Nah, I'll correct the record because anyone who worked hard enough absolutely had access to "that level of resources"
My grandparents, First generation immigrants without a college degree bought a beautiful single family house in 1960s Northern California on a working class salary. In fact they lived across the street from George Lucas (My grandmother knew his parents). They too, were a completely average, middle class family. Not any different from Steve Jobs or the hundreds of other success stories.
Over the course of the 80s, 90s, and 00s, the same city and cities like it became notorious for crime and gang violence, homes became unaffordable, and the conditions that allowed someone to "start a company out of a garage" was wiped out as society stratified into the super rich and the super poor. Which should serve as a cautionary tale of any place that is thinking of emulating the California success story.
The US already makes highly advanced goods like cars using robotic manufacturing.
Wouldn't an entrepreneur be able to figure out how to make something as simple as a shoe factory? And wouldn't that also result in fairly high paying union jobs, such as the people to maintain the machines and software?
The question really is if such entrepreneur made such a shoe factory that still employed union labor at fairly high rates of pay, why wouldn't they just install that factory in a place where labor costs less?
If the goal is union jobs at fairly high rates of pay, we can make high-productivity jobs like CVS employee (~$1.2mm revenue per employee IIRC) into good high-paying union jobs by incentivizing CVS employees to unionize.
Even the type of high-value manufacturing present in the US tends to be less productive with labor than Costco (~$30k net profit per employee) or Delta (~$56k net per employee) or ADP (~$84k net). Since our labor pool is decreasing, it is even more critical for Americans to work in high-productivity jobs rather than moving the other direction.
Clothing is hard because it needs to have stretch. Iron is easy to automate because it doesn't stretch (well it does but not by enough to worry about). Thus we have been automating steel for a long time, and clothing still has a lot of manual sewing done on it. To the extent we have automated sewing it is often has a significant quality reduction.
Hopefully somebody can solve the problem. There is a lot of work on it, and progress is being made. Don't ask me how close they are, I don't work in that space.
and one of the ways to do that effectively is with intense automation and integrated supply chains regardless of geo-political borders. Neither of these is attractive to this circus
What? Of all the non-high-tech things you can manufacture, shoes actually seem pretty complicated. You have a mix of different materials, if you want to go more traditional you need a higher level of employee skill, you need a big variety of styles and sizes to be competitive, and if people have one bad experience with your product they'll probably never buy from you again. Also the margins and competition are brutal.
Why would an entrepreneur even think about building a factory when building materials might potentially skyrocket? Anyone who is considering something like this is just going to wait until Trump isn't in office so things can stabilize. If you said, right now, I'm gonna build a factory, it probably wouldn't start producing anything until 2028 at best.
Before you were born you didn’t have the thing you call a consciousness. But now you do.
I think continuity is a red herring, realistically our whole idea of consciousness is probably off base. It might not even be a real thing, for example my pet cat doesn’t care if he has a consciousness or not because he never invented a word for it.
Perhaps I do. Perhaps it's only there when I pay attention to it, and my brain smooths over the gaps like I know it does with saccades and blind spots (both literal and metaphorical). And even if it is there all the time, is it like yours?
I agree but the reason it won’t be an apocalypse is the same reason economists get most things wrong, it’s not an efficient market.
Relatively speaking we live in a bubble, there are still broad swaths of the economy that operate with pen and paper. Another broad swath that migrated off 1980s era AS/400 in the last few years. Even if we had ASI available literally today (And we don’t) I’d give it 20-30 years until the guy that operates your corner market or the local auto repair shop has any use in the world for it.
I had predicted the same about websites, social media presence, Google maps presence etc. back 10-15 years ago, but lo and behold, even the small burger place hole-on-a-wall in rural eastern Europe is now on Google maps with reviews, and even answers by the owner, a facebook page with info on changes of opening hours etc. I'd have said there's no way that fat 60 year old guy will get up to date with online stuff.
But gradually they were forced to.
If there are enough auto repair shops that can just diagnose and process n times more cars in a day, it will absolutely force people to adopt it as well, whether they like the aesthetics or not, whether they feel like learning new things or not. Suddenly they will be super interested in how to use it, regardless of how they were boasting about being old school and hands-on beforehand.
If a technology gives enough boost to productivity, there's simply no way for inertia to hold it back, outside of the most strictly regulated fields, such as medicine, which I do expect to lag behind by some years, but will have to catch up once the benefits are clear in lower-stakes industries and there's immense demand on it that politicians will be forced to crush the doctor's cartel's grip on things.
