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PaperclipPerfector  4d ago (text post)   16125 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 19, 2025

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There has been a lot of hype news in robotics + AI lately, as the AI updates just continue to come at a blinding pace. From Tesla/XAI we have the Optimus robot, which I can't tell if this is a major breakthrough or just another marketing splash driven by Elon.

On the other side of the fence, you have Nvidia releasing an open foundational model for robotics and partnering with Disney of all companies to make a droid robot.

You also have Google's I/O, which I haven't had the energy to look into.

With the speed of AI updates and the wars of hype, it's always hard to tell who is actually advancing the frontier. But it does seem that in particular robotics are advancing quite rapidly compared to even a couple of years ago. Personally I think that while automating white collar work is useful and such, AI entering into robotics will be the real game changer. If we can begin to massively automate building things like housing, roads, and mass manufactured goods, all of the sudden we get into an explosive growth curve.

Of course, this is where AGI doomer fears do become more salient, so that's something to watch out for.

Either way, another day, another AI discourse. What do you think of this current crop of news?

Optimus robot

Musk is famous for overpromising and excessively-optimistic timelines. He's basically the Peter Molyneux of tech. I wouldn't take anything he says seriously, unless we see the robot performing household tasks with proof that there isn't someone operating it like a waldo.

If I may AKSHULLY for a moment.

He overpromises and never delivers on schedule...

And then STILL delivers an end result closer to the hype than any of his rivals.

That's been the secret. Hype something up and then deliver (eventually) a product that doesn't live up to the hype but is still better than anything else in its class.

There's yet to be an example I can think of where he made a promise then got beaten by a competitor to delivering on it.

So failing to deliver isn't fatal if nobody else can beat you to delivering.

If you burn billions of dollars trying to deliver something no one even bothers trying to make, then it can very easily prove fatal. It doesn' matter that the competition didn't try to beat him to the Cybertruck, or Semi, or Optimus, if these things are nothing but massive money sinkholes. Also, pretty sure that strictly speaking, Waymo beat him to the Cybercab / Robotaxi.

If you mess it up bad enough, it can even overturn your prior success. If Starship doesn't work out, and the competitors catch up to Falcon in the meantime, that's still pretty fatal for SpaceX.

I mean, that's the whole reason for the hype, isn't it? To make sure you sell a bunch of the thing before people realize its not quite up to snuff. He's a much better salesman than other billionaire founders.

And he's also got a knack for finding ways to squeeze profits out of projects by some lateral thinking:

What to do with unused launch capacity on Falcon? Launch a network of satellites for a globe-spanning internet service. Satellites that need to be replenished regularly. Starlink is a great product in its own right and justifies Falcon launches, so it helps keep SpaceX solvent.

Then he pulled that switcheroo with Twitter by selling it to the AI company, so that even if he never turns a profit on twitter as a service, he's already got a way to profit from the information.

To say nothing of how quickly Grok has become an important part of X's infrastructure.

This is why the claim that Elon is stupid and lucky don't make sense to me. Guy may not play 4d chess, but he's playing speed chess like a grandmaster, making sure his few mistakes don't ruin him by moving faster than his opponents, if only by a split second.

There's yet to be an example I can think of where he made a promise then got beaten by a competitor to delivering on it.

Tesla robotaxi comes to mind. Waymo has been serving customers and steadily increasing its coverage for years now. Musk has been promising autonomous robotaxis since 2019 (initial timeline: 2020) and Waymo launched its Phoenix pilot in 2022.

On the other side of the fence, you have Nvidia releasing an open foundational model for robotics and partnering with Disney of all companies to make a droid robot.

It's not that weird that they're partnering with Disney. When Walt pushed the company to develop animatronics in the 60s their work was groundbreaking. Making the animatronic Lincoln for the world's fair was extremely difficult. They kept running into new engineering problems and having to invent their way out of them. Since then they've sunk huge amounts of money and talent into improving animatronics further. Have you seen some of the most recent Disney animatronics? They're incredibly lifelike, and other companies just can't manage to imitate their quality.

So I figure Disney has a lot of experience, technology, and capital that would be useful for making lifelike robots that are aesthetically pleasing.

Agreed. Imagineering is not a joke.. Nvidia-Disney will have the most expressive robots in different varieties of your favorite characters. Tesla won't stand a chance in the marketing.

Provide me with a relevant C.S. Lewis quote please, old chap.

What might have come of it if the man had been educated - or even brought up in a decent society?

This one?

Hah, referring to Disney?

Olive beat me to it! Here's the full quote, from a letter Lewis wrote to a friend in 1939:

What did you think of Snowwhite and the VII Dwarfs? I saw it at Malvern last week. . . . Leaving out the tiresome question of whether it is suitable for children (which I don’t know and don’t care) I thought it almost inconceivably good and bad—I mean, I didn’t know one human being could be so good and bad. The worst thing of all was the vulgarity of the winking dove at the beginning, and the next worst the faces of the dwarfs. Dwarfs ought to be ugly of course, but not in that way. And the dwarfs’ jazz party was pretty bad. I suppose it never occurred to the poor boob that you could give them any other kind of music. But all the terrifying bits were good, and the animals really most moving: and the use of shadows (of dwarfs and vultures) was real genius. What might not have come of it if this man had been educated—or even brought up in a decent society?

Very awesome quote. “What would CS Lewis think of Disney” now makes me wonder what all the other greats thought of Disney

Lewis actually saw it with Tolkien, who was not a fan either. That article is pretty clickbaity, but even so, I concede that I smile at the thought of Lewis and Tolkien walking into the cinema, watching Snow White, and then complaining to each other all the way back to the pub.

It is crazy to me that most people alive today will be around to see how this - this journey of civilization, this grand process of technological development - ends, or at least moves far, far beyond us. There is a millenarian tension in the air. Paradise or extinction (at least for most people), it seems increasingly clear it will be one or the other.

I have deep emotions seeing you go from an AI-skeptic a few years back to well, this. I'm not quite sure what those emotions are, but they're there.

I’m very flawed, in that I’m often arrogant, prone to making things up, dismissive. But I like to think that when the evidence is there, I can adapt, change my view. The evidence is here - even a simpleton can extrapolate. It’s easy to be scared but, when I am, I think of all the scientists and philosophers and inventors who one day imagined a moment like this, but who never got to see it. That is also a privilege, even if the outcome is a poor one.

I'm certainly not critiquing you for changing your mind! Imagine you had an interlocutor who you respected, yet who had always strongly pushed back against your claims. To have them suddenly adopt them, potentially even more strongly than yourself? That's a bemusing experience to say the least. It's as if the Pope recanted and became a Protestant, if not as drastic.

I am moderately depressed, and often feel shite about how life has been going recently (objectively not bad enough to warrant it). Yet I find strong comfort in knowing that in likely in one of the most interesting periods of human history. Leaving aside the 97 billion deceased anatomically modern humans, I feel a pang of sadness for every visionary, every proto-rationalist, singularitarian who dreamt of a transhumanist future, and yet died before they could see it.

In their honor, I intend to live to see wonders/horrors, and if the former, a lasting solution to every problem I've ever had. If the latter? Barring starving to death, it'll probably be quick and mostly painless. The future could be amazing, and I want to see it unfold. I'm sick of nothing ever happening.

I've been feeling this vibe lately. Humanoid Robots, Starship, and LLMs are the three things that make this feel more like the future than it ever has.

We are SO CLOSE. To being multiplanetary, interacting with computers that pass the turing test for 95% of the population, and finally being able to own a golden retriever without having to sweep every single day.

But it all seems to be hanging on the edge of a knife. Our governments are so obscenely powerful, people are so scared and stupid, weapons continue to become so much more lethal.

At the end of the day I'm just in wait and see mode. Whatever happens happens. I didn't grow powerful enough to meaningfully affect the outcome in time I don't think, so might as well worry about what I can control.

so might as well worry about what I can control.

It feels like a triage problem, doesn't it?

When your emergency center has too many victims to work on them all right away, you quickly assess them all and mark each person with one of 3 (in the original "tri"-age) tags: one group is going to live without your help, one is going to die regardless of your help, and one is borderline enough that they'll die without your help but live with it. You don't help the victims who need the most help, you help the victims where your help does the most good.

There's a bunch of wild possible futures where humanity dies out regardless of what I do, and there's a bunch of wild possible futures where humanity becomes so rich that we all end up fine no matter what I do. I might as well continue to focus on the more mundane possible futures that fall in between those extremes, even as the in-between category (which once felt nearly certain) becomes less and less likely, because the in-between futures are the only ones where my actions would have made a difference.

Yep.

But it starts to drive you (well, ME) a tiny bit insane to have to act 'normal' while you have an acute awareness of the impending moment.

I literally cannot believe that I'm sitting at my desk, at work, while some other dude, in a lab or office somewhere else, is engineering an AI that is going to replace my job or possibly kill me in a few years.

Its like if humanity discovered the massive Egg that Godzilla was about to hatch from. And scientists on analysis estimate that "This thing is going to hatch within 2-10 years, and there's not much we can do about it."

But I have to go back to work and ignore the Godzilla egg and do spreadsheets and contracts and all the stuff that keeps society moving, knowing that unless the hatching fails entirely, none of this will make a damn spit of difference.

Stop there, go no further, turn back now. That is the antilife equation.

I think it helps me to be old enough to have become aware of the seriousness of the Cold War before the end of the Cold War. I still remember the library shelves where little-me found a book explaining Mutually Assured Destruction, warhead and missile counts, warhead blast radii, etc. We didn't know about all the actual close calls yet, but there was enough there to make it quite clear that at any moment I could be 45 minutes away from incineration, with so little I could do about it that there wasn't even any point to anxiety.

In an objective sense this is much worse than that, because even an all-out nuclear exchange would have left us (well, humanity, anyway; everyone I knew personally would also have been incinerated) with billions of survivors and a viable (at least in some countries) civilization to rebuild from, whereas if Superintelligence actually turns out to be obtainable while Friendliness remains distant and Corrigibility remains intractable then that's the end of that. But for my subjective well-being I think it's good that my reaction to a bit of creeping existential dread is "Hey, I remember you. Long time no see."

I like my job, but I think it’s all about not living through it. I take solace in the things that I hope will still matter to me no matter what.

It is crazy to me that most people alive today will be around to see how this - this journey of civilization, this grand process of technological development - ends, or at least moves far, far beyond us.

Maybe you're right, but there are plenty of times in history where people have felt this way before, and most of those examples I can think of are from long before I was born. Most recently, the Atomic Scientists would have you believe we've been on a knife-edge of nuclear armageddon -- maybe they're right, but never materialized during the Cold War. Or you could go back and look at any number of doomsday cults, even including early Christians anxiously awaiting Christ's return in their lifetimes.

The pattern has held long enough that I'd personally discourage making any huge life changes assuming it won't matter.

maybe they're right, but never materialized during the Cold War.

I mean, if they were right, then in most timelines, a ton of humans died/were never born, and thus it is just more probable that you were born into the timeline where we narrowly avoided the doomsday scenario.

Or you could go back and look at any number of doomsday cults, even including early Christians anxiously awaiting Christ's return in their lifetimes.

My issue here is that we can see and interact with the 'messiah' this time. There are compelling arguments for why it will keep getting smarter. And if it gets smarter, there are plausible ways it can wipe out decent swaths of humanity.

I will grant that it is almost impossible to take anyone completely seriously because in both the scenario where we get Utopia AND the scenario where we get annihilated, nobody will care about the accuracy of the predictions that led up to it, so the incentive to be truthful and honest is minimal.

Just be cautious about normalcy bias, when things have been getting rapidly weirder for a while now.

the incentive to be truthful and honest is minimal.

Except to the extent we can avoid doom through correct perception and action.

Agreed. Hence I generally support the Rationalist project, hopeless as it seems.

Yeah, a lot of contradictory thought patterns emerge if I ruminate about the future more than like 2 years out.

Should I live as conservatively, frugally and healthily as possible to ensure I make it to there in good shape, or should I be more reckless and try to enjoy life as much as possible since it could all end? (obviously if EVERYBODY does the latter, we might not make it there at all).

Assuming we survive, are we bound for a future of exploring the stars and colonizing new worlds, or do we get stuffed in VR experience machines that satisfy every psychological desire we have without going anywhere? Will I even have a choice?

Is there any point in breathlessly following every notable development in the AI/Robotics space to try and guess when the big moment will arrive, or would it be more constructive and mentally healthy to divorce almost entirely from it and just read escapist fiction all the time so I don't worry about something I can't really control?

Should I continue to behave as though I expect society to persist into the next century and thus be very concerned about e.g. birth rates, pollution, government's fiscal policies, and/or immigration policies? Or does none of this matter in 10-15 years, and thus I should just do the bare minimum to keep things running but hey, let the kids do what they want in the meantime. The AI can fix the mess later.

It is in my nature to prepare, both mentally and financially, for things to go south. I don't buy the hype and promises without skepticism, but I can't deny that every 6 months for the past, what, 3 years? The SOTA models have demonstrated new capabilities that check another box off my "is it smarter than humans?" list. The temptation to just give up 'trying' and go with the flow is strong.

A bit of optimism, I do believe that I'm young and healthy enough that I'm likely going to be around when we reach Longevity Escape Velocity, if the AGI stuff never fully manifests we've got all the pieces to fix most age-related problems in humans so as to give us functional immortality by 2050. Which will create a whole host of new and exciting issues if the AGI isn't already in charge.

I'm not entirely sure I believe this but the bear case isn't that hard to articulate.

We hit the top of the S-curve for LLM's and they merely become very useful tools instead of ushering in the singularity or obviating human labor. Frontier research starts stagnating as a result of having picked all the low-hanging fruit / the competency crisis / failure of higher ed / loss of state capacity / pick your favourite boogeymen and life in 2050 looks about as similar to 2025 as life in 2025 looks about as similar to 2000. This hypothetical world is probably worse for the median westerner compared to 2025 owing to some combination of immigration / climate / financialisation etc etc and the path of civilization doesn't look great without some sort of technological salvation but it's unlikely that any of these issues will be back-breaking in one generation.

Re preparation: it's interesting to me that a lot of people's reaction to millenarism is to make life choices that would be very dumb in any world where Nothing Happens. Assuming you're already reasonably happy with your current life, liquidating your job and savings seems to me to have low upside (how much happier is burning all your bridges to be a hedonist really going to make you?) and very high downside (I can see lots of worlds where having a decade or more of savings gets you through the worst of AI societal upheaval, and of course if Nothing Happens your life is knocked significantly off-track).

This is kind of where I'm at personally, I still save a large amount of my income even though I'm also not quite sure if life will still look the same in 25 or 50 years. In any world where it does look similar I'm set, I'm more prepared for any medium-level scenario where investments are still useful in getting through the transition period or retain relevance post-transformation, and in worlds where life becomes so good or so bad that property and index funds become worthless there really nothing I could have done anyways, liquidating everything to do drugs or travel doesn't seem like it has a great ROI when I'm already broadly content with my current life.

As a side note: why are you bullish on LEV? It's my understanding as a complete medical layman that we've pretty much made zero progress on life extension. We're much better at keeping the very young, mothers in childbirth, the unlucky (genetic diseases, trauma, infection, disease etc) and the ill-and-probably-should-be-dead elderly alive, but modern technology hasn't really meaningfully moved the quality-adjusted lifespan of the average healthy person afaik.

As a side note: why are you bullish on LEV? It's my understanding as a complete medical layman that we've pretty much made zero progress on life extension. We're much better at keeping the very young, mothers in childbirth, the unlucky (genetic diseases, trauma, infection, disease etc) and the ill-and-probably-should-be-dead elderly alive, but modern technology hasn't really meaningfully moved the quality-adjusted lifespan of the average healthy person afaik.

As a medical professional:

This is an accurate statement. Or close enough to not need any hairs split.

That being said, I still expect LEV because:

1)ASI.

  1. Even in the absence of ASI, we're finally making good progress on things like cybernetics, replacement organs and the like. The only organ we can't currently replace, in any meaningful sense, is the brain. For obvious reasons, a transplant wouldn't work. But we are at/close to the point of being able to replace other organs. We've also made progress in applied genetherapy, even if rudimentary. More importantly, enough real money (i.e billions of dollars) is being invested in SENS or regenerative medicine that we can hope to see a difference.

I weakly expect us to achieve LEV in my nominal life expectancy, and probably yours, without ASI. With ASI, that becomes a far stronger expectation, only balanced by the risk of it killing us all.

As a side note: why are you bullish on LEV?

Keeping up with the literature, it seems very much like the 'code' of why aging occurs/effects us the way it does has almost been cracked. In short, the information that our cells use to reproduce starts to accumulate errors from both internal and external causes and their ability to repair those errors diminishes in kind (the more errors to repair, the more strain on the repair system). This leads our cells to A) become cancerous, B) Become senescent (nonfunctional but still 'active'), and C) change/mutate to a different type of cell, which obviously isn't helpful.

Eventually this cascades to full organ failure, and we die.

i.e. the science seems to 'know' the reason we 'get old.' The systems behind it are becoming better understood, and now the hunt is on for various methods or drugs or therapies that can trigger or reinforce natural repair systems or otherwise keep the cells reproducing accurately for much longer.

This is an actually tricky question, but a LOT more interest in this area has led to increased funding. It does seem likely that a couple silver bullets might emerge in the near future.

There's the obvious question of "where are the immortal mice?" And I think that's probably the thing that gives me the most doubt. If there's a surefire solution, then labs should be able to demonstrate it by pumping some mice full of it and showing that they just don't die naturally.

But watch out for interventions to extend canine lives. There's clearly something brewing.

And of course. "where are the immortal Billionaires," who could obviously afford any treatment they want, regardless of how experimental or illegal? Although I'd certainly suggest that the Billionaires just hitting their 50's and 60's these days are looking less decrepit than usual.

And I want a Goddamn explanation for how Tom Cruise is still hanging from airplanes in his early 60's. That doesn't invoke Thetans.

However I am reserving some bearishness for the possibility that the whole field is suffering from the current scientific crises where p-hacking, fraud, and failed replications are running rampant. For instance, studies of Blue Zones where extreme human longevity seems to be more common, seems likely to suffer from poor record-keeping, which is to say we can't be sure anyone is really as old as they say.

