This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
I think being AI skeptical is fine up to a point.
Doubting AI can do things it has been able to do for four months is different from doubting capabilities we haven't seen yet, and might never see. I think there are smart reasons to believe AI might never be significantly more capable than it is (though I don't agree with this position.)
Even from a pure business perspective, I'm open to the idea that AI might be a bubble. But I have forced myself to watch Youtube videos by people confidently predicting that AI will all go away when the bubble pops because it is too expensive to run, and I just feel like they genuinely haven't done the first bit of research on the topic. Like, how hard is it to find out about local models for both text and images?
At the very least, now that these things are out in the wild, there's no way that the open weight LLM and image model genie is ever going back in the bottle. The unit economics of frontier AI may never work, but AI slop is here forever.
Yeah, I think it's quite possible that Anthropic and or (especially?) OpenAI have over-leveraged themselves and suffer some horrible fate and possibly derail the economy, but I doubt AI will go away, even if its pace of improvement levels off. I think the worst-case scenario is it becomes a niche for hobbyists and cybersecurity types, like Linux or something.
I think @OliveTapenade is wrong inasmuch as coding and cybersecurity is not "niche" but correct inasmuch as software is something like 5% of the US economy and people who are inside of the AI [information] bubble don't realize that not everything is computer.
If 'niche' is too dismissive, would it be better to say 'bounded'? Thus far bots seem to be very good at interacting with data, but they do not interface with the world beyond that. I think I stand by the idea that they're a wordcel technology. Maybe they will put all the coders out of work, but that leaves the overwhelming majority of the economy. I can't help but feel like people who work in data manipulation are over-generalising from their situation to everyone.
This is closer to what I am getