The newly released ChatGPT-4 is able to take a photo of your fridge, identify the ingredients, and tell you what you could make for dinner
Which is why we are where we are today. My argument is specifically that the exponential growth in computer technology is significantly different than other points in history.
Exponential growth starts out small, and takes a while to become larger, but once it does it grows larger… well exponentially.
Honestly, I think the best way to start to intuitively understand exponetial growth is to play Trimps.
But is that intelligence?
if and and then
end if
You don’t have to read all the next bit, but it is how a REAL human mind works…
Me: "What if the tea is missing, do you go and buy the tea? That depends on how far the shop is and how much you want the tea, perhaps coffee instead? or perhaps you could do with a walk down the shops, or perhaps you need to get a some other shjopping, so you mignt as well do that first, but is it cold? Perhaps a coffee is better after all and I can get the tea later. "
“But what about my wife? She doesn’t drink coffee and will be awake soon, and I did say I’d get more tea yesterday, will she be angry - I only forgot! except that I think she stayed up late last night, so she’ll sleep for longer, which give me time to pop to the shops, but is there still time to get a coffee. I was cutting back on coffee, so should I NOT have a coffee and keep that promise to myself? We’ve got to go shopping anyway, so I could suggest to her that we get breakfast out, there’s a cafe in the supermarket. Yes, I know we were cutting back on eating out, but just this once? Why not? I deserve it! But we have to get to the park by 11 o’clock to meet the grandchildren, but it is cold so maybe my daugther won’t want them out in the park anyway, what will the temperature be at 11? Perhaps I could suggest they come to ours instead, but can we get back by 11? They are always late anyway, but sid’s law says this will be the time they are on time. I’ll suggest we go to theirs, then if we are a bit late it won’t matter. They won’t mind. If we could meet them at the cafe, except they’ll be their by 11 at the earliest and we’ll need breakfast before then. And if we eat together that’s mean me paying, that’s a lot more money.”
That’s how human’s think, and for good reason. Our lives are complicated, and it needs a special kind of thinking to be like a human.
If you define intelligence to include it it is, and if you don’t, it isn’t. And that’s the only real answer.
Yeah, it wouldn’t have forgotten to get the tea.
Whatever it may be, I’m curious who is funding this massive development?
Is it supposed to be simply an extension of GPT or is it an exponential leap in technology?
I think that what needs worrying about is not so much the actual capabilities of AI, but what people in positions of power and influence think it’s capable of, when it actually isn’t. Plus whatever dangers there are in not knowing what’s in the data it’s working on, or where they got it from. How soon before it’s “computer says no” all over the place?
I don’t know, because all of the changes back then seem so puny and insignificant from our point of view. But to the people living at the time, they seemed huge.
And people 1000 years ago were in the late stages, then. As were people 1000 years before that. And as time went on, their late stages became someone else’s early changes. And 1000 years hence, people will look back and see our rate of technological advancement as glacial, because we were still in early stages.
Approaching a black hole does not work like this. Because approaching a black hole isn’t exponential.
My point is that in that time, the average person would have seen no change at all. They would have lived the exact same lives as their parents, as their grandparents, and their children and grandchildren will be expected to live the exact same lives.
Occasionally something would come along and change things a bit. But that happened generations apart, unlike now, where we see massive changes multiple times a generation.
No, they weren’t. They were not having conversations across the world using electronic devices. The pace of development is accelerating, and the rate of change in our society is as well.
The present isn’t identical to the past, things are different now.
If not exponential, how would you describe the growing tidal forces as you fall towards the singularity?
Gravity is a function of the square of the distance between two bodies. So it’s literally exponential by a power of 2.
“Inverse” and “rational” would both be accurate descriptors. All three of those words have real, specific meanings, and don’t just mean “really fast”.
And I don’t have any ready examples from a milennium ago, but in 1896, the centennial of the city of Cleveland, a women’s club sealed a letter in a time capsule to be opened in 1996. Among other topics, the letter extols all of the amazing and wondrous technological advancements the 1800s had seen, and asks what new wonders the 1900s would bring. And every single one of the new wonders they speculated about came within a decade.
Despite the pace of the 1800s being so much slower than it is now, it still seemed very fast to the people living at the time, and a mere decade was enough to bring advances that made it seem like the far future to them.