And that means the information gleaned from studying them will be inherently flawed. This might have ripple effects on the field's validity, if their model of 'extreme' longevity (and thus the metrics they're chasing) are on shaky grounds.

But the motivation to solve this issue is huge, and AI drug discovery is already a thing, so I'd expect some breakthroughs to emerge relatively soon. Maybe we get those immortal mice.

and in the meantime there are definitely a number of smaller interventions that, when done consistently, can up your chances of keeping healthy long enough to survive until aging reversal becomes feasible.

Interesting, thanks.

The current evidence seems to align with my preconceptions that absolutely nothing has happened so far for humans, although I wasn't aware of that dog trial which does seem promising. Perhaps it's true that AI will lead to further innovation in the space, but personally I'd at least like to see some immortal mice before I start hoping to overcome the human condition.

Its not that 'absolutely nothing' has happened, but more that every advance has been marginal, so even if you follow ALL the best advice, you're getting an extra 10-15% of extra lifespan at best.

If you want to see the absolute extreme limit of human longevity science, follow Bryan Johnson.

Should I continue to behave as though I expect society to persist into the next century and thus be very concerned about e.g. birth rates, pollution, government's fiscal policies, and/or Or does none of this matter in 10-15 years, and thus I should just do the bare minimum to keep things running but hey, let the kids do what they want in the meantime. The AI can fix the mess later.

I have the same doubts. It’s hard not to care, because for now the problems still exist. It will take solving them to end those concerns.

As for the rest of life, we brought some things forward and are probably living a little faster. There are things I want to do and experience, but most are regular life milestones. Going full hedonist and spending all the money / becoming a drug / sex / gambling / food addict doesn’t seem to make the people who do it happy, end of the world or not.

It’s hard not to care, because for now the problems still exist. It will take solving them to end those concerns.

Add on that there's so many people I care about who are just living life without much awareness of what appears to be on the horizon... and it feels literally impossible to explain to them why they should perhaps care a bit about what we're seeing. There's so many disparate chapters of lore I'd have to catch them up on so they can see the whole picture like I do, I'd look like the crazed conspiracy theorist with red thread until they finally got up to speed and it clicked for them too... if it ever does.

Bit lonely being unable to bridge the gap on a topic that I find important. Hence why I'm here.

There are things I want to do and experience, but most are regular life milestones. Going full hedonist and spending all the money / becoming a drug / sex / gambling / food addict doesn’t seem to make the people who do it happy, end of the world or not.

There's wisdom in that, but I can think of certain things I could be indulging in that would ABSOLUTELY make me happier, and I would do more of them if my time preference where about 5-10% higher.

One thought that springs forth recently: If I quit my job and sold my house and everything in it, I could afford to buy a decent camper van and then take a year, maybe two to drive around the Country with my dog. And why not? It won't hurt anybody, and I'll rack up a pretty fulfilling experience that will take my mind off the pending event. And that's without touching my own (modest) retirement savings. Which reminds me: What the FUCK am I supposed to with with a 401(k) as someone who is under 40?

Seriously, although I understand the benefit of having a money stash that you can't easily touch, the idea that I will want to keep adding to this pile of money that I will be unable to draw from until I'm in my 60's feels farcical under current expectations. Like, I just do not believe that the future is one where I diligently tap away at a series of steady jobs, watch my savings grow over a couple decades, and then have to draw on that money in old age for a peaceful retirement.

Can someone lay out the path to 2050 where the most likely outcome is that the market grows about 5-7% every year on average, we don't have a debt crisis, or catastrophic event, OR an AI-fueled industrial revolution that pushes things parabolic for a bit, and I, when I hit 67, will be SUPER grateful to my past self for diligently squirreling away U.S. Dollars (rather than betting on BTC, for example) over that whole period.

I will grant, if I cash in all my chips now and the "NOTHING EVER HAPPENS" brigade is right, I'd look very stupid later. And the Gods of Copybook headings have been undefeated for centuries.

But even if 'NOTHING EVER HAPPENS,' there are still enough small happenings that keep piling up that it really seems like the standard assumptions that go into the ol' "Put aside 15% of your pretax income in an index fund and never touch it" advice are not going to hold over the future. I don't think there's a reason to give up on saving entirely, but it suggests one should be taking wilder risks and being much less concerned with historic returns as a guideline for future probable outcomes.

Not that the advice of a random internet stranger should mean anything, but I think you should take the camper trip with your dog.

I would feel duty-bound to wind up some stuff at work before embarking, but depending on how this year proceeds it might seem like a good move. I'm kinda sick of paying bills and being responsible when the world seems geared to go through some serious upheavals, and all my best laid plans could collapse in a week.

Its not even ennui, I enjoy what I do, but the world doesn't seem like its going to give me the outcomes that I've wanted since childhood, no matter how much I ask and work for it.

A good friend of mine is taking a trip through southeast Asia for a month while he's between jobs, and it seems like a helluva fun time. He got to fire off an RPG.

The one romantic prospect that I was sort of excited for has mostly fizzled (I may give it one more shot, but there's not much on the horizon now). Gambling on finding a soulmate while traveling appeals to the romantic inside me. The romantic who has been beaten into a depression by the realities of modern dating.

And you're a BIT more than a 'random internet stranger."

grateful to my past self for diligently squirreling away U.S. Dollars (rather than betting on BTC, for example)

These both sound terrifying to me.

The investment value of BTC is either an underlying "BTC will become so convenient to transact with that everyone will want to keep balances in it" (which looks less likely to happen the longer it goes without happening) or a meta "you can sell your BTC to someone who'll pay even more for it for some reason" (which happens, but can't happen forever without a non-circular reason). The investment value of USD has an underlying "everyone in the US needs some to pay their taxes instead of going to jail", and that's great, but at some point either we're going to get the federal debt under control or we're going to monetize it and dilute your USD to nothing, and I'm not betting on "get the federal debt under control".

an index fund

This is less terrifying. Sure, if the ASI kills everyone and/or mandates a Socialist Utopia then you're wasting a sweet camping-with-the-dog opportunity, but if property rights retain any respect then it'll be good to have equity in a wide enough array of investments to definitely include some companies who'll manage to surf the tidal wave rather than be crushed by it. A crashing dollar is going to hurt stocks but not as badly as it's going to hurt dollars.

