In the post about GPT-4V, I mentioned the paper “Building Machines That Learn and Think Like People” (https://arxiv.org/abs/1604.00289) by Brenden Lake, Tomer Ullman, Joshua Tenenbaum, and Samuel Gershman. In that seminal paper the authors suggested that truly human-like learning and thinking machines will have to reach beyond current engineering trends in both what they learn, and how they learn it.
Attempting to build thinking machines is the work of a fool because it incentivizes great societal evils, while disincentivizing known stable systems. The consequences of such are collapse/extinction.
Before you think this is some doomer who isn't speaking from a place of sound/rational education or knowledge, I'd suggest you thoroughly review how our economic and political systems actually work historically and what happens every time there are too many people given a set finite resources.
A more recent example based on history would be depicted in the movie Conspiracy (2001). The dialogue was taken from minutes of that specific event. This is how horrible things happen, behind closed doors without your participation unless you are privileged to be there. Now expand the consequences of that to every mid-level worker and below in the world instead of just refugees, with the only people who benefit being the power elite; and you have a relatively straight forward model to work from.
Next how do you manage economic calculation? The impacts of such a drastic shift in the factor markets must be managed somehow to avert unrest, but this too is an intractable problem.
Subjective value theorem as framed by Carl Menger pretty much says that there can be no discrete value placed on goods because it is relative by each individual's needs, psychology, personal resources, and availability (supply/demand) of primary and indirect goods.
If most workers are no longer needed, how do they pay for anything? UBI fails because it runs directly into economic calculation issues. Shortages occur as a side effect, producers leave the market, the inefficiencies propagate towards collapse in the absence of rational pricing (this is covered in blinding detail by Mises in his 1950s essays on Socialism, and why it structurally fails). I'm glossing over a lot of details, but they are there for you to review.
Exchange and distribution of labor only work efficiently in functioning marketplaces, without proper price discovery the system fails. Notably it requires price discovery and the core elements of money, where you have a stable medium of exchange, unit of account, and store of value.
These all get incredibly warped with concentration in fewer hands dictating chaotic dynamics until a cascade failure occurs. Most people are consumers, not producers in the goods sense. Consumers make money through factor markets which become largely obsolete, and only available to those who have inherent attributes weighted towards intelligence. What do you do with all those people who no longer can work for basic subsistence.
Notably, Inflationary pressures fight with deflationary forces on the store of value in fiat, which leads to a chaotic unstable system over time. This eventually self-sustains towards either hyper-inflation (and currency failure) or deflation; you ride a knifes edge until you miscalculate (at the policy level) because these are lagging indicators, hysteresis at work. Both increasingly interfere in markets over time as producers stop producing when they cannot guarantee profit. This makes any kind of economic calculation impossible.
In hyper-inflation, production halts because profit cannot be guaranteed, systems we depend on fail, Malthus law of population re-asserts and we're all dead, as we fight over the limited resources.
In deflation, production is reduced, prices fall, production halts because profit cannot meet minimum levels, systems we depend on fail, Malthus law of population re-asserts and we're all dead, same thing.
If you think this cannot happen, look at what happened with baby formula during the pandemic. All the domino's depend on production and forward consumption which cannot be calculated under these new environments.
These systems that you are seeking to directly impact/interfere in are societal level systems. Unlike small systems, you can't just wake up one day as an individual and direct everyone to do something radically different and expect them all to follow. You are fighting against friction and momentum.
This research is putting fuel into a runaway train that's going to take humanity over a cliff into oblivion because we have no functioning societal systems that can possibly work for the environment being created.
The populist majority with nothing will ensure those who have concentration of resources (with everything) are removed. Societal conflict increases and devolves into barbarism. MAD doctrine probably ceases to work, and you have psychopaths making decisions that determine everyone's future.
There are so many uneducated supporters of these type of outcome (destructionists) seeking this today, claiming these things don't matter in the big picture from a fallacious place of survivor bias.
What you do matters, contributing towards this goal in any form matters. The legacy of this area of study with the lack of controls over it will be tragic assuming anyone actually survives this. There's a reasonable likelihood no one will survive as once cascade failures start, its already past a point of no return; and that includes the next generation. Your kids.
Whatever happened to people actually retaining their core values, such as following the social contract, and preparing the way for the next generation to thrive. All that makes any impact or headlines today is irrational magical thinking that doesn't solve issues, and just creates more insidious issues that can't be solved.
What a travesty of circumstances we find ourselves in, and the people involved in these areas of study aren't asking "Should we be doing this", they are asking can we, and damn the consequences. You don't see people quitting their jobs and leaving the sector, over the existential threat these systems pose, you see business people seeking permission to eliminate workers jobs, appeasing policy makers despite being in a position where they reasonably should know better.
AGI doesn't even need to occur for any of the above to happen. All that needs to happen is sufficient interference in critical systems that lead to cascade failures.
Many business people consider the perfect ideal corporation to be a small board of directors, where all the work and cost is run by cheap machines and wealth is retained internally for shareholders, for all time. Except they don't pay recognition that it all fails once you reach a certain point of integration, as always happens on an S curve in business.
Profits are front-loaded, and towards the end there is nothing left in the tank when you need it to stave off disaster. That unfortunately is how oligopoly works, you effectively hold the world/market hostage by making yourself too big too fail.
