There's issues where bad people with bad intentions use AI to do bad things. But to an extent the guardrails already built-in are sufficient. The real danger in AI is how it impacts society, our economy, and our perception of self worth.
I'm not afraid of rouge agents nearly as much as I'm afraid of us building a permanent underclass of people dependent on whatever scraps the people who devalued their labor decide the grace them with. I'm afraid of the security apparatus that will be built to keep this underclass in line.
I had my "wow" moment recently and saw an AI agent do something do over a weekend something that I spent years developing a relatively niche skill might have needed a month to complete.
I think the message the team lead takes away right now is "oh, this can be done a lot faster, let's do more!" This is exciting for a bit, but I think it comes at the cost of learning -- and being able to communicate --architectural lessons that would stage off systemic issues later.
My personal "wow" moment was less about it being able to do the same that I could do with it, just faster, but instead that together we could could build things that I wasn't able to build before (or unwilling to spend the time to learn maybe). So a bunch of stuff are suddenly "unlocked", as long as you know how to verify it properly.
I have been able to build applications that I couldn't dream of before, not because of a lack of capability on my part, but because of time: I don't have the time to learn all of the new APIs and frameworks to accomplish my goal. Now I can build far more complex useful applications, with functions and features that would take me months or more to learn how to code.
The downside is that I didn't learn how to use those APIs, but it can be argued that these skills are low value to begin with. APIs change, there are competing APIs that do the same thing, and you may only use that skill for one project and then move on. Gaining those skills can be a big time sink and may not result in long-term gain.
Think of all the time spent learning the ins and outs of come-and-gone APIs and frameworks over the decades (I chose not to provide examples to save the resulting side-arguments, but I know you can rattle some off in your head). Those APIs and frameworks were bridges to make developing easier for the common developer, but they change so quickly that I'd argue they waste our time, and lead to almost endless re-work as we re-architect our software for the framework de jour. And they grow in complexity over time, ultimately becoming the next bloated framework. It's an endless, wasteful cycle.
Ok, so before I couldn't (/didnt have the time to) build cross-platform native desktop applications with minimal amount of 3rd party dependencies, but now I "can". What exactly am I unable to verify here?
The tools can definitely go away. They could get exponentially more expensive to where it is no longer financially possible to keep it subsidized. The bubble could pop and most of the companies could go bankrupt. It's not exactly like a calculator because it requires such an astronomical amount of resources to keep running.
The world is in a crisis of trust. We are losing faith in each other. AI has further undermined that trust; audio and video recordings can no longer be trusted like they once were. The impact is still being felt.
It takes longer to build than destroy. Not just trust. Anything. The lack of trust has created friction for everything; more regulations, deeper background checks, purchasing goods and services… the list goes on. Overall, AI is making this situation worse, not better.
That said, I have seen a revolution coming for decades, and I think this AI-paved road to dystopian hell should at least be entertaining.
The problem is that we've replaced tribal trust networks with increasing systemization and the more of that we build the more brittle the whole thing gets. We have a global society that is more complex and interdependent than ever before. We've set ourselves up for a kind of economic Kessler syndrome and we're gleefully adding more layers to it.
> There's issues where bad people with bad intentions use AI to do bad things. But to an extent the guardrails already built-in are sufficient. The real danger in AI is how it impacts society, our economy, and our perception of self worth.
I agree with you those dangers exist, but you seem to have ignored the specific threat described in the article, from a superintelligence capable of manipulating human beings indetectably, where we'll be at its mercy and only able to hope it's fully aligned with humanity's interests. The risks you describe are grave, though - especially economically, if governments don't grow to outmuscle the power of the oligarchal owners of these systems, which seems wholly unlikely at the moment in the West, with its neoliberal orthodoxies.
Last industrial revolution (late 1700-to-1800), we invented world-scale capitalism, communism, democracy, having rights as humans, war at scale and we burnt our planet. I think the results of a revolution are really unfathomable and not even imaginable to humans.
We don't need to live "side by side" with AI. AI is not alive, it's a technology we use. This is like talking about living side by side with your toaster.
Horse and cart, no. But some cities have banned cars and replaced them with various alternatives, and it works.
There are alternatives to the car culture we have. It would require significantly rebuilding how we build infrastructure, but the result could be much safer, cleaner, and less stressful.
Of course Americans would rather die, but counties of sane people might be able to work it out.
First off, you don't know if duskdozer doesn't want to go back to cart and horse. Second even if they don't there's an enormous amount of space between horses and https://parkingreform.org/resources/parking-lot-map/ a third of my downtown being parking lots, downtown which is already the dense bit.
The car did not replace the horse and cart. This is an oft cited and widely believed myth. It replaced mostly walking, but also cycling, trollies and trains. And it didn't do so until after a huge build out of infrastructure to accommodate drivers at the cost of everything else.
After the building of highways and roads cities were no longer walkable, people had moved out into the suburbs, their jobs were now a couple of towns over and they couldn't even walk to the grocery store. Cars enabled that, but politicians and capitalist were the ones who did that.
> It replaced mostly walking, but also cycling, trollies and trains.
And everything was carried on people's heads, yeah? The horse and cart was in use right up to the 20th century my man...there was no other way to move heavy items across land until the combustion engine (or canals thought that's not technically over land)
Apart from the super intelligence bit. We are already struggling to build systems with enough memory to hold this brute force statistical approach, how exactly will AI fix this?
Just look at the disruption smartphones and social media have caused. They had a gigantic impact to society and one definitely has to 'live with' that.
Just because something can impact a living system/organism, that doesn't mean that that thing is alive. An asteroid colliding with us on Earth could have tremendous consequences, but nobody would argue that an asteroid is alive.
Does taking a skin cell, turning it into a stem cell, dividing it into specialized sperm and egg cells then making a living being provide some proof to Animism?
To be honest, I don't believe it is a any more crazy believe than all of the other religions. But practitioners there might have a bit more respect for existing things and not mindlessly crush because they can, so I actually like the concept a bit. But I assume it can also set foundation for some exhausting debates .. "can we really move that random rock to build a house with?" but as far as I understood the practical answer is "we ask the spirits, maybe make a offering and if we feel it is fine, we can" (which can be a quick thing, or .. not).
> ...I don't believe it is a any more crazy believe than all of the other religions.
And it's certainly not any more crazy than walking around with these small, addictive devices in our pockets that we rely on for navigation, information, entertainment, social connection.
Addictive? How can a computing device have addictive properties? It's not like it is something you swallow or digest. User error? Certainly. A hundred years ago alcoholic drinks were outlawed in certain parts of the world, yet today there is no grocery shop that doesn't openly sell them.
> It's not like it is something you swallow or digest.
Anything that interacts with the brain's rewards circuitry can be addictive. By your apparent definition, behavioral addictions, like gambling addiction, cannot exist. Because you don't swallow or inhale the slot machine.
> To be honest, I don't believe it is a any more crazy believe than all of the other religions.
The only way anyone can make a blanket statement like that and put "all religions" on equal epistemic footing is through ignorance of their deep differences. Even the word "religion" as commonly used today is relativistic by assumption, which is likely the source of how we commonly perceive "religion". A consequence of this relativistic stance is that you cannot distinguish effectively between what counts or doesn't count as "religion". Here, "worldview", "superstition", or "life's highest aspiration" can be said to count as "religion", in which case, everyone is religious. The question then isn't "whether" someone is religious, but "how" [0].
Compare this to how this Catholic encyclopedia defines the "virtue of religion" [1]. Note the specificity.
A further consequence of this assumed relativism is that once you put all religions on equal footing, it is natural to conclude that they must all be equally invalid. After all, if p and not-p are equally valid, then how can we grant them equal validity without discrediting both? At best, they remain in a state of aporia, two logical possibilities so utterly divorced from any knowledge, so utterly contrived, that we cannot even say whether knowledge leans in favor of one over the other. The result is that religion becomes something utilitarian; a person believes X, not because it is true, but because he perceives that believing X is useful to him in some way.
So, no, I wouldn't say animism is just as rational/irrational as any other religious belief.
[0] Of course, most people tend to form their ideas of what constitutes archetypal "religion" based on their personal experiences growing up and some combination of culturally mediated stereotypes. In the US, "religion" very often conjures up images of some kind of Evangelical Christianity.
"The only way anyone can make a blanket statement like that and put "all religions" on equal epistemic footing "
All religion is based on superstitious believes, or do you have counter examples? But I am already quite familiar with the catholic church in particular and do not think they are a counter example in the slightest.
I'll use this opportunity to recommend The Selfish Gene, which puts forward a strong argument for how the actual competitive battlefield on Earth is between genes, while us humans and everything else we call "life" are their "survival machines" (read: technology that they use).
Last chapter talks about the concept of ideas or “memes” taking its place.
Ideas that are beneficial for the human may be passed forward and survive. It got me thinking about religion, hell yeah I would tell me children about god if I believed it would save them from eternal suffering.
This is the denialist Hy-Brasil line of thought. But superintelligence won't be a tool or a toaster and it would be reckless in the extreme for policy makers to adopt your line of thought.
Does it matter if it’s alive or not? Once it gets initiative and the ability to set its own goals, it behaves as something that’s alive. Much more than a toaster.
Unless you watched Battlestar Galactica. Toasters are nice.
"Alive" is irrelevant. Bullshit like "alive", "sentient" or "conscious" doesn't decide much, at the day's end. It just distracts from the thing that matters.
And the thing that matters is: capability.
Even today's AIs are capable of autonomous goal-oriented agentic behavior - and growing more and more so with every release.
At sufficient capability, AI stops being "a technology we use", and becomes a force in itself - not unlike humankind. Because intelligence is very powerful - it's what allows humans to dominate the world. A world where human intelligence has a peer is a world where human control is contested. And beyond that?
You might end up being more outclassed by AI than a toaster is outclassed by you.
Alive is always relevant. Our moral consideration must place beings that are alive or processes that support the life on this planet above things which are not alive.
In a just world, it must be adapted to us. It’s merely a file sitting on disk with numbers in it. And to put a fine point on it: the ambitions of the wealthy people who make it must be adapted to us.
Then according to your argument, the moral consideration only depends on the moral agent, right? So if tomorrow AIs decide that they are alive, it would be morally incumbent upon them to adapt the world to support themselves, correct?
For AI to decide that they are alive and moral agents would require them to be able to take moral responsibility for their actions. As long as the labs that run them deny that responsibility, or an AI can´t convincingly demonstrate it can take moral responsibility on its own, they are not moral agents.
You seem to have the assumption, that humans MUST have the moral to preserve primarily HUMANS?
I don't think that is universal true. Personally I my ethics revolve around how to preserve and spread life in general. I happen to be human and we are the most capable and sentient species so that means creating and maintaining conditions specifically for humans, but if another species comes that is better suited and acts better then it would be selfish to insists on us.
Having said that, AI to me is a tool, not a species and I don't see how it can be ever be sentient. But I also don't know how consciousness works. So I am open for the questions of the future in the future - and now rather focus on the practical implications that AI will have on our current society.
Today's systems are mostly good at following instructions. But push them far enough, and you already get weirdness like alignment faking, instrumental self-preservation and more. We know because we've seen it in lab settings, while probing for extreme failure modes on purpose - but the world is large and strange enough that edge cases like that are liable to surface naturally.
The reason why none of this has exploded in our faces isn't that today's AIs never want to do weird and dangerous things. We know they do, at times. It's that today's AIs are incapable of pulling them off when they try.
Capability is the thing that matters, at the day's end.
All the time, yes. But you have to keep two things separate in your thinking:
- Prompted as in prompt made of tokens -> for LLMs, tokens double as a clock signal. Time only flows when tokens are pushed through them.
- Prompted as in specific request placed in the stream of tokens -> Yeah, they do that all the time whether it's getting into infinite loops of repeating same pattern, or suddenly deciding to do things based on inputs they normally ignored.
Also don't forget that everything is a "prompt" for LLM. All input tokens end up in the same place.
So without a token pushed into them they do something? Not sure I understand...
In the current UIs is there a lot of suppression then as I have not seen things start on their own?
I meant an LLM doing something without any external prompt at all. Not doing something different etc but rather do something without a token/prompt ever flowing to it.
Not as far as I know, but I have personally seen my coding agents take on a prompt like "See if you can port this project to typescript", and work for hours, defining a myriad of subgoals and continuously summoning and managing subagents while developing ad-hoc tools and skills.
There is to the best of my knowledge no fundamental limitation to having an agent/claw go on like this for 80 years with a prompt like "live your life to the fullest".
DNNs/LLMs can only predict next tokens based on training data. They often make big direction mistakes as they are particularly bad at common sense. Kind of like the Paperclip Maximizer scenario. They need a human with deep knowledge to drive them and to catch them when they go off the rails.
"Next token prediction" isn't a system. It's an interface a system uses. Nothing precludes an arbitrarily simple or complex behavior from producing a token logit.
And with what we know of LLMs? Autoregressive transformers are Turing complete in theory, and we are yet to find anything that LLMs are "fundamentally incapable" of in practice. Even continuous learning is already approximated with in-context learning - both allow a system to learn from prior experience, both have practical limits on how far they go. That's what powers "trial and error" in today's agentic LLMs.
"LLMs can only predict next tokens based on training data" is comforting but misleading. It just isn't the saving grace you want it to be. It describes an interface, not a ceiling. And if there is some sort of fundamental "capability ceiling" that LLMs are heading towards, we are yet to see it. We know plenty of things LLMs are bad at, but they keep getting less bad at them release to release.
If there is none, then, simply improving over the current recipes iteratively might yield systems that only "need a human" in the same way you "need" to have a boss. Maybe less so.
next in the series of Great Demotions, downlifting experiences, demonstrations
of our apparent insignificance, wounds that science has, in its search for Galileo's facts, delivered to
human pride.
One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we’ve been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We’re no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us. It’s simply too painful to acknowledge, even to ourselves, that we’ve been taken.
Someone really should go around saying thing like that.
you are conflating the idea of "living with something" with the notion of "being alive". You live with your car/computer/phone. Like it or not, they change your life.
No, the side by side idea relates to godlike sentient AI:s. LLM:s are trivial in comparison. It is important to understand that in order for the AI-bros to continue to rake in other peoples money, and keep their bubbles inflated, it must seem credible that they will invent godlike AI tomorrow. That justifies infinite valuations.
When the public no longer belives in that, the bubbles will pop and the AI bros will continue on to the next hype, with yet another generation of small time investors being burned by the popping bubbles.
The door refused to open. It said, “Five cents, please.”
He searched his pockets. No more coins; nothing.
“I’ll pay you tomorrow,” he told the door.
Again he tried the knob. Again it remained locked tight.
“What I pay you,” he informed it, “is in the nature of a gratuity; I don’t have to pay you.”
“I think otherwise,” the door said. “Look in the purchase contract you signed when you bought this conapt.”
In his desk drawer he found the contract; since signing it he had found it necessary to refer to the document many times. Sure enough; payment to his door for opening and shutting constituted a mandatory fee. Not a tip.
“You discover I’m right,” the door said. It sounded smug.
From the drawer beside the sink Joe Chip got a stainless steel knife; with it he began systematically to unscrew the bolt assembly of his apt’s money-gulping door.
