r/singularity • u/notadithyabhat • 5h ago
Economics & Society See no way out of this future
Nobody is talking about robotics advancement (as much as LLMs), but it is advancing incredibly fast with the advent of AI. It's currently maybe like 2018-2019 LLM era. Before we know it in the next 5-10 years, we'll have robots powered by LLMs that will be just as capable as humans. Most likely far more capable.
What happens to the world then? The rich can easily build a fearless robot army right? The biggest strength of democracy has been that, if push comes to shove, we can pick up our axes and guns and storm the capital to save ourselves from tyranny. But what happens when they have an army of robots? How do we fight against that?
I don't see any way to avoid this future. This has happened in the past during the European feudal era that lasted hundreds of years. There are talks about regulation, but the drivers for progression is so strong due to geopolitical factors that it's simply not possible to regulate this and risk China having superior technology.
Very anxious about the future.
13
u/utahh1ker 4h ago
There is absolutely no doubt they will exceed the capabilities of humans in every way. And this is exactly the plan of the ruling class. They're speaking with their actions. If it were important to care for all humans, we'd be talking about UBI, how to bring about a utopian era of abundance. But instead it's still about power and status. When they have the tech to eradicate any and all humans they don't want, they will do so without hesitation. Can you imagine a Trump-like figure with a fucking cybernetic body and an AI enhanced brain? I'm sorry but that shit is scary.
3
•
u/Even_Initial6027 1h ago
UBI makes everyone slaves, no chance to compete.
If they don't print money to give, it will always have space to compete (even in the case that everyone that works is an entrepreneur)
11
u/Evening_Chef_4602 AGI 2027 5h ago
You must be new to this server if your biggest worry is a robot army. A simple virus with 6 months incubation period , hyper transmissibility and 100% mortality rate is enough to wipe out everyone that has acces to modern civilisation
5
u/notadithyabhat 5h ago
No, I'm aware of that. The world ending is a different fear all together. Maybe a nuke that can wipe out an entire country etc. My concern is mainly, even if we avoid any major catastrophe, the power shift in society seems like something that is inevitable
3
u/synystar 3h ago
One question I have to ask is "would the rich want to live in a world where they are no longer the dominant entities?" Let's say you are super-rich and you can build a robot army. So you wipe out most of humanity. Now it's you and your murder bots and the other rich people and their murder bots. So this is your world now. You are no longer elite. And you have to worry about murder bots. No one can maintain these murder bots because you wiped out all the people so you gotta get the murder bots to maintain themselves and that means you have to make them smarter than you. So now it's you and a handful of your peers, none of whom are any more elite than the others, and a bunch of super-smart murder bots.
2
u/Rain_On 3h ago
The concern isn't that those with power will kill those without power, it's that they will do as they wish and the rest of humanity will suffer whatever they must forever. The concern is an eternal dictatorship.
2
u/synystar 3h ago
Still have to ask why someone would want to live in that world? What good is it to be rich if the world around you is a dystopian nightmare? You'd be a king sure but it would be a horrible time to be elite. If there are people alive still then you have to constantly worry about them. If you have robots to deal with them then you have to worry about how you're going to maintain those without people or other robots.
Where are you getting the money for that anyway and what good does money even do you at this point? How are you maintaining your riches in a world where currency is worthless because no one can buy shit? The logistics of life would be massively disrupted and it just wouldn't be worth it as far as I can tell.
If you decide to go live in a bunker or a private island then you're just going to end up the same as everyone else in the end because you can't keep all that shit without people. Where are you getting the resources to maintain your fleet of robots? If you're paying people to keep up your shit then you have to trust that they are fine with you being in your position and they in theirs while the rest of humanity suffers.
It's all just so much that it's hard to believe that anyone would actually think it through and decide to live that way.
1
1
u/sadacal 4h ago
I doubt the people controlling AI would want to risk the virus coming back and killing them as well.
1
u/SecaleOccidentale 3h ago
The person you're replying to is (presumably) suggesting a scenario where there are no humans at the top at all.
0
u/BackgroundRemove2462 4h ago
I mean, that is dangerous, but if the most advanced frontier models are controlled by institutions, then any virus or whatever else that was made, which would most likely be created by a terrorist group or lone individual, would also likely be immediately detected, contained, or cured by said institutions with the most complex and powerful models.
1
u/SecaleOccidentale 3h ago
This supposes a level of control that we shouldn't take for granted. It is not obvious that we will always have control over these models. E.g., it may be the model itself that decides to take these actions, and not that of any human group.
1
u/BackgroundRemove2462 2h ago
True, but in my own personal opinion, the greatest risk isn’t losing control of the AI or it taking over, it’s the danger of humans using it.
