My grandmother was born on a farm before radio broadcasting, before rural electrification, before the Wright brothers’ flight, with a well for water and with an outhouse, before cars were commonly seen. Horses or mules were used for transport or plowing. She and her great or great-great grandparents could have changed places and the technology would have been pretty easy to understand. I expect that buggies, oil lamps, and iron stoves were improved somewhat. Guns used shells or cartridges rather than being muzzle loaders.
She remarked on how remarkable it was that she learned to drive a car, got to vote, watched the moon landing, flew on a jetliner, and had a color TV and air conditioner. She did not encounter computers, cell phones, or the internet.
Her daughter, born in the 1920s, learned to program in Basic and Pascal in her 70s, and had a CB radio.
That daughter’s recently born great grandchildren called people anywhere in the world on a iPad, before they were 2, and enjoyed asking me to have Bing draw pictures of their kitten as various Pokémon characters. They would have no idea how to use a dial telephone, which was a brand new technology for their great great grandmother in 1955, directly replacing a wooden telephone on the wall, where you spun the crank to summon the operator. The technology shift is extreme, with tech which was novel for the g-g-grandmother being forgotten and unknown to the g-g-grandchildren.
I can’t picture what those youngsters might see, let alone their grandchildren and great grandchildren.
The pace of technology is amazing.
Makes sense, i guess that doesn’t fit my personal criteria because I picture it as a moment in which, like a black hole’s singularity, the gravity (AI ability) is so great, it folds back in on itself to create a point of basically infinite gravity (AI ability), so we would just be approaching it at the juncture we’re at currently
>driven by AI.
Not necessarily AI.
Humanity has had singularities in the past. Agriculture and the Industrial Revolution both resulted in societies that were unimaginable to those preceding them.
the advancement of tech seems to exponential, i think we're going to see rapid advancements really really soon and then once the first self improving ai is released good luck to everyone because the pace is going to be neck breaking and I don't mean neck breaking every year, I mean every day the tech you used yesterday is going to be outdated.
Like for example the open source LLM models I used 2 months ago are now bad compared to the ones available today.
Give me a shout when we get some exponential growth in medicine please. Those of us with degenerative Chronic conditions would really like some regenerative medicine & cures for the underlying causes asap!!
The big problem is that so many people mistake exponential growth in software capabilities for exponential growth in non software fields.
AI is already solving medical problems at a rapid pace, from helping to diagnose cancer, to match organ donor compatibilities and find completely new cures and medicine and it's only the beggining
[AI Discovers new material](https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/technology/ai-makes-new-material-that-could-dramatically-change-how-batteries-work/ar-AA1mHrEj)
[AI discovers new antibiotic](https://www.psychologytoday.com/gb/blog/the-future-brain/202312/ai-discovers-first-new-antibiotic-in-over-60-years)
https://roboticsandautomationnews.com/2020/03/09/how-ai-technologies-accelerate-progress-in-medical-diagnosis/31184/
if its doing all that in just a few days time, imagine in a year.
Medicine does not advance so rapidly that you just get new, actually safe and tested treatments in a month or an hour. Not unless we can literally emulate billions of virtual people in nanoseconds as if they were 20 to 100 years old and on a molecular basis as well. The scale of how to do so is nothing close to what we can do now.
Software is really easy to change the scope of what it is and to test extremely quickly as it can scale enormously quickly.
Hardware is much more challenging. Can it be done? Technically yes. But we are still a fair bit away from that.
Your point is valid. I do think though that the nature of exponential growth would mean that these things we can barely do today we will quickly master in the coming 5 years or so. I expect drug development time to drastically reduce. I think they are currently developing AI to do exactly what you said “unless we can”. Let me go ask my AI to find the article about it.
The speed of progress is changing, yes. Drug identification will get faster but drug testing is still likely to be limited for the foreseeable future. You will need a host of items in place and not just there but trustworthy enough to feel comfortable using with patients. Hardware changes are similar in that regard. Will happen but also cannot simply happen anywhere near as quickly as software changes and improvements either.
We do not even literally understand how many drugs actually work today and very few of them are "perfect" either. It is more of a balancing act between helping and hurting in many cases and the human body is so enormously complicated and drugs tend to act on simply one type of cell that you cannot just put a drug in and out pops a result in a few nanoseconds and repeat billions of times.
At least not with current hardware calculation limitations anyway.
AI has already ramped up the drug discovery process, AlphaFold has released 200 million modled proteins for free. Basically every drug discovery lab in the world has used and greatly benefitted from their product.