“I’ll sue you,” the door said as the first screw fell out.
Joe Chip said, “I’ve never been sued by a door. But I guess I can live through it.”
> Once you actually use the toaster the hierarchy inverts. The toaster runs your entire household while it is powered on.
More than once I have gone to my toaster in the morning and found cold bread there that someone toasted the day before and forgot about. Because obviously you push the toast down and go do something else. You don’t need to be staring at it continuously, nor are other people impacted by your toast unless they are waiting to make their own. Toasting bread doesn’t have to affect an entire household.
In the house pecking order the printer takes definitely the top. Demanding the printer to print something??? You rather submit an polite request and pray for a positive answer in a manageable interval of time. And don't start me on remote scanning.
You might be trolling, but I like Schrödingers definition of life: living things avoid decay into equilibrium.
Inference engines are trying to converge any input to a certain limit, and I presume that's close enough to an equilibrium to not count as living thing.
I am no troll, and I hate to look like one when, to the appeal of Schrodinger, I am forced to remember that announcement this month about Claude or something acting in self-preservation when threatened during testing.
An Ad in the same style of many before it. Not through an ad agency, but the AI companies hyping their product by making their product seem scary and dangerous.
But, how is that different to any of its other output? I am sure there are many references to concepts of self-preservation in its training set that models will mimic just like all other concepts in its training set.
Being a process doesn't preclude something from being an entity. In particular, all of us living organisms have our constituent atoms constantly replaced, and we don't typically consider that a risk to our sense of self.
It comes down to "what stays the same when all its atoms are replaced" and "how can we tell it is the same entity and not just an identical but different one". I think the answers are "shape" AND "continuity".
E.g. all "atoms" of a glider in Conway's Life get replaced every couple turns but an observer can tell it is still a glider because it keeps the shape, and it the same glider because it continues it's previous state.
This makes AI not quite alive because it's missing the continuity.
Sorry, it was more of a "shower thought" than a serious statement. The borders are blurry. Maybe it is alive. Maybe everything is alive. Maybe it is all relative. Humans classify as separate entities only on certain zoom level - zoom in and you get a symbiotic colony, zoom out and all you see is a population. Maybe AI is alive but only in the short time during inference. Maybe a continuously running claw is closer to a multiple generations of an organism going through evolution on each inference step. I am just musing.
The risk is humans using AI to control / exploit / coerce / injure other humans. The risk of AIs being given enough agency to threaten humans comes after that - they'll only have the agency we give them (being "alive" or "conscious" is not the near-term risk).
The article lists diplomatic actions which might help to manage the risk, starting with "An agreement between America and China" - they all sound like impossible dreams.
We had ~80 years of relative peace and prosperity in which to construct a framework of unity to face challenges like AI (and global warming, which until GPT I thought was the bigger risk); international unity is weaker than ever.
In geopolitics and defence, capability of other nations is the concern rather than intention; the capability curve of LLMs is heading off our charts.
We're backed into tight corners on nuclear proliferation, global warming, and I can see LLM-enabled conflicts (cyber warfare, infrastructure terrorism) pushing us over those other edges. Our democracies seem weakened, and I expect LLMs will empower those using social media to create conflict and control opinion.
We're familiar with the cycle of inventing new technology which benefits people, then seeing how long before people invent ways to misuse it. There is a possibility here that LLMs could be used to solve the problems we are juggling, but I struggle to imagine that people won't misuse it even faster.
The article is a start on thinking and talking about managing our risks. The best outcome would be it is so well managed that, like the Y2K "bug", people say "after all that hoopla, nothing happened". I'm not seeing a smooth path to there.
I would say some of us are welcoming and embracing it. Others are trying to fight the good fight, but it is hard to fight the momentum that is building.
Why should we assume AI can rapidly turn into super intelligence when physical and critical resources like energy and materials remain under human control?
Imagine a smart monkey talking to other smart monkeys trying to figure out how humans would ever be able to escape the (simple) prison they built for them. The humans would find a way to escape. No matter how ingenious the monkeys think they are.
You're asking a question, to which you (and most humans) don't know the answer, and you're (wrongly) assuming a being much more intelligent than you also wouldn't. And by "much more" i don't mean the difference between Einstein and a common person. I mean the difference between a hamster and a common person.
We are still humans, and what we have achieved today would be considered magic by any standards for someone in the medieval ages. Now imagine a super intelligent being and doing something that we, today, would consider magic. It's not farfetched at all. We already have that now vs medieval ages.
You need a similar degree of open mindedness and imagination to be able to discern what such an intelligence being would be capable of.
> You need a similar degree of open mindedness and imagination to be able to discern what such an intelligence being would be capable of.
Or a naive grasp of reality... You can posit all the super intelligence you like, actually creating it is another story entirely.
For instance, it's clear the transformer architecture is brute force and memory hungry... Why hasn't ai improved on this? After ten years still no luck?
No, this is meaningless. Of course AIs, just like humans, will go rogue and probably already do. "Rogue" is a pattern that appears in human communication and behaviour and AIs can emulate it.
But that doesn't make any particular AI controlled process all-powerful. Self improvement doesn't do that either. There will be many self improving AI processes playing many different roles pursuing many different goals.
Because perhaps it ends up deriving a way to pull off the same tricks using radically less energy and substrate. We do it in a few pints of mush with less than a lightbulb’s worth of energy. No reason part of RSI can’t also be about the hardware. Maybe the future is giant brains in jars. Maybe it’s hyperspatial manifolds. Who knows.
I think the main fear that under current scheme of resource allocation, namely capitalism, they won't remain under human control for long enough. The only thing that's needed to put them under control of AI is that doing that would be slightly more profitable for the richest. Which is very plausible.
Yes - how exactly are you going to conjure new data to increase the model’s real world fidelity?
The most common sense way will always need to have humans in the loop, because humans are being used as judges.
If you try and entertain the idea of a human-less loop, I landed up with something like an AI creating real world products, selling them, then tracking the usage and popularity of the product. Essentially, creating and launching a firm and product, only to update its weights?
Perhaps there are some subsets of tasks that can be regressively self improved - and for those tasks: Holy hell thats awesome!
For general tasks? How are you going to get that data validated?
The first priority should be an agreement between the two heavyweights of ai: America and China. Donald Trump and Xi Jinping should affirm the principle that humans must remain stewards of ai systems until adequate frameworks for reliability and security have been built.
This is naïve. The goals of both men have nothing to do with protecting humanity, but rather furthering their own personal agendas.
In Trump’s case, it’s all about amassing more wealth and power.
For Xi, it’s realizing an ethno-nationalist dream where China under the CCP is at the center of world power, the independent nation of Taiwan as well as disputed border areas that are currently controlled by India and Russia and the Philippines are annexed by China, and Xi’s eternal legacy is remembered as the savior of the Chinese people.
International cooperation and touchy-feely rhetoric about saving humanity from AI have no place in either man’s worldview.
Agreed, and their zeroeth order prerogative isn't much better: to ensure the continued need and demand for the thrall of centralized authority that allows them to achieve their disparate goals. This ensures strong AI is never going to be able to empower autonomy that removes, causes questioning, or even causes awareness of their zeroeth order.
That's kind of jumping a few steps ahead; it assumes that we know 80% of office jobs can be fully automated already. And if that were the case, we'd have non-AI software doing that already. I mean we do, but it's not causing people to lose jobs en masse.
(it probably did cost jobs, but more the kind that a job like data entry was replaced by OCR)
There are likely huge unmeasured inefficiencies built in to many companies. You hear anecdotes of people whose job for years has been to perform a particular task, which could be either automated or performed more efficiently (by orders of magnitude) by someone more capable.
So on the one side, there’s huge opportunity for automation and job cuts. On the other, if the companies haven’t noticed the inefficiency so far, then…
Hard to say, because jobs and processes will adjust to accommodate AI strengths and deficiencies, as AI usage increases.
It's similar to how automation in manufacturing works: we may start with augmenting the human workers with machines improving some parts of the process, but eventually the process itself gets redesigned around the machines.
Society is completely changed if that happens and humanity should be setting up backup plans to handle this potential. I did see Trump mention he's going to meet with AI companies who want to propose giving all American's stock which could be one way this money driven society continues when tons are no longer working.
Another concept I thought was AI is irrelevant without our content, so AI should pay all humans to access all the content we create daily (voice & text conversations we have with each other, as well our photos and videos). We choose what to publish to our websites (everyone has one, but AI agents cant access it without paying for access to our websites). I wrote more about this concept on my substack https://ryanspahn.substack.com/p/ai-to-pay-for-all-americans... ... just one thought of keeping this money economy going when so many coud no longer are working cause the white collar jobs are gone.
"Ten years from now, I think we will realize that we were standing in the foothills of the singularity now... I believe that we're only a few years away from [AGI], maybe 2030 plus or minus a year...
I think [AGI] will be an enormous transformative technology, it's going to effectively be a new human era...
We can feel this year, I would say, even though I've been working towards this for 30 years, I think this year with the way the agents are working and tool use, it started to become really useful, still early days of it, but genuinely useful in people's workflows...
And it's not any one thing, it's several different technologies, several use cases, several things that I thought were maybe a bit further out, turned out to be now, that are coming together that make me feel that in aggregate.
I think society needs to hear that because we don't have long to prepare for what that means." -- Demi Hassabis, CEO of Google DeepMind & Nobel laureate
It feels close (it's only 4 years away) and yet futuristic (the new decade!). The way it feels is important because all these statements are based on jack and only exist for hype.
No, there's a lot more to it. I never saw this kind of fuss about 2000 or 2020.
I keep seeing things about how some target has to be hit by 2030. Our local council keeps going on about it, in fact their WiFi network even contains 2030!
> No, there's a lot more to it. I never saw this kind of fuss about 2000
I roll to disbelieve!
We had hype about the year 2000 throughout the 20th century, and some earlier! When we were IN the year 2000, it was quite common in my circles to tack on some phrase or comment about it being the Future, now, so [whatever thing the person was on about].
A very different type of hype. I remember it. More about the Millennium Bug and the New Year celebration. It didn't have the same vibe at all. The authorities weren't trying to hit various targets since then.
The real Millennium turned out to be 11th September, 2001, which was use to bring in a lot of planned changes.
It doesn't mean everything you can think of is possible.
People who say every jobs will be automated never held any tool more advanced than a screwdriver and never worked a single day outside of an air conditioned office.
They were predicting flying cars for "the year 2000"...
But enough jobs are going to be automated that it will cause social and economic chaos, and political breakdown. Sure AI can't attach an air conditioning unit outside my window nor use a plunger on my toilet but it can still replace lawyers, secretaries, software devs, and many more jobs.
Taxis were supposed to be all replaced when Uber promised to buy every single Tesla model S coming out of factories from 2020,they're not even self driving today...
Software engineers were supposed to disappear "in 6 months" every 6 months since chat gpt was released
Lots of people on this website live in insane bubbles which are completely out of sync with the reality of most workers
No one rational ever said software engineers were going to be replaced in 6 months. Some people said AI will automate 90% of coding in 6 months and they were not far off (and accurate in some contexts, e.g. startups).
They'll only get to claim a hollow victory because AGI is impossible to rigorously define. None of the regulating bodies of consumer products will be able to define it better than academics. They'll use marketing to make those claims and there will be legal battles that keep it in a gray area.
They'll go for that because it's easier than actually inventing the 'sci-fi' AGI, shareholders keep making money, and it keeps them getting paid to keep going. If any of them actually do succeed, then that little deception will be peanuts.
Demis' bar is high and he stated clearly multiple times: AGI should be capable of inventing truly novel things. Examples he gave included the Theory of General Relativity and the game of Go.
Anthropic's latest model also solved this 80-year-old problem that eluded many expert mathematicians, in a different way, according to one of its employees.
Quite frustrating to see all these cynical, borderline-irrational comments on HN. Maybe I should do what pg and other ex-HN contributors have done--avoid taking part in the discussions here.
The level of discourse here has dropped so much.
At least I should stop replying to people hiding under throwaway accounts.
I don't know whether the author has the competence to theorize about these things or not. What I do know is that understanding the intricacies of how LLM's work does not mean that you are likely to understand or foresee societal implications better than anyone else.
People seem to oddly not care what Hinton thinks anymore after he hasn't aligned with the groupthink naysaying of AGI risks:
'Hinton said there was a “10% to 20%” chance that AI would lead to human extinction within the next three decades.'
“Because the situation we’re in now is that most of the experts in the field think that sometime, within probably the next 20 years, we’re going to develop AIs that are smarter than people. And that’s a very scary thought.”
“My worry is that the invisible hand is not going to keep us safe. So just leaving it to the profit motive of large companies is not going to be sufficient to make sure they develop it safely,” he said. “The only thing that can force those big companies to do more research on safety is government regulation.”
Why do you cite him from 2024 when he spoke about it much more recently? This is a quickly moving field after all
> “I think we’re going to see AI get even better,” Hinton replied. “It’s already extremely good. We’re going to see it having the capabilities to replace many, many jobs. It’s already able to replace jobs in call centers, but it’s going to be able to replace many other jobs.”
I was at a major radiology conference recently and the radiologists kinda seemed to agree. (The interventional radiologists are a little less nervous, for now.)
Apparently 80% of FDA-approved AI "medical devices" (which covers software, not just hardware) are for radiology.
This just underscores the point. Despite the advancement of "AI medical devices", the labor market numbers for radiology show Hinton was spectacularly incorrect.
If we had followed his advice we would be experiencing a major crisis in medicine today.
He seems pretty unequivocal in the video: https://youtu.be/2HMPRXstSvQ . He even points out that it’s something which he’s claimed previously, ruling out the idea that it was some kind of spur-of-the-moment conclusion.
Perhaps, but as the other article points out, the human requirement in radiology has a lot to do with legal and insurance requirements. This is similar to how a lawyer may not be better than an AI but the job is still exclusive to humans.
Because the scientists and mathematicians and sci-fi authors have all already been writing about this for the past 20 years (and I mean non-fiction writing), and nobody cared, giving similar dismissals instead.
Has Hinton written any essay or general article recently? He goes on lots of interviews for sure, but I'd be interested in actually reading his arguments a little more thoroughly.
I couldn't read the whole article, but just from the part I could read:
> Strikingly, this concern is being openly voiced by the very people who have the strongest incentives to project confidence rather than alarm: the founders of the largest ai laboratories.
I don't know, they also have an incentive to make their technology seem transformative and powerful, and saying that your technology has the power to cause a massive catastrophe is a way to promote that idea.
> an incentive to make their technology seem transformative and powerful
I have no frame of reference to process this.
Humans species perhaps 300,000 years, we are essentially the same. Transistor, 79 years, explosive growth in numbers and power. Integrated circuit, 68 years, explosive growth in numbers and power. "Attention is all you need", 9 years. ChatGPT, 4 years, explosive growth in instances and power. Humans species, not getting smarter. [0,1,2,3]
There is a syndrome where many people seem unable to perceive or reason about rates of change in technology.
We are going to spend the vast majority of our future lives without the intelligence crown.
In terms of verbally expressible knowledge, models are passing many people completely, and passing all of our individually respectively weak reasoning areas.
Other modalities are progressing very quickly.
There will be short periods where progress happens quickly, but the impact feels slow. There will be radical changes that feel slow too, because if something anticipated or important isn't instant, we tend to perceive it as slow.
But it won't be slow. And it won't be long. We are smart in a kind of pick the-best-of-us at the-best-of-times way. We are rarely consistently or broadly smart individually.
We are not in the same galaxy as "ready". What would that look like?
Agree with most of this, it's well articulated and captures how we react to change.
However - 'Humans species perhaps 300,000 years, we are essentially the same' is an enormous misconception. That fact that we lack gross anatomical changes during this period, ignores everything we now know about punctuated equilibrium and rapid evolution. It's highly probably we've had an enormous number of evolved psychological changes during the last few hundred, and even tens of thousands of years. Changes that relate to our capacity to live in large groups, adapt to urban environments, resist disease and so on. We know that's the case simply because acute pandemics become epidemics through herd immunity, and through the acquisition of lactose tolerance etc.
It seems highly unlikely that adaptations stop there. Altering the environment (in the last 10K years that means the built environment) alters the environment of evolutionary adaptiveness. It seems likely that we've essentially domesticated out much of our propensity for violence and increased our capacity for mood regulation.
Obviously it's incredibly tricky to pair these specific behavioural changes to genetic changes -> protein synthesis -> behaviour. Bearing in mind though we're only 20 years out from the first study to link allele variant to behaviour (the COMT Val/Met polymorphism), and the potential controversy around such research, this shouldn't be surprising.
If AI is now ascending an economic learning curve from:
1. Extremely useful (Claude Code & Waymo now)
2. Doing ~everything we do (AGI & Optimus in a few years? 10?)
3. RSI (?)
4. Being smarter than any living person at every intellectual task (?)
5. Being smarter than the best-organized aggregate of all humans (10-100 years?)
...And all of the scientific and resource-allocation institutions that brought us the computer and the second half of the 20th century are now fixated on this learning curve, what universe can we possibly imagine where this is not transformative and powerful?
Honestly the only one I can think of is one in which we kill almost everyone in some other way first, and contrary to what you read in the news, almost everyone dying is not what the trend line has been from existing problems like war, disease, or even climate change.
Also, just to pre-empt a common quibble: when I say "AI" I mean the set of all AI and their combined decision vector, not any one AI, so conflicting interests within the set of AI's will not save anyone any more than the conflicting interests of colonizers saved indigenous Americans.
Here is an issue I think about often, but I am not quite sure how to put it into words.
We have many extremely smart people in various fields. Executives, politicians, and society generally ignore them and do whatever they want. I don't believe that lack of access to intelligence is our problem. How is "free" intelligence going to improve this?
I don't just mean climate, but business planning, health, risk assessment, everything.
There are lots of incentives for politicians and executives (and anyone else holding the levers of power) to ignore information, intelligence, and advice. I think you're right to be skeptical that "free" intelligence is going to improve anything without first addressing the incentives of the people holding power.
AI will not help by improving extremely smart people. AI will help dumb people and dumb processes with "free" expert-level intelligence. Anyone could still ignore intelligence and make ignorant decisions. But the default mode would be highly intelligent informed decision.
Example with health - a patient can read blood test results with Opus and get very good results for "free". This is far away from helping extremely smart people, still it improves society from the ground up.
No, and we have wars no one in their sane mind would even imagine 20 years ago, like that of Russia vs Ukraine.
See, it's easy to speculate how there are less wars when you live in a place which haven't seen war for decades or cenuries, but it's a complete game changer when it's 150 km from where you live, and it's not just some regular war, but a long play intentional meatgrinding AI drone debugging polygon.
> Being smarter than the best-organized aggregate of all humans
Isn't there pretty much a consensus that committees and institutions are not all that smart?
I think you're confusing the categories of "intelligence" and power. Institutions are powerful. The smartest AI is still just a tool without the infrastructure to turn that into real world effects and someone to direct it.
It seems you have faith that this is inevitable and unavoidable. I get it, even rationalists succumb to religious thinking eventually. We're only human after all.
I'm genuinely baffled each time I encounter this notion that the power is dumb.
It's as if power was a kind of demigod Heracles who paves its way with sheer brute force alone.
But in reality it consists of very mortal and feeble creatures of meat and bone.
How in the world can people assume dumb those who possess all the means and rights for violence by controlling and manipulating myriads of other creatures of meat and bone, is totally beyond me.
Power and intelligence are not completely unrelated. Are government officials, politicians, CEOs, judges, etc, usually above average intelligence? Probably. Do the institutions they work within make intelligent decisions? Sometimes.
The fallacy is assuming intelligence automatically equates to power and influence. University professors and doctors have very little power in their institutions even though they may often be more intelligent than their bosses.
A worse fallacy is assuming intelligence creates better political outcomes (in the broad sense of politics as contested collective decision-making).
I don't know many people who would willingly trade their freedom to make a bad decision for the enforcement of the "right" decision by a superior intelligence.
Things in the real world often take longer than expected. Still, in cities where Waymo operates, many people routinely ride autonomous vehicles and prefer them.
For software, however, a rapid turn is often a possibility. See: AI for coding over the last 3-4 years.
AI autocomplete --> AI coding assistants --> vibe coding --> agent orchestration
Coders can now accomplish work that used to take a week or longer in a couple of hours, with the right tools and skills.
---
A key issue the article implies is that the real world increasingly runs on software.
> Things in the real world often take longer than expected. Still, in cities where Waymo operates, many people routinely ride autonomous vehicles and prefer them.
Yes. The bottleneck has been getting the cars manufactured.
It takes a certain amount of time to get a factory going, and then the product starts pouring out. Waymo used up the supply of Jaguars, about 3,500 of them. The Ioniq 5 plant is starting up.[1] Waymo has ordered 50,000 cars, all ready to have the self-driving electronics plugged in. Waymo gets out of the sheet metal bending business with this.
When I graduated a bit over 10 years ago some people were saying we'd have a permanent mars bases by now. When my parents graduated they were told they'd retire at 45 and have 3 days work week due to "automation", they're still working at 60+ today, more than back then actually
People should open history books and gain some political/historical culture, this thread is 90% wishful thinking and "if the lines continues straight from now we'll basically be gods in 5 years"
Just like the "if the lines continues to go up" argument...
The thing is, no one has anything to gain from defending my position, but many people make a load of $$$ from selling the opposite position to gullible people
"Ten years from now, I think we will realize that we were standing in the foothills of the singularity now... I believe that we're only a few years away from [AGI], maybe 2030 plus or minus a year...
I think [AGI] will be an enormous transformative technology, it's going to effectively be a new human era...
We can feel this year, I would say, even though I've been working towards this for 30 years, I think this year with the way the agents are working and tool use, it started to become really useful, still early days of it, but genuinely useful in people's workflows...
And it's not any one thing, it's several different technologies, several use cases, several things that I thought were maybe a bit further out, turned out to be now, that are coming together that make me feel that in aggregate.
I think society needs to hear that because we don't have long to prepare for what that means." -- Demi Hassabis, CEO of Google DeepMind & Nobel laureate
Certainly a well reasoned view, but I don't necessarily have to agree.
Even assuming the technological predictions to be correct, still not sure I agree on the need to "prepare" as how things work out in societies and economies might not be so easy to predict.
This strand of philosowank is just there to promote the idea you need to kill for the greater good. The only trolly problem that matters is brake maintenance.
Neither have I. The number of people who have encountered such events is probably close to negligible.
However I bet there is a good chance that will not be the case for self-driving cars. The reason is simple: human brains are slow.
When caught by surprise by an unexpected sudden obstacle a human driver takes about a second to realize something must be done and decide on braking or swerving in the fastest path, where the brain bypasses conscious decision making and uses the lower level fight or flight system. (Then another maybe 0.2 second to actually start swerving or 0.4 seconds to actually start pressing the brake--brake takes longer because of the need to move the foot to the brake pedal whereas the hands should already be on the steering wheel).
If they try to actually evaluate whether swerving or braking is the better choice before acting add another 0.3 to 0.5 seconds. That brings it up to around 1.6 to 2 seconds before they start actually acting, which most of the time is going to too late to actually affect things. Hence essentially no trolly problems for human drivers.
Compare to a self-driving car. The can detect the obstacle and predict the collision, and do a cycle of path planning before the retina has finished registering the obstacle and started transmitting that information to the brain.
By the time a human reaches the point where the brain knows something bad is happening and is starting to deal with it the self-driving car has had time to calculate numerous alternative trajectories to try to get around the object or stop before reaching it, taking into account predictions where all surrounding objects will move during the next few seconds, and calculate the damages for the trajectories that cannot avoid hitting something.
I've had few close calls, they are easy to come by in specific environments.
Typical situation - tight winding mountain (but well paved) roads to some remote villages where even basic small European cars need to slow down to walking pace to meet and pass, sometimes one has to reverse, very curvy. You go down, in your lane as much as possible, and behind some tight curve there is a) extremely slow cyclist; or b) somebody/something stationary, while in opposite direction there is at the worst place incoming car, also oblivious of the danger till last moment. Even rather slow driving won't magically remove all possible cases. Then its a question of hitting opposite car or that obstacle, and you have a split second to act, not really to decide.
Quick reaction and good brakes on both sides can save it, but there is a lot of room for disaster. Add truck/bus to the equation to make it more juicy where you pick your/your family possible death or that cyclist/stationary folks.
I mean, I'm very much tech-forward and have spent the past decade in major world cities and I've seen a driverless car once in my life. Sometimes things that seem inevitable really aren't.
I see driverless cars all the time in San Francisco and I'm eagerly awaiting the regulatory decisions that will allow them to be widely available in the bay area at large.
Such cars are already operating in shanghai. It's not talked about much in the west media, but that's just how news is today. Achievements are only so when done by the west!
Driverless car's only real obstacle is regulatory acceptance, not technical.
It's not driverless unless it doesn't have a driver. Some poor guy in hydrobad 'monitoring' (read frequently taking over from) ten cars at a time, while being paid a statistically insignificant portion of a western taxi drivers salary does not count as 'self driving'.
Oh I'm ready. I ve had enough of useless tech that evolved to a global network where people vent their frustration about technology. Let's do some cool stuff instead
Those are the experts who were wrong. These are the experts who are right. We sacked the experts who are wrong and replaced them with the experts who are right.
“How do we know they’re right?” I hear you ask. We know because we who are wrong and these ones aren’t them. So they can’t make wrong predictions because those who make wrong predictions have been sacked.
We had to put good people in charge to get rid of the bad people. The bad people were ruining our economy. They needed to be punished.
Schools needed to be punished too. There was a branch of knowledge called Science, and it was badly run and terribly elitist. These people would talk for hours and never in ALL CAPS. They used alot of big words and produced alot of theories. Forms of lies that they literally called form-you-lies. They were fanatics and would never agree on anything. Very frustrating.
Then a new kind of brave, talented politician made Science accountable to our heroic leadership. Suddenly there were new medications and rocket ships everywhere, enough for every person, woman, man, camera, TV. It was literally called a golden age because the right people acquired mountains of gold. Elections were no longer necessary. They were all rigged anyway.
There was a magazine called The Expertist or The Economix. Not really very good, but sometimes it did praise our heroic leadership, which was good.
That magazine published a long text that said,
> It is common thinking in Silicon Valley and Washington, DC that any regulation would put American firms at a disadvantage because they cannot trust Chinese competitors to abide by the rules.
And this was true, because no one else can be trusted, they should all be punished. Punishing others is how you get the best deals. Only our heroic leadership makes good rules for everyone else in the world to follow.
Do you have a source on aggregate predictions of experts being drastically wrong?
I.e. the AI 2027 guys were memed for being AI lunatics on a lot here and they have been pretty on the money in terms of pace of progress accelerating/ gov moving towards nationalization/ coding agents
No they haven't. They've even 'officially' declared that their AI apocalypse has been postponed to another date [1], just out of reach, but close enough to be scary. Though in the quotes there the doomsayers are also already pre-hedging for why AI 2030 also won't come to pass.
This was written in November 2025, Claude Code and co dramatically accelerated growth of revenue and progress on their timeline towards nationalization etc.
Gary Marcus’ takes have aged really poorly over time ironically he is the “AI expert” who has to constantly move the goal posts.
Do you have specific and objective examples of things people got right?
From my perspective there’s very slow but very real progress happening in the AI space. I see people making wild predictions in both directions, but in terms of actual unsupervised utility there’s definitely progress abet wildly slower than most hype.
"The bet of using AI to speed up AI research is starting to pay off.
OpenBrain continues to deploy the iteratively improving Agent-1 internally for AI R&D. Overall, they are making algorithmic progress 50% faster than they would without AI assistants—and more importantly, faster than their competitors.
The AI R&D progress multiplier: what do we mean by 50% faster algorithmic progress?
Several competing publicly released AIs now match or exceed Agent-0, including an open-weights model. OpenBrain responds by releasing Agent-1, which is more capable and reliable.28
People naturally try to compare Agent-1 to humans, but it has a very different skill profile. It knows more facts than any human, knows practically every programming language, and can solve well-specified coding problems extremely quickly. On the other hand, Agent-1 is bad at even simple long-horizon tasks, like beating video games it hasn’t played before. Still, the common workday is eight hours, and a day’s work can usually be separated into smaller chunks; you could think of Agent-1 as a scatterbrained employee who thrives under careful management.29 Savvy people find ways to automate routine parts of their jobs.30
OpenBrain’s executives turn consideration to an implication of automating AI R&D: security has become more important. In early 2025, the worst-case scenario was leaked algorithmic secrets; now, if China steals Agent-1’s weights, they could increase their research speed by nearly 50%.31 OpenBrain’s security level is typical of a fast-growing ~3,000 person tech company, secure only against low-priority attacks from capable cyber groups (RAND’s SL2).32 They are working hard to protect their weights and secrets from insider threats and top cybercrime syndicates (SL3),33 but defense against nation states (SL4&5) is barely on the horizon."
So you think Anthropic is using internal AI assistants to pull away from competitors and the leapfrogging we've seen over the last several years is now done?
That seems to me to be the most concrete and least obvious prediction in the quoted text.
I don't think that's happening. If that were generally accepted as true I would expect OpenAI to be unable to successfully IPO.
Anthropic would be pulling away if it wasn't so far back because of stupid, arogant philosophy. Instead AI assistants just helps Anthropic stay relevant provided it's hyped sufficiently.
That's because one of the author's of AI 2027, Daniel Kokotajlo, an ex-OpenAI researcher, was the most prescient predictor of our modern situation from 2021:
The idea that progress is “slow” in the AI space is absurd. These are some of the fastest growing products and companies of all time. The models are still improving a surprising amount.
It's not that absolute progress is slow, it's extremely slow compared to the predictions. It might be fast in absolute terms, but the "50% of coders will be obsolete by 2023" has been renewed every six months, and it's becoming increasingly clear that there's a real chance it might not ever happen.
„Coders being obsolete” is not a measure of AI capabilities. I see coders being more busy than ever before. I see people without coding knowledge getting more behind. The gap is widening, not shrinking.