Personally, I just wish I knew what to advise my kids. My index funds are at the "can pay for college if they don't go to med school" level, not the "idle rich" level. Even if AI progress levels off below superhuman, it looks like it will level off at somewhere around "can interpolate within the manifold of all existing human knowledge", and how much economic room is there for the vast majority of human knowledge workers in a world like that? Being able to personally push the boundaries of knowledge into previously uncharted territory used to be what you needed to do to get a PhD, not what you needed to do on a regular basis just to remain economically viable.

The investment value of BTC is either an underlying "BTC will become so convenient to transact with that everyone will want to keep balances in it" (which looks less likely to happen the longer it goes without happening) or a meta "you can sell your BTC to someone who'll pay even more for it for some reason" (which happens, but can't happen forever without a non-circular reason).

The Bitcoin Maxi case at this point is that it is digital gold. More fungible and easier to store, and readily convertible to whatever currency you need. I don't buy it all myself, but Bitcoins ongoing survival is proof of something.

And if you think a dollar collapse is pending, then BTC is probably where people flee to in at least the short term.

Personally, I just wish I knew what to advise my kids.

I think I can make a case for NOT following certain paths, but as for actionable "Do this to prosper in the future" advice I am at a loss. Its not like you can just say "Plastics" and nudge them off in the direction of the next big technological gold rush.

10-15 years ago "learn to code" would have been SOLID advice. No longer. I'm increasingly reading that AI models are really good at various parts of the practice of medicine... and SUPPOSEDLY robot surgery is here. So the Med school investment looks a bit questionable.

And as for college funds... why should colleges even be a thing, at least with their current business model, when AIs are generally capable of teaching at the level of even the best professors, across any subject?

Yeah, for Gen Alpha, there is probably NO career advice that previous generations can offer them based on experience other than "wait and see."

Being able to personally push the boundaries of knowledge into previously uncharted territory used to be what you needed to do to get a PhD, not what you needed to do on a regular basis just to remain economically viable.

I can imagine a world where the AI is doing all the knowledge work but keeps giving humans various tasks that it needs to complete in order to push the boundaries of knowledge forward. Tasks that will seem completely nonsensical to the individual performing them but in the aggregate allow the AI to improve things, iteration after iteration, and thereby keep most humans 'employed' and paying them in some currency they can spend with other humans and thus the 'economy' chugs along but in effect everyone on earth is a 'gig worker' who gets tasks assigned to them as needed, and gets rewarded for performance.

A scarier version is that the AI requires you to be Neuralinked up to it so it can inject arbitrary commands into your brain as needed, but also rewards you handsomely for helping out.

That only makes your refusal to let us know what men yearn for but can never admit all the more cruel.

It’s my theory that there is a psychosexual component to male envy. In any case I know I’ll just get flatly disagreed with if I make the case here, and I lack unfalsifiable / objectively compelling and comprehensive evidence. I’ve just always believed it.

What else is there to be envious of, his fucking watch?

And, you can’t take the hassle? That’s new. Although if I have to choose, I much prefer that reason for censoring yourself, than the implication it is to protect our fragile egos and ids. The latter could be interpreted as a challenge, or as passing the buck.

I know posters who use objectively compelling and comprehensive evidence, and they’re all cowards.

Like a candle in the wind - unreliable.

Yeah a lot of Christians I know seem to think it’s the Apocalypse. I disagree but there is that vibe.

Even the Pope seems to, which is interesting.

/r/singularity has been blowing up with Veo's progress in video, with something like this or this being examples.

Clearly a ton of progress has been made here, but I'm still wondering when these will move from merely being able to generate silly short videos to demonstrate "progress", to actually being able to be part of robust production pipelines. Stuff like artwork is much more simple, and still isn't quite ready for primetime (i.e. fully replacing artists).

There's a reason I do expect someone (or a very small team) to produce a feature-length film on a shoestring budget using AI by year's end.

The different modalities were already demonstrated, the only thing that was needed was someone to combine them into an extended, coherent end product.

This one makes it probably an order of magnitude easier. In my previous post I speculated that they could produce 1 minute of usable footage a day and pull it off. Well, now you can get a minute or so of 'usable' footage in two hours, apparently.

Won't be long until you can type a sufficiently detailed prompt into one of these things, pay a couple thousand dollars worth of credits, and it can spit out a whole movie for you.

I find this unlikely. It might happen in a few years if current progress continues but this year is too early. If I arbitrarily set the threshold of a "film" at >75 minutes long, and set some baseline quality standard of say >50 on Metacritic, and stipulate that principle photography must be done entirely through AI (humans doing minor touch-ups would be fine), I think people would be very hard pressed to do that in the very short term. The scaffolding and pipelines don't really exist yet to make that feasible.

In fact, I'm writing this one down in my list of predictions that won't happen to keep track of.

My hedge is that I'm saying its >50%, so not a certainty, but I want to be clear that IF it happens I wasn't caught off-guard and if it doesn't happen (or indeed never happens) I did stick my neck out and will accept the derision.

Because obsessive auteurs (or autists) with time on their hands and the proper tools CAN in fact create amazing works in relatively short time frames. It took Michelangelo 4 years to paint the Sistine Chapel. Would we agree that with modern tools and a few decent assistants, in the current era he could easily knock it out in less than 1?

Bo Burnham produced an acclaimed 87 minute-long special all by his lonesome in just over a year.

A small and dedicated team that animated an 84-minute long film over 5 1/2 years using free tools totaled about 40-50 people working on it but was mostly down to just two guys doing the critical work.

(Incidentally, "Flow" is also what Google is calling their AI video workspace)

So if the AI is sufficiently good to 10x the productivity of the creators, a team of about 5 could probably get something that's Netflix-Worthy (derogatory way to put it, granted) done inside of a year, if they share a vision and have maniacal but competent leadership.

