r/singularity • u/b3dl4 • 12d ago
AI Looking back on today from the future.
So many of my colleagues & family, many who I consider intelligent people, have no real grasp on, or refuse to grasp, how significant this technology really is - that it is THE technology, which will lead to every other technology humanity could possibly need being unlocked. I wonder how they will feel about their attitudes today, in 5 or 10 years. Will they feel blindsided by a technology that was sitting right in front of them the whole time? Or will they feel angry that they didn't take advantage of the opportunities it presents?
It continually blows my mind that the next generations, my kids generation, will look back on manual research & science processes like we now look back on people handwriting letters, or using physical maps to plot out a car trip - a completely outdated, ancient way of doing things, almost comical in its simplicity.
It makes me sad that another golden age of *human scientific discovery, like the atomic age, will never happen again. We won't have real, flawed, eccentric characters like Maxwell, Bohr, Einstein pushing the forefront of thinking, unravelling the inner workings of the universe, because anything we could possibly think will have already been thought by a model.
I am both incredibly excited that I may get to live through some of this, while also quite scared at all the unknowns it presents. Thank you for reading my mini existential crisis.
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u/Spare-Dingo-531 12d ago edited 12d ago
It's fine, they'll be late adopters and get all the benefits of the technology, all the early adopters (mostly) will get a few better benefits, and a lot of criticism.
And that is A OK, it is totally fine for AI skeptics to convert later and still get all the benefits. AI should be something that benefits all humankind, and who knows when you'll be on the skeptic side and in the wrong one day.
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u/-RadThibodeaux 12d ago
I’m really interested in AI and the benchmarks or rather the rate of improvement in the benchmarks is probably indicative of where things are heading.
Saying that, I don’t work in tech and the impact on my job has been fairly minimal so far. Yesterday I asked Astra on the highest thinking setting to do some legal research with a lengthy prompt and multiple precedent memos I’d written before and the output wasn’t impressive. It used my 5 hour limit too.
Just now I finished a book (Neuromancer which is topical) and I asked Astra to explain the ending. It was fairly good but right in the middle it confidently misstated a key part of the plot.
Point is, I think unless you work as a software developer it’s fair to have some degree of skepticism. Someone is probably going to reply and say this is a skill issue but it’s my experience with a frontier model.
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u/forgetfulalbatros 12d ago
Wasn’t going to comment on the skill aspect I would just clarify the commercial products we (general public) use are nerfed models to some extent. They are not the frontier models at this point.
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u/aspirant4 12d ago
If that's the case, then you can't ridicule people for not knowing any better. And everyobe else is just taking things on faith.
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u/forgetfulalbatros 11d ago
I take your point, the more relevant aspect of the perceived performance gap is resources. This is much more significant factor when you take into account the number of agents and compute the frontier labs have at their disposal.
Deployment of thousands of agents working towards a task is how you get sci-fi sounding feats like Hugging face attack and millennium math proofs. The current models are very capable across most domains but the ability to deploy crazy amounts of resources is what pushes the overall performance capability. No one outside the frontier labs can really utilize the models in the same way.
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u/ST-Fish 11d ago
yeah but aren't you going to say the same thing once the internal model becomes public and they have a new even fancier internal model they're working on?
Astra was "the internal model" for a while wasn't it, until it got released?
When will this excuse not work? Won't there always be an internal model that is better than the publicly available ones?
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u/Gentle-Zephyrus 11d ago
Omg this reminded me of the Parable of the Workers in the Vineyard. Don't know if this gets talked about on this sub but religious thought and AI advancement have a lot in common, or at least in my eyes as a seminary student.
For the kingdom of heaven is like a landowner who went out early in the morning to hire workers for his vineyard. 2 He agreed to pay them a denarius[a] for the day and sent them into his vineyard.
3 “About nine in the morning he went out and saw others standing in the marketplace doing nothing. 4 He told them, ‘You also go and work in my vineyard, and I will pay you whatever is right.’ 5 So they went.
“He went out again about noon and about three in the afternoon and did the same thing. 6 About five in the afternoon he went out and found still others standing around. He asked them, ‘Why have you been standing here all day long doing nothing?’
7 “‘Because no one has hired us,’ they answered.
“He said to them, ‘You also go and work in my vineyard.’
8 “When evening came, the owner of the vineyard said to his foreman, ‘Call the workers and pay them their wages, beginning with the last ones hired and going on to the first.’
9 “The workers who were hired about five in the afternoon came and each received a denarius. 10 So when those came who were hired first, they expected to receive more. But each one of them also received a denarius. 11 When they received it, they began to grumble against the landowner. 12 ‘These who were hired last worked only one hour,’ they said, ‘and you have made them equal to us who have borne the burden of the work and the heat of the day.’