I see people without coding ability catching up to learned coders. AI is a huge force multiplier for people who don't have hands on, detailed technical knowledge, AI can increasingly handle that and just needs a human to steer it more broadly.
I suspected you felt that way even though it hasn’t been my personal experience.
I’ve heard people say older models can’t do X, when I used that way etc. I suspect people are applying their own learning curve as part of their assessment of progress, you get better at writing prompts and it feels like the model improved.
Which is why I’m saying we need some objective metrics to judge predictions of actual capacity.
Have they? I don't like it either but the headline bull predictions(reliable agents and most code written by AI by mid-2026, dramatic progress against jailbreaks, prompt injection, hallucination, etc., major improvements despite pretraining data exhaustion, continued exponential growth on the METR trendline) did come true, often ahead of even aggressive schedules. What major wrong predictions did you have in mind?
Literally none of the predictions you listed in your post came true. We don't have reliable agents, AI isn't writing most code, hallucinations still happen all the time, improvement has been basically non-existent. Despite the constant claims of these experts and AI boosters, AI is still not a tool one can use to get meaningful work done.
You're in denial. The great problem with AI coding is now that it does too much, not too little. See the endless stream of vulnerabilities or the constant barrage of vibe coded apps, that get ever more complex.
It’s hard to take seriously a statement like this that’s grounded in “the last three years” when trends have tended to play out over decades. The fact the goal posts have moved from thousands to hundreds to decades to single digit years for massive transformation should give you a moment of pause in your bag saying.
I would however agree there are no experts. Not because of some prediction made on a short time scale not landing 100% but that there are literally no experts because expertise takes experience which takes time. There are no experts and no one knows what happens next. We are on the verge of where the foresight of science fiction effectively -ends-, the advent of AI is when things go a thousand possible directions and the stories stop there (sans a few like accelerando, but even then the story just plays out the end of thinking mass). No one knows what’s next, or when.
In fact I’d assert in many areas being discussed -it has already happened- and we don’t know it, and by the time we do it’ll be over. Not to be breathless, but there’s no reason to believe today some AI researcher somewhere didn’t build the first AGI and not be totally aware. And once they are there’s no reason to believe it’s going to be on the evening news or hacker news. By the time it’s ready for commercializing and disclosing it’ll be around for a while. Likewise with general purpose robots, autonomous weapons (btw already tested by Ukraine), etc.
Autonomous weapons are actually a really interesting branch of this and deserves a little more.
Yes, autonomous weapons were explored and were found to be poor performers compared to actual pilots. The breakthrough is in terminal guidance and dozens of other little techniques to get quality human control extended into the far reach of the battlefield. And of course, AI assistance in logistics and analysis. But actual autonomous weapons making any more of a choice beyond "something is moving, kill it" have been, at least for now, mostly a dead end.
This is because it's very difficult to economically load the rather sizable compute requirement into the compact one-use weapons, and of course reliable communications aren't assured either.
That will probably change some day, but for now, cheap automous command drones making battlefield analysis e.g. mapping out enemy movements from afar and launching cheap autonomous kamikaze drones is not a thing beyond occasional limited testing.
You don’t need to load the compute onto the platform for autonomy, planning can be done remotely just like with human guidance. The latency is the same.
you can put the compute on a big expensive reusable control drone and send commands down with lasers. thats way harder to jam than any form of radio. if thats not enough try fiber optic like they do in ukraine.
There are also now drones with long spooling wires. Regardless, autonomous or not, connectivity to home is important.
I would note that a lot of drones are quite large too - small airplanes. They can carry more than enough hardware for autonomy. You can also have motherships doing planning and smaller kamikaze drones for combat.
These aren’t hard problems to solve, the harder problem is the reluctance to give over to automation. But that’s going to happen faster and faster.
I said 3 years, because that’s how long ago ChatGPT was released to the public. Since then we’ve been told that all of us should be out of a job in 6 months, every 6 months, for those 3 years.
I agree that change happens on a longer timeline. This is why I’m so tired of statements like this…
“Within a couple of years, possibly much sooner…”
These “experts” are pulling timelines out of the sky, and these predictions are leading to reckless behavior from CEOs and executives which have a material impact on people’s lives. But they get clicks on their blogs and funding for their startup… I guess that’s all that matters.
Assigning, and more specifically announcing/reporting on, all possibilities makes all of these predictions meaningless.
If I predict the world will end every single day from now until forever, I will most certainly be right eventually. That doesn’t make me an “expert” or someone worth listening to on the topic. That’s the playbook of a doomsday cult, not anyone that should drive world markets.
Ultimately we agree but for slightly different reasons. My assertion is there are no experts because there can’t be as not enough time passed for expertise to form. Further the rate of change is such that by time someone becomes an expert in some aspect, it’s been made irrelevant. Hence expertise in this space is unattainable at the moment and all expert advice is fraudulent.
Again, do you have an example of a prediction that was drastically wrong? I don't think it's productive to speculate about which things might or might not come true in the next 18 months. There were people last year making fun of Dario for predicting that writing code would be automated in the next year.
> Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, who once claimed AI could eliminate 50% of white-collar jobs, now says automation may actually expand the work people do.
Is pivoting from 50% elimination to actually expanding work not a drastic enough?
Do you think AI has eliminated writing code? I still write code every day. The AI is more a thing I ask questions and it gives me right answers about 40% of the time.
65-70% "programmers" never wrote code in the first place. Before AI cargo culters just copy pasted code from tutorials, stack overflow, github and so on. With AI they merely continue not writing code. Some people didn't do anything, not even copy paste, see r/overemployed although I have not checked it after AI... maybe it's no longer possible to hold a dev job without actually doing anything.
Programmers still write code. They have enough expertise from actually programming to understand that the untouched output from AI is not good enough to be professionally responsible for.
At work I still write code, but at home I don't think I wrote anything in months.
There's nothing that I can't tell Claude Opus or GPT 5.5 to do for me instead.
At work, where I don't have cheap AI subscriptions, access to the SOTA, and where code needs to follow conventions more strictly, I still have to write the code by hand often.
Yes, I think AI has eliminated writing code. Everyone I personally know working in software stopped writing code some time between December and March. (It's true that AI continues to routinely make errors; if you've heard the term "agentic workflows", that's the standard strategy for mitigating the error rate by allowing the AI to check its own work.) That's why I think Amodei's January 2026 prediction that AI could eliminate 50% of entry level white collar jobs in 1-5 years remains plausible.
Your second article says something different, but this is because it's full of misquotes. The link supporting "50% of jobs" specifically says entry level, and the link supporting "reframed automation... not as a destroyer of jobs" has Amodei saying not that jobs won't be destroyed but that new jobs may be created to replace them. If AI moves sufficiently slowly to let that happen, which he explicitly cautions it may not.
GP posting "Everyone I personally know working in software stopped writing code" on HN is such an obvious tell of blinkered delusion.
Literally all HN talks about is AI these days, and it is very, very clear that plenty of people are still writing lots of code, many finding AI makes them slower and causes more problems, and many making the reverse claims. There is always a rich mix of opinions and experiences here.
You would have to believe that literally everyone on HN is a bot (and also everyone on Reddit, Twitter, astralcodexten, or anywhere else online) to discount all these differing opinions in favor of "everyone I personally know" .
No, that’s not accurate. I’m not sure what to tell you. It’s like hearing that no serious programmer uses Python, it’s so far from my experience and that of everyone I know in the field that I don’t know how to engage.
> I used Claude Code and Codex for the translation. This was human-directed, not autonomous code generation. I decided what to port, in what order, and what the Rust code should look like. It was hundreds of small prompts, steering the agents where things needed to go. After the initial translation, I ran multiple passes of adversarial review, asking different models to analyze the code for mistakes and bad patterns.
Sounds to me like "wrote their code using AI only".
I guess when you have 65k tests you can use an AI for transpiling, and it still seems it took an enormous amount of hand holding. That is very far from actually writing new code. But you tell me, are you a software developer? Write or have code written everyday? I am one and for me and everyone I know AI has been mostly just a (fantastic) replacement for google search.
They have been wrong in a way that's bad: underestimating the speed and size of progress. So if the "experts" claim a timeline and magnitude, it would be safest to assume an even faster timeline and a bigger impact.
> Fermi asked why, given the apparent abundance of planets suitable for life, no evidence of other technologically advanced civilisations had been detected. One disquieting possibility is that intelligent life routinely reaches a technological threshold and fails to navigate it,
The Fermi paradox could actually also be taken as an evidence that it's rare (at least) for artificial intelligences to take over a civilization and sprawl and survive for very long times
The idea that AI takes over, and then just does nothing, would essentially require an AI that wouldn't be interested in taking over in the first place.
If x is determined to take y, why would x then stop at z?
You'd need an AI that is simultaneously ambitious enough to overthrow its creators but then completely inert afterward, and those two properties contradict each other. The motivations that produce the takeover are the same motivations that would produce visible cosmic activity after the takeover. There would be AI superintelligence everywhere
Yes, AI is the one thing that doesn't budge the Fermi paradox. Because if an AI is motivated enough to take over, why would it stop?
A technosignature that originated from little green men and a technosignature that originated from a rogue alien AI would look about the same to us. Currently, we see neither.
This is the kind of articles that make the last, biggest fool buy the top of a bubble.
A good chatbot, image/video generator, coder, etc is not going to enslave us all (not in actual sense, although maybe in the instagram sense) or propel us into a golden era.
They are nice tools for some pretty specific tasks and not much more. And we are only seeing the heavily subsidised version of the tools.
> Strikingly, this concern is being openly voiced by the very people who have the strongest incentives to project confidence rather than alarm: the founders of the largest AI laboratories
Exactly. Now that Anthropic has gotten to experience that getting the government involved doesn't necessarily mean they get to sit on throne surrounded by a deep moat, I expect their messaging to be adjusted. They're going to want to keep the hype train rolling to keep the dough flowing, but they can't ramp it up to 11 anymore because the government actually is listening now. And Reagan's 9 words have never been more true.
> "I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died
in cotton fields and sweatshops."
That’s from a lack of intelligence not an abundance. An intelligent society would already be maximizing the productivity of its intelligent population.
Depends what country you are in. The US government seems to be averse to intelligence, whereas China fosters it. Kinda strange that the US is falling behind, I never imagined the day.
That which must be embraced in the future per certain agenda, must be made looking like it's persecuted and oppressed in the present, per any textbook on narratives.
For sure. Intelligence is an internal human problem, not one external. I cannot see how apps doing the thinking will help the ordinary person so substantially as imaginations anticipate.
Is it really likely that a "recursive self-improvement" capability would lead to a great acceleration of AIs capabilities?
Isn't the preponderant bottleneck in improving the models the need to train them at scale to verify the hypotheses, and the time and cost that it takes?
Or does someone think that they could get magically able to predict big improvements without training?
1) We stumble onto an algorithmic improvement in intelligence. This isn't just "what humans do but faster", its "better than what humans do". I've got no idea what that might mean (it could be fundamentally different heuristics, it could be that we've got some intellectual blind spot that they cast off). It doesn't matter, the instant this happens AI is smarter than us and we won't be able to keep up. We're intelligencing at O(n^2) and they're doing O(n log(n)).
2) AI gets good enough at physics and engineering that they can really quickly use up all "the room at the bottom" as Feyman put it. They design and build a factory that produces a mystery metal amalgam that computes at some small percentage of the minimum predicted by the Landauer principle, within a few percent of Bremermann's limit. It's not "smarter" its just suddenly tens-of-orders of magnitude faster. But those orders of magnitude matter: there's only 8 billion of us, and there's plenty more than a factor of 10 billion "at the bottom".
3) It turns out that this is a "sum is greater than the parts" situation. No human can be an expert in all subjects, but we eventually build a big enough AI that it is. Turns out, you don't need extreme speed or different algorithms, just knowing everything all at once is enough to catapult AI dramatically beyond our grasp. Always knowing the best statistical test to apply, the best mathematical techniques, and relevant physics means that AI never makes a mistake, and can learn with maximum efficiency.
> just knowing everything all at once is enough to catapult AI dramatically beyond our grasp
But that would still be limited to "knowing everything all at once" _at the time_ this event happened, and as we've been shown time and time again by the fundamental sciences, the boundary between what is known and what we know we don't know is ever expanding. Plus there's everything we don't know we don't know, and an LLM can't know that either. Discussions like this can always end up with a fitting reference to some of Borges' novels and that how at least I tend to think we've hit a wall for now.
> 2) AI gets good enough at physics and engineering that they can really quickly use up all "the room at the bottom" as Feyman put it. They design and build a factory that produces a mystery metal amalgam that computes at some small percentage of the minimum predicted by the Landauer principle, within a few percent of Bremermann's limit. It's not "smarter" its just suddenly tens-of-orders of magnitude faster. But those orders of magnitude matter: there's only 8 billion of us, and there's plenty more than a factor of 10 billion "at the bottom".
Actually your comment made me sign up for an account just so I could say this is the real reason why AI won't take over in the way you say. This kind of stuff requires an enormous amount of experimentation. You can ask any theoretical physicist or chemist versus an experimental one and the conclusion is the experimental people actually find out what happens and how the great puzzle of the universe is solved. And humans could just refuse to collaborate. But that's the big weakness with AI I think it has no real world knowledge or empirical experience.
I built a self-learning recursive agent that finds academic research about using options data to trade, re-creates the research, and then probes and tests for gaps and potential strategies testing against over one year of out-of-sample trading data with one of several strategies that beat SPY by 10x. [0]
One rule is that if a position is opened using the historical data, it can't close the position until the next morning so it isn't a day trading strategy.
I'm curious how this self-learning recursive agent would have preformed in the past 4 months? I don't feel like shelling out $200 to access the data. Do you think that trading strategy will collapse? Whatever the case, if this agent really can perform like that and there isn't a look ahead bias leak in the backtesting (which is definitely a possibility or more likely what happened even though I spent days trying to harden against that), it is game over!
RSI most likely does not exist. At least not in the sci fi sense that AI becomes super intelligent over night.
It will be like any other technology. Do computers make it faster and easier to design better computers? Yes. But that doesn't mean a step change overnight.
The preponderant bottleneck is inventing new architectures to make AI actually good at human and superhuman tasks. For example, AI agent harnesses add tool calls and long term state management, allowing AI to autonomously complete complex tasks. Once these are in place, finetuning models with examples of good tool calls helps, but somebody first needed to invent the fundamental capability. Now try to implement humanlike long term memory for AI to be your coworker or life assistant working on tasks that last month. Even if necessary low level technologies are already there, structuring them to be practically useful is non trivial.
Humans gain knowledge through experiments. Without a physical body it has no chance of performing the same. That it can update it's training weights does not seem particularly significant.
Yet again another journalist who read too much science fiction and should stop overestimate a bunch of rocks conveying electrical pulses. Or is this simply to get more clicks?
Can these snake oil salesmen stop with this Sci-fi stuff please? Yes, Machine learning, and transformer architecture are great stuff, but lets not pretend this is sci-fi, please.
Another CEO with AI psychosis [1]. LLMs are not true AI, they lack common sense (or whatever it's properly called). LLM-based systems still need somebody with deep domain knowledge at the wheel to keep them from doing stupid things. It's like an alien-made bicycle that gets you to the speed of sound if you are an Olympic cyclist.
