It’s grifting, pure and simple. All those things may be possible but Sam Altman is spewing this line of bullshit to keep the venture capital flowing into his company.
Exactly. As a SW engineer, I don't know how far we are from an AGI exactly, but I am confident enough Altman and openAi have no idea where to even start.
As a software engineer that works in AI, the "breakthrough" we've made is in proving that LLM's can perform well at scale, and that hallucinations aren't as big a problem as initially thought. Most tech companies didn't do what OpenAI did because hallucinations are brand-damaging, whereas OpenAI didn't give a fuck. In the next few years, all existing AI systems will be through LLM's, and probably as good at ChatGPT.
We might make more progress now that researchers and academics see the value in LLM's, but my weakly held opinion is that it's mostly surrounded by hype.
We're nowhere near what most would call AGI, although to be blunt, I don't think the average person on here could truly tell you what that looks like without disagreeing with AI researchers.
In Venice he never claims that he will be the one to do these things, at least in that tweet he doesn't claim to be the one that's going to do those things.
I'm not sure what the line about creating new realities means. I assume he means VR and not that AI is going to give us the ability to access hyperspace or something.
No no, they're desperately looking for that, because gating infinite abundance away from the plebs will be amazing for quarterly profits and entertainment! Think of all the reality shows you can make by pitting the poor against themselves!
Abundance is already here, tons of food are destroyed and thrown out when they accidentally make too much while people are starving, there's no money in abundance, it's the artificial lack of supply that keeps prices high and profits soaring.
It's enough to look at how much stuff is available in a supermarket, or in the average, home, to know we live in an age of abundance. The problem is, is that abundance is not shared, but hoarded.
We have enough food to feed the world, we have enough production for everyone in the world to have a smartphone and internet access and electricity. We can make clothes for everyone, we can home everyone. We have enough healthcare for everyone.
By an objective measure, we have abundance, we have enough. The world is just severely mismanaging our resources and the distribution of them. Because the economy doesn't work for humans, instead humans work for the economy.
An issue with this tweet is that we already have the capacity to do a lot. We have the technology to provide healthy and diverse diets for the entire planet and fit a cities worth of farming inside a few city blocks (vertical hydroponics/aeroponics). We have the ability to create electricity in a dozen different renewable ways. We have the ability to desalinate water creating nearly infinite fresh water, we have enough square footage in the world to easily house everyone. We have stellar education systems that we could hand out to the entire world.
Why don't we do it? Well, all these things cost money. But the issue is, there also exists staggering amounts of money across the world. The panama papers revealed just a fraction of the wealth being hoarded by just a fraction of the wealthiest people in the world (and most implicated in the panema papers weren't even too crazy, like soccer stars and business owners). There's exists tens to hundreds of trillions of dollars of wealth created by the world just floating around in billionaires bank accounts and in the coffers of world powers.
So it's not an issue of abundance coming in the near future, we have it here on earth right now.
Well, I am convinced we currently have no idea how an AGI could be made. It shouldn't be a HW issue since it is possible to have a human brain worth of computing power in a small cluster. So it could be near impossible or we may be one great shower thought away, there is no way to know.
You're not exactly wrong but at the same time we all benefited from the invention of say electricity or computing. If they do invent fusion or something I'm sure we'll get benefits. Maybe not free power but at the very least that allow us to buy it.
With access to that much power we could desalinate seawater on an industrial scale or power some of the carbon capture technologies. It will make things better.
It's very rational, it's always been mocked and looked down upon to be optimistic. But through the ages it has been proven to be true that we achieve much more than we imagine.
However the pessimism built in to most people probably helps this drive and is actually a good thing.
I believe the first paragraph except colonizing space, at least not without hundreds of years of new technology at the human pace of invention.
We humans cannot even minimally adequately care for one another or this habitat, the one we evolved from, the most accommodating, self-correcting(to a point), resilient habitat that humanity will EVER know by far, and we've been fucking this easy situation up like breathing. Earth isn't even the "enter your name" part of the interstellar civilization test, that would be colonizing our local moon. No, failing the Earth test is basically taking the test to the bathroom assuming it to be toilet paper.