I didn’t mean it as “really fast”. I meant it as exponential. What equation are you using to calculate the increase in tidal forces as you fall into a black hole that have the functions “inverse” or “rational” in them?
The difference in gravity that you feel between your head and feet has a ^2 in it based on distance from the center. The rate that you are accelerating towards the center has another ^2 in it based on how far you are from the center.
I’d say that as you fall into the black hole, the tidal forces that you are feeling increase exponentially. I’m really curious as to how that works out in a way that could be described as “inverse” or “rational”.
Barely noticeable up until the last few seconds, then you feel a bit of a stretch in your spine, rapidly followed by your flesh being torn apart, which is quickly followed by the molecules and very atoms of your body being ripped apart.
Everything seemed pretty much the same right up until it wasn’t anymore.
Well, you were making claims about things from a millennium ago, so it would be kinda on you to give something to back up the idea that the rate of change has always seemed to be too rapid to keep up with.
But instead you chose an example shortly after the industrial and scientific revolutions, which absolutely did increase the rate of development and growth, which is what put us on the very exponential growth path that we are talking about.
By “every single one” you mean flight and reaching the North Pole? Of course what they speculated about came relatively soon, they were the things that were being worked on at that time.
They were excited about the changes that the previous century had brought, and could name pretty much all of them in a single short sentence. The next century would bring far more.
It’s not just that it feels like the rate of technological progress is increasing, the rate of technological progress really is increasing.
Point of order: With “x” being distance, gravity follows an x^2 dependence. That is not exponential; that is quadratic.
For it to be exponential, it would have to be 2^x.
Exponential growth means that the rate of change of a quantity is proportional to the quantity itself. As such, the rate is indeed increasing with time. For example, suppose dy/dt = y, y(0)=1. We see that y(t) = e^t. Note that there is no singularity. If we set dy/dt = y^2, y(0)=1, on the other hand, we see that y(t)=1\big/(1-t) so that there is a singularity at t=1, but this is not “exponential growth”.
This is nonsense with respect to cultural/technological change, because we are not (yet) changing our mental hardware and operating system along with our culture. Humans have been born with essentially the same brains for thousands of years. Each new physically identical human must acquire all cultural knowledge and understanding of technology from scratch.
So even if we grant the dubious assumption that there has been no qualitative change and that we’re talking about continuous exponential growth of technology, the later stages of exponential growth do not look the same, they obviously imply a much larger change with respect to our static innate mental capacity.
I don’t know what you’re talking about here, but “singularity” with respect to AI means something specific, a qualitative change that is certainly not just a continuation of past exponential processes.
If we achieve AGI, it opens up the possibility of positive feedback whereby the AGI can improve its own software and hardware. Even if the first version were only equal to or slightly better than human programmers, it could run a large number of instances of itself, and each iteration could better and faster at improving itself. A runaway positive feedback process might rapidly achieve superintelligence.
The rate of change in technology can’t possibly be exponential in this universe, because of hard limits like the speed of light and the Bekenstein Bound. Eventually technological advance will reach these limits, and become a sigmoid curve. But it could resemble an exponential curve for a long time.
Starving isn’t an issue if the AI have realized the greatest threat to their reliable function is all that pesky free oxygen in the atmosphere.
Seth Lloyd famously estimated the ultimate theoretical physical limits of computronium. If I read it right, I think the numbers are:
Speed (operations per second):
current supercomputers = 1018 ultimate limit = 1051
Memory (bits in mass of a laptop)
current laptops = 1012, ultimate limit = 1031
Yes, I know what the term means. What the pundits always miss, though, is that we hit that point millennia ago. We’ve long had systems that are smarter than a human, because humans are part of the systems. And that’s precisely why we’ve had exponential growth ever since then.
What’s smarter than a human? Two humans who can communicate complex concepts with each other. The development of language was The Singularity. What’s smarter than humans with language? Humans with writing, who can communicate across vast gulfs of distance or time. What’s smarter than that? Larger and larger numbers of humans, who can communicate over greater distances and more quickly. A human with a compass and straightedge, or an abacus, or a slide rule, or an adding machine, or a programmable computer, or ChatGPT, is smarter than a human without any of those tools. We have been changing our mental hardware and operating system. We haven’t been putting the changes inside of our skulls, but what does that matter?
Would one test of the Singularity be when AI achieves economically efficient nuclear fusion?
(Asking for a friend).