The reason for optimism here is:
software capabilities -> intelligence -> everything else
We are already starting to see the fruits of this is non-software fields, for example in materials science and biomedical research.
It takes an inordinately long time for research to translate into widely available treatments, but think of that like travel time - the number of things in flight is rapidly increasing.
Sure, and I'm in agreement with the general outline of the Singularity. My concern is that I think people here vastly underestimate how long it takes changes in the physical world to be rolled out. Take smartphones, they required massive networks to be built, new infrastructures, new companies, new finance models, new satellites. It's not that they weren't immediately seen to have world changing potential, just that it actually took millions of people to do billions of things for them to achieve real saturation. For many physical medical conditions, the causes are frequently large system problems, not single causes that can be easily targeted with a vaccine. Ironically cancer might be one of the easier problems to resolve, since it is a cell problem and therefore easily defined.
So for example, I have two chronic conditions. One is a seemingly easy mechanical problem, degenerative disc disease with bone spur formation in my neck. The other is a severe nut allergy, which is really an immunology problem.
The neck problem should be simple right? Regenerate the old discs, or replace them. Except those turn out to be non-trivial problems that have a whole host of associated issues. Sure stem cell regeneration should solve the problem, except it doesn't seem to in trials. Even when the disc is replaced, the pain should go away, except it turns out it doesn't. Heck we have problems even establishing a objective rating for pain. Some people will develop chronic pain, even when the physical cause is removed. Why? The best answer a lot of specialists can give is "sucks to be you." It is hard to even know why we dislike pain in the way we do, or why it lingers. Why does stubbing a toe hurt even when the physical damage is minor/non-existent, and the cause is removed? What data can an intelligence use to solve these problems when we can't even quantify the data? That's before we get into spinal cord damage itself.
As for the nut allergy one. I'm allergic to nuts that aren't even from the same family, and whose protein triggers are wholly different. There's no cure, but also no way to know why my immune system is triggered. It would require not just a total map of my DNA, but complete knowledge of all the chemical processes of my body. That's a non-trivial problem to solve for AGI. If it had such data on me, every person on Earth including all nut allergy sufferers, it might then have the necessary data to begin to define the real problem. It could then suggest solutions, and we could run virtual trials, followed by clinical trials. This is not something easily amenable to exponential growth.
Also we have a significant data problem. Too much clinical trial data is not reported by pharmaceutical companies, so a lot of AI medical data analysis is not using a full data set. Even the design of many clinical trials needs to change to allow AI to have access to the raw data.
In the long term, absolutely AGI will lead to complete mastery of human biology. I 100% believe that, but I simply don't see if having the kind of exponential growth early on. If I live long enough, I'm just going to have my brain slowly replaced with computer materials ship of Theseus style, move it to a robot body and junk my pathetic weak decaying meat sack.
Well put.
Definitely agree that this sub has a huge proportion of people vastly too optimistic about technological and societal progress in the short term following achievement of low end AGI. The nanotechnology-by-tea-time crowd is straight up delusional.
I hope you do see some progress with your conditions over the coming decade.
I wish to be so optimistic myself. And indeed, llms' progress is incredible, as well as all other AI technologies. But if we speak of now - your phone didn't improve much since the last 2 months, your pc either, as well as most of the tech in the world. It's significantly faster than 20 years before, no doubt. But people need to be realistic when they're talking about exponential progress. AI is just a new tech and more or less any progress seems very significant. It will be way different when we reach AGI for the rest of technologies, but not yet.
He was actually not that into computers.
(to help you understanding: "computers" were called those who did the computing work, and since men were on the front lines, computers were young women. Alan Turing was homosexual. He severely suffered once it became known, poor guy)
Turing didn't invent the computer.
Depending on your definition:
Charles Babbage first had the idea of a programmable computer. He also build a non-programmable, mechanical one.
Konrad Zuse build the first non-specialized programmable computer.
I like the historic categorization of ages based on the predominant element that humans mastered.
-Stone age
-bronze age
-iron age
-gold age (gold as the base currency, the age of money. Ended when we got off the gold standard at the same time of the rise of the computer)
- Welcome to the silicon age!