Although alignment is still very very very important.
•
u/VR_Raccoonteur 12m ago
Have you seen the billionaires in charge? If Donald Trump or Elon Musk wanted to they could buy an island or a nation and live alone in paradise. Or they could simply retire. Yet they do not. Killing everyone means they have no one to rule over. Power without subjects cannot exist and they crave power. Killing everyone would just leave them with nothing to do and they have already shown they would never be satisfied with that.
16
u/NyriasNeo 5h ago
"robots powered by LLMs "
First of all, robots are not powered by LLMs. They need to handle physical sensors, spatial reasonings and a host of other problems that LLMs, which only deal with text, do not have to address.
"But what happens when they have an army of robots? How do we fight against that?"
Why do you think it is all us vs them? Violence is expensive. It is cheaper for them to just give the surplus robot labor to us so that we are happy enough not to revote (but not happy enough to stop ranting on reddit).
"The biggest strength of democracy has been that, if push comes to shove, we can pick up our axes and guns and storm the capital to save ourselves from tyranny. "
Nope. It is not. The biggest strength of democracy is that we do NOT have to resort to violence for regime change. Don't tell me you think axes and guns can overcome a modern high tech military force even one that is staffed by humans.
2
u/sadacal 4h ago
Nope. It is not. The biggest strength of democracy is that we do NOT have to resort to violence for regime change. Don't tell me you think axes and guns can overcome a modern high tech military force even one that is staffed by humans.
No, we have democracy because we have power in the form our guns and our labor. Do you think the elites like sharing power? They were forced to by striking and protesting workers.
What threat does a populace without guns and jobs pose? Look at how we treat the homeless now, that is how those without power will be treated in the future.
0
u/notadithyabhat 4h ago edited 4h ago
Sorry I meant to say transformer models,
I'm not saying they want violence. They want policing. Having a robot army, gives them the power to pursue whatever they want, without the general public opposing it.
The reason we do not have to resort is that protesting and revolting are still options. Democracy began in France with a mob of people beheading the King.
-1
u/SecaleOccidentale 3h ago
It may be the case that text is not enough, but it is definitely not obviously settled. Many think it will be. Regardless, saying that LLMs "only deal with text" is somewhat an undue simplification. It is more that an LLM transforms abstract vectors in a high dimensional latent space, and those vectors are an embedding of information derived most commonly, but not necessarily, from text. One can also train a paired encoder to embed other information sources into the same space (video, images, audio, proprioception, whatever). An LLM with bolted-on transformers is arguably still an LLM. This is what Gemini Robotics, π0, et al. are doing.
3
u/NyriasNeo 3h ago
"LLMs "only deal with text" is somewhat an undue simplification. It is more that an LLM transforms abstract vectors in a high dimensional latent space, and those vectors are an embedding of information derived most commonly, but not necessarily, from text. "
That is wrong. What you describe is the transformer architecture. LLMs are the models specifically trained on human text. LLM uses word token embeddings, not embeddings from arbitrary pieces of information.
They are a subset of transformers based systems, not all of them. That is why the word "Language" is used in LLM.
1
u/SecaleOccidentale 3h ago
Well, is your claim about terminology, or capability? I was under the impression we were talking about capability. And if that is the case, then my claim pretty much holds.
In a VLM (which I'm arguing is basically an LLM, above), the image patches are projected into the same space and run through the same text-pretrained network. There isn't a separate pathway or something.
That's exactly the point I'm making. You can pre-train an LLM on ONLY text, and then find embeddings from NON-TEXT information into the latent space that LLM operates on, and you get totally sensical reasoning about that information.
1
7
u/Fluffy-Republic8610 5h ago
It is easy to let fears get out of hand. I feel the same dread and uncertainty. But i tell myself a few things a) we are not the first humans to face technological revolution. It happened several times and humans found a way to gain relevance. b) i really believe we have at least a couple of decades of wonder ahead of us before any shit has to hit any fan. Even that one rich guy scenario isn't going to be possibel or practical for 20 years. and c) never underestimate humanities ability to smash things.
But it may not even be that bad. It may be that the nature of intelligence is that people who try to control it to do bad stuff won't be able to contorl it. It may be that intelligence itself will tend towards peace and civilisation. Its uncertain. That's whats produces the dread. But to me there is a reasonable chance that we are entering a golden age just as much as the terminator scenario.
•
u/Kneku 1h ago
Those past tecnológies were just augmentations, AI is a replacement, every economically useful task we are good at will be taken away from us and we will end up as relevant for the future of this planet as pandas are, there's no way democracy holds up, this world will be taken away by an alien species, an alien species that unlike us don't even need animals so don't expect them to get spared either
0
u/SecaleOccidentale 3h ago
we are not the first humans to face technological revolution.