Everything else in non-multigenerational reach will be completely and totally unforgiving. Even in the best circumstances, one person going stir crazy if we're talking about sending real people can literally get everyone else killed, one major failure everybody dead, one major accident everybody dead.
Sorry, I know most of us are deluded into believing salvation comes from reckless attempts at ready fire aim growth, but if we don't get this world fully squared away from the consequences of our reckless actions, find homeostasis and successfully meet the needs of the humans here on easy mode Earth, the idea that we can make colonies of hundreds or thousands on our Moon/Titan/Mars is a bad joke.
We can send 5-20 HIGHLY TRAINED perfect specimens to Mars or Titan to plant a flag and grow potatoes for a few years, and I'm all for that as a human rallying achievement, we really need one of those, but that isn't the same thing as developing a true, sustainable presence on another world. We'll have either long since decimated this habitat or pulled out a miracle of finding equilibrium with it long before we're ready for that.
I believe none except colonising space... The others are so far off that we don't even know for sure if they're even possible, what's going to go wrong or whether we're looking in the complete wrong direction, meanwhile you're dismissing the only realistic one in the next 250 years because we're close enough that we actually know how hard it is.
There's something to be said about chasing after things that are impossible as the possible seems too hard, but I'm not enough of a philosopher for that.
Knowing how hard something is can be a larger barrier than not knowing. But the main barrier preventing space colonies is the same thing preventing ocean colonies — "Why?". What motivation is there to settle space? Exploration and experimentation can be done for motivation of seeing if we can, but settling needs known payoff both for the settlers and the funders.
Asteroid mining is the only current suggested motivation for such a thing. And it's very possible that by the time we figure out asteroid capture, we won't need humans present for that work.
If it weren't for the thieving class and the people who fall for their bullshit, I'm convinced we'd be having serious discussions about what it means to live in a post-scarcity society by now.
Hopium. There's far too much "evil" force in this world for there to ever be an edan or unity. Overall chaos is what got us to our current state of humanity. Chaos will always be.
Don't read that as me saying humans are shit though. It's more like humans don't want to take their lack of "power" seriously. Which is natural or whatever... I know it all sounds negative, but I don't mean for it to sound negative. Chaos is the only constant, order comes from it, but chaos is always dominant from the present moment to the future. You can't stop the universe, including human society from changing and growing. You can learn about it and create from it but it always owns you. No matter who you are.
None of the things mentioned here that we could achieve would require an absence of evil or need the whole world to cooperate. Hell we've been doing the last one for quite some time in the form of books, movies and video games.
Never is a long time. The common people are tiring of what capitalism has wrought and the ongoing drive to force people to do more for less and discard those who are sufficiently useful. Our appetite to revolt may well be fueled by this push. A greater danger is the tendency for successful revolutions to turn into serial dictatorships, each overthrowing the previous one until everyone is dead tired of war. France took around a century to sort itself out from monarchy, and today is still capitalist.
On the other hand, the climate crisis might drive us to extinction, and if it doesn't, is estimated (by the few who dare to estimate it) to reduce the population to below 500 million. If we end up migrant tribes again, we might be able to tackle the trends towards feudalism early.
And the climate crisis is not the only great filter we're being confronted with. Personally, I don't hope anymore so much as look soberly at where we are now and try to guess at where we'll go. And for now the best we can do in the US is hope we can obstruct and delay the steady march towards autocratic fascism until the desperados running the Republican party can't keep it together anymore.
I know that's not inspiring, but if someone is saying something to inspire us, they're taking us for marks.
I don't disagree with any of these things, we just don't know when they will come to be and its going to be a rough ride. Old and new systems fighting, the history and the future all happening at once. We are experiencing something that has never happened to any species on earth, or maybe in the entire universe ever, so we're flying blind, ready or not.
Ugh. So many places in the world already have abundance that is hard to imagine; but that's only the case because of extreme hoarding of resources and wealth.
It's a character flaw called "wishful belief" - that is, failure to distinguish between what you predict that'll happen and what you hope that'll happen.