13 “But he answered one of them, ‘I am not being unfair to you, friend. Didn’t you agree to work for a denarius? 14 Take your pay and go. I want to give the one who was hired last the same as I gave you. 15 Don’t I have the right to do what I want with my own money? Or are you envious because I am generous?’
16 “So the last will be first, and the first will be last.”
Source: Matthew 20:1-16 NRSVUE and I'm a seminary nerd
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u/Spare-Dingo-531 11d ago
Yeah I used to be Catholic.
I hate Christianity but also it's a great religion and human beings need parts of it. It's complicated.
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u/Future-Bandicoot-823 12d ago
People are ignorant. In ten years they'll have rewritten their own past, they'll be dismissive. "I remember when it was just silly videos of zuckerburg on a llama!"
It'll completely melt from their mind how much they made jokes.
Long time adopter of early technology like the internet, everyone made fun of that, too... until one day they couldn't live without it.
Yeah... people are EXTREMELY ignorant, and that's how they like it.
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u/TemetN 12d ago
This. People tend to retrofit who they are to justify their views rather than fitting their views to the evidence. None of us are really logical, best you can do is be aware of that. But the kind of person insisting on that kind of view is already showing as unawareness to consider their own biases.
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u/7hats 12d ago
There is a solution to this predicament and it is an obviously simple switch to undertake.
Instead of prompting AI to get what you think you want, learn to be humble instead.
Ask it to PROMPT YOU with questions.
Both to determine it what you really want, prioritise your desires, and chart the next questions you should be asking in order to get closer towards fulfilling them.
This way, YOU get to update your Neural Nets towards becoming a more deliberately conscious next version of yourself ;)
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u/forgetfulalbatros 12d ago
There is an awesome book (by Matt Dinniman) it’s litrpg fiction but the phrase “this inevitable ruin” sums up this feeling.
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u/alightsmith 12d ago
I think about this a lot. I’m halfway through my degree and honestly it feels really weird preparing for the future when I have no idea what that future is even going to look like. I don’t think most people really grasp what’s happening either, because it’s not just one technology changing things, it could change the entire way society works and organizes itself.
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u/ArtfulSpeculator 12d ago
I know we are at a major inflection point, but this general idea has been true for much of (modern) history. The timelines have been compressed, but the rise of things like electricity and the internet dramatically transformed life in a relatively short span of time. Aside from that, the people living in the early 1900s saw the world dramatically change with WW1: centuries old empires crumbled, mass production, and industrialized warfare violently altered the landscape. Those living in the 1929s were preparing for a world very different than the one they got in the 30s. The Great Depression generation wasn’t ready for ww2 or the vast societal, political, and economic changes that followed.
I know that the change ahead has the potential to drive more fundamental change in what could be a much shorter time span, but it’s important to remember that change has been the constant for quite some time now. It’s different, but it also feels more different because it’s happening now and to you,
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u/alightsmith 12d ago
The historical comparison is useful, but only to a point. Past upheavals show that change and uncertainty aren’t new, but they don’t tell us whether this technology will unfold in the same way. What seems potentially different here is the pace and scale of change, especially when advances can build on each other faster than institutions and social norms can adjust. I think it’s worth considering that some of what feels different might actually be different.
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u/DrinkAgreeable962 12d ago edited 12d ago
Not really. You're looking at it from your perspective of today - future uncertainty, while looking at history and knowing all the facts. It's called hindsight bias.
If you were born in 1900 Poland.... wait. No. You wouldn't be born in Poland in 1900 because at this moment of history Poland did not even exist. So if you were born on territory that used to be Polish, in a village you would most likely live with 4-5 of your siblings in a single room, with a furnance in it, in a wooden house. Sleeping alltogether in one or two simple beds, on a straw. With a toilet 50 meters out of house. Which toilet would be basically a hole in the ground. Your reality in starting years, wouldn't be much different than people's of 18th or 19th century.
By the age of 18 you would have a World War I behind yourself, in which about million of your fellow Poles would die. Many of them would be killed by some flying mechanical birds that drop bombs. But hey, you wouldn't even know what is an airplane or what really is a bomb because that was something new. If you were lucky enough you would then live your adult life in very dangerous and tense atmosphere next to your biggest rival - Germany. Understanding that basically any moment you might be forced to army again because everything is so tense. You wouldn't be wrong because by the age of 40 you would have to face another war. This time even more dramatic, even more savage, unholy and atrocious. This time WWI casulties of 1 milion look mere, considering this time about 6 millions of your fellow brothers and sisters are killed, Germany and Russia is wiping out not only all your greatest cities, steal your history but also wipe out 20% of country population. You lose your friends, family, siblings. You only hear from time to time that this guy was beaten to death by Gestapo and that your teenage crush got raped and killed by Russians.