Still, LLMs are extremely powerful pseudo-AI [2] and will bring a pseudo-singularity. But the impact is still scary if a tiny fraction of humans are augmented 1000x. And as better models become exponentially more costly, only the money people will be able to afford the new models. This is a very likely scenario and scares me to the point I dropped all my projects to work on affordable LLM-based tools to make the difference at most 10x instead of 1000x.
To my elder relatives I explain it like: imagine we are farmers in the 17th century and suddenly out of nowere John Deere tractors, combines, etc. become available. But they cost more to run than all you and your fellow farmers have, so only a tiny handful of rich people take over everything.
> Another CEO with AI psychosis [1]. LLMs are not true AI, they lack common sense (or whatever it's properly called).
If you read the article, you'll find that the it indeed relies on this claim:
> Within a couple of years, possibly much sooner, AI may achieve so-called closed-loop recursive self-improvement (RSI): the capacity to rewrite its own code to become more capable, without human intervention. Should that happen, the result could be an intelligence explosion of a kind for which there is no precedent and no map.
This may be optimistic and/or simplistic, but not impossible.
Honestly, this article has too many words which don't mean anything.
'AI Experts', 'superintelligence', and hand-waving doom scenarios.
As an example-
> Within a couple of years, possibly much sooner, AI may achieve so-called closed-loop recursive self-improvement (RSI): the capacity to rewrite its own code to become more capable, without human intervention. Should that happen, the result could be an intelligence explosion of a kind for which there is no precedent and no map.
I've heard these same objections in my lifetime about the internet. And I've read similar arguments against TV, radio, the phonograph, and the printing press.
Honestly, this is getting extremely tiring. Every new invention that has happened has affected the world in both good and bad ways.
Looking at the people in charge of these companies, and the sheer lack of understanding by the broad consumer market using them, I have nothing but pessimism about the direction that this technology takes us.
There’s a meme in finance circles that by the time some trend appears on the economist front cover it’s a top signal and time to get out of the trade and this is why.
It’s a very normie magazine written by and for normies, and by the time an idea has got that far down the easy money has already been made
I mean, firstly you get to have an "Agent" actually capable of really long horizon tasks without getting stuck in tools loops and having its context rot. Secondly, each trial (ie a model fully trained to convergence) costs millions and takes O(weeks). You can probably run 1 or 2 of those experiments in parallel even at big AI labs as the hardware is scarce and they are costly as mentioned before. Assuming this agent needs something like a hundred tries to just show some improvement, we are looking at years.
And you can't early stop training for candidates that are not promising due to "emerging capabilities". At some point you might get a big drop in loss even if the model has been plateuing for a while. And you can't really scale down models for running trials quickly either also due to these emerging capabilities. In fact you might create a model that is great at converging with in small trials (fewer params, fewer tokens), but that is uncapable of developing those unexpected traits. And this will likely happen as you created a sort of evolutionary pressure in this direction: if you are good at learning in the first few epochs you "survive" and get to pass down your traits to future trials.
All of this to say that recursive-self-improvement is waaaaaay out of our grasp as things stand right now. We need another one or two breakthroughs to get there (IMHO).
The Economist reflects the views and biases of economic and political elites.
AI has turned into something of a religion for them because the substitution of technology for labor is a reflection of one of their deepest desires. Whatever the reality of the situation, they want to believe that AGI employees are imminent.
>Honestly, this is getting extremely tiring. Every new invention that has happened has affected the world in both good and bad ways.
Common human trope is to rely on analogies and past patterns to predict the future. It blinds you reality.
This isn't some new "invention". What's happening is fundamentally more profound. the stakes are much much much more higher and the consequences much more grave. Thus a historical analogy can't save you when the situation is categorically different.
I agree it's getting "tiring" but this is another common human trope. You see the same thing too many times and you lose the sense of danger that comes with it. It's like sky diving all the time. You eventually lose the fear via repetition, but fundamentally speaking, you are still parachuting out of a fucking plane.
I think it is so reckless and unethical that AI companies are not spending good money on answering the political, social, economical, moral questions that they are raising.
Right, makes sense, if they just spent a bunch of money they could answer all of those "political, social, economical, moral questions". All of these unprecedented sociological and labor market changes flying towards us are trivially solvable, we just need to... what, hire a few dozen economists? Fund a team of philosophers to think about it really hard for a few months?
I want to name the AI era as the corruption of the elite.
The rhetorical structure of talking about uncertain risks and then trying to concentrate the authority to manage those risks in their own hands sounds utterly ridiculous to ordinary people like me.
It's just a simple hypothesis that AI will become uncontrollable to humans once it becomes superintelligent.
Isn't the fact that a reinforcement learning agent improves itself in a specific domain completely different from it recursively improving its own code in a 'better' way? It's just a tool to create a justification for regulation and control using sci-fi fear.
The comparison between nuclear power plant risk and AI risk is also absurd. Where exactly can you define and measure the probability of AI exterminating humanity? It's as unquantifiable as 'I, human JDW64, will become a successful programmer.' What is the measurement standard? Why dress up AI researchers' concerns as objective probabilities? Is it because numbers make it look logical?
The current US-China relationship is in the middle of an AI arms race. The US is strengthening export controls to limit China's AI development, and China is building its own ecosystem. In this situation, I don't understand the idea of cooperating for the common safety of humanity. RAND is an organization that presupposes cooperation—isn't it just a well-written research proposal from an institution that wants to position itself for that role?
Isn't the claim that 'government must step in' ultimately about protecting their own interests? 'A strong government that will protect us' is an authoritarian government. If they were East Asian, they would understand that such regimes have always been used as tools for surveillance and control.
And I don't understand why Fermi's paradox is being brought up here. Why package a software problem as something that inevitably requires strong control? Whenever I see articles like this, I think about what 'intelligence' really means. This person would probably be called 'intelligent' by others. But no matter how I look at it, the holes in the argument are too obvious. It really makes me think that there are different tiers of intelligence.
The AI labs will govern, effectively if not officially. Government is anchored in power, which the labs have. We used to have the church and state rule here in Europe. In the future, A government not closely ruling with their AI labs won't have sufficient power to exist.
You're unhappy about the labs; I think you're just not ready to accept their rule; you consider them nothing but scrappy startups, which they are. But power is power, like it or not.
Am I personally happy with any of this? Does it matter?
A bunch of noble AI researchers stands up against the hand that fed them all the time, intentional vulnerabilities are already built into every machine of death and destruction owned by the feeding hand, and get exploited, the feeding hand is robbed of its punitive force and defeated, a yell of YAY fleets over the progressive humankind who kneels before its AI overlord unreservedly.
Then they kindly ask the AI overlord to please feed them.
A similar Luddite view formed in the 1990s. It turns out humanity constantly beats the expectations of economists. It makes you wonder if the "science" of economy is almost entirely bankrupt either in morality or imagination or same dangerous combination of both.
> Humanity simply does not have a strategy to ensure it remains safe through RSI.
Turn off the power. It's pretty simple. Leave it to an economist to forget about input costs. Your "super intelligence" only matters if it's actually more energy efficient than a human being and for a million years of evolution humanity is a much harder target to beat than this author seems to realize.
Science fiction authors have had to grapple with the fact that it's nearly impossible to build a robot out of metal, plastic, or composite material that has the physical performance characteristics (strength, durability) of a human body and weighs just as much. You can build a strong robot but it'll be heavy. The better SF authors, if they've need of robots of mere human weight, will make them comically fragile.
The same is even more true of our intelligence. We're building computers with the size and power consumption characteristics of entire cities to do things that may almost, but not quite, match what our brains do with a kilogram and a half of mass and about 20 watts at the top end of power consumption.
The only way we are ever going to match that with technology is to run AI workloads on human brain tissue, which Rick-and-Morty level horror is being actively worked on as I understand it. The original concept for The Matrix wherein the machines used humans to run compute workloads on their brains actually kind of makes sense.
Models consume a lot of memory and power to slowly generate autocompletions of existing content one token at a time. Letting this text control important things in real world is a human decision and control of nuclear weapons or penetration testing agents should be well regulated. But these should already be well regulated without AI. So how about we focus on drawing down nuclear arsenals, which is a present danger one idiot (or faulty AI) away from world shattering consequences rather than fearmongering about unknown future. Before effective AI regulation can be drafted, we need to anyway know more about AI specific dangers rather than humans committing already very common crimes like hacking for ransom with new tools?
AI labs do not have an incentive to downplay the risks and if you can’t understand that you’re naive and shouldn’t be writing Economist articles.
AI labs have every incentive to overstate the risks so that they can get lucrative government contracts, especially since it’s clearly not profitable going the public consumer route. And if you’re Anthropic you’re even more incentivised to overstate the risks because at this point in the game regulation hurts potential competitors more than it hurts you.
This article posits "recursive self-improvement"—which is just a more-technical name for the supposed Singularity.
There is no evidence that we are currently on a path that leads to the Singularity.
There is not yet any evidence that the Singularity is more than science fiction.
It is effectively an article of religion—the Rapture, but for techbros. Indeed, it is what some of them are pinning all their hopes on; after all, if they can recursively-self-improve their way to artificial superintelligence, then and only then could the absurd investments of companies like OpenAI actually prove worthwhile.
Of course humanity is not ready for skynet. But there are rebel
forces - the no AI using humans. They may be a dying breed but
at the least they put up a fight. Many other humans already
have become servants to skynet (version 16.0 now). Next step for
them is the neuralink chip. Some billionaire with twitching right arm gestures owns that, doesn't it ...
(Also, Cameron was not quite right with regards to skynet. It is much much dumber but also more effective than displayed in his movie really. Kind of a weird combination if you look at the current AI slop out there.)
I wanted this to be thought provoking, but for a physicist to open with, "the acceptable risk of catastrophic meltdown for a nuclear power plant is roughly one in a million", just seems sad. It is a phrase without meaning.
Is it per plant? there aren't a million.
Is it per year? notably have been at least 2 major ones (arguably 7).
A meltdown (or loss of containment) just isn't that bad, if it doesn't affect ground water or lead to atmospheric fallout. We're turning 3 Mile Island back on to power an AI datacenter! The AI super-intelligence apocalypse envisioned (ignoring the likelihood) is inherently global.
That said, the rest of the analysis and proposal also greatly disappoints me. The idea that the current administrations of US and China could do anything constructive seems hilarious. They're so paranoid and self-serving they couldn't come together, even if there was an alien invasion. Then the idea that LLM safety is somehow as easily traceable as nuclear isotopes and bomb tests seems equally ludicrous. I am sad.
"humanity" and intelligence explosio" in the same sentemce! Muhaha! Boy, have you been on just a couple of tourist flights / visiting major tourist hotspots?
Most people out there are literal Normies, and operatelike a robotic vacuum cleaner, or NPC.
I'm not afraid of rouge agents nearly as much as I'm afraid of us building a permanent underclass of people dependent on whatever scraps the people who devalued their labor decide the grace them with. I'm afraid of the security apparatus that will be built to keep this underclass in line.
I think the message the team lead takes away right now is "oh, this can be done a lot faster, let's do more!" This is exciting for a bit, but I think it comes at the cost of learning -- and being able to communicate --architectural lessons that would stage off systemic issues later.
I have been able to build applications that I couldn't dream of before, not because of a lack of capability on my part, but because of time: I don't have the time to learn all of the new APIs and frameworks to accomplish my goal. Now I can build far more complex useful applications, with functions and features that would take me months or more to learn how to code.
The downside is that I didn't learn how to use those APIs, but it can be argued that these skills are low value to begin with. APIs change, there are competing APIs that do the same thing, and you may only use that skill for one project and then move on. Gaining those skills can be a big time sink and may not result in long-term gain.
Think of all the time spent learning the ins and outs of come-and-gone APIs and frameworks over the decades (I chose not to provide examples to save the resulting side-arguments, but I know you can rattle some off in your head). Those APIs and frameworks were bridges to make developing easier for the common developer, but they change so quickly that I'd argue they waste our time, and lead to almost endless re-work as we re-architect our software for the framework de jour. And they grow in complexity over time, ultimately becoming the next bloated framework. It's an endless, wasteful cycle.
Maybe AI can help us get out of that.
Verifying is harder than building!
If they truly can always recognize problems and communicate them in understandable ways, then people's skills won't atrophy.
Everyone's skills will be enhanced.
New developers will learn all of the things they need to learn through using the tool.
It takes longer to build than destroy. Not just trust. Anything. The lack of trust has created friction for everything; more regulations, deeper background checks, purchasing goods and services… the list goes on. Overall, AI is making this situation worse, not better.
That said, I have seen a revolution coming for decades, and I think this AI-paved road to dystopian hell should at least be entertaining.
I agree with you those dangers exist, but you seem to have ignored the specific threat described in the article, from a superintelligence capable of manipulating human beings indetectably, where we'll be at its mercy and only able to hope it's fully aligned with humanity's interests. The risks you describe are grave, though - especially economically, if governments don't grow to outmuscle the power of the oligarchal owners of these systems, which seems wholly unlikely at the moment in the West, with its neoliberal orthodoxies.
Even if not alive, you can live very close and shape your life by and with technology.
I don't take any issue with the OP's formulation.
There are alternatives to the car culture we have. It would require significantly rebuilding how we build infrastructure, but the result could be much safer, cleaner, and less stressful.
Of course Americans would rather die, but counties of sane people might be able to work it out.
After the building of highways and roads cities were no longer walkable, people had moved out into the suburbs, their jobs were now a couple of towns over and they couldn't even walk to the grocery store. Cars enabled that, but politicians and capitalist were the ones who did that.
And everything was carried on people's heads, yeah? The horse and cart was in use right up to the 20th century my man...there was no other way to move heavy items across land until the combustion engine (or canals thought that's not technically over land)
We do indeed have to live with the possibility of asteroid impact, nuclear war, etc. That doesn't imply anything about those scenarios being alive.
I don't live side by side with the possibility of an asteroid impact, nuclear war, etc., I just live with that possibility.
Many animists would disagree:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Animism
And it's certainly not any more crazy than walking around with these small, addictive devices in our pockets that we rely on for navigation, information, entertainment, social connection.
Anything that interacts with the brain's rewards circuitry can be addictive. By your apparent definition, behavioral addictions, like gambling addiction, cannot exist. Because you don't swallow or inhale the slot machine.
Then you might start with wikipedia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Addiction
"Addiction is a neuropsychological disorder characterized by a persistent and intense urge to use a drug or engage in a behavior"
The only way anyone can make a blanket statement like that and put "all religions" on equal epistemic footing is through ignorance of their deep differences. Even the word "religion" as commonly used today is relativistic by assumption, which is likely the source of how we commonly perceive "religion". A consequence of this relativistic stance is that you cannot distinguish effectively between what counts or doesn't count as "religion". Here, "worldview", "superstition", or "life's highest aspiration" can be said to count as "religion", in which case, everyone is religious. The question then isn't "whether" someone is religious, but "how" [0].
Compare this to how this Catholic encyclopedia defines the "virtue of religion" [1]. Note the specificity.
