The Singularity - Official Thread

[Yuli Ban]

[Yuli Ban]

[Tadasuke]

Looking at this robot trying to do things, I don't see how possibly the Singularity could be near. You have to have huge amounts of belief to think that it's near.

[Yuli Ban]

Ironically, this is one of the first things I've seen in a while that gives me a hint of evidence that transformative AI might actually be imminent. Combining LLMs with robotics has been a long time coming, but seeing it in action is more impressive than I expected. This is EXACTLY what we've been in need of to reach that world constantly promised all throughout the previous decade.

[Nero]

Looking at this robot trying to do things, I don't see how possibly the Singularity could be near. You have to have huge amounts of belief to think that it's near.

https://www.mobilephonehistory.co.uk/li ... phones.jpg

This is what a mobile phone looked like in 1992.

https://cdn.mos.cms.futurecdn.net/zcSpz ... tYG9L5.gif

This a mobile phone in the year 2022.

https://qph.cf2.quoracdn.net/main-qimg- ... cc6d0.webp

This is what a phone looked like 30 years before the mobile phones in the first image existed.

The Singularity is around 30 years away based on most estimates, and seeing how massively technology can change within that timeframe you should put less stock in what you see now and more in what could be next.

[Tadasuke]

https://www.mobilephonehistory.co.uk/li ... phones.jpg

This is what a mobile phone looked like in 1992.

https://cdn.mos.cms.futurecdn.net/zcSpz ... tYG9L5.gif

This a mobile phone in the year 2022.

https://qph.cf2.quoracdn.net/main-qimg- ... cc6d0.webp

This is what a phone looked like 30 years before the mobile phones in the first image existed.

The Singularity is around 30 years away based on most estimates, and seeing how massively technology can change within that timeframe you should put less stock in what you see now and more in what could be next.

Yes, I know how have phones evolved. My dad was one of the first people in our city to have used a mobile phone and it was big. Now the cheapest phones have 3 GB of RAM, which was a lot for a desktop PC 20 years ago.

But still, I don't see how androids will be widely sold in the near future. Humanoid robots have been promised since at least 1939 and they are still not here. I remember how excited we were in 2010, but not much came out of it. My friend was skeptical from the beginning and he was right - not much progress has been accomplished since then. Helpful, dexterous, humanoid robots will happen one day, but not soon.



This dishwasher unloading robot from 2010 is on a similar level to that 2022 robot above:


The Singularity is a time when such robots are vastly superior to unaugmented biological humans in every way, can do everything better, no matter what task it is and can think for themselves. I feel like there was more progress in such robots between 1998 and 2010 than between 2010 and 2022. If the Singularity was indeed 30 years away, we would witness greater and greater change happening in shorter and shorter time.

[Yuli Ban]

Exactly my thoughts as well


AGI, even TAI, is going to see the machines do things we just can't fathom as humans. Things that will seem brilliant, like paths we could have traversed if only we were capable of seeing them.

[Yuli Ban]

[Yuli Ban]

https://www.mobilephonehistory.co.uk/li ... phones.jpg

This is what a mobile phone looked like in 1992.

https://cdn.mos.cms.futurecdn.net/zcSpz ... tYG9L5.gif

This a mobile phone in the year 2022.

https://qph.cf2.quoracdn.net/main-qimg- ... cc6d0.webp

This is what a phone looked like 30 years before the mobile phones in the first image existed.

The Singularity is around 30 years away based on most estimates, and seeing how massively technology can change within that timeframe you should put less stock in what you see now and more in what could be next.

Yes, I know how have phones evolved. My dad was one of the first people in our city to have used a mobile phone and it was big. Now the cheapest phones have 3 GB of RAM, which was a lot for a desktop PC 20 years ago.

But still, I don't see how androids will be widely sold in the near future. Humanoid robots have been promised since at least 1939 and they are still not here. I remember how excited we were in 2010, but not much came out of it. My friend was skeptical from the beginning and he was right - not much progress has been accomplished since then. Helpful, dexterous, humanoid robots will happen one day, but not soon.



This dishwasher unloading robot from 2010 is on a similar level to that 2022 robot above:


The Singularity is a time when such robots are vastly superior to unaugmented biological humans in every way, can do everything better, no matter what task it is and can think for themselves. I feel like there was more progress in such robots between 1998 and 2010 than between 2010 and 2022. If the Singularity was indeed 30 years away, we would witness greater and greater change happening in shorter and shorter time.