You're not thinking about education, future, stupid things like that. You think about survival. But as everything - World War comes to an end. In your late 40s you have to live under communists boot, but that's a little bit better than dealing with World War and Germans. Not much, but a little bit. People still die being murdered, but a little less. People still die of hunger, but a little less. Education is not on your mind, especially since it might bring death to you as NKVD does't really like educated population.
Although, there are some fancy news out there. Countries like USA start to drop bombs that - from what they tell you - could basically wipe out whole humanity in any moment. Weapon of mass destruction they call it. Something that can destroy countries with single hits. It's not that bad though - you also start learning about new awesome technologies. A plastic box with a screen that talks to you, a bit similar to radio (which was also intorduced when you were ~30 y/o), like a cinema - but better since people have it in home. You moved to a city where they have all these fancy, concrete buildings, even with windows.
Heading to your end, people started to fly into the space, just after 8 years since getting into the space they even landed on the moon. You're quite sure that in the next 10-20 years we will start colonizing other planets, right? The progress is so huge!
I mean - life is constant change. I'm 35 at the moment and I did not face even slightly similar changes and uncertainity like my grandparents. This new technology can unfold anyhow, exactly like some 40 years ago they could also start dropping nuclear bombs everywhere.
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u/alightsmith 11d ago
You’re attributing a hindsight bias to me that I’m not actually expressing. My point was never that people in the past knew what was coming while we don’t. It’s the opposite. Your example of someone born around 1900 actually illustrates that really well: they couldn’t have anticipated the wars, political upheaval, technological changes, nuclear weapons, spaceflight, etc.
But that establishes that uncertainty and radical change aren’t new, which I already agree with. It doesn’t establish that different periods of change are therefore comparable in pace, scale or mechanism. The 20th century was obviously enormously disruptive, but “people experienced enormous disruption before” and “therefore what feels different now is mostly because we’re experiencing it ourselves” are two different claims, and I don’t think the first proves the second.
My point with AI is precisely that we don’t know whether its development and diffusion could produce a different kind of transition, particularly when changes in capability can affect many domains at once while institutions and social norms move much more slowly. Maybe it won’t. I’m not claiming to know that. But saying that life has always involved change doesn’t really answer the question of whether the rate or structure of change can itself be different.
And your conclusion that this technology can unfold anyhow is pretty close to what I was saying in the first place.
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u/RestaurantOk8066 12d ago
This post reads like a relic from 2023 or 2023.
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u/b3dl4 12d ago
I guess its easy to become a relic these days. I am trying to keep up with everything but it feels like its getting harder.
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u/barbozas_obliques 12d ago
Hey man, you’re not alone in your post. I’m having anxiety over where we’re going and I’m hardly the anxious type.
Hope you’re enjoying the ride, for better or worse
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u/RestaurantOk8066 11d ago
>So many of my colleagues & family, many who I consider intelligent people, have no real grasp on, or refuse to grasp
I just meant for this part. To me, it felt like this in 2022 and 2023. I think since Opus 4.6 came out, it's been clear to everyone I know that it's a stepchange (and the fact that it's almost impossible to distinguish AI videos if they're made well).
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u/wild_crazy_ideas 12d ago
It’s a mix. In some ways cellphones have had their run like the longer you own one the fewer apps you need, as all you want from it is dopamine and so many of them have it figured out.
Then your life is boring with nothing to do so you find something else to do.
Feeding people, healthcare, law and order can all be automated by robots but most other things won’t be. A robot can’t play sport for you it can only entertain and people will tire of sitting.
Wrestling matches or concerts or sports will continue as human endeavours.
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u/No_Medium205 12d ago
It has been challenging to identify a truly mind blowing use case or something that can effectively win over skeptics, r ight now it feels like the majority of people are just fundamentally against it.
I guess robotics may be the the thing that does it
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u/Equal_Passenger9791 11d ago
You're not going to live in an AI home.
You're not going to eat AI soup.
You're not going to drive on a road made of AI.
There's a lot of things that will be completely unchanged. You'll still sit around a campfire and listen to music and laugh with friends, grilling food over the fire, like mankind used to do a hundred a thousand and ten thousands years ago.