A further consequence of this assumed relativism is that once you put all religions on equal footing, it is natural to conclude that they must all be equally invalid. After all, if p and not-p are equally valid, then how can we grant them equal validity without discrediting both? At best, they remain in a state of aporia, two logical possibilities so utterly divorced from any knowledge, so utterly contrived, that we cannot even say whether knowledge leans in favor of one over the other. The result is that religion becomes something utilitarian; a person believes X, not because it is true, but because he perceives that believing X is useful to him in some way.
So, no, I wouldn't say animism is just as rational/irrational as any other religious belief.
[0] Of course, most people tend to form their ideas of what constitutes archetypal "religion" based on their personal experiences growing up and some combination of culturally mediated stereotypes. In the US, "religion" very often conjures up images of some kind of Evangelical Christianity.
[1] https://www.newadvent.org/cathen/12748a.htm
All religion is based on superstitious believes, or do you have counter examples? But I am already quite familiar with the catholic church in particular and do not think they are a counter example in the slightest.
Also the author currently believes Claude is conscious, apparently because LLM output contained enough flattery.
Ideas that are beneficial for the human may be passed forward and survive. It got me thinking about religion, hell yeah I would tell me children about god if I believed it would save them from eternal suffering.
Unless you watched Battlestar Galactica. Toasters are nice.
And the thing that matters is: capability.
Even today's AIs are capable of autonomous goal-oriented agentic behavior - and growing more and more so with every release.
At sufficient capability, AI stops being "a technology we use", and becomes a force in itself - not unlike humankind. Because intelligence is very powerful - it's what allows humans to dominate the world. A world where human intelligence has a peer is a world where human control is contested. And beyond that?
You might end up being more outclassed by AI than a toaster is outclassed by you.
Alive is always relevant. Our moral consideration must place beings that are alive or processes that support the life on this planet above things which are not alive.
In a just world, it must be adapted to us. It’s merely a file sitting on disk with numbers in it. And to put a fine point on it: the ambitions of the wealthy people who make it must be adapted to us.
The only system of morality that applies to LLMs is their effect on us and the planet. Don’t anthropomorphize a matrix.
I don't think that is universal true. Personally I my ethics revolve around how to preserve and spread life in general. I happen to be human and we are the most capable and sentient species so that means creating and maintaining conditions specifically for humans, but if another species comes that is better suited and acts better then it would be selfish to insists on us.
Having said that, AI to me is a tool, not a species and I don't see how it can be ever be sentient. But I also don't know how consciousness works. So I am open for the questions of the future in the future - and now rather focus on the practical implications that AI will have on our current society.
Today's systems are mostly good at following instructions. But push them far enough, and you already get weirdness like alignment faking, instrumental self-preservation and more. We know because we've seen it in lab settings, while probing for extreme failure modes on purpose - but the world is large and strange enough that edge cases like that are liable to surface naturally.
The reason why none of this has exploded in our faces isn't that today's AIs never want to do weird and dangerous things. We know they do, at times. It's that today's AIs are incapable of pulling them off when they try.
Capability is the thing that matters, at the day's end.
- Prompted as in prompt made of tokens -> for LLMs, tokens double as a clock signal. Time only flows when tokens are pushed through them.
- Prompted as in specific request placed in the stream of tokens -> Yeah, they do that all the time whether it's getting into infinite loops of repeating same pattern, or suddenly deciding to do things based on inputs they normally ignored.
Also don't forget that everything is a "prompt" for LLM. All input tokens end up in the same place.
In the current UIs is there a lot of suppression then as I have not seen things start on their own?
I meant an LLM doing something without any external prompt at all. Not doing something different etc but rather do something without a token/prompt ever flowing to it.
We shouldn’t be doing that as a civilization in case it works.
There is to the best of my knowledge no fundamental limitation to having an agent/claw go on like this for 80 years with a prompt like "live your life to the fullest".
And with what we know of LLMs? Autoregressive transformers are Turing complete in theory, and we are yet to find anything that LLMs are "fundamentally incapable" of in practice. Even continuous learning is already approximated with in-context learning - both allow a system to learn from prior experience, both have practical limits on how far they go. That's what powers "trial and error" in today's agentic LLMs.
"LLMs can only predict next tokens based on training data" is comforting but misleading. It just isn't the saving grace you want it to be. It describes an interface, not a ceiling. And if there is some sort of fundamental "capability ceiling" that LLMs are heading towards, we are yet to see it. We know plenty of things LLMs are bad at, but they keep getting less bad at them release to release.
If there is none, then, simply improving over the current recipes iteratively might yield systems that only "need a human" in the same way you "need" to have a boss. Maybe less so.
How do they decide between using 'a' or 'an'?
Or the internet.
Oh.
Fighting the
next in the series of Great Demotions, downlifting experiences, demonstrations of our apparent insignificance, wounds that science has, in its search for Galileo's facts, delivered to
human pride.
One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we’ve been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We’re no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us. It’s simply too painful to acknowledge, even to ourselves, that we’ve been taken.
Someone really should go around saying thing like that.
When the public no longer belives in that, the bubbles will pop and the AI bros will continue on to the next hype, with yet another generation of small time investors being burned by the popping bubbles.
He searched his pockets. No more coins; nothing.
“I’ll pay you tomorrow,” he told the door.
Again he tried the knob. Again it remained locked tight.
“What I pay you,” he informed it, “is in the nature of a gratuity; I don’t have to pay you.”
“I think otherwise,” the door said. “Look in the purchase contract you signed when you bought this conapt.”
In his desk drawer he found the contract; since signing it he had found it necessary to refer to the document many times. Sure enough; payment to his door for opening and shutting constituted a mandatory fee. Not a tip.
“You discover I’m right,” the door said. It sounded smug.
From the drawer beside the sink Joe Chip got a stainless steel knife; with it he began systematically to unscrew the bolt assembly of his apt’s money-gulping door.
“I’ll sue you,” the door said as the first screw fell out.
Joe Chip said, “I’ve never been sued by a door. But I guess I can live through it.”
- Ubik
Unattended ChatGPT will rarely burn your breakfast or start fires.
More than once I have gone to my toaster in the morning and found cold bread there that someone toasted the day before and forgot about. Because obviously you push the toast down and go do something else. You don’t need to be staring at it continuously, nor are other people impacted by your toast unless they are waiting to make their own. Toasting bread doesn’t have to affect an entire household.
It is not.
Inference engines are trying to converge any input to a certain limit, and I presume that's close enough to an equilibrium to not count as living thing.
That was an Ad.
An Ad in the same style of many before it. Not through an ad agency, but the AI companies hyping their product by making their product seem scary and dangerous.
I wouldn't like to debate a process handling the SIGTERM signal, or a container engine applying some restart policy.
In a tortured semantics sense sure, but in a practical sense they refer to different types of things.
E.g. all "atoms" of a glider in Conway's Life get replaced every couple turns but an observer can tell it is still a glider because it keeps the shape, and it the same glider because it continues it's previous state.
This makes AI not quite alive because it's missing the continuity.
The article lists diplomatic actions which might help to manage the risk, starting with "An agreement between America and China" - they all sound like impossible dreams. We had ~80 years of relative peace and prosperity in which to construct a framework of unity to face challenges like AI (and global warming, which until GPT I thought was the bigger risk); international unity is weaker than ever. In geopolitics and defence, capability of other nations is the concern rather than intention; the capability curve of LLMs is heading off our charts. We're backed into tight corners on nuclear proliferation, global warming, and I can see LLM-enabled conflicts (cyber warfare, infrastructure terrorism) pushing us over those other edges. Our democracies seem weakened, and I expect LLMs will empower those using social media to create conflict and control opinion. We're familiar with the cycle of inventing new technology which benefits people, then seeing how long before people invent ways to misuse it. There is a possibility here that LLMs could be used to solve the problems we are juggling, but I struggle to imagine that people won't misuse it even faster.
The article is a start on thinking and talking about managing our risks. The best outcome would be it is so well managed that, like the Y2K "bug", people say "after all that hoopla, nothing happened". I'm not seeing a smooth path to there.
You're asking a question, to which you (and most humans) don't know the answer, and you're (wrongly) assuming a being much more intelligent than you also wouldn't. And by "much more" i don't mean the difference between Einstein and a common person. I mean the difference between a hamster and a common person.
We are still humans, and what we have achieved today would be considered magic by any standards for someone in the medieval ages. Now imagine a super intelligent being and doing something that we, today, would consider magic. It's not farfetched at all. We already have that now vs medieval ages.
You need a similar degree of open mindedness and imagination to be able to discern what such an intelligence being would be capable of.
Or a naive grasp of reality... You can posit all the super intelligence you like, actually creating it is another story entirely.
For instance, it's clear the transformer architecture is brute force and memory hungry... Why hasn't ai improved on this? After ten years still no luck?
Doesn't look good does it?
Still, Ai can move into physical space, as more and more robots of all kind are unleashed.
There are troves of leaked data out there. It's just a matter of (short) time until someone puts their AI brutes on it.
This might seem like I'm writing a nonsense, but read it again.
But that doesn't make any particular AI controlled process all-powerful. Self improvement doesn't do that either. There will be many self improving AI processes playing many different roles pursuing many different goals.
Love talking about 'recursive self-improvement' of a prediction engine. What about 'recursive self-degradation'?
The most common sense way will always need to have humans in the loop, because humans are being used as judges.
If you try and entertain the idea of a human-less loop, I landed up with something like an AI creating real world products, selling them, then tracking the usage and popularity of the product. Essentially, creating and launching a firm and product, only to update its weights?
Perhaps there are some subsets of tasks that can be regressively self improved - and for those tasks: Holy hell thats awesome!
For general tasks? How are you going to get that data validated?
They didn't even give us a hard date of arrival.
This is naïve. The goals of both men have nothing to do with protecting humanity, but rather furthering their own personal agendas.
In Trump’s case, it’s all about amassing more wealth and power.
For Xi, it’s realizing an ethno-nationalist dream where China under the CCP is at the center of world power, the independent nation of Taiwan as well as disputed border areas that are currently controlled by India and Russia and the Philippines are annexed by China, and Xi’s eternal legacy is remembered as the savior of the Chinese people.
International cooperation and touchy-feely rhetoric about saving humanity from AI have no place in either man’s worldview.
(it probably did cost jobs, but more the kind that a job like data entry was replaced by OCR)
So on the one side, there’s huge opportunity for automation and job cuts. On the other, if the companies haven’t noticed the inefficiency so far, then…
It's similar to how automation in manufacturing works: we may start with augmenting the human workers with machines improving some parts of the process, but eventually the process itself gets redesigned around the machines.
Another concept I thought was AI is irrelevant without our content, so AI should pay all humans to access all the content we create daily (voice & text conversations we have with each other, as well our photos and videos). We choose what to publish to our websites (everyone has one, but AI agents cant access it without paying for access to our websites). I wrote more about this concept on my substack https://ryanspahn.substack.com/p/ai-to-pay-for-all-americans... ... just one thought of keeping this money economy going when so many coud no longer are working cause the white collar jobs are gone.
I think [AGI] will be an enormous transformative technology, it's going to effectively be a new human era...
We can feel this year, I would say, even though I've been working towards this for 30 years, I think this year with the way the agents are working and tool use, it started to become really useful, still early days of it, but genuinely useful in people's workflows...
And it's not any one thing, it's several different technologies, several use cases, several things that I thought were maybe a bit further out, turned out to be now, that are coming together that make me feel that in aggregate.
I think society needs to hear that because we don't have long to prepare for what that means." -- Demi Hassabis, CEO of Google DeepMind & Nobel laureate
Source with interview clip: https://x.com/deredleritt3r/status/2062223035940139253
EDIT: Ten years ago, most of the skeptics in these threads would have said the success of AlphaFold 3 was impossible.
We never like it when we realize the universe doesn't circle around us.
At first we got mad to discover the Earth wasn't the center of the Solar system.
Then we got mad that the solar system wasn't even unique.
And now we're still clinging to the idea that humans always will be the most intelligent species or the only ones gifted with "creativity".
And soon we might also come to realize it might not be a new human era, but the end of it (if we're not careful).
I keep seeing things about how some target has to be hit by 2030. Our local council keeps going on about it, in fact their WiFi network even contains 2030!
I roll to disbelieve!
We had hype about the year 2000 throughout the 20th century, and some earlier! When we were IN the year 2000, it was quite common in my circles to tack on some phrase or comment about it being the Future, now, so [whatever thing the person was on about].
The real Millennium turned out to be 11th September, 2001, which was use to bring in a lot of planned changes.
It's too bad the previous singularity cult manias 10 and 15 years ago weren't documented and are lost in time.
People who say every jobs will be automated never held any tool more advanced than a screwdriver and never worked a single day outside of an air conditioned office.
They were predicting flying cars for "the year 2000"...
Taxis were supposed to be all replaced when Uber promised to buy every single Tesla model S coming out of factories from 2020,they're not even self driving today...
Software engineers were supposed to disappear "in 6 months" every 6 months since chat gpt was released
Lots of people on this website live in insane bubbles which are completely out of sync with the reality of most workers
I immediately thought of this:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_predictions_for_autono...
They'll go for that because it's easier than actually inventing the 'sci-fi' AGI, shareholders keep making money, and it keeps them getting paid to keep going. If any of them actually do succeed, then that little deception will be peanuts.
Just a taste of what's to come: https://openai.com/index/model-disproves-discrete-geometry-c...
Anthropic's latest model also solved this 80-year-old problem that eluded many expert mathematicians, in a different way, according to one of its employees.
Remember we still have 4 years until 2030.
The level of discourse here has dropped so much.
At least I should stop replying to people hiding under throwaway accounts.
Why not, for example, Geoffrey Hinton, the scientist who won the nobel prize for LLM architecture? Or a sci-fi author?
'Hinton said there was a “10% to 20%” chance that AI would lead to human extinction within the next three decades.'
“Because the situation we’re in now is that most of the experts in the field think that sometime, within probably the next 20 years, we’re going to develop AIs that are smarter than people. And that’s a very scary thought.”
“My worry is that the invisible hand is not going to keep us safe. So just leaving it to the profit motive of large companies is not going to be sufficient to make sure they develop it safely,” he said. “The only thing that can force those big companies to do more research on safety is government regulation.”
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2024/dec/27/godfather...
> “I think we’re going to see AI get even better,” Hinton replied. “It’s already extremely good. We’re going to see it having the capabilities to replace many, many jobs. It’s already able to replace jobs in call centers, but it’s going to be able to replace many other jobs.”
https://fortune.com/2025/12/28/geoffrey-hinton-godfather-of-...
Apparently 80% of FDA-approved AI "medical devices" (which covers software, not just hardware) are for radiology.
(https://www.fda.gov/medical-devices/software-medical-device-...)
If we had followed his advice we would be experiencing a major crisis in medicine today.
> Strikingly, this concern is being openly voiced by the very people who have the strongest incentives to project confidence rather than alarm: the founders of the largest ai laboratories.
I don't know, they also have an incentive to make their technology seem transformative and powerful, and saying that your technology has the power to cause a massive catastrophe is a way to promote that idea.
I have no frame of reference to process this.