Do we know how good it is at building coherent multi-scene videos? Can I have the same two people in the same room, from a different angle? Ideally in a long continuous shot, but even after a cutover would be amazing. Otherwise, this is pretty limited in utility for entertainment media - maybe commercials.

But either way, it's enough to be a problem for trusting video. It's like the world envisioned in The Truth Machine, in which everyone tells the truth. Everyone becomes highly trusting, and life is good. Only with AI video-gen, it's inverted: everything could be lies, so no one believes anything, so life is terrible. Fun.

If my (extremely amateur) experiences with images is any guide, then it’s extremely bad at permanecense (google tells me this is not a word but I feel like it is).

maybe "continuity" is the word you're looking for?

everything could be lies, so no one believes anything, so life is terrible. Fun.

For most of human history, you didn't believe something unless you saw it yourself or someone you trusted told you about it. Photo and video evidence wasn't a thing. If we lose it, it would be a shame, but I don't think it would make life terrible.

There are ways to mitigate this of course, multiple independent sources. A problem is if you have a large group of people with institutional/cultural power willing to act semi-organically to further lies.

I haven't heard anything one way or the other in terms of building coherent multi-scene videos. This, from my experience, means that it's probably pretty terrible at doing this. If it wasn't, people would be aggressively showing it off.

I did take a gander at a couple of Google's Veo 3 demos for a look into one future of filmmaking.

The sailor and "Irish coast" clips were better than rally car. I did take the time to read the prompts, posted below in the description, and noted the first two were short and simple, while the rally car prompt (which had bad audio via headphones) one was insanely dense. Behold, the future of screenwriting:

Prompt: The scene explodes with the raw, visceral, and unpredictable energy of a hardcore off-road rally, captured with a dynamic, almost found-footage or embedded sports documentary aesthetic. The camera is often shaky, seemingly mounted inside one of the vehicles or held by a daring spectator very close to the action, frequently splattered with mud or water, catching unintentional lens flares from the natural, often harsh, sunlight filtering through trees or reflecting off wet surfaces. We are immersed in a challenging, untamed natural environment – perhaps a dense, muddy forest trail, a treacherous rocky incline littered with loose scree, or a series_of shallow, fast-flowing river crossings. Several heavily modified, entirely unidentifiable, and unbranded off-road vehicles are engaged in a frenetic, no-holds-barred race. These are not showroom models; they are custom-built, rugged machines – open-wheeled buggies with exposed engines and prominent roll cages, heavily armored pickup trucks with oversized, knobby tires and snorkel exhausts......... [and on and on and on. About twice more text to follow.]

Probably written by an LLM? To be fair, the other two video prompts are only a few sentences long:

Prompt: In rural Ireland, circa 1860s, two women, their long, modest dresses of homespun fabric whipping gently in the strong coastal wind, walk with determined strides across a windswept cliff top. The ground is carpeted with hardy wildflowers in muted hues. They move steadily towards the precipitous edge, where the vast, turbulent grey-green ocean roars and crashes against the sheer rock face far below, sending plumes of white spray into the air. Transcript

Seems good enough to change a chunk of TV commercial filmmaking and advertising at the least.

Have you seen this?

This appears to be a full music video done entirely with AI; that's my guess, anyhow. The quality is remarkable; obviously the format plays to AI's strengths, but what they have here looks to me to rival a professional production with a serious budget, and I'm pretty confident they got it in one and possibly two orders of magnitude less time and money than it'd have taken for a conventional production.

I actually found the rally car one the most impressive, because holy cow that's a lot of details to keep consistent, including The water splash on the camera lens, and the vehicle itself doesn't do any weird shape changing even as the water obscures it, and the audio was good enough that I would not have called that it was an AI producing it rather than a professional Foley artist.

Camera motions seem slightly unnatural but THE CAMERA IS MOVING and the scene retains coherence. Actually mind-blowing.

I heard steady washed out "wobbles" in audio which I found distracting. It could have been my cheapo wireless earbuds. I agree it's visually stunning. and a great expo for the fluid bits. Pass the soma, Mom, we're getting super HD vision in the singularity.

Found an even better example, which has a number of tells, but if you told me this was a clip from a TV show I might believe you at first:

https://youtube.com/watch?v=kC8dxvMKsEc

Yup. Seems at least B movies with live actors are finished soon. Unless it's cheaper to film which I doubt except in the most minimalist arthouse cinema. The hope for the Screen Actor's Guild is many people miraculously form strong, lasting opinions to only pay to watch live action media. It hadn't occurred to me that this will cause the death of many entertainment celebrities. I didn't categorize them much of artists I suppose.

Or the immortality of said celebs.

If they can keep casting well-liked actors in films via AI, even after they'd dead or retired, they're going to do it.

I do wonder, as with AI-Generated music, which is ACTUALLY INDISTINGUISHABLE these days, if one major reason people will still prefer 'real' artists is simply because they want to personally meet them or be able to experience them live, so they'll eventually shun the AI stuff not specifically because they know it is AI, but because there's no personal life/gossip/tabloid drama to follow, and they want to physically touch the person at some point.

LLMs generate gossip and tabloid drama about real celebrities; they wouldn't have any issues doing the same about AI-generated celebrities.

It will be a gradual process: first generating all the extras; then improving the real performances of real actors; then generated performances of dead actors; then licensed generated performances of live main actors; and then entirely generated main actors. And it won't be admitted at first. But having a reliable actor who always turns up sober and on time, looks like and does what exactly you want them to, has no time constraints, and doesn't take a substantial cut of the profits is a massive pull.

And if audiences insist on being sold a real life backstory about the actors to form parasocial relationships with them, well, Hollywood will be happy to generate and sell that to them too.

Hah, that'd be a hell of a reversal. I bet they'd keep a physical person 'on staff' who can make in-person appearances pretending to be the actual actor, but in reality they're not getting paid like an actual celebrity.

The Job of 'actor' still entails acting, but now you've just become a body double for the digital version, you make a lot less money but all you have to do is not generate any really bad press and uphold the charade and you'll be comfortable for life.

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It’s true that robotics is getting renewed attention, but this seems to be more the result of increased investment rather than any foundational sea change in knowledge or theory. The fixation on a bipedal and human-ish one is also just that, a fixation, and still leads to some difficulty even moving around consistently - see for example the robot marathon and of course claims that the Tesla robots have been somewhat relying on human controllers last I heard. No new paradigms yet there.