This doesn't apply to literal ASI, mostly because copy-pasteable intelligence is an absolute gamechanger, particularly if the physical interaction problems that prevent exponential growth (think autonomous robot factory) are solved (which I'd assume a full ASI could do).
People keep comparing to other tools, but a real ASI would be an agent, so the right metaphor is not the effect of the industrial revolution on workers, but the effect of the internal combustion engine on the horse.
A lot of people assume that AI naturally produces this predictable style writing but as someone who has dabbled in training a number of fine tunes that's absolutely not the case.
You can improve things with prompting but can also fine tune them to be completely human. The fun part is it doesn't just apply to text, you can also do it with Image Gen like Boring Reality (https://civitai.com/models/310571/boring-reality) (Warning: there is a lot of NSFW content on Civit if you click around).
My pet theory is the BigCo's are walking a tightrope of model safety and are intentionally incorporating some uncanny valley into their products, since if people really knew that AI could "talk like Pete" they would get uneasy. The cognitive dissonance doesn't kick in when a bot talks like a drone from HR instead of a real person.
> My pet theory is the BigCo's are walking a tightrope of model safety and are intentionally incorporating some uncanny valley into their products, since if people really knew that AI could "talk like Pete" they would get uneasy. The cognitive dissonance doesn't kick in when a bot talks like a drone from HR instead of a real person.
FTR, Bruce Schneier (famed cryptologist) is advocating for such an approach:
We have a simple proposal: all talking AIs and robots should use a ring modulator. In the mid-twentieth century, before it was easy to create actual robotic-sounding speech synthetically, ring modulators were used to make actors’ voices sound robotic. Over the last few decades, we have become accustomed to robotic voices, simply because text-to-speech systems were good enough to produce intelligible speech that was not human-like in its sound. Now we can use that same technology to make robotic speech that is indistinguishable from human sound robotic again.
— https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2025/02/ais-and-robot...
Reminds me of the robot voice from The Incredibles[1]. It had an obviously-robotic cadence where it would pause between every word. Text-to-speech at the time already knew how to make words flow into each other, but I thought the voice from The Incredibles sounded much nicer than the contemporaneous text-to-speech bots, while also still sounding robotic.
That doesn't sound like ring modulation in a musical sense (IIRC it has a modulator above 30 Hz, or inverts the signal instead of attenuating?), so much as crackling, cutting in and out, or an overdone tremolo effect. I checked in Audacity and the signal only gets cut out, not inverted.
Interestingly, it's just kinda hiding the normal AI issues, but they are all still there. I think people know about those "normal" looking pictures, but your example has many AI issues, especially with hands and background
> He encourages us not to get hung up on galaxies far, far away but to pay more attention to our own fragile planet and the frail humans around us.
While I don't necessarily agree with the motives of the Silicon Valley billionaires you must have a really basic imagination to hate on the future, and the answers to Man's oldest questions which may be on Mars and beyond. Of course, like a broken record, out comes the trope of "Why don't you solve poverty on Earth (with all that money)".
For once, can the malthusians come up with a single unique idea or viewpoint rather than recycling the same content? People criticize AI for producing slop but look at what makes the NYT.
I don't see how solving poverty on earth can't be more important than the endeavor of trying with the current rather limited tech to inhabit an as good as inhabitable planet.
As others in the thread mention, these are problems of political economy that no person or mega corp or even nation state can solve.
So, continuing to also work on other things is both rational and morally sound.
Progress in one area unlocks new possibilities in other areas. E.g. abundant near-free energy would make eliminating poverty a more tractable political problem than it has proven to be.
Space exploration is merely a _technological_ problem. Solving poverty is a _political_ problem, one that is resistant to just throwing money at the problem.
Even if we solve poverty, we can always turn right around and un-solve poverty. Something like this has happened in quite recent memory with a whole lot of other "solved" problems. Luckily, we can come back from that failure and solve those problems all over again, as long as we don't go extinct.
It depends on how you answer the question "why are we here?"
Is the goal is to create an earthly utopia with minimum suffering and maximum happiness? Is it aggressive progress so that we can't be wiped out by a random cosmic event? Or should we be eschewing all of that and living harmoniously with nature and dying spiritually content when our time is up?
There is also the argument that if we had focused on solving poverty 150 years ago instead of prioritizing rapid industrialization and economic growth more people would be in poverty today. A 50 year period of scarcity would completely erase all progress we have made towards lifting people out of poverty, regardless of how equitably we distributed the scarce goods.
There are large swathes of earth that are too inhospitable, like deserts. They're more accessible and easier to support life in than Mars, and yet no one lives there.
I'm just making the basic point that we have a wealth of much more hospitable places to live on earth, and somehow they're not viable candidates as "backup plans" for humanity.
Going a little further, living in the ocean is easier than living on Mars. As far as I can tell there are no billionaire-funded submarine civilisation programs.
They're not viable candidates as backup plans for humanity because they have the same vulnerabilities to comet strikes, global nuclear war and pandemic as the rest of the Earth.
OTOH, if one of those took out human life on Earth, people living on Mars could re-colonize Earth.
There are approaches to solving hunger and housing, however extremist capitalism & avoidance of paying taxes by oligarchs and their corporations are standing in the way of it.
Hate to be the bearer of bad news but you could build infinite housing in San Francisco and the streets would still be riddled with drug-abusing vagrants. They may technically stop being "homeless" if you give them all a free apartment but it's not a magic wand that will solve SF's problems.
You can only have beautiful, clean and safe cities if you're willing to forbid people - who can walk in from anywhere at any time no matter how much you subsidize yesterday's batch with free housing - from making them ugly, dirty, and unsafe, and SF doesn't have the heart to make anybody do anything. They used to halfheartedly try to go through the motions, and for about 10 years now, they have given up even that.
I think some people should get subsidized housing, but when I say build more housing I’m talking about increasing the supply and putting it on the market so that regular people can afford it.
As it stands now housing is completely unaffordable. The median income in San Francisco is $120k which means half the people there don’t even make that. I would like my kid’s elementary school teacher to be able to afford not to have roommates.
Also for what it’s worth 70% of the homeless in SF are from SF.
By the way, I agree to you that overall, more normal (market rate) housing is the only reasonable way to make more housing affordable. The absurd SF system of paying $664K (2019 figure) to build one 'BMR' unit, then using a lottery to distribute it to one lucky family, while keeping most of the city zoned for SFH and fighting every developer who wants to build anything on the scraps where density isn't outright banned, is absurd.
But I gave up on SF and left years ago because the majority of their voters apparently like the situation, since they keep electing the same set of people and supporting ballot measures to keep trying the same failed strategies. Just one more tax increase. Just one more blocked condo tower, just one more $100M bond, and we'll fix homelessness AND housing affordability. Just one more!
(Self reported) - and why would you tell some survey taker you came in on a Greyhound from Bakersfield because you know they have far better amenities for you in SF?
Actually it does have something at stake: its singular goal of minimizing the loss function on its training data. AI is therefore designed to convince you it's right, which is a different optimization than actually being right. For example, I code a lot with agentic code editors, you’ll quickly learn they love to modify broken tests to superficially pass, rather than fixing the underlying failure. All the folks on the Vibe Coding hype train don't have enough experience to spot this and therefore think the AI is a lot smarter than it actually is.
This has scary implications if extrapolated out to extremes, because a sufficiently advanced AI would do exactly what you’re describing, manipulate power dynamics to get to a superficial outcome.
> AI is therefore designed to convince you it's right, which is a different optimization than actually being right.
I get the impression, when talking to conversational AIs, that they're more tuned to convince you that you're right — sycophantry likely minimizes how often people press the RLHF thumbs-down button, and thereby appears more-often-than-warranted in the RLHF fine-tune dataset.
> AFAIK it’s still an open question whether there is any copyright in model weights
There's definitely copyright when you ask the model to spit out Chapter 3 of a Harry Potter book and it literally gives it to you verbatim (Which I've gotten it to do with the right prompts). There's no world where the legal system gives Meta a right to license out content that never belonged to them in the first place.
My grandparents, First generation immigrants without a college degree bought a beautiful single family house in 1960s Northern California on a working class salary. In fact they lived across the street from George Lucas (My grandmother knew his parents). They too, were a completely average, middle class family. Not any different from Steve Jobs or the hundreds of other success stories.
Over the course of the 80s, 90s, and 00s, the same city and cities like it became notorious for crime and gang violence, homes became unaffordable, and the conditions that allowed someone to "start a company out of a garage" was wiped out as society stratified into the super rich and the super poor. Which should serve as a cautionary tale of any place that is thinking of emulating the California success story.
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