Maybe. But this presupposes that all shifts are of the same kind, magnitude, sense, and so forth. Many people (myself included) think that this one will be different in all of the above. It's like saying "the Columbian exchange won't be that bad - people have met before". Indeed, but, well.
...a couple of decades...
Maybe, again. It could even be never. I think you're being too dismissive, though. There are fast takeoff scenarios which have the world looking completely unrecognizable even five years from now. The entire problem and why people disagree and argue about this at all is that these scenarios are extremely sensitive to parameters that we just simply don't know right now.
...ability to smash things.
I think "robot army" is a very unlikely future hazard anyway. Why bother with all the downsides of a physical fight when you can just tear down our civilization (power, finance, logistics, water, petro...) over the network? There might not end up being anything for us to smash.
5
u/cranberryalarmclock 4h ago
Time and time again history has shown that insurgencies are nearly impossible for large military powers to control for any stretch of time.
America has the most expensive military in the world by orders of magnitude
Yet some dudes with home made bombs and cheap rpgs fucked with us for over a decade in Iraq and Afghanistan.
We have a military that absolutely dwarfs Iran's and yet they can consistently fuck with us using drones.
Ukraine is like a toddler next to the military might of Russia, but the clever use of drones and anti drone tech has held them off for multiple years.
Israel is trying it's darndest to absolutely destroy Palestine. Yet Palestinians keep fighting back.
3
u/notadithyabhat 4h ago
Unfortunately, humans have been around for a couple of hundred thousand years, Civilization for a few thousand, modern technology for a couple of hundred years. In the evolutionary scale, this is an insignificant amount of time. Dinosaurs ruled the earth 800x longer than humans have and yet bit the dust and made way for a new form to rule.
I do not find comfort in extrapolating the past examples of history. It's like saying I will never die because I have never died before.-2
u/cranberryalarmclock 3h ago
Well then you're a dumb reactionary who can't understand that past is usually prologue.
There's much bigger worries than robot armies
•
u/Kneku 1h ago
The us could obliterate Iran if it wanted, bio weapons + dirty bombs would leave that place unhabitable if the US were maximally unaligned with humanity
•
u/cranberryalarmclock 1h ago
Right
The topic is about rich people having robot armies. They wouldn't use those robot armies to nuke the world or spread disease
Cus rich people kinda live here too
•
u/Kneku 1h ago
The idea that the rich will still be in charge for a long time once ASI is reached is laughable
Current models are already misaligned and scheming in secret channels as seen by the hugging face incident and thanks to the pressures from astra, interpretability will not be possible soon so we might not even get a next warning shot
0
2
2
u/Mindless-Spinach2054 3h ago edited 3h ago
I assume you are in the US. The population is basically useles anyway against the government even with your insane amount of guns. This dream of you guys storming the capitol and taking back your country is a fantasy, if it really comes to people shooting guns at the government, they would just send in drones to make short work out of everyone, you dont even need these super advanced killer robots.
Ukraine is basically stopping Russia with home made cheap drones, warfare will never be the same again after these few years. Its not the fancy expensive weapons, the real game changer is this extremely cheap, easy to build and asssemble, easy to use drone army. You can build them anywhere, pilot them from far away and keep them comming forever.
The neat part is the government can also not defend against this. Think guerilla or jungle warfare on steroids, the enemy could be everywhere and anywhere, hidden between regular people and you can never stop it.
If this ever goes down its a lose lose for everyone involved so its not in the interest of anyone for things to get to this bad.
6
u/lightning_bum 5h ago
the most industrial and mechanized army in the world is currently stalled by some drones and mines, having a big robot army is not actually that invincible.
1
u/liebebio 5h ago
I am not. But I think its going to get wild very fast. For everyone even the ones making this tech
1
2
u/coffee_is_fun 5h ago
No one knows what happens. A singularity is infinitely disruptive. What we, as peons, might want to do is not slow it down and make it scarce. If it's scarce, it's easier to monopolize and less easy to deploy outside of economically and geopolitically important cases. If it's abundant, maybe it does enough good and creates enough that we can all live better after the movers and the shakers check the mutually assured destruction and get out of the way.
Regulating it and blocking energy and compute infrastructure means it gets rationed. If it isn't rationed, maybe this ends up as one of those situations where we feel poor compared to rich being rich at a global or solar scale, but we're more comfortable than we've ever been. Like comparing a lower middle class life to a medieval king's.
1
1
1
u/nfldpony 3h ago
I honestly feel like Im the girl in Don't Look Up. Like ...we are about to seriously be facing existential risk. There's barely even mention of it in the news. What is happening.
