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PaperclipPerfector  4d ago (text post)   16355 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 12, 2025

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Humanity as a whole wants good AI, but the attempts are split several ways and don’t individually have the ability to capture profit to sustain high burn rates when cheaper or free alternatives exist.

Guess what, governments exist to solve coordination failures. Even if yankees cannot solve the problem of 'how develop AI if it's going to cost billions and capturing the profit is hard', you can bet the Chinese Communist Party is going to bite the bullet, commission another few nuclear power plants and let the Huawei Ascends that they can't export bc US banned it be used for this purpose by the most promising companies.

Because they need AI. US needs it to and they'd probably also be able to

The rest of your comment is basically irrelevant fluff.

If we knew how good AI will be, the conversation would be a lot clearer. If AI plateaus at 2x human intelligence, then I doubt most people would claim it could trivially solve everything.

How do you even 'define' intelligence. If we go by IQ estimates, 2x human intelligence is von Neumanns by the server rack. And you can experiment on such much more easily to figure out how to organise them.

I'd say that would solve a lot of problems, if not majority of them, and create a few new ones.

Say a devops AI that auto-pushes code assumes humans will follow best-practices, but they don’t, and this results in a bug in a critical piece of infrastructure that causes a power outage for 12 hours.

With AI you can do an arbitrary amount of testing pretty easily so no, that won't happen.

All in all, I am not convinced at all.

How do you even 'define' intelligence. If we go by IQ estimates, 2x human intelligence is von Neumanns by the server rack

It is said that you have to be twice as smart to debug a clever piece of code as you have to be to write that piece of code. By that metric, an AI twice as smart as von Neumann would be capable of debugging a program that von Neumann was just barely capable of writing.

With AI you can do an arbitrary amount of testing pretty easily so no, that won't happen.

Lol. Lmao, even.

Is "do an arbitrary amount of testing, including testing the annoying boundaries with poorly documented external systems" where the incentives will point? I would bet against.

Is "do an arbitrary amount of testing, including testing the annoying boundaries with poorly documented external systems" where the incentives will point? I would bet against.

Incentives are aligned towards people getting what software they desire. If they're going to have more workforce, more work will be done to make systems safe.

Wouldn't this predict that large companies with huge customer bases and large, skilled dev teams (e.g. apple, google) would ship high-quality, stable, working software?

Trump also wheeled out the pork barrel for Ai, maybe less than the Chinese will, maybe there will be more pork later.

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