There continues to be progress on the LLM front but this is actually, maybe contrary to the impression you are getting, slowing. I wouldn’t call it a plateau at all but there’s a real sense of struggle out there. Most of the focus in the last six months has been tool use of various kinds, rather than fundamental improvements, though there are some theoretical ideas kicking around that might prove fruitful. On the contrary the major research labs have started to see some diminishing returns. Meta notably can’t even catch fully up to the front players and most of the team quit in frustration. Anthropic has been stuck in a bit of a rut with 3.7 only a mixed improvement over 3.5 and in some ways a regression. OpenAI has had trouble getting the so-called “version 5” off the ground that’s an impressive enough improvement to deserve the name. Google is catching up and adding some neat things. Context windows are going up. “Agent” systems are being experimented with more. Video generation is showing some sparks of brilliance but the compute required is pretty steep. Deepfake video and voice, even real time stuff, is the biggest issue right now, more than any AGI crap.

Meta notably can’t even catch fully up to the front players and most of the team quit in frustration.

Do you have any source on this? I'd love to learn more.

This article is a good top level summary. This post was unverified but the reasons seem to match other reporting that the most recent model is a massive sunk cost. The head and VP not only both resigned last month but also asked their names not to be put on the eventual release. “Most of the team” probably overstated sorry. I accidentally took out of context the still notable fact that 11 of 14 of the authors of a major paper on the fundamental AI research team at Meta have left since publication and formation in 2023. Either way, Meta is behind absolutely but everyone is slowing. IMO we need another theoretical leap, probably about implementing “memory”, to keep progress rolling.

The fixation on humanoids is understandable: a humanoid robot is a drop-in replacement for a human worker. When I use a food delivery service I often select a courier robot. It's a cute box on six wheels that drives to my apartment block entrance. But the delivery company can use them because I live in a sizable neighborhood between a railroad and a stroad that is both flat and full of restaurants.

A wheeled box can't cross the stroad because it can't use an underpass. A wheeled box can't cross the railroad either because there's an overpass. A wheeled box can't get to my front door as there are a few insurmountable obstacles even in the apartment complex: the first door leading to the lobby has an anti-hobo lock that you need three fingers to open, the second door has an intercom and is quite heavy, then there's a small flight of stairs leading to the elevator (there's a ramp, but you have to unlock and lower it), the robot then has to call the elevator and ring my doorbell.

In a country like the US that has ADA-compliant everything it's probably easier to build a useful delivery robot that can get around on wheels with a single button-pressing finger, but this is still quite limiting. You can't put a hundred of them into a warehouse or a sweatshop without rebuilding it to be robot-accessible. Everything in our lives is designed for human bodies, it's a very obvious target for the robotics industry.

stroad

I can honestly say this is the first time seeing that word ever used. But then again, I don't think I've ever really made a distinction between a "street" and a "road" before, let alone thought of something in between.

'Stroad' is a shibboleth, generally meaning "[I don't like] roads that have more than one lane and are generally unobstructed".

Not exactly. A freeway is not a stroad. An arterial without businesses or housing that serves to move people from place to place is also not a stroad.

Generally, a stroad is a high or medium-speed road with housing or commercial areas right on it.

Really, the reason they exist is cost. It's cheap to take a one-lane-bidirectional road that has a bunch of existing development on it, expand it out to 2, maybe put a center turning lane in it, and you have what is effectively a highway.

Strong Towns and the other anti-car people get extremely butthurt about "but muh suburban financial sustainability", but this is why this kind of construction exists in the first place. Same with the 4-way stop and the traffic light; it doesn't require a few million dollars per intersection like roundabouts do (it's the cheaper, more technologically-advanced option, though it of course does make other sacrifices).

Yes, it'll cost you more lives and property damage because someone didn't look both ways and got (them or their car) hit by another car going 50 mph, but human safety and human dignity (in this case, the dignity of not living in a million-dollar shoebox and it only taking 10 minutes to get to your destination rather than 60) are always two sides of the same coin.

It's cheap to take a one-lane-bidirectional road that has a bunch of existing development on it, expand it out to 2, maybe put a center turning lane in it, and you have what is effectively a highway.

This is only the case in the situation where the development isn't actually on the road or the lanes are super wide.

Same with the 4-way stop and the traffic light; it doesn't require a few million dollars per intersection like roundabouts do (it's the cheaper, more technologically-advanced option, though it of course does make other sacrifices).

I'm not sure what your claim is, exactly. Are you saying that stop signs are technologically advanced? Or that you can have stop signs on a road where the speed limit is 50 (based on your next paragraph)? I certainly haven't seen that before.

Yes, it'll cost you more lives and property damage because someone didn't look both ways and got (them or their car) hit by another car going 50 mph, but human safety and human dignity (in this case, the dignity of not living in a million-dollar shoebox and it only taking 10 minutes to get to your destination rather than 60) are always two sides of the same coin.

Wide, high speed roads are a nuisance to live near (ask me how I know), so I don't know that it's a big increase in dignity to make every road a 45MPH arterial.

I'm not sure what you are getting at with your 10 minute vs 60 minute journey hypothetical. The places where it takes 10 minutes to make a trip and the places where it takes 60 minutes to drive an equivalent distance are not the same, and this goes back to the land usage in the first part. You can't expand the roads endlessly, because there's stuff on the side of the road, and to make things worse, that stuff on the side of the road is why people travel in the first place, and with wider roads those places are forced further apart except in totally rural areas.

You can't take e.g. San Francisco and replace every two lane road with a six lane road to fix the traffic without running out of land or building double decker freeways in the middle of the city.

In general, my preferred mode of living is a medium town with quiet, shaded streets in town so that people can walk and bike around and kids can play in the street without getting oneshotted by a driver scroooolling tiktoks at 50 MPH. This is incompatible with wide roads with high speed limits, aka, stroads.

For everything else, there's the interstate.

Isn’t this a solved problem in a more local sense? You just put a housing development off the main road with deliberately curved and winding streets which has the natural effect of slowing down car speeds and limiting through traffic as long as the entry points were sensibly chosen. No need to be a mid sized town, this can be dropped into bigger city outskirts.