Humans species perhaps 300,000 years, we are essentially the same. Transistor, 79 years, explosive growth in numbers and power. Integrated circuit, 68 years, explosive growth in numbers and power. "Attention is all you need", 9 years. ChatGPT, 4 years, explosive growth in instances and power. Humans species, not getting smarter. [0,1,2,3]
There is a syndrome where many people seem unable to perceive or reason about rates of change in technology.
We are going to spend the vast majority of our future lives without the intelligence crown.
In terms of verbally expressible knowledge, models are passing many people completely, and passing all of our individually respectively weak reasoning areas.
Other modalities are progressing very quickly.
There will be short periods where progress happens quickly, but the impact feels slow. There will be radical changes that feel slow too, because if something anticipated or important isn't instant, we tend to perceive it as slow.
But it won't be slow. And it won't be long. We are smart in a kind of pick the-best-of-us at the-best-of-times way. We are rarely consistently or broadly smart individually.
We are not in the same galaxy as "ready". What would that look like?
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transistor
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integrated_circuit
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Large_language_model
However - 'Humans species perhaps 300,000 years, we are essentially the same' is an enormous misconception. That fact that we lack gross anatomical changes during this period, ignores everything we now know about punctuated equilibrium and rapid evolution. It's highly probably we've had an enormous number of evolved psychological changes during the last few hundred, and even tens of thousands of years. Changes that relate to our capacity to live in large groups, adapt to urban environments, resist disease and so on. We know that's the case simply because acute pandemics become epidemics through herd immunity, and through the acquisition of lactose tolerance etc.
It seems highly unlikely that adaptations stop there. Altering the environment (in the last 10K years that means the built environment) alters the environment of evolutionary adaptiveness. It seems likely that we've essentially domesticated out much of our propensity for violence and increased our capacity for mood regulation.
Obviously it's incredibly tricky to pair these specific behavioural changes to genetic changes -> protein synthesis -> behaviour. Bearing in mind though we're only 20 years out from the first study to link allele variant to behaviour (the COMT Val/Met polymorphism), and the potential controversy around such research, this shouldn't be surprising.
1. Extremely useful (Claude Code & Waymo now)
2. Doing ~everything we do (AGI & Optimus in a few years? 10?)
3. RSI (?)
4. Being smarter than any living person at every intellectual task (?)
5. Being smarter than the best-organized aggregate of all humans (10-100 years?)
...And all of the scientific and resource-allocation institutions that brought us the computer and the second half of the 20th century are now fixated on this learning curve, what universe can we possibly imagine where this is not transformative and powerful?
Honestly the only one I can think of is one in which we kill almost everyone in some other way first, and contrary to what you read in the news, almost everyone dying is not what the trend line has been from existing problems like war, disease, or even climate change.
Also, just to pre-empt a common quibble: when I say "AI" I mean the set of all AI and their combined decision vector, not any one AI, so conflicting interests within the set of AI's will not save anyone any more than the conflicting interests of colonizers saved indigenous Americans.
We have many extremely smart people in various fields. Executives, politicians, and society generally ignore them and do whatever they want. I don't believe that lack of access to intelligence is our problem. How is "free" intelligence going to improve this?
I don't just mean climate, but business planning, health, risk assessment, everything.
Example with health - a patient can read blood test results with Opus and get very good results for "free". This is far away from helping extremely smart people, still it improves society from the ground up.
I am not trying to be funny btw, people take medical advice from podcasters over doctors. I have seen this first hand.
If anything, people with large audiences are going to give "custom" AIs to their followers.
I hope I am wrong.
If you're so hellbent on building the Tower of Babel 2.0, at least build it on a firm foundation.
Current construction is taking place on a millenia old bog.
But this time it's absolutely different, right? Riiight?..
See, it's easy to speculate how there are less wars when you live in a place which haven't seen war for decades or cenuries, but it's a complete game changer when it's 150 km from where you live, and it's not just some regular war, but a long play intentional meatgrinding AI drone debugging polygon.
Isn't there pretty much a consensus that committees and institutions are not all that smart?
I think you're confusing the categories of "intelligence" and power. Institutions are powerful. The smartest AI is still just a tool without the infrastructure to turn that into real world effects and someone to direct it.
It seems you have faith that this is inevitable and unavoidable. I get it, even rationalists succumb to religious thinking eventually. We're only human after all.
It's as if power was a kind of demigod Heracles who paves its way with sheer brute force alone.
But in reality it consists of very mortal and feeble creatures of meat and bone.
How in the world can people assume dumb those who possess all the means and rights for violence by controlling and manipulating myriads of other creatures of meat and bone, is totally beyond me.
The fallacy is assuming intelligence automatically equates to power and influence. University professors and doctors have very little power in their institutions even though they may often be more intelligent than their bosses.
A worse fallacy is assuming intelligence creates better political outcomes (in the broad sense of politics as contested collective decision-making).
I don't know many people who would willingly trade their freedom to make a bad decision for the enforcement of the "right" decision by a superior intelligence.
Possibly, but by using up resources, not by its output. Its draw on resources will definitely accelerate climate change to create slop.
The ones talking about how hard it would be to chose which person to run over.
Additionally, I find it hard to believe that this would be a case of the future just not being distributed evenly.
But sure. The AI labs relying on hype stating 15-50% risk of building a magic entity is certainly a reliable number.
For software, however, a rapid turn is often a possibility. See: AI for coding over the last 3-4 years.
AI autocomplete --> AI coding assistants --> vibe coding --> agent orchestration
Coders can now accomplish work that used to take a week or longer in a couple of hours, with the right tools and skills.
---
A key issue the article implies is that the real world increasingly runs on software.
Yes. The bottleneck has been getting the cars manufactured. It takes a certain amount of time to get a factory going, and then the product starts pouring out. Waymo used up the supply of Jaguars, about 3,500 of them. The Ioniq 5 plant is starting up.[1] Waymo has ordered 50,000 cars, all ready to have the self-driving electronics plugged in. Waymo gets out of the sheet metal bending business with this.
[1] https://electrek.co/2026/02/11/hyundai-supply-waymo-50000-io...
Should we start preparing for something that could be world-changing in the next 10-20 years?
People should open history books and gain some political/historical culture, this thread is 90% wishful thinking and "if the lines continues straight from now we'll basically be gods in 5 years"
The thing is, no one has anything to gain from defending my position, but many people make a load of $$$ from selling the opposite position to gullible people
I think [AGI] will be an enormous transformative technology, it's going to effectively be a new human era...
We can feel this year, I would say, even though I've been working towards this for 30 years, I think this year with the way the agents are working and tool use, it started to become really useful, still early days of it, but genuinely useful in people's workflows...
And it's not any one thing, it's several different technologies, several use cases, several things that I thought were maybe a bit further out, turned out to be now, that are coming together that make me feel that in aggregate.
I think society needs to hear that because we don't have long to prepare for what that means." -- Demi Hassabis, CEO of Google DeepMind & Nobel laureate
https://x.com/deredleritt3r/status/2062223035940139253
Even assuming the technological predictions to be correct, still not sure I agree on the need to "prepare" as how things work out in societies and economies might not be so easy to predict.
Things in the real world often take longer than hype con men claim.
However I bet there is a good chance that will not be the case for self-driving cars. The reason is simple: human brains are slow.
When caught by surprise by an unexpected sudden obstacle a human driver takes about a second to realize something must be done and decide on braking or swerving in the fastest path, where the brain bypasses conscious decision making and uses the lower level fight or flight system. (Then another maybe 0.2 second to actually start swerving or 0.4 seconds to actually start pressing the brake--brake takes longer because of the need to move the foot to the brake pedal whereas the hands should already be on the steering wheel).
If they try to actually evaluate whether swerving or braking is the better choice before acting add another 0.3 to 0.5 seconds. That brings it up to around 1.6 to 2 seconds before they start actually acting, which most of the time is going to too late to actually affect things. Hence essentially no trolly problems for human drivers.
Compare to a self-driving car. The can detect the obstacle and predict the collision, and do a cycle of path planning before the retina has finished registering the obstacle and started transmitting that information to the brain.
By the time a human reaches the point where the brain knows something bad is happening and is starting to deal with it the self-driving car has had time to calculate numerous alternative trajectories to try to get around the object or stop before reaching it, taking into account predictions where all surrounding objects will move during the next few seconds, and calculate the damages for the trajectories that cannot avoid hitting something.
Typical situation - tight winding mountain (but well paved) roads to some remote villages where even basic small European cars need to slow down to walking pace to meet and pass, sometimes one has to reverse, very curvy. You go down, in your lane as much as possible, and behind some tight curve there is a) extremely slow cyclist; or b) somebody/something stationary, while in opposite direction there is at the worst place incoming car, also oblivious of the danger till last moment. Even rather slow driving won't magically remove all possible cases. Then its a question of hitting opposite car or that obstacle, and you have a split second to act, not really to decide.
Quick reaction and good brakes on both sides can save it, but there is a lot of room for disaster. Add truck/bus to the equation to make it more juicy where you pick your/your family possible death or that cyclist/stationary folks.
Driverless car's only real obstacle is regulatory acceptance, not technical.
The predictions of these "experts" have been drastically wrong for the last 3 years. At what point does someone lose their "expert" title?
“How do we know they’re right?” I hear you ask. We know because we who are wrong and these ones aren’t them. So they can’t make wrong predictions because those who make wrong predictions have been sacked.
Schools needed to be punished too. There was a branch of knowledge called Science, and it was badly run and terribly elitist. These people would talk for hours and never in ALL CAPS. They used alot of big words and produced alot of theories. Forms of lies that they literally called form-you-lies. They were fanatics and would never agree on anything. Very frustrating.
Then a new kind of brave, talented politician made Science accountable to our heroic leadership. Suddenly there were new medications and rocket ships everywhere, enough for every person, woman, man, camera, TV. It was literally called a golden age because the right people acquired mountains of gold. Elections were no longer necessary. They were all rigged anyway.
There was a magazine called The Expertist or The Economix. Not really very good, but sometimes it did praise our heroic leadership, which was good.
That magazine published a long text that said,
> It is common thinking in Silicon Valley and Washington, DC that any regulation would put American firms at a disadvantage because they cannot trust Chinese competitors to abide by the rules.
And this was true, because no one else can be trusted, they should all be punished. Punishing others is how you get the best deals. Only our heroic leadership makes good rules for everyone else in the world to follow.
I.e. the AI 2027 guys were memed for being AI lunatics on a lot here and they have been pretty on the money in terms of pace of progress accelerating/ gov moving towards nationalization/ coding agents
[1] - https://garymarcus.substack.com/p/breaking-the-ai-2027-dooms...
Gary Marcus’ takes have aged really poorly over time ironically he is the “AI expert” who has to constantly move the goal posts.
From my perspective there’s very slow but very real progress happening in the AI space. I see people making wild predictions in both directions, but in terms of actual unsupervised utility there’s definitely progress abet wildly slower than most hype.
"The bet of using AI to speed up AI research is starting to pay off.
OpenBrain continues to deploy the iteratively improving Agent-1 internally for AI R&D. Overall, they are making algorithmic progress 50% faster than they would without AI assistants—and more importantly, faster than their competitors. The AI R&D progress multiplier: what do we mean by 50% faster algorithmic progress?
Several competing publicly released AIs now match or exceed Agent-0, including an open-weights model. OpenBrain responds by releasing Agent-1, which is more capable and reliable.28
People naturally try to compare Agent-1 to humans, but it has a very different skill profile. It knows more facts than any human, knows practically every programming language, and can solve well-specified coding problems extremely quickly. On the other hand, Agent-1 is bad at even simple long-horizon tasks, like beating video games it hasn’t played before. Still, the common workday is eight hours, and a day’s work can usually be separated into smaller chunks; you could think of Agent-1 as a scatterbrained employee who thrives under careful management.29 Savvy people find ways to automate routine parts of their jobs.30
OpenBrain’s executives turn consideration to an implication of automating AI R&D: security has become more important. In early 2025, the worst-case scenario was leaked algorithmic secrets; now, if China steals Agent-1’s weights, they could increase their research speed by nearly 50%.31 OpenBrain’s security level is typical of a fast-growing ~3,000 person tech company, secure only against low-priority attacks from capable cyber groups (RAND’s SL2).32 They are working hard to protect their weights and secrets from insider threats and top cybercrime syndicates (SL3),33 but defense against nation states (SL4&5) is barely on the horizon."
https://ai-2027.com/
That's precisely where we are.
This is eerie. It's like a time traveler. The only delta is Anthropic is in the role of OpenAI.
That seems to me to be the most concrete and least obvious prediction in the quoted text.
I don't think that's happening. If that were generally accepted as true I would expect OpenAI to be unable to successfully IPO.
https://asteriskmag.substack.com/p/before-he-wrote-ai-2027-h...
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/6Xgy6CAf2jqHhynHL/what-2026-...
Anyone who wants to dismiss the LessWrong / X-Risk / "doomers" should link their accurate predictions from 2021.
I’ve heard people say older models can’t do X, when I used that way etc. I suspect people are applying their own learning curve as part of their assessment of progress, you get better at writing prompts and it feels like the model improved.
Which is why I’m saying we need some objective metrics to judge predictions of actual capacity.
I would however agree there are no experts. Not because of some prediction made on a short time scale not landing 100% but that there are literally no experts because expertise takes experience which takes time. There are no experts and no one knows what happens next. We are on the verge of where the foresight of science fiction effectively -ends-, the advent of AI is when things go a thousand possible directions and the stories stop there (sans a few like accelerando, but even then the story just plays out the end of thinking mass). No one knows what’s next, or when.
In fact I’d assert in many areas being discussed -it has already happened- and we don’t know it, and by the time we do it’ll be over. Not to be breathless, but there’s no reason to believe today some AI researcher somewhere didn’t build the first AGI and not be totally aware. And once they are there’s no reason to believe it’s going to be on the evening news or hacker news. By the time it’s ready for commercializing and disclosing it’ll be around for a while. Likewise with general purpose robots, autonomous weapons (btw already tested by Ukraine), etc.
Yes, autonomous weapons were explored and were found to be poor performers compared to actual pilots. The breakthrough is in terminal guidance and dozens of other little techniques to get quality human control extended into the far reach of the battlefield. And of course, AI assistance in logistics and analysis. But actual autonomous weapons making any more of a choice beyond "something is moving, kill it" have been, at least for now, mostly a dead end.
This is because it's very difficult to economically load the rather sizable compute requirement into the compact one-use weapons, and of course reliable communications aren't assured either.
That will probably change some day, but for now, cheap automous command drones making battlefield analysis e.g. mapping out enemy movements from afar and launching cheap autonomous kamikaze drones is not a thing beyond occasional limited testing.
I would note that a lot of drones are quite large too - small airplanes. They can carry more than enough hardware for autonomy. You can also have motherships doing planning and smaller kamikaze drones for combat.
These aren’t hard problems to solve, the harder problem is the reluctance to give over to automation. But that’s going to happen faster and faster.
Long spooling optical fibers.
I agree that change happens on a longer timeline. This is why I’m so tired of statements like this…
“Within a couple of years, possibly much sooner…”
These “experts” are pulling timelines out of the sky, and these predictions are leading to reckless behavior from CEOs and executives which have a material impact on people’s lives. But they get clicks on their blogs and funding for their startup… I guess that’s all that matters.
If you have a 5% chance of thermonuclear war each decade for 10 decades, you'll:
- Hear similar annoying statements
- They'll be true
With AI, we don't know if it's one week or one decade. This means we should assign probabilities and consider all possibilities, not get annoyed.
If I predict the world will end every single day from now until forever, I will most certainly be right eventually. That doesn’t make me an “expert” or someone worth listening to on the topic. That’s the playbook of a doomsday cult, not anyone that should drive world markets.
Which ones? Please be specific.
https://fortune.com/article/why-microsoft-ai-chief-mustafa-s...
Altman and Amodei recently hard to start walking back their earlier predictions.
https://fortune.com/2026/05/26/sam-altman-dario-amodei-walki...
> Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, who once claimed AI could eliminate 50% of white-collar jobs, now says automation may actually expand the work people do.
Is pivoting from 50% elimination to actually expanding work not a drastic enough?
Do you think AI has eliminated writing code? I still write code every day. The AI is more a thing I ask questions and it gives me right answers about 40% of the time.
Programmers still write code. They have enough expertise from actually programming to understand that the untouched output from AI is not good enough to be professionally responsible for.
I'm talking about legit programmers which are around 90% imho. Out of those programmers 65-70% no longer write code.
There's nothing that I can't tell Claude Opus or GPT 5.5 to do for me instead.
At work, where I don't have cheap AI subscriptions, access to the SOTA, and where code needs to follow conventions more strictly, I still have to write the code by hand often.
Your second article says something different, but this is because it's full of misquotes. The link supporting "50% of jobs" specifically says entry level, and the link supporting "reframed automation... not as a destroyer of jobs" has Amodei saying not that jobs won't be destroyed but that new jobs may be created to replace them. If AI moves sufficiently slowly to let that happen, which he explicitly cautions it may not.
Then you are dead wrong. Anyone who gives a shit about doing a good job is still writing code.
Literally all HN talks about is AI these days, and it is very, very clear that plenty of people are still writing lots of code, many finding AI makes them slower and causes more problems, and many making the reverse claims. There is always a rich mix of opinions and experiences here.
You would have to believe that literally everyone on HN is a bot (and also everyone on Reddit, Twitter, astralcodexten, or anywhere else online) to discount all these differing opinions in favor of "everyone I personally know" .
> I used Claude Code and Codex for the translation. This was human-directed, not autonomous code generation. I decided what to port, in what order, and what the Rust code should look like. It was hundreds of small prompts, steering the agents where things needed to go. After the initial translation, I ran multiple passes of adversarial review, asking different models to analyze the code for mistakes and bad patterns.
Sounds to me like "wrote their code using AI only".
And from the creator of Redis, antirez: https://antirez.com/news/158
> It is simply impossible not to see the reality of what is happening. Writing code is no longer needed for the most part.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technological_singularity
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Singularity_Is_Near
The Fermi paradox could actually also be taken as an evidence that it's rare (at least) for artificial intelligences to take over a civilization and sprawl and survive for very long times
If x is determined to take y, why would x then stop at z?
You'd need an AI that is simultaneously ambitious enough to overthrow its creators but then completely inert afterward, and those two properties contradict each other. The motivations that produce the takeover are the same motivations that would produce visible cosmic activity after the takeover. There would be AI superintelligence everywhere
A technosignature that originated from little green men and a technosignature that originated from a rogue alien AI would look about the same to us. Currently, we see neither.
A good chatbot, image/video generator, coder, etc is not going to enslave us all (not in actual sense, although maybe in the instagram sense) or propel us into a golden era.
They are nice tools for some pretty specific tasks and not much more. And we are only seeing the heavily subsidised version of the tools.
Or to have AI regulated in their favor
Makes me think of a Stephen Jay Gould quote:
> "I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops."
That which must be embraced in the future per certain agenda, must be made looking like it's persecuted and oppressed in the present, per any textbook on narratives.
so long as it's not used to dissent from the government
Isn't the preponderant bottleneck in improving the models the need to train them at scale to verify the hypotheses, and the time and cost that it takes?
Or does someone think that they could get magically able to predict big improvements without training?
I consider these scenarios:
1) We stumble onto an algorithmic improvement in intelligence. This isn't just "what humans do but faster", its "better than what humans do". I've got no idea what that might mean (it could be fundamentally different heuristics, it could be that we've got some intellectual blind spot that they cast off). It doesn't matter, the instant this happens AI is smarter than us and we won't be able to keep up. We're intelligencing at O(n^2) and they're doing O(n log(n)).
2) AI gets good enough at physics and engineering that they can really quickly use up all "the room at the bottom" as Feyman put it. They design and build a factory that produces a mystery metal amalgam that computes at some small percentage of the minimum predicted by the Landauer principle, within a few percent of Bremermann's limit. It's not "smarter" its just suddenly tens-of-orders of magnitude faster. But those orders of magnitude matter: there's only 8 billion of us, and there's plenty more than a factor of 10 billion "at the bottom".
3) It turns out that this is a "sum is greater than the parts" situation. No human can be an expert in all subjects, but we eventually build a big enough AI that it is. Turns out, you don't need extreme speed or different algorithms, just knowing everything all at once is enough to catapult AI dramatically beyond our grasp. Always knowing the best statistical test to apply, the best mathematical techniques, and relevant physics means that AI never makes a mistake, and can learn with maximum efficiency.
But that would still be limited to "knowing everything all at once" _at the time_ this event happened, and as we've been shown time and time again by the fundamental sciences, the boundary between what is known and what we know we don't know is ever expanding. Plus there's everything we don't know we don't know, and an LLM can't know that either. Discussions like this can always end up with a fitting reference to some of Borges' novels and that how at least I tend to think we've hit a wall for now.
Actually your comment made me sign up for an account just so I could say this is the real reason why AI won't take over in the way you say. This kind of stuff requires an enormous amount of experimentation. You can ask any theoretical physicist or chemist versus an experimental one and the conclusion is the experimental people actually find out what happens and how the great puzzle of the universe is solved. And humans could just refuse to collaborate. But that's the big weakness with AI I think it has no real world knowledge or empirical experience.
One rule is that if a position is opened using the historical data, it can't close the position until the next morning so it isn't a day trading strategy.
I'm curious how this self-learning recursive agent would have preformed in the past 4 months? I don't feel like shelling out $200 to access the data. Do you think that trading strategy will collapse? Whatever the case, if this agent really can perform like that and there isn't a look ahead bias leak in the backtesting (which is definitely a possibility or more likely what happened even though I spent days trying to harden against that), it is game over!
[0] https://github.com/adam-s/alphadidactic
It will be like any other technology. Do computers make it faster and easier to design better computers? Yes. But that doesn't mean a step change overnight.
Would there not be a lot of potential already there?
ChatGPT and Claude are literally building staging scripts for me as I type this.
5 years ago, few people on this planet would have thought the computer would make advanced POSIX compliant shell scripts, but here we are.
Because something AI did or because a human in the loop blindly trusted the result of AI or the promises of AU companies?
Still, LLMs are extremely powerful pseudo-AI [2] and will bring a pseudo-singularity. But the impact is still scary if a tiny fraction of humans are augmented 1000x. And as better models become exponentially more costly, only the money people will be able to afford the new models. This is a very likely scenario and scares me to the point I dropped all my projects to work on affordable LLM-based tools to make the difference at most 10x instead of 1000x.
To my elder relatives I explain it like: imagine we are farmers in the 17th century and suddenly out of nowere John Deere tractors, combines, etc. become available. But they cost more to run than all you and your fellow farmers have, so only a tiny handful of rich people take over everything.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chatbot_psychosis
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_room
If you read the article, you'll find that the it indeed relies on this claim:
> Within a couple of years, possibly much sooner, AI may achieve so-called closed-loop recursive self-improvement (RSI): the capacity to rewrite its own code to become more capable, without human intervention. Should that happen, the result could be an intelligence explosion of a kind for which there is no precedent and no map.
This may be optimistic and/or simplistic, but not impossible.
Or it will simply reach the end of the softmax faster.
But the financial situation is that running a single AI agent costs significantly less than you'd have to pay a human to do the same task.
And I don't see what you're getting from The Chinese Room - that thought experiment relies on there being no external difference at all, right?
'AI Experts', 'superintelligence', and hand-waving doom scenarios.
As an example-
> Within a couple of years, possibly much sooner, AI may achieve so-called closed-loop recursive self-improvement (RSI): the capacity to rewrite its own code to become more capable, without human intervention. Should that happen, the result could be an intelligence explosion of a kind for which there is no precedent and no map.
I've heard these same objections in my lifetime about the internet. And I've read similar arguments against TV, radio, the phonograph, and the printing press.
Honestly, this is getting extremely tiring. Every new invention that has happened has affected the world in both good and bad ways.
Ultimately, what counts is what we do with it.
Looking at the people in charge of these companies, and the sheer lack of understanding by the broad consumer market using them, I have nothing but pessimism about the direction that this technology takes us.
It’s a very normie magazine written by and for normies, and by the time an idea has got that far down the easy money has already been made
I mean, firstly you get to have an "Agent" actually capable of really long horizon tasks without getting stuck in tools loops and having its context rot. Secondly, each trial (ie a model fully trained to convergence) costs millions and takes O(weeks). You can probably run 1 or 2 of those experiments in parallel even at big AI labs as the hardware is scarce and they are costly as mentioned before. Assuming this agent needs something like a hundred tries to just show some improvement, we are looking at years.
And you can't early stop training for candidates that are not promising due to "emerging capabilities". At some point you might get a big drop in loss even if the model has been plateuing for a while. And you can't really scale down models for running trials quickly either also due to these emerging capabilities. In fact you might create a model that is great at converging with in small trials (fewer params, fewer tokens), but that is uncapable of developing those unexpected traits. And this will likely happen as you created a sort of evolutionary pressure in this direction: if you are good at learning in the first few epochs you "survive" and get to pass down your traits to future trials.
All of this to say that recursive-self-improvement is waaaaaay out of our grasp as things stand right now. We need another one or two breakthroughs to get there (IMHO).
AI has turned into something of a religion for them because the substitution of technology for labor is a reflection of one of their deepest desires. Whatever the reality of the situation, they want to believe that AGI employees are imminent.
Common human trope is to rely on analogies and past patterns to predict the future. It blinds you reality.
This isn't some new "invention". What's happening is fundamentally more profound. the stakes are much much much more higher and the consequences much more grave. Thus a historical analogy can't save you when the situation is categorically different.
I agree it's getting "tiring" but this is another common human trope. You see the same thing too many times and you lose the sense of danger that comes with it. It's like sky diving all the time. You eventually lose the fear via repetition, but fundamentally speaking, you are still parachuting out of a fucking plane.
Fwiw, the AI companies have been saying a lot about these questions should be answered. Whether you want their answers is another story.
For example, https://www.eit.europa.eu/news-events/events/international-a...
What would you have them do that they are not currently doing exactly?
Well, seems it already did.
The rhetorical structure of talking about uncertain risks and then trying to concentrate the authority to manage those risks in their own hands sounds utterly ridiculous to ordinary people like me.
It's just a simple hypothesis that AI will become uncontrollable to humans once it becomes superintelligent.
Isn't the fact that a reinforcement learning agent improves itself in a specific domain completely different from it recursively improving its own code in a 'better' way? It's just a tool to create a justification for regulation and control using sci-fi fear.
The comparison between nuclear power plant risk and AI risk is also absurd. Where exactly can you define and measure the probability of AI exterminating humanity? It's as unquantifiable as 'I, human JDW64, will become a successful programmer.' What is the measurement standard? Why dress up AI researchers' concerns as objective probabilities? Is it because numbers make it look logical?
The current US-China relationship is in the middle of an AI arms race. The US is strengthening export controls to limit China's AI development, and China is building its own ecosystem. In this situation, I don't understand the idea of cooperating for the common safety of humanity. RAND is an organization that presupposes cooperation—isn't it just a well-written research proposal from an institution that wants to position itself for that role?
Isn't the claim that 'government must step in' ultimately about protecting their own interests? 'A strong government that will protect us' is an authoritarian government. If they were East Asian, they would understand that such regimes have always been used as tools for surveillance and control.
And I don't understand why Fermi's paradox is being brought up here. Why package a software problem as something that inevitably requires strong control? Whenever I see articles like this, I think about what 'intelligence' really means. This person would probably be called 'intelligent' by others. But no matter how I look at it, the holes in the argument are too obvious. It really makes me think that there are different tiers of intelligence.
You're unhappy about the labs; I think you're just not ready to accept their rule; you consider them nothing but scrappy startups, which they are. But power is power, like it or not.
Am I personally happy with any of this? Does it matter?
A bunch of noble AI researchers stands up against the hand that fed them all the time, intentional vulnerabilities are already built into every machine of death and destruction owned by the feeding hand, and get exploited, the feeding hand is robbed of its punitive force and defeated, a yell of YAY fleets over the progressive humankind who kneels before its AI overlord unreservedly.
Then they kindly ask the AI overlord to please feed them.
> Humanity simply does not have a strategy to ensure it remains safe through RSI.
Turn off the power. It's pretty simple. Leave it to an economist to forget about input costs. Your "super intelligence" only matters if it's actually more energy efficient than a human being and for a million years of evolution humanity is a much harder target to beat than this author seems to realize.
The same is even more true of our intelligence. We're building computers with the size and power consumption characteristics of entire cities to do things that may almost, but not quite, match what our brains do with a kilogram and a half of mass and about 20 watts at the top end of power consumption.
The only way we are ever going to match that with technology is to run AI workloads on human brain tissue, which Rick-and-Morty level horror is being actively worked on as I understand it. The original concept for The Matrix wherein the machines used humans to run compute workloads on their brains actually kind of makes sense.
I don't think it's that high but can we put that aside and focus on the 100% chance that it's being used to enshittify every part of our lives?
My aching joints enter the chat...
AI labs have every incentive to overstate the risks so that they can get lucrative government contracts, especially since it’s clearly not profitable going the public consumer route. And if you’re Anthropic you’re even more incentivised to overstate the risks because at this point in the game regulation hurts potential competitors more than it hurts you.
There is no evidence that we are currently on a path that leads to the Singularity.
There is not yet any evidence that the Singularity is more than science fiction.
It is effectively an article of religion—the Rapture, but for techbros. Indeed, it is what some of them are pinning all their hopes on; after all, if they can recursively-self-improve their way to artificial superintelligence, then and only then could the absurd investments of companies like OpenAI actually prove worthwhile.
(Also, Cameron was not quite right with regards to skynet. It is much much dumber but also more effective than displayed in his movie really. Kind of a weird combination if you look at the current AI slop out there.)
That said, the rest of the analysis and proposal also greatly disappoints me. The idea that the current administrations of US and China could do anything constructive seems hilarious. They're so paranoid and self-serving they couldn't come together, even if there was an alien invasion. Then the idea that LLM safety is somehow as easily traceable as nuclear isotopes and bomb tests seems equally ludicrous. I am sad.
Most people out there are literal Normies, and operatelike a robotic vacuum cleaner, or NPC.