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