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roads that have more than one lane

in each direction (two in total)

It's not exactly a stereotypical suburban American stroad, given that I live in a massive metropolis, but the effect is similar: Soviet urban planners had a cyclopean sense of scale, their successors saw a quick and dirty solution to the traffic issues: why build highways when you can just build a dozen lanes in the existing right of way?

Anti-car people made it up even though there was already a word for it (arterial road or arterial highway).

To be fair, IMO it isn't a totally useless word. There is value in differentiating between a generic "urban arterial" road and an "urban arterial" that specifically favors long-distance travel while giving nothing but lip service to local access and pedestrians, where a limited-access road that doesn't even try to accommodate local access and pedestrians would be safer. Compare US 130 in Pennsauken, NJ (awful unfixable grandfathered design), with NJ 70 in Cherry Hill, NJ (much better).

t. civil engineer (roadway, not traffic, so not really an expert on this topic)

The actual fix for US 130 was the construction of I-295. What remains is only residual problems. As US 130, it was intended for long-distance travel; all mainline US system roads were.

(Fun fact: at one point late in the construction of I-295, it was possible to take US 130 North to I-295 North and end up back where you started; getting caught in such a loop gave me serious hatred for US 130)

The actual fix for US 130 was the construction of I-295. What remains is only residual problems.

By no means has US 130 been fixed. The buildings are so close to the traveled way, and the lanes are so narrow (because, many decades ago, it was converted from two lanes with a shoulder in each direction to three lanes with no shoulder in each direction), that those buildings regularly get hit by errant cars. And there are so many driveways, and the state govt.'s right of way is so narrow (especially after space has been reserved for sidewalk), that even putting up guide rail to prevent these crashes is impossible.

It's a term recently coined by people who want to eliminate cars.

The term was coined by Chuck Marohn at Strong Towns, who absolutely does not want to eliminate cars - at the point where he founded Strong Towns he lived in a suburb of Brainerd MN (micropolitan area population 99k) which even urbanists don't think is going to be a transit city. It is also geographically small enough (the contiguous built-up area around Brainerd proper is <10 miles across) that slowing the traffic in the city and inner suburbs to 30MPH isn't going to add more than a few minutes to anyone's journey. If you live in a town the size of Brainerd, there is no need for anything intermediate between city streets and the main road from Brainerd to the next town over.

Given Marohn's published views on stroad repair, I suspect he sees the Texas solution - use part of the right-of-way for a limited-access road and part for "frontage roads" (which are actually streets in Marohn's taxonomy) and only allow access between them every few miles - as the correct one if you have enough traffic to justify that much tarmac. US-19 north of Tampa Bay - identified by various people as the worst stroad in America - looks like an example where there is enough space to do this.

Given Marohn's published views on stroad repair, I suspect he sees the Texas solution - use part of the right-of-way for a limited-access road and part for "frontage roads" (which are actually streets in Marohn's taxonomy) and only allow access between them every few miles

I wonder if Texas got this from Mexico? This is a common pattern in high-traffic areas down there, although IME the driving experience kind of sucks that may be more for Mexico reasons than a flaw with the concept.

The issue is mostly "how do you turn left (and/or cross over) without a bunch of traffic lights on the arterial"?

In Mexico they just... put a bunch of traffic lights on the arterial, with predictable impacts on congestion -- plus the added quirk that left turns are for some reason accomplished by pulling into the slip road to your right, waiting for a left-turn light, then turning left across both directional lanes on the arterial part (also the opposite slip road I guess).

It's kind of fun, but I don't really get it.

an anti-hobo lock that you need three fingers to open

How's that work, exactly? I know they live a hard lifestyle at the best of times, and apparently they're now losing fingers to xylazine too in some areas, but I would have assumed that most hobos still have 8 or 9 fingers, minimum, nowhere near down to 3 per hand even.

Nah, the anti-hobo part is knowing which three buttons to press out of ten, requiring enough fingers to do this is the anti-robot side effect.

When I watched Nvidia's CES(?) presentation it was kind of wild to see all their AI products and/or aspirations. Their concept of having robots tokenize movements to complete tasks the same way LLMs tokenize words to respond to questions was an interesting concept. The part where current laborers have to train the robots was dystopian as hell. But I will derive a sense of deep schadenfreude when some "undocumented worker" or H1B that was trained by his white male predecessor (under duress) then has to train his AI replacement. Hard to imagine AI doing a worse job than 3rd world "elite human capital". And as a share holder of NVDA I'm rooting for it. Even as a nationalist I hope it takes off and is cheaper and has few externalities than the open borders policy our ruling class continually pushes in the interest of cheap labor. It represents a possible means to solving the labor issue that continually undercuts the polity of nations. It at least represents a ray of possible hope over the current status quo where the only solution to the dysfunction of our current society is to feed 6B third worlders through it at the fastest rate possible because "muh gdp".

If I'm not mistaken what they're showing off now -virtual environments training etc was showed off in China months before. Ofc people claim those demos were faked etc.

NVDA's share price might be a bit overvalued. Chinese will likely catch up within a few years. They've got all the TSMC people they need and everyone working on replicating EUV etc. And with US trying to ban foreign installs of Huawei Ascends, people now see that Huawei actually has a useful product..

Funny, I was just looking at this a few minutes ago.

What do you think of this current crop of news?

Talking about AI, especially with regards to capabilities advancement, feels kind of pointless right now because the battle lines have clearly been entrenched. Any discussion of the shortcomings of current models or potential limitations of deep learning is met with "ahh, but just wait 1/5/10 years, then you'll be sorry!"

Very well then, let's wait 1/5/10 years. I'll check back in 2030.

Talking about AI, especially with regards to capabilities advancement, feels kind of pointless right now because the battle lines have clearly been entrenched.

Unlike the other topics which usually come up in the CW thread :P

Oh sure. But with ethical/political questions, you can keep going round and round forever with new arguments because there's no hope of ever reaching a final settlement.

AI capabilities are largely a straight empirical question. We can know exactly where AI will stand 10 years from now. We just have to wait 10 years to find out.

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