I just don't know if I can agree, because "greater and greater change happening in shorter and shorter time" is exactly what is happening. But I think I know why it doesn't feel that way.

1) Technology progresses faster than society. We're using last decade's bleeding edge technology right now, but the bleeding edge is starting to get further and further away from what society is comfortable with. As I posited in the Man of 2022 thread, we already have a substantial amount of proto-transhumanist augmentation available right now, though largely noninvasive. But even if it only cost $500 to use the whole package, how many people would protest? How wonky would it look? Likewise I've been mentioning that AI will render modeling jobs obsolete ever since 2019. I've nothing against models. It's just an obvious job to replace. GANs and transformers alike long since passed the point when such is feasible. So why are there still models? Because We Live In A Society and societal evolution doesn't move anywhere near as fast as technology.

2) We're coming out of an inter-industrial period, what I call "foundational futurism." It's a tragic irony of history that the Third Industrial Revolution petered out right as we arrived at Y2K, the year most associated with the Future, but that's the way it goes sometimes. We've been here before, in the 1830s-1860s and the 1920s-1940s. During these inter-industrial periods, the visible rate of progress seems to slow despite the fact technology continues progressing in the background. I often hear that penicillin was invented in the 1920s so this claim is bogus. Except penicillin wasn't widely used until World War 2. It was invented and couldn’t seem to escape the lab until it did. This is just the fact of technological development. Industrial revolutions are caused by multiple technologies creating a feedback loop of economic growth and further technological advances. At some point, that loop breaks down and the rate of new technologies reaching mass commercial availability seems to dwindle, instead focusing on refinements of what came before and experiments of what's to come.

The Fourth Industrial Revolution is the one where we'll see transformative AI arise, as I feel it already has started to. Give it a few more years and you'll see what I mean.

[TrueAnimationFan]

"The artificial intelligence system disappears...in a quest to search for more."

What's that supposed to mean? That it launched itself into space to look for other alien civilizations that collectively uploaded themselves into their AI systems? That it concluded existence is meaningless and then shut itself off?

[Yuli Ban]

It's Demis Hassabis suddenly saying "ten years" after spending so long saying "several decades" that gives me pause.

[Yuli Ban]

"The artificial intelligence system disappears...in a quest to search for more."

What's that supposed to mean? That it launched itself into space to look for other alien civilizations that collectively uploaded themselves into their AI systems? That it concluded existence is meaningless and then shut itself off?

I always interpreted it as the AI desiring to break free of Earthly limitations and explore the cosmos to maximize understanding. Of course, it's really just a speculative analog of Creation.

[Yuli Ban]

The Average Joe, the kind of person that thinks something like the Oculus Rift CV1 is still 100 years away, is going to get reamed.

[Nanotechandmorefuture]

The Average Joe, the kind of person that thinks something like the Oculus Rift CV1 is still 100 years away, is going to get reamed.

As is tradition. Hell the Average Joe refuses to listen about developments in things like the digital dollar and more that are happening right now if you told them about it. As unfortunate as it is it is a very hard truth I had to accept that a lot of these folks are just dumb. All the internet and tech did was expose how bad the situation is with dumb people.

[Yuli Ban]

The way I see it, the first proto-AGI will arrive as soon as an AI lab manages cross PaLM, DALL-E 2, Jukebox, and MuZero. The strength of the model doesn't matter since we're talking about generality. It could be GPT-2, CLIP, MuseNet, and AlphaGo in terms of strength, though stronger is better.

This can't be more than a few years away. All the pieces are already there.

The Average Joe can be forgiven for not being prepared. I don't think anyone is.

[Yuli Ban]

[Ozzie guy]

More and more I think we are living in a very specific time period where we can both actually observe exponential growth in AI e.g. GPT3 vs GPT4 (when it is released) but secondly at the same time AI feels really slow.

It is realistic to say there is a good chance GPT 4 will be twice as good as GPT3 so basically one doubling in two years akin to moores law. Yet at the same time AI progress feels really slow whist we live it, waiting 2 + years is a drag and like GPT3, GPT4 will still be miles away from human level AGI.

[funkervogt]

A cool interview about the rise of AGI.

[Yuli Ban]

[Yuli Ban]