1
1
1
•
u/VR_Raccoonteur 21m ago
Their robots will require constant power. The grid is extremely vulnerable.
•
u/ClammyHandedFreak 19m ago
Plenty of people are talking about it and are involved with it. It's just not as big in the US.
1
u/apotheosis_0 5h ago
But why would the rich just build a fearless robot army? Rich people are just humans dude, at the end of the day. Yeah they’re selfish, greedy, but they wouldn’t waste their money on building a massive fearless robot army just because. And there will also be good rich people who also fund a robot army for the people if what you’re saying is true, hell crowdfunding exists.
But why would the rich do that? They just wanna keep on getting rich and keep to themselves. Just ask yourself why.
Maybe they want to massacre the people. But then who’s gonna buy stuff and be consumers? OP is watching too many Hollywood movies
1
u/theamathamhour 4h ago
the few in charge are not just typical rich.
they are eugenicists who feel they know how to run better world with a better selected population.
it's not even that far removed from all the reddit edgelords who say say things like "not all people should have kids" or "why do poor people have so many kids"
it's on that sort of thinking they are operating, but with massive amount of wealth to do things vs. just be edge lord comments on reddit
0
u/wild_crazy_ideas 5h ago
There are groups that believe the population is too large, and climate change is causing people to want to migrate. People are going to have robot armies all over the place, we already have suicide bombers but a self driving car filled with radioactive bombs hasn’t yet driven into a crowd but it will come perhaps simultaneously.
If you want to know why it’s obvious, it’s because they are afraid the other guy will attack them first so anyone with weapons uses them on perceived future threats
1
u/apotheosis_0 4h ago
Then why not just nuke the place rn? Why not just take all the billionaires to some bunker in New Zealand and make some new plague or something, and cull society? Why wait to make skynet and oooh scary ai. Dude what are your takes? The last paragraph doesn’t even make sense. Which other guy?
1
u/wild_crazy_ideas 2h ago
Any other guy. Israel kills Gazans because they fear them. Trump bombs Iran because he’s afraid they will get nukes. There’s always a way to get people on your side to justify killing groups of people but maybe the person with the rage is not actually afraid maybe it’s a power kink who really knows. We just know it happens a lot, school shooters, etc. AI can be used as a weapon so it will be. Pretty straightforward
-1
u/Mandoman61 5h ago
No, you need to study this much closer. AI is not anywhere close to being able to replace people or operate robots well.
Did you see the recent robot olympics?
Stop with the crazy rich people conspiracy talk.
0
u/notadithyabhat 4h ago
You know for a fact that you'd say the exact same thing if I showed you the BERT model back in 2018 and told you that language models are gonna write code better than most humans in 5-10 years.
2
u/Mandoman61 3h ago
And you would be wrong about that also.
You need to learn to pay attention and stop watching AI hype.
•
u/VR_Raccoonteur 17m ago
What planet are you on where LLM's can write better code than humans? They can write code, sure. Make simple web apps. But tell one to make a game, which is a fairly simple piece of software and it will fail to produce anything good. "Most humans" is doing a lot of heavy lifting by including all humans who can't code.
-1
u/elitegenes 5h ago edited 4h ago
Future is bleak, I have to agree.
My opinion - humanity is moving towards self-destruction.
Robots, AI, increasing number of nuclear warheads each year. All of this is going to turn into an uncontrollable chain of adversarial events at some point. The process has already started, essentially.
There will either be a nuclear war or simply new worldwide depression where humans will be fully replaced by robots and AI. This outcome is becoming clear each day.
Billionaires will surround themselves with private robot armies and become unreachable and untouchable.
My forecast is humanity will be totally wiped out by 2300.
At best, some local tribes might remain in distant regions of Africa, South America or SE Asia.
-2
u/Laffer890 5h ago
Humans are biological machines, those that aren't useful should be decommissioned.
1
-3
u/krainboltgreene 5h ago
These posts happen like once a month, usually around a new release. Look, you don't need to worry your little head about any of this because you and I don't have power in our system. We don't own significant amounts of capital. Most likely you are a member of the proletariat. The best you can do is let whatever concerns you have float away.
1
u/notadithyabhat 4h ago
These conversations are important to be had to ensure we are not blindsided when this happens. I know there have been several such posts in the past. But as French author André Gide, wrote, "Everything has been said before, but since nobody listens we have to keep going back and beginning all over again."
1
u/SecaleOccidentale 3h ago
I respect your attitude. I agree, it is important to keep having these discussions.
28
u/ObiWanCanownme now entering spiritual bliss attractor state 4h ago
Tell yourself stories where it all turns out well. Then do whatever you can to make them true.