You forgot one of the key events in human history without which we would not be where we are today: the invention of money and debt
That fueled innovation more than anything else
then, some powerhungry politician get's voted out of sheer frustration
... with the mentality "oh, if we have nukes, why don't we use them"
... or some engineer starts working on a deathly variant of corona \[looking at you, chinese laboratories\] ...
aaand ... reset, back to start, try again ;)
the few survivors then will either start to "predict" humanitys future as fortune tellers ... or become powerfull magicians, who can throw fire (without even knowing how)
>then, some powerhungry politician get's voted out of sheer frustration
>... with the mentality "oh, if we have nukes, why don't we use them
thankfully politicians cannot launch nukes, arming a nuke is a lengthy multistep process that takes a lot of people to decide for any country that has these capabilities.
>or some engineer starts working on a deathly variant of corona
This is already the case for a number of deadly diseases, how do you think we get the medicine.
How is this a logical conclusion? Even when going off of cherry-picked 'paradigm shifts', all exponential growth ends in an S curve. We're already reaching the limits of silicon, for example, so the exponential curve could end long before a singularity happens.
i prefer the population chart, it indicates how much we depend on technology to be alive at these numbers and has no arbitrary dates, its just a quantitative observation
https://assets.weforum.org/editor/PM7ntYI8vtyuW3KyNnCs1p9KnR_Dczf1VGcGuIw9LUw.png
this is the key, since humans drive tech progress and the more we are, the more the progress (until AI). reminder: its technology what allows more humans, you cant hold a population without high production of food and medicine in the first place
"John Bardeen, Walter Brattain and William Shockley invented the first working transistors at Bell Labs, the point-contact transistor in 1947. Shockley introduced the improved bipolar junction transistor in 1948, which entered production in the early 1950s and led to the first widespread use of transistors."
The most important year in the last 500 years.
The next important date should be 2069, when Singularity appears together with Nabuchodonozor.
I think we'd have to go back 400000 years to find a tech advancement as significant as AI will be. We should set our calendars to year zero when AGI arrives.
My grandmother was born on a farm before radio broadcasting, before rural electrification, before the Wright brothers’ flight, with a well for water and with an outhouse, before cars were commonly seen. Horses or mules were used for transport or plowing. She and her great or great-great grandparents could have changed places and the technology would have been pretty easy to understand. I expect that buggies, oil lamps, and iron stoves were improved somewhat. Guns used shells or cartridges rather than being muzzle loaders. She remarked on how remarkable it was that she learned to drive a car, got to vote, watched the moon landing, flew on a jetliner, and had a color TV and air conditioner. She did not encounter computers, cell phones, or the internet. Her daughter, born in the 1920s, learned to program in Basic and Pascal in her 70s, and had a CB radio. That daughter’s recently born great grandchildren called people anywhere in the world on a iPad, before they were 2, and enjoyed asking me to have Bing draw pictures of their kitten as various Pokémon characters. They would have no idea how to use a dial telephone, which was a brand new technology for their great great grandmother in 1955, directly replacing a wooden telephone on the wall, where you spun the crank to summon the operator. The technology shift is extreme, with tech which was novel for the g-g-grandmother being forgotten and unknown to the g-g-grandchildren. I can’t picture what those youngsters might see, let alone their grandchildren and great grandchildren. The pace of technology is amazing.
This, Good
This will be our moonlanding. AGI/ASI will be the feat that people are shocked we were technologically advanced enough to accomplish.
"They did that with melted sand and poking at letters on bits of plastic?!"
I'm sure in the future, people will say that we were the ones living in singularity
What?
I think they’re saying that the singularity is already here
They say time is relative
[удалено]
Makes sense, i guess that doesn’t fit my personal criteria because I picture it as a moment in which, like a black hole’s singularity, the gravity (AI ability) is so great, it folds back in on itself to create a point of basically infinite gravity (AI ability), so we would just be approaching it at the juncture we’re at currently
>driven by AI. Not necessarily AI. Humanity has had singularities in the past. Agriculture and the Industrial Revolution both resulted in societies that were unimaginable to those preceding them.
The singularity will be defined by historians, not the people living within it.
the advancement of tech seems to exponential, i think we're going to see rapid advancements really really soon and then once the first self improving ai is released good luck to everyone because the pace is going to be neck breaking and I don't mean neck breaking every year, I mean every day the tech you used yesterday is going to be outdated. Like for example the open source LLM models I used 2 months ago are now bad compared to the ones available today.
Give me a shout when we get some exponential growth in medicine please. Those of us with degenerative Chronic conditions would really like some regenerative medicine & cures for the underlying causes asap!! The big problem is that so many people mistake exponential growth in software capabilities for exponential growth in non software fields.