Collapse will still occur if there is no one that can bail you out, and supporting things that have a high chance of ending in evil outcomes taints the people involved forever, regardless of what excuse they might tell themselves when all is said and done and its too late to do anything because it was ignored at the time it could have made a difference.
Attempting to build thinking machines is the work of a fool because it incentivizes great societal evils, while disincentivizing known stable systems. The consequences of such are collapse/extinction.
Before you think this is some doomer who isn't speaking from a place of sound/rational education or knowledge, I'd suggest you thoroughly review how our economic and political systems actually work historically and what happens every time there are too many people given a set finite resources.
A more recent example based on history would be depicted in the movie Conspiracy (2001). The dialogue was taken from minutes of that specific event. This is how horrible things happen, behind closed doors without your participation unless you are privileged to be there. Now expand the consequences of that to every mid-level worker and below in the world instead of just refugees, with the only people who benefit being the power elite; and you have a relatively straight forward model to work from.
Next how do you manage economic calculation? The impacts of such a drastic shift in the factor markets must be managed somehow to avert unrest, but this too is an intractable problem.
Subjective value theorem as framed by Carl Menger pretty much says that there can be no discrete value placed on goods because it is relative by each individual's needs, psychology, personal resources, and availability (supply/demand) of primary and indirect goods.
If most workers are no longer needed, how do they pay for anything? UBI fails because it runs directly into economic calculation issues. Shortages occur as a side effect, producers leave the market, the inefficiencies propagate towards collapse in the absence of rational pricing (this is covered in blinding detail by Mises in his 1950s essays on Socialism, and why it structurally fails). I'm glossing over a lot of details, but they are there for you to review.
Exchange and distribution of labor only work efficiently in functioning marketplaces, without proper price discovery the system fails. Notably it requires price discovery and the core elements of money, where you have a stable medium of exchange, unit of account, and store of value.
These all get incredibly warped with concentration in fewer hands dictating chaotic dynamics until a cascade failure occurs. Most people are consumers, not producers in the goods sense. Consumers make money through factor markets which become largely obsolete, and only available to those who have inherent attributes weighted towards intelligence. What do you do with all those people who no longer can work for basic subsistence.
Notably, Inflationary pressures fight with deflationary forces on the store of value in fiat, which leads to a chaotic unstable system over time. This eventually self-sustains towards either hyper-inflation (and currency failure) or deflation; you ride a knifes edge until you miscalculate (at the policy level) because these are lagging indicators, hysteresis at work. Both increasingly interfere in markets over time as producers stop producing when they cannot guarantee profit. This makes any kind of economic calculation impossible.
In hyper-inflation, production halts because profit cannot be guaranteed, systems we depend on fail, Malthus law of population re-asserts and we're all dead, as we fight over the limited resources.
In deflation, production is reduced, prices fall, production halts because profit cannot meet minimum levels, systems we depend on fail, Malthus law of population re-asserts and we're all dead, same thing.
If you think this cannot happen, look at what happened with baby formula during the pandemic. All the domino's depend on production and forward consumption which cannot be calculated under these new environments.
These systems that you are seeking to directly impact/interfere in are societal level systems. Unlike small systems, you can't just wake up one day as an individual and direct everyone to do something radically different and expect them all to follow. You are fighting against friction and momentum.
This research is putting fuel into a runaway train that's going to take humanity over a cliff into oblivion because we have no functioning societal systems that can possibly work for the environment being created.
The populist majority with nothing will ensure those who have concentration of resources (with everything) are removed. Societal conflict increases and devolves into barbarism. MAD doctrine probably ceases to work, and you have psychopaths making decisions that determine everyone's future.
There are so many uneducated supporters of these type of outcome (destructionists) seeking this today, claiming these things don't matter in the big picture from a fallacious place of survivor bias.
What you do matters, contributing towards this goal in any form matters. The legacy of this area of study with the lack of controls over it will be tragic assuming anyone actually survives this. There's a reasonable likelihood no one will survive as once cascade failures start, its already past a point of no return; and that includes the next generation. Your kids.
Whatever happened to people actually retaining their core values, such as following the social contract, and preparing the way for the next generation to thrive. All that makes any impact or headlines today is irrational magical thinking that doesn't solve issues, and just creates more insidious issues that can't be solved.
What a travesty of circumstances we find ourselves in, and the people involved in these areas of study aren't asking "Should we be doing this", they are asking can we, and damn the consequences. You don't see people quitting their jobs and leaving the sector, over the existential threat these systems pose, you see business people seeking permission to eliminate workers jobs, appeasing policy makers despite being in a position where they reasonably should know better.
AGI doesn't even need to occur for any of the above to happen. All that needs to happen is sufficient interference in critical systems that lead to cascade failures.
Many business people consider the perfect ideal corporation to be a small board of directors, where all the work and cost is run by cheap machines and wealth is retained internally for shareholders, for all time. Except they don't pay recognition that it all fails once you reach a certain point of integration, as always happens on an S curve in business.
Profits are front-loaded, and towards the end there is nothing left in the tank when you need it to stave off disaster. That unfortunately is how oligopoly works, you effectively hold the world/market hostage by making yourself too big too fail.
Collapse will still occur if there is no one that can bail you out, and supporting things that have a high chance of ending in evil outcomes taints the people involved forever, regardless of what excuse they might tell themselves when all is said and done and its too late to do anything because it was ignored at the time it could have made a difference.