many shells, knowing the actual shell was most likely a different shape would be something they would probably want to know, so the position of their fossil could be placed more accurately in the graphed space.
This is a problem of insufficient checking happening in-between a PR being made, and it being committed.
Imagine you have a low quality coder in your coders, they produce a lot of code, but while some of it is fine, some of it is... dubious. That is no different from an AI and the way you deal with it is the same. You check the PR before committing it.
To allow PRs from them (or anyone really) to get merged without proper checking for bugs etc is just sloppy repo management. The problem is not "AI bad, human good", it is that a human is allowing PRs through to release without properly checking them.
Not many people see that the end result is that when ordinary people stop earning money, and stop buying products, all the money will be used purely for B2B transactions.
Money will still exist, but people will not see hardly any of it. To break out of being just a person and start a business you will still need money, but be unable to get any.
Thus, the endgame is revealed. You don't need to form a dictatorship, you don't need to have a war, you just need to remove all real choice from people, and then you have complete control over what they are able to do by simply making it cost too much. There will be a firewall between ordinary people, and the people who own businesses where all the money sits.
We see the start of it already, when just two individuals have a combined wealth on the order of a trillion dollars. That inequality is not going down, only upwards.
Sure, you may get universal basic income, have a nice house, car (food, clothing etc of course) but there will be a massive air gap between what you could obtain in a lifetime and the minimum you would need to move from that situation into the world where the real money is.
Corporate saving rose by nearly 5 percentage points of global GDP between 1980 and 2013, and since the 2000s the corporate sector flipped from net borrower to net lender in many advanced economies — the "corporate saving glut." Much of it just piled up as cash reserves. Currently, 10–15% of GDP per year flows into corporate retained earnings never to leave. Think about the long term ramifications of that for you and your purchasing power.
AI didn't make this situation, it is just speeding it up.
This is the only point I disagree with. Given human history, it’s much more likely that you wind up in a slum, dying of dysentery. Or the third generation trapped in a trailer park cooking meth to get by. Or, maybe, if you’re lucky, being a cleaner, chauffeur, or cook for one of the wealthy.
> That inequality is not going down, only upwards.
This was talked about 15+ years ago when I was a young student. I saw the writing on the wall and made it a priority to live below my means and aggressively invest.
Unfortunately, many of my friends think I am crazy for not "enjoying life" more... We shall see what happens I guess.
I think the point is that it is his OPs opinion and they cannot read the future. Nobody here can, so the reply has just as much weight as the original.
So saving and living below means is a great strategy either way.
It doesn't cost life to eat modestly and live smaller than you can afford, you live life while doing this. Many think the best part of their life was when they were young and poor, its not a bad life to have low costs so you can live stress free.
Unless you think that the rich experiences of life are what make life worth living, that money grants you access to some of those richest experiences, and that you are more able to fully appreciate and incorporate those experiences into your personhood at a younger age.
I'd advise that person to change their attitude about that, because it's stupid and inhuman. Otherwise you get the absurd statement that average people in most countries, billions, a normal married guy in Vietnam, none of their lives are worth living.
I've traveled to 63 countries, I've had wonderful relationship with people across the globe, and love coding/building services.
I spent ~3 years living in Vietnam, having a more comfortable life than most Americans, while retaining US income levels.
My remote job enabled me to live with my parents longer, earning California-level pay in Florida, helping me save more money and have more time with them.
> Unfortunately, many of my friends think I am crazy for not "enjoying life" more
then, in 30-40 yrs time, those same friends all want gov't bailouts for their pensions, and higher taxation of people like yourself, to fund it (because, you know, you're rich enough to be able to spare it of course!).
I've always been heavily invested in the technology industry and companies that seem popular on HN.
Currently my quantum computing investments have done quiet well. In the past, Google, Apple, and Cloudflare were big winners for me.
Although, over the long term, my performance with more volatility and less tax efficiency barely better than $SPY (mine: 16.28% vs spy: 15.71% annualized return). Schwab says benchmarks an "aggressive, but diversified" portfolio (more bonds and international) to have 12.57% annualized.
The practical difference between a select few owning everything and governments owning everything ends up being practically minor. The key is disperse true ownership (which is NOT just collective ownership via the standard shares; your share in Meta gives you as much control of that as your vote does the government).
Currently, 10–15% of GDP per year flows into corporate retained earnings never to leave. Think about the long term ramifications of that for you and your purchasing power.
That part is just an artifact of the tax system. The aim of corporations is to return excess earning to share holders. But because dividends are taxed, corporation essentially return their earnings as high share prices.
If it weren't for this, many more corporations would be hit by corporate raiders eager to unlock those retained earnings.
But overall, yeah, there has a flood of profits that have piled up.
> We see the start of it already, when just two individuals have a combined wealth on the order of a trillion dollars. That inequality is not going down, only upwards.
Isn't there an inconsistency here? You've set up this narrative of businesses as being the only entities with money (wealth?) but then singled out two individuals.
Also, how do calls for equality of wealth address the inequality in contribution of value and efficiency to society and the economy at large?
Businesses will still be owned or at heavily influenced by individuals and it is those individuals that will be able to steer how those business’ capital is allocated (including towards themselves).
At this point in time I doubt that AI is ever going to escape the control of the humans with capital, and those humans will just use it as a tool in order to amass ever more capital.
The hopeful outlook is that AI is also a lever for the working class. It's why I think local models are important.
> Isn't there an inconsistency here? You've set up this narrative of businesses as being the only entities with money (wealth?) but then singled out two individuals.
You're nitpicking. When an individual is a billionaire, they're basically a business entity.
Ultimately, what is the point of knowledge acquisition and easy maintenance?
To make the work easier for humans to do.
What is the point of knowledge acquisition by humans and easy maintenance if an AI is doing the work?
Some people paint, but if you want to record a scene instantly you press a button on a camera. You don't need to know what the camera does to record the image, you don't need to know how to paint, or anything to do with image manipulation. The tool takes care of that for you. Humans have always offloaded work to machines any chance they get. Other humans have always cried that those tools are the end of human ability, from just writing in 370BC to the smartphone in 2007.
AI is simply not able to innovate, only combine.
reply