22 Comments
User's avatar
Opinion AI's avatar

This feels right. We are past the easy hype stage and now in the messy part where power, jobs, and politics all clash. The tech is moving fast, but the real fight now is about who gets to shape the rules around it.

bartb's avatar

“Free thinkers are those willing to use their mind without prejudice and without fearing to understand things that clash with their own customs, privileges, or beliefs.”

- Leo Tolstoy

Joe's avatar

I’d be very interested to hear your take on the comments by Peter Girnus. Not sure how there is any enthusiasm to be had when such a future awaits. https://www.threads.com/@ryanshrime/post/DVgcrQkjwdN?xmt=AQF0sSukKZSPVSLz8HiiXuVOCfZksGmxivUE_pa6oZ7LzNasWC-aWBgCMwJObvEoL63ZbWc&slof=1

Shank's avatar

David, You're practically screaming what we all come to feel. The atmosphere is changing so fast culture is lagging behind. We are also seeing that the structures we have designed may not hold our systems in place. The direction isn't doom but it is real, if we don't find a way to face this as a community we will surely be as unprepared as poor Frodo. Keep up the screaming!

Greg Steckler's avatar

Messy Middle is right.... I think maybe the Drake Equation needs a new integer (civilizations that survive making it into AI). At first I agreed with Dario's position on guardrails for his AI and disagreed with David's. But it looks like its out of the bag everywhere (they used it anyway in multiple flavors) to say nothing of China's stance. I'm not so sure having humans in that decision loop is going to avoid disaster anyway. Missiles are flying...working out a solution by humans is not a good use of time.

DK's avatar

Illuminating article as always!

Im someone who canceled chatGPT pro this week. My gut reaction was “F them! They ain’t getting my data!” I was team Anthropic all day.

But now, I’m rethinking it. The lines are blurred

Also think it’s funny that the”red” side wants more AI. I feel like their jobs and livelihoods are most at risk. I work in tech and am constantly at the cutting edge so I’ll be ok…hopefully lol

Emma-Jayne Punter's avatar

Your articles, knowledge and writing bend my brain and open up my mind to ideas I never even knew about. Thank you for that. Some of what you say I don’t fully understand but it’s a learning journey of expanding my mind ✌🏻

Genie Arms's avatar

Here i’m in my own existential battle, i thought it was just me.

https://geniearms.substack.com/p/the-cracked-mirror

Newton Cheng's avatar

I've noticed as things get "messier", an increasing number of my colleagues who's jobs may be affected bury their heads further in the sand. I take this as a coping mechanism - the potential change coming is overwhelmingly hard and scary to fathom. I fear this causes a "hollowing out" effect on the conversation where the number (and diversity) of voices and perspectives shared drops.

SendingLightFTHG's avatar

I’ve been following you for a short time now, and I find your writing, both interesting and eloquent. 🌿

Cognitive Friction's avatar

So, I've noticed that everyone assumes that surpassing is the only possible outcome and nobody even tries to imagine a reality in which we fix our deficiencies and upgrade our meatware to compete with machine intelligence.

Why is it like this? Where are the dreamers? Why are we all buying into the narrative that there is a chasm and it can only grow?

Dan's avatar

Yeah I expected to see more positive hype related to the seemingly more possible scifi future coming, but there is a list of people waiting for neuralink implants. I think hype will grow when people see someone paralyzed walking again, it'll get harder to call it the mark of the beast lol

David Shapiro's avatar

This is categorically wrong. Look up the transhumanists.

Cognitive Friction's avatar

Yeah, I know about transhumanism but it's not what I'm talking about - H+ nowadays seems to heavily depend on the technology - be it AI, drugs, hardware implants, you name it - so even more reliance on tools.

What I mean is the opposite direction, self-improvement that decreases dependence.

Diane  DiSerafino's avatar

I would love to know what you are talking about if not transhumanism. I’ve not heard of any alternative that would upgrade our “meatware” other than going the extropian route…

(I’m not a scientist, just someone doing research for a YA dystopian novel involving AI and transhumanism. I am very curious about your comment.)

Cognitive Friction's avatar

I’ll try to write an article that will attempt to clearly describe the idea, because although I have some intuitive understanding, it doesn’t seem that easy to communicate. Need to think harder on how to put it into words properly.

David Shapiro's avatar

Genetic engineering is still transhumanism.

Cognitive Friction's avatar

How about engineering better learning processes, without genetic modifications?

Anyway, what you are saying is actually more evidence for me that the idea I am thinking about doesn't even exist as a concept and thus nobody is thinking about it. :)

Mentor of AIO's avatar

I think about that every day. That’s what ISITAS it’s all about. Check it out.

David Shapiro's avatar

There are limits to biology. Nootropics and "brain training" cannot break your biological limits.

Cognitive Friction's avatar

Sure - and what are those limits, precisely?

And are we utilizing what we have in the best way? We already know there are some techniques that reliably and significantly increase the learning capacity: space repetition, forward testing, interdisciplinary learning, etc.

Why not invest much, much more in exploring those areas: more seriously, with a bigger scale?

We also know there are edge cases like some extreme capabilities of savants, maybe understanding them better can also lead to some interesting breakthroughs?

Hardware is one thing, but software is another, as you know. What if our current learning paradigms are an equivalent of O(2^N) brute force algorithms, while O(n^2) is possible?