In the waning years of the 1800s, during the late Victorian era, some came to believe that human knowledge would soon be perfected. This notion was not entirely unjustified. Science had leapt great bounds in a few decades, medicine was finally being researched and practiced in line with evidence, industry had dramatically expanded productive capacity, mechanized transportation had opened the world. Humanity was on the move.
If AI ends up at super-human intelligence, it could be bigger than the wheel, fire, book, and steam engine, since those were inventions of human-level intelligence.
There are many aspects of intelligence we've been massively surpassed already on, like memory, and a some prestigious markers of intelligence - like chess playing - that we're in the rearview mirror on.
I wonder if we're in a god-of-the-gaps position, trying to point out all the ways AI hasn't yet beaten us, only to learn that yep, there's a transitional fossil for the A+ Philosophy 101 essay, too.
The latter's a bad example, though, since an A+ Phil 101 student isn't the essayistic equivalent of a Chess Grandmaster. Possibly, AI will never write a Freddie deBoer essay, or War & Peace. It will be a very good blogger, and output some plausible techno but will never be Aphex Twin or whoever.
Yet I found myself entranced the other eve by some Infinite Zoom AI art, that struck me - non-high - as the most interesting art I'd yet seen on Earth. And I've heard some AI music that reminded me of Ariel Pink, maybe surpassed him - it didn't sound like a bland averaging of Pop Music, but rather an averaging that was skewed by some bent circuits, then beamed back to us, like the Vegans sending our own broadcasts back to us in Carl Sagan's Contact.
One on AI using more information than a human could. I'd love to see chess playing AI limit its training to a human sized amount of sample data and then see how it does versus human grand masters.
And my other 2 cents.
To me many fears of AI taking over our world amp 1:1 to the reality that profit motive has already taken over the world. AI will belong to Corporations driving algorithmically by profit motive. So we're lamenting about AI causing us to lose something we already lost by my estimation. As a guy who views himself a leftist of sorts, not as left as DeBoer, I do think AI should force us to look at using job security as a qualifier for existence and realize its foolish and we must find a way to move on.
Several things I find quite interesting in this lovely essay.
Some are questions. Why are men the ones who can't find lovers? Shouldn't it be both sexes?
With a bit of humor I note that in S Korea and China, government wants women to go back to making babies instead of incomes that allow them to be independent. Both societies are paternalistic and oftentimes relegate women to a subservient role if they are wives and mothers. According to Drum Tower in the Economist, there are no women in the Politburo anymore. There are cases where women aren't granted divorces from abusive men because local officials don't want their marriage statistics to look bad. Women shouldn't be forced to put up with abusive assholes. How is that not obvious?
Is this what's going on here? Is this why men can't find lovers and stable partners? Or is it hype that women only want handsome rich men and many men chose to stay out of the dating game rather than risk rejection? Are there equal numbers of lonely men and women, but women handle it better by surrounding themselves with friends?
Why do so many modern people find life boring and unfulfilling? I wonder if modern story telling on screens has something to do with it? Our lives are never going to be as interesting as what is shown there. Though, I guess most people don't register that the plots and situations, even the dialog is basically the same, over and over and over. Am I happy because I've chosen to surround myself with family and hobbies instead of watching screens? I don't care about new cars, fancy restaurants, clothes and make-up etc...is that because I don't see it constantly? Or am I an anomaly?
Have people always felt this sense of non-purpose, unfulfilled boredom? Or were they too busy staying alive to bother with the higher levels of Maslow's hierarchy of needs? Do people need religion to give them community and purpose?
I disagree about doing away with cancer, or at least cancer that hits the old. My father died of renal cell carcinoma and my mother of dementia. There is no doubt in my mind which was the better. There are drugs that can make the end of cancer a good death, not so with dementia.
Certainly the insight about what you call "covid maximalists" rings true about people I know in my own life.