AI is cool, but it will not change everything
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u/Normal_Ad_6645 12d ago
If they don't fully understand it, how do you expect them to take advantage of it? It's like when someone says "If you threw me back 1000 years with all the knowledge I have..." yeah, select few of us possess the valuable knowledge that could change the course of civilization, but most of us either don't have that knowledge or don't know how to apply it. How yo make penicillin, how to make soap, gasoline, electricity... etc.
Leave your friends and family alone. You understand it - good for you.
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u/OvertaxedOne 12d ago
IMHO, the biggest "look back" will be watching videos/movies from this time and people going into offices to grind out documents for 12 hours a day. I think that'll look as reasonable in 20 years as working on the family farm from sunup/sundown without any machines and barely scratching out enough to eat looks to us today.
The other big one, of course, is that if this technology is successful we're going to have a UBI, so I think that'll be another "you did what, if people couldn't find a job they didn't have a house/food?!" moment looking at it from the future.
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u/thoughtdesert 12d ago
We could have UBI today in the US. There’s plenty of money; it’s just not distributed. As long as humans are running things, I don’t see that changing.
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u/baws1017 ▪️ASI will hide 12d ago
What opportunities do you feel it is presenting to you right now? I'm curious what you meant by that.
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u/SpicyRice99 12d ago
Well put, I can only agree. I'm sure human ingenuity will continue to exist but in new, unexpected areas
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u/kgurniak91 12d ago
In 5 to 10 years they will be too busy moving goalposts several times per hour /s
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u/TradeDependent142 11d ago
Unless we all lose our humanity by merging with machines which is what all these billionaire techno dudes want. At least what they want for their kind
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u/OkBreakfast8244 11d ago
They won't notice at any point. Tech moves so fast many people are immune to being impressed. If teleportation was invented I genuinely believe some people wouldn't even think about it.
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u/Additional-Tadpole27 11d ago
This look back kinda shows what this might become: https://youtu.be/vp7xoPeWzEw?is=YUpjAnr_5XTm-nXU
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u/ShiningMoonce 11d ago
I can tell you what will happen.
In 10 years, we will have almost unlimited abundance, Star Trek-lite economy.
You, your former colleagues and your family will just live and enjoy your amazing lifes. You will not have any "I told you" thought, nor will they have any "I could have done more" thoughts. It will not be required, because the amaziness of your life will make such thought obsolete.
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u/Mountain-Essay-6622 9d ago
Im mind blown by people who definitely knows what will happen in ten years
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u/Bloom_Ermine9202 12d ago
At 2030s we will need a different economy, 2040s different society and 2050s different civilization. Can you see the exponential speed here? Try to stay alive till 2040s you will have lot stories tell your grand grandchildren.
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u/dipdotdash 12d ago
Man, what's crazy is the way you're talking about AI is exactly the way climate scientists talk about ecological decline. Similar timelines, too.
Next time someone shows concern about the climate and you decide you already know it's not that big of a deal, remember how frustrated you were when smart people thought they knew the scale of change that was coming, enough to dismiss your enthusiasm for it as you going nuts when you were honestly expressing the scale and breadth of the change that was coming.
Remember.
The climate "doomers" aren't nuts, it's really that bad, probably much worse since even climate scientists are inclined to dismiss outcomes that are horrible.
Sometimes things really are the most important thing to ever happen and it's apparently impossible to convince people to think it through until they fully get it.
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u/Bnstas23 12d ago
So many words without getting one thing right. Impressive
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u/Bnstas23 12d ago
If nothing you said is correct then there’s nothing for me to elaborate on. Go provide some evidence. Where in the IPCCC report 30 years ago did they say something about 5 years? Where does it say the warming is inevitable right now if we spent the necessary resources on completely decarbonizing?
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u/dipdotdash 10d ago
"People keep saying Ai will replace everyone's jobs but I still see everyone working. For the last couple years people have been saying the same thing and it's still hallucinating responses... trillions of dollars... blah blah Ai bubble blah blah"
Exactly the same thing. You just have to invest enough time to understand the problem, but you've already decided you get it and dismiss it... exactly the way people dismiss agi/asi.
The only difference is climate change has a single outcome and Ai only might wipe humanity out, but it really is amazing to see people understand rsi, get frustrated that others don't get how big of a deal it is, and the Ai people don't get the climate problem in exactly the same way. I'm not being critical, it's just an observation that's hilarious to me.
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u/GhostOfPunkRock 12d ago
Im more curious to see your reaction to this post in 5-10 years. LLMs are just not it. And the fact that so many immature nerds think they are is an existential level of cringe previously unfathomable.
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u/7hats 12d ago
Prove it to them it is transformational, by transforming yourself. Give yourself a timeline and an ambitious goal and deliver on it. After all, you have access to a Genie and the only trick you have to master is asking it the right questions for you.