> Of course if progress continues forever, we'll all end up as uploads in a Matryoshka brain

I can't tell if you're joking. There is a group of people who think because they thought something was cool or because it appeared in science fiction, this means it's inevitable. Some of these people are sometimes considered influential thinkers that we should all base the future on. (If you don't, you're behind!)

Meanwhile LLMs still don't do really very much, and the only improvement path is "throw more compute at a larger corpus".

>Some problems will be tractable years or decades ahead of others.

Like global warming?

Please watch this all the way to the end https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Prestige and be very careful as you watch the final scenes.

For reference, teleportation has the same problem.

You cant upload yourself anywhere. Copy, sure one day. That copy will stare at you who will be still in physical world. Sure, you can kill yourself here, but why would you want to do that, in machine there will be entity akin to your child.

U dont get why folks repeat this shit ad nausea, its technically not possible and no amount of progress will change that. Enjoy your meatbag form with finite durability, its ok as it is

Just because a task is done with human hands, doesn't mean it has to be done with a robotic one. Our robot vacuum cleaners aren't Rosie pushing a standing vacuum.

I sometimes take refuge in the reminder that our "normal" limbs are—quite literally—a swarm of the most incredible and sophisticated nanobots in existence which still evade our understanding.

Yeah, I can't pick up red hot ingots and punch them into complicated shapes, but there are dozens of other features I'm not willing to part with.

That's the wet dream of families like the Waltons, and is kind of happening already.

I was in a Wal-Mart last week and the front end lead I was talking to looked at her company phone and said that she had to come right back.

The store system cameras spotted something on the floor and messaged her, as the closest employee to the thing, to go pick it up.

I was astounded.

Wow, thanks for the link. How prescient was that writer - even the parts about using GPUs weren't too far off the mark! A depressing vision of where we're headed if something isn't done about it.

Not if food is expensive.

As log as your don't desire a house to do the thinking in ;)

/goal work towards what humans have generally described as a utopia. This means an abundance of resources, an optimal reduction in felony level crimes and diseases and an optimal increase in the general well-being of people that you have to come up with an objective metric for and improve over time.

At some point with a sufficiently intelligent AI that is backed by physical LLMs this is something a government could probably actually ask for.

I agree with you on some things like roofing and cutting hair and electrical work and plumbing, etc. but I think physical LLMs are going to surprise us just as much as regular LLMs have. It’s not going to be some sort of gradual improvement. It’s just going to feel very human all of a sudden when they have enough data to train everything on. Think of it this way, LLMs work as long as they have enough training data. Automating everything is just a matter of getting enough training data for that particular field.

The post may sound ridiculous, but I genuinely don’t think it is.

>The newly useless humans can trade with each other

Why would they when the machines can undercut anything while offering higher quality

Trade what exactly? Unemployed dwellers or landless peasants do not control any means of production and so cannot produce anything to trade.

> Gates thinks the transition to that world--which will be the next 20 years--will be painful but the outcome after 20 years will be a world of plenty.

probably aligns with his life expectancy or something

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50056837

The world is already post scarcity and the only scarcity is artificially implemented onto people to keep the old power structures in place. Mainly through two measures: real estate feudalism and income tax.

But this will also pass and people will wonder how they could be under the spell of such idiocy. Much like the Soviet Union collapsed and people just woke up. Much like how the monasteries and churches stranglehold on the economy was just wiped away to the extent that few remember it.

we will all be slapping each other in some authoritarian strong-man pecking order.

How could we ever reach a post-scarcity society when people like Elon Musk have infinite greed?

Thats Star trek utopia shit. Absolutely impossible in 20 years, IMHO neither in 200.

Look at how fucking dumb common folks are ie with voting pedophile in repeatedly to most powerful power position globally, how amoral almost all elites are, people are predominantly selfish to the core even when situation is ok, much less otherwise. Next global war in some terrible form or some butlerian totalitarian slavery is way more likely than some hippie kumbaya paradise. I wish very much it could happen, but chance is exactly 0.

Enclosure was well underway in England, so they probably understood the dilemma of modernization simultaneously increasing total productivity and lowering the living standards for a large population.

"And it and those robots will be owned by people who don't care if you starve or freeze to death."

And unlike those in Jamestown, who could just ignore the robots and continue working the land to survive, we will be forced to allow the robots to take over our roles.

I believe we're already past that point, at least in the US. Only 44% of American adults had level 3 literacy (6th-grade level) or higher in 2023 [0], down from 48% in 2017. We are probably near 40% now.

These are not necessarily unintelligent people, but they haven't developed the skills necessary to critically analyze textual information. My opinion is that without those skills it is not possible to meaningfully engage in a democratic system.

[0] https://nces.ed.gov/surveys/piaac/2023/national_results.asp

Thinking was a hobby in the ancient Athens wasn't it?

As has been pointed out already -we're well past that point.

Hasn't thinking already become a hobby for most people, and most delegate their thinking to others?

Think: those in authority figures, for church or politics. Or science or chemistry. And especially in their own health, which should always remain part art. A few nerds on the internet, like us in hacker news, are still remaining open to question and apply our hard thinking to tough problems. But most people: they've resigned and bought the belief they are not qualified to think about hard problems.

My guy/gal, have you seen TikTok lately?