Artfully written as always and I love seeing more positive pro-AI stuff out there, but I somewhat disagree with
@danshipper on the conclusions of this (maybe dangerous to disagree publicly with my CEO, but I know he'll be cool with it :-).
I don't expect humans to always be in the driving seat BUT I am also optimistic like Dan is, because I don't think machines overtaking us will be that bad.
I would call my position something like "jagged free lunch":
- machines will be superhuman at some things, subhuman at others
- to the extent machines are better than us at some things it's because the environment they "live in" rewards those things i.e. math benchmarks
- machines will eventually be capable of beating humans at everything BUT only at a cost surpassing human salaries and latency
- this is because it will cost so much and take so much time to evaluate fuzzy tasks with machines that it will be quicker and cheaper to use human intuition / experience
- there are no free lunches in evolution, given a fixed energy + raw material input humans already make mostly the right tradeoffs in intelligence vs heuristics
Essentially it costs so much to brute force all the available options with compute to simulate reality that it is irreducibly cheaper to just "live in" reality and let market forces / physics 'teach' you the right heuristics. One day robots will live here with us but will be subject to the same scaling laws biological intelligence is.
Adam Curtis was gave a typically Curtisian interview to @DeanKissick for @vice
I read a lot of it as confession
I'm not sure Curtis realized...
...then I wrote down some thoughts
🧵 (1/12)
https://t.co/OOGIMzuVKK
No smoking gun, but the preponderance of evidence points to smartphones, not economics, as the culprit for the global drop in fertility:
• In the US and UK, births fell first and fastest in areas that got 4G earliest
• Birth rates were stable in the US, UK and Australia until 2007; in France and Poland until 2009; in Mexico and Indonesia until 2012; in Ghana, Nigeria and Senegal until 2013-15
Each of these inflection points matches local smartphone adoption (see picture).
• The younger the age group, the sharper the drop.
• in-person socialising among young adults is dropping. In SK, by 50% in 20 years
• Sexual dysfunction is higher among heavy social media user
• Effect is largest in culturally traditional societies — Middle East, Latin America, sub-Saharan Africa
• Decline holds across countries hit hard by GFC 2008 and those not hit, fast-growing and not growing.
Excellent again @jburnmurdoch.
https://t.co/RYEMXD2bRM
@deankissick@VICE (12/12)
I wrote ~2,000 words saying this
Then noticed I'd written a print essay about a print man for a public that has the disposition of neither
I published it anyway. The alternative was not writing
Full piece: https://t.co/DJwICwFK3u
Adam Curtis was gave a typically Curtisian interview to @DeanKissick for @vice
I read a lot of it as confession
I'm not sure Curtis realized...
...then I wrote down some thoughts
🧵 (1/12)
https://t.co/OOGIMzuVKK
I was really looking forward to, after originally reading this, Human as Media part 2 and 3 (Adaptation of Mass Media & The Extension of Human)
Many of the themes of 2 have probably now been covered by your other work, but 3 and particularly the Post-Singularity planned parts feel they'd be very interesting and relevant given recent technological speed