I liked the article, really, and my criticism is not the article's fault as such, but I have encountered so much rhetoric lately about how the "incel" demographic is suffering some unprecedented agony, it's becoming annoying and depressing. This really is a lot of attention and even sympathy for a small subset of men who are blaming everything on factors outside their control, conflating being sexually deprived with being lonely and having feelings and needs in a society that only allows men to seek intimacy and vulnerability... with women. They can look only at themselves and at other men if they want to fix that. I wish I could go a month without reading anything about why actually Beavis and Butthead are tragic figures because they never score, when they're tragic for so many other more compelling reasons. But this all has nothing to do with the article.
Damn Freddie, that was an outstanding essay. Woe to my own pitiful mind as my first reaction was to wonder if you were giggling when you wrote "The incel issue is so sticky".
Am I the only one to read this and be stunned -- and envious of -- the volume of information and apparent command that Freddie has of topics including the Victorian age, quantum physics, AI, linguistics, philosophy, and too many others to recount?
For an essay about an accessible concept -- our need to recognize that technology is not a "solution" to being human -- Freddie simultaneously showed he's operating on a different level..
Somehow I am never prepared for Freddie's clarity of observation and expression. His summation of adult life is the very thing that my parents wished to keep from me. It's spot on. What is required is courage in the face of so much attempted obliteration. I don't agree with either atheism or Marxism as guiding tenets, because I swallow nothing whole, but this essay is beyond brilliant on first reading. It just takes awhile to digest. I'm going to go outside and fill my birdbath.
AI isn't AI until it can truly create something that didn't exist before. Do current models do that? Or do they cull through vast available data (from the Internet?) on a categorized topic to deliver an "optimal" result? If this is the case is it not a conformity machine rather than utopian and apocalyptic?
For example, if the cure to cancer is to eat eucalyptus leaves while submerged at a depth of 12 feet of pepsicola in ceramic swimming pool located at the geographic center of Skudeneshavn Norway, assuming that has never been documented, could it discern and test it as a cure?
If AI ends up at super-human intelligence, it could be bigger than the wheel, fire, book, and steam engine, since those were inventions of human-level intelligence.
There are many aspects of intelligence we've been massively surpassed already on, like memory, and a some prestigious markers of intelligence - like chess playing - that we're in the rearview mirror on.
I wonder if we're in a god-of-the-gaps position, trying to point out all the ways AI hasn't yet beaten us, only to learn that yep, there's a transitional fossil for the A+ Philosophy 101 essay, too.
The latter's a bad example, though, since an A+ Phil 101 student isn't the essayistic equivalent of a Chess Grandmaster. Possibly, AI will never write a Freddie deBoer essay, or War & Peace. It will be a very good blogger, and output some plausible techno but will never be Aphex Twin or whoever.
Yet I found myself entranced the other eve by some Infinite Zoom AI art, that struck me - non-high - as the most interesting art I'd yet seen on Earth. And I've heard some AI music that reminded me of Ariel Pink, maybe surpassed him - it didn't sound like a bland averaging of Pop Music, but rather an averaging that was skewed by some bent circuits, then beamed back to us, like the Vegans sending our own broadcasts back to us in Carl Sagan's Contact.
So much in here. Amazing.
Some thoughts in this area I've had for awhile.
One on AI using more information than a human could. I'd love to see chess playing AI limit its training to a human sized amount of sample data and then see how it does versus human grand masters.
And my other 2 cents.
To me many fears of AI taking over our world amp 1:1 to the reality that profit motive has already taken over the world. AI will belong to Corporations driving algorithmically by profit motive. So we're lamenting about AI causing us to lose something we already lost by my estimation. As a guy who views himself a leftist of sorts, not as left as DeBoer, I do think AI should force us to look at using job security as a qualifier for existence and realize its foolish and we must find a way to move on.
What a fantastic essay!
Several things I find quite interesting in this lovely essay.
Some are questions. Why are men the ones who can't find lovers? Shouldn't it be both sexes?
With a bit of humor I note that in S Korea and China, government wants women to go back to making babies instead of incomes that allow them to be independent. Both societies are paternalistic and oftentimes relegate women to a subservient role if they are wives and mothers. According to Drum Tower in the Economist, there are no women in the Politburo anymore. There are cases where women aren't granted divorces from abusive men because local officials don't want their marriage statistics to look bad. Women shouldn't be forced to put up with abusive assholes. How is that not obvious?