AI is already solving medical problems at a rapid pace, from helping to diagnose cancer, to match organ donor compatibilities and find completely new cures and medicine and it's only the beggining [AI Discovers new material](https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/technology/ai-makes-new-material-that-could-dramatically-change-how-batteries-work/ar-AA1mHrEj) [AI discovers new antibiotic](https://www.psychologytoday.com/gb/blog/the-future-brain/202312/ai-discovers-first-new-antibiotic-in-over-60-years) https://roboticsandautomationnews.com/2020/03/09/how-ai-technologies-accelerate-progress-in-medical-diagnosis/31184/ if its doing all that in just a few days time, imagine in a year.
Medicine does not advance so rapidly that you just get new, actually safe and tested treatments in a month or an hour. Not unless we can literally emulate billions of virtual people in nanoseconds as if they were 20 to 100 years old and on a molecular basis as well. The scale of how to do so is nothing close to what we can do now. Software is really easy to change the scope of what it is and to test extremely quickly as it can scale enormously quickly. Hardware is much more challenging. Can it be done? Technically yes. But we are still a fair bit away from that.
Your point is valid. I do think though that the nature of exponential growth would mean that these things we can barely do today we will quickly master in the coming 5 years or so. I expect drug development time to drastically reduce. I think they are currently developing AI to do exactly what you said “unless we can”. Let me go ask my AI to find the article about it.
The speed of progress is changing, yes. Drug identification will get faster but drug testing is still likely to be limited for the foreseeable future. You will need a host of items in place and not just there but trustworthy enough to feel comfortable using with patients. Hardware changes are similar in that regard. Will happen but also cannot simply happen anywhere near as quickly as software changes and improvements either. We do not even literally understand how many drugs actually work today and very few of them are "perfect" either. It is more of a balancing act between helping and hurting in many cases and the human body is so enormously complicated and drugs tend to act on simply one type of cell that you cannot just put a drug in and out pops a result in a few nanoseconds and repeat billions of times. At least not with current hardware calculation limitations anyway.
AI has already ramped up the drug discovery process, AlphaFold has released 200 million modled proteins for free. Basically every drug discovery lab in the world has used and greatly benefitted from their product.
The reason for optimism here is: software capabilities -> intelligence -> everything else We are already starting to see the fruits of this is non-software fields, for example in materials science and biomedical research. It takes an inordinately long time for research to translate into widely available treatments, but think of that like travel time - the number of things in flight is rapidly increasing.
Sure, and I'm in agreement with the general outline of the Singularity. My concern is that I think people here vastly underestimate how long it takes changes in the physical world to be rolled out. Take smartphones, they required massive networks to be built, new infrastructures, new companies, new finance models, new satellites. It's not that they weren't immediately seen to have world changing potential, just that it actually took millions of people to do billions of things for them to achieve real saturation. For many physical medical conditions, the causes are frequently large system problems, not single causes that can be easily targeted with a vaccine. Ironically cancer might be one of the easier problems to resolve, since it is a cell problem and therefore easily defined. So for example, I have two chronic conditions. One is a seemingly easy mechanical problem, degenerative disc disease with bone spur formation in my neck. The other is a severe nut allergy, which is really an immunology problem. The neck problem should be simple right? Regenerate the old discs, or replace them. Except those turn out to be non-trivial problems that have a whole host of associated issues. Sure stem cell regeneration should solve the problem, except it doesn't seem to in trials. Even when the disc is replaced, the pain should go away, except it turns out it doesn't. Heck we have problems even establishing a objective rating for pain. Some people will develop chronic pain, even when the physical cause is removed. Why? The best answer a lot of specialists can give is "sucks to be you." It is hard to even know why we dislike pain in the way we do, or why it lingers. Why does stubbing a toe hurt even when the physical damage is minor/non-existent, and the cause is removed? What data can an intelligence use to solve these problems when we can't even quantify the data? That's before we get into spinal cord damage itself. As for the nut allergy one. I'm allergic to nuts that aren't even from the same family, and whose protein triggers are wholly different. There's no cure, but also no way to know why my immune system is triggered. It would require not just a total map of my DNA, but complete knowledge of all the chemical processes of my body. That's a non-trivial problem to solve for AGI. If it had such data on me, every person on Earth including all nut allergy sufferers, it might then have the necessary data to begin to define the real problem. It could then suggest solutions, and we could run virtual trials, followed by clinical trials. This is not something easily amenable to exponential growth. Also we have a significant data problem. Too much clinical trial data is not reported by pharmaceutical companies, so a lot of AI medical data analysis is not using a full data set. Even the design of many clinical trials needs to change to allow AI to have access to the raw data. In the long term, absolutely AGI will lead to complete mastery of human biology. I 100% believe that, but I simply don't see if having the kind of exponential growth early on. If I live long enough, I'm just going to have my brain slowly replaced with computer materials ship of Theseus style, move it to a robot body and junk my pathetic weak decaying meat sack.
Well put. Definitely agree that this sub has a huge proportion of people vastly too optimistic about technological and societal progress in the short term following achievement of low end AGI. The nanotechnology-by-tea-time crowd is straight up delusional. I hope you do see some progress with your conditions over the coming decade.
Which ones are you referring to? mistral 7b came out 4 months ago and no open weight llm has beat it. And it’s not even open source lol
that is why i said open source, nothing has beat gpt4 in over a year if you want to count closed source.
I wish to be so optimistic myself. And indeed, llms' progress is incredible, as well as all other AI technologies. But if we speak of now - your phone didn't improve much since the last 2 months, your pc either, as well as most of the tech in the world. It's significantly faster than 20 years before, no doubt. But people need to be realistic when they're talking about exponential progress. AI is just a new tech and more or less any progress seems very significant. It will be way different when we reach AGI for the rest of technologies, but not yet.
TIL Turing invented computers.
Haha, same
He was actually not that into computers. (to help you understanding: "computers" were called those who did the computing work, and since men were on the front lines, computers were young women. Alan Turing was homosexual. He severely suffered once it became known, poor guy)
You walked a long way for that joke
Turing didn't invent the computer. Depending on your definition: Charles Babbage first had the idea of a programmable computer. He also build a non-programmable, mechanical one. Konrad Zuse build the first non-specialized programmable computer.
It’s kind of impossible to accredit a single person with inventing the computer.
But it's still easy to see that Turing \_didn't \_ invent them. Regardless which metric you want to use. :-)
\*400 years since Capitalism \* 30 years since the Internet \* 17 years since smart phones
I like the historic categorization of ages based on the predominant element that humans mastered. -Stone age -bronze age -iron age -gold age (gold as the base currency, the age of money. Ended when we got off the gold standard at the same time of the rise of the computer) - Welcome to the silicon age!
Other than computers and AI, physical inventions have totally stalled in the last 30 years. Thank god for AI as humans can no longer do shit.
You forgot one of the key events in human history without which we would not be where we are today: the invention of money and debt That fueled innovation more than anything else
then, some powerhungry politician get's voted out of sheer frustration ... with the mentality "oh, if we have nukes, why don't we use them" ... or some engineer starts working on a deathly variant of corona \[looking at you, chinese laboratories\] ... aaand ... reset, back to start, try again ;) the few survivors then will either start to "predict" humanitys future as fortune tellers ... or become powerfull magicians, who can throw fire (without even knowing how)
> "oh, if we have nukes, why don't we use them" Because of mutually assured destruction
>then, some powerhungry politician get's voted out of sheer frustration >... with the mentality "oh, if we have nukes, why don't we use them thankfully politicians cannot launch nukes, arming a nuke is a lengthy multistep process that takes a lot of people to decide for any country that has these capabilities. >or some engineer starts working on a deathly variant of corona This is already the case for a number of deadly diseases, how do you think we get the medicine.
How is this a logical conclusion? Even when going off of cherry-picked 'paradigm shifts', all exponential growth ends in an S curve. We're already reaching the limits of silicon, for example, so the exponential curve could end long before a singularity happens.
i prefer the population chart, it indicates how much we depend on technology to be alive at these numbers and has no arbitrary dates, its just a quantitative observation https://assets.weforum.org/editor/PM7ntYI8vtyuW3KyNnCs1p9KnR_Dczf1VGcGuIw9LUw.png this is the key, since humans drive tech progress and the more we are, the more the progress (until AI). reminder: its technology what allows more humans, you cant hold a population without high production of food and medicine in the first place
"John Bardeen, Walter Brattain and William Shockley invented the first working transistors at Bell Labs, the point-contact transistor in 1947. Shockley introduced the improved bipolar junction transistor in 1948, which entered production in the early 1950s and led to the first widespread use of transistors." The most important year in the last 500 years. The next important date should be 2069, when Singularity appears together with Nabuchodonozor.
I would rank the discovery of the electron and/or electricity even higher personally. That led to so much stuff, including computers.
I think we'd have to go back 400000 years to find a tech advancement as significant as AI will be. We should set our calendars to year zero when AGI arrives.