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Culture War Roundup for the week of February 13, 2023

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GPT’s evolutions seem to obviously support the ‘more compute’ approach, with an asterisk for the benefits of human feedback. But I’m also bearish on human uniqueness. Human writ large are very bad at thinking, but we’re hung up in the handful of live players, so AI seems to keep falling short. But we’ve hit on an AI smarter than the average human in many domains with just a handful of serious tries. If the human design can output both the cognitively impaired and von Neumann, then why expect a LLM to cap out on try #200?

Human writ large are very bad at thinking.

Indeed!

At the risk of putting words in your mouth, I think your post up-thread about needing lawyers/doctors/bartenders to verify the output of near-future AI's medical/legal/self-medical work points to a general statement: AGI with human level intelligence cannot independently function in domains where the intelligence of an average human is insufficient.

OTOH, advancing from FORTRAN to AI-with-average-human-intellect seems like a much bigger challenge than upgrading the AI to AI-with-Grace-Hopper-intellect. It seems like the prediction to make--to anyone--is: "When will AI be able to do 90% of your work, with you giving prompts and catching errors? 0-100 years, difficult to predict without knowing future AI development and may vary widely based on your specific job.

When will AI be so much better at your job Congress passes a law requiring you to post "WARNING: UNSUPERVISED HUMAN" signage whenever you are doing the job? The following Tuesday."