Is this what's going on here? Is this why men can't find lovers and stable partners? Or is it hype that women only want handsome rich men and many men chose to stay out of the dating game rather than risk rejection? Are there equal numbers of lonely men and women, but women handle it better by surrounding themselves with friends?
Why do so many modern people find life boring and unfulfilling? I wonder if modern story telling on screens has something to do with it? Our lives are never going to be as interesting as what is shown there. Though, I guess most people don't register that the plots and situations, even the dialog is basically the same, over and over and over. Am I happy because I've chosen to surround myself with family and hobbies instead of watching screens? I don't care about new cars, fancy restaurants, clothes and make-up etc...is that because I don't see it constantly? Or am I an anomaly?
Have people always felt this sense of non-purpose, unfulfilled boredom? Or were they too busy staying alive to bother with the higher levels of Maslow's hierarchy of needs? Do people need religion to give them community and purpose?
I disagree about doing away with cancer, or at least cancer that hits the old. My father died of renal cell carcinoma and my mother of dementia. There is no doubt in my mind which was the better. There are drugs that can make the end of cancer a good death, not so with dementia.
Replika in the news today: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2023/07/05/ai-windsor-intruder-queen-elizabeth-jaswant-singh-chail/
Certainly the insight about what you call "covid maximalists" rings true about people I know in my own life.
I liked the article, really, and my criticism is not the article's fault as such, but I have encountered so much rhetoric lately about how the "incel" demographic is suffering some unprecedented agony, it's becoming annoying and depressing. This really is a lot of attention and even sympathy for a small subset of men who are blaming everything on factors outside their control, conflating being sexually deprived with being lonely and having feelings and needs in a society that only allows men to seek intimacy and vulnerability... with women. They can look only at themselves and at other men if they want to fix that. I wish I could go a month without reading anything about why actually Beavis and Butthead are tragic figures because they never score, when they're tragic for so many other more compelling reasons. But this all has nothing to do with the article.
I will add my note of praise to the pile. This is brilliant. Thank you for writing this; it made me reassess my thinking in a number of areas.
This was amazing. The other day you wrote about how you’d love to have a bigger audience. This piece should be read by everyone. Truly magnificent.
Damn Freddie, that was an outstanding essay. Woe to my own pitiful mind as my first reaction was to wonder if you were giggling when you wrote "The incel issue is so sticky".
Am I the only one to read this and be stunned -- and envious of -- the volume of information and apparent command that Freddie has of topics including the Victorian age, quantum physics, AI, linguistics, philosophy, and too many others to recount?
For an essay about an accessible concept -- our need to recognize that technology is not a "solution" to being human -- Freddie simultaneously showed he's operating on a different level..
I just wanted to say I thought this article of yours was a real gem. Thank you Freddie.
Somehow I am never prepared for Freddie's clarity of observation and expression. His summation of adult life is the very thing that my parents wished to keep from me. It's spot on. What is required is courage in the face of so much attempted obliteration. I don't agree with either atheism or Marxism as guiding tenets, because I swallow nothing whole, but this essay is beyond brilliant on first reading. It just takes awhile to digest. I'm going to go outside and fill my birdbath.
AI isn't AI until it can truly create something that didn't exist before. Do current models do that? Or do they cull through vast available data (from the Internet?) on a categorized topic to deliver an "optimal" result? If this is the case is it not a conformity machine rather than utopian and apocalyptic?
For example, if the cure to cancer is to eat eucalyptus leaves while submerged at a depth of 12 feet of pepsicola in ceramic swimming pool located at the geographic center of Skudeneshavn Norway, assuming that has never been documented, could it discern and test it as a cure?
This essay is so good, I re-upped *after* reading the whole thing.
Yes.
Well done.
In the end, we can’t outrun life. It meets us wherever we are.
A scary counterpoint to Freddie’s views on AI:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/kAmgdEjq2eYQkB5PP/douglas-hofstadter-changes-his-mind-on-deep-learning-and-ai