Before AI, did you find that the existence of human expertise in the world far surpassing yours 'automated your thinking and cognition' or limited your intellectual scope to inventing party-tricks? I've always found greater intelligences than mine are like runways for curiosity. It's hard to believe anyone in their presence would fall into a stupor instead of being highly stimulated by them - and I can't see why it would be any different with ASI. Actually, this "AI undoes your cerebral strapping" argument seems exactly like the kind of slovenly thinking it wants to blame on AI.
yes to a degree. When I was 16, my idea about "what cutting edge thing to work on" was pointless, I couldn't make a meaningful contribution. Most developer's work is mundane and wrote. Things they think are "cutting edge" are actually just ideas they haven't considered, or markets they don't realize are saturated with really good players already. It takes time, effort, and knowledge to make a meaningful contribution. But if those fields are saturated by players that are beyond human ability, then its a bit like trying to become a competitive chess player when the bar for entry is stockfish -- no human will ever again pass this bar. At a certain point, the bar for being paid for intellectual contribution will surpass human abilities. The things humans can understand and ideas they contribute will not be worth much.
To make an unrelated anology, the presence of Lebron James definitely dampens my ability to contribute meaningfully to basketball. Even with all my practice, I cannot achieve his level. But if he didn't exist, and the best 90% of basketball players were eliminated, then I might be able to meaningfully contribute. Of course, I can still play basketball as a hobby, but you were talking about making meaningful contributions on hard novel problems at the frontier of knowledge and ability. That frontier is moving away from humans and will soon be the domain of electronic experts.
I think the main point is the ubiquity of AI intelligence. If there is a human far surpassing me, but unavailable to me, then I have to work through it myself. If the answer is a prompt away, then why bother.
This is the 'Not today, so never" fallacy. As capabilities in all fields are stagnant and human progress stands still. I would switch off the 'nam flicks and check out some of the recent Chinese robotics progress before attempting to peer into the future.
I'd temper my views of the apparent recent Chinese robotics progress.
It's more than nothing, but there can still be a big gap between what is presented and the real timeline to follow; see e.g. the US example with Tesla's "Paint It Black" video, what was it, around a decade between the video and the AI getting to the level shown in that video?
My view doesn't need tempering. I talked about progress, which is indisputable, whatever its pace or current limitations might be. And that was the entire point: robotics is not a stagnant field.
What looks good on TV, what impresses a news show, these do not directly map to the hard stuff.
Likewise the other way around, this hand and wrist by itself is more impressive breakthrough than any of what I saw in those two videos, despite being much less flashy and 6 years ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x4O8pojMF0w
I'm also sure I've seen exactly the same two clips of an AI learning how to control a simulated avatar in Two Minute Papers a dozen times each over the years, before I got tired of the channel mostly becoming "Incremental LLM release! Also Unreal Engine sometimes!"
Note however that this does not mean I'm saying "there is definitely no progress in robotics"! Not at all! I'm saying that the stuff we find easily is the spectacle, not the substance, and that progress with the substance is much much harder to gauge.
Reading stuff like this (as a layman), diminishing these things as 'Next token predictors' seems absurdly reductive. At some point we'll need to concede that 'selection' is a better term for this than prediction.
> which in no way challenge the established view that these bots are next-token predictors.
I mean, of course they are, that's literally what the inference loop does. You can look at the source of your favorite model runner and you'll see exactly that.
What I find misleading about this term is that it focuses attention on the "next token" part and glosses over the "prediction" part as some sort of unspecified "statistical algorithm" - even though this is where most of the work happens and where the interesting questions are.
There are other next token prediction algorithms such as markov chains or HMMs that also "fit the same interface", but are vastly simpler than what LLMs use.
I've seen various posters talk about "stochastic parrots" or about how LLMs were just "using very simple word statistics" to get their results, which sounded to me very much as if they thought of LLMs simply as glorified markov chains. I would consider that a big misunderstanding.
"In machine learning, the term stochastic parrot is a metaphor that frames large language models as systems that statistically mimic text without real understanding."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stochastic_parrot
> I have a mixed bag of UK friends, and it's about half-half.
Polls show the population regrets Brexit. [1]
> One thing I think myself is that there was an ugly _hope_ that the UK would suffer as a result. A hope which, as far as I can see, wasn't realised. Living in Europe, I saw a lot on the news about how the UK had shot itself in the foot and things were going badly, but when I visit friends, not so much.
The UK took a big hit to GDP as a result of Brexit [2], it drastically raised export costs [3] and ordinary people have faced steeper household bills ever since. [4] Meanwhile it led to increased immigration [5] with consequent social tensions.
57% is what I said and would have expected to see. Aside from that, I'm going to go out on a limb and say that a poll on "do you regret brexit" is looking for a particular answer.
> The UK took a big hit to GDP as a result of Brexit
During that time period, we had Covid, global supply chain disruptions, Russias invasion of Ukrain, central banks raising interest rates, energy and food prices going up globally. Brexit was just one of many factors effecting the UK GDP. To say "GDP went down because of Brexit" is disingenuous.
> ordinary people have faced steeper household bills ever since
This one's the biggest clue that Brexit isn't as bad as people are making out. The EU country I'm living in, and those I've visited on holidays in the last years are also complaining of exactly the same thing. It's across EU (the world?), but people look at the UK and say "See, Brexit was bad".
Any excuse to kill something, eh? Tell me, in the free market where a competitor was eating into your paycheck, or threatening the fast food supply to your children, would you head over to their HQ packing heat?
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