| ▲ | einpoklum 4 hours ago |
| Not only do we have to live with endless LLM slop now, it seems we also need to accept an endless sequence of 2-cent philosophical blog posts where people describe the "world with AI" based on two minutes of meandering thought. |
|
| ▲ | A_D_E_P_T 4 hours ago | parent | next [-] |
| Hah, well, you must have never encountered LessWrong before. It has been like that for well over a decade, in fact it's probably approaching its second decade... One thing you've got to give them credit for is that they've been talking about AI -- about the present moment, really -- from the beginning. Nick Bostrom, who wrote "Superintelligence" about ten years ago, has always been in their orbit. |
| |
| ▲ | fwlr 3 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | It started in 2006, although it didn’t have its own site until 2010-ish. I’m not sure it will ever be given its dues for its prescience. The whole rationality project was started with the explicit aim of upgrading participants’ reasoning abilities so that when AI came along for real, there would be people capable of thinking it through without making all the usual mistakes humans make when trying to reason about things. In the discussions I read today, everyone involved from commenters up to CEOs are making all and exactly those mistakes, meaning it is in my opinion perhaps the greatest called shot of all time. | |
| ▲ | Chance-Device 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | He’s right though, this post says nothing non-obvious. It boils down to “AIs that can do some difficult things might be able to do other difficult things. Also: Danger!”. There isn’t enough here for it to be interesting. | | |
| ▲ | baq 4 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | On the contrary this couple paragraphs is aimed strictly at 'normies' as in people who are riding the current exponential with little history of thinking about this moment. Most people's beliefs and knowledge needs updating and patching without hoping that 'it obviously follows from assumptions' because most people don't bother to think about the assumptions in the first place. IOW: > There isn’t enough here for it to be interesting. True - for you and the dozens of folks like you, to paraphrase a meme. | | | |
| ▲ | cbogie 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | is the horsepower behind ai speculation less than, greater than or equal to human speculation? seems they’re recursively related, though human speculation has more torque since it occurs naturally or at least as spontaneously as it takes for an epiphany instance to occur. and then transposed into an ai chat prompt to get the analytical momentum for some grand scheme that gets published to whatever extent ie a comment, blog post, or whatever textual content that then gets ingested as training data…llm rinse repeat. not sure where this is going. is anyone? |
| |
| ▲ | aaron695 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | [dead] |
|
|
| ▲ | elcritch 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Yes, it’s also the way human society processes new stuff, be it novel technologies and the philosophical ramifications or other topics. Call it distributed Bayesian processing. Sure each 2-cent philosophical posts isn’t worth much on its own but add up many of them over time and we get something more than its parts. |
|
| ▲ | dgellow 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| I guess you haven’t yet read Amodei’s essays? There is a significant overlap between the early SF AI scene and LessWrong contributors.
That comes directly from the top, look at Anthropic leadership |
|
| ▲ | Avicebron 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-] |
| Well with each new thing we get the grifters, lesswrong is an AI grifter hangout. |
| |
| ▲ | doitLP 3 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Grifters don’t usually spend their entire lives devoted to preparing for something that doesn’t yet exist, giving up whatever else they like doing to work on that problem, and spending years trying to plan out how to make things go well for everyone when that thing materializes. Grifters are opportunistic short-termists. Whatever you can say about these rationalists, they aren’t that. | | |
| ▲ | Avicebron 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | Eliezer spent his life devoted to science fiction and building a cult around himself, and now him and the rest of them are trying to vindicate themselves before they fade into obscurity. |
| |
| ▲ | dgellow 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | They are true believers. Terrible philosophers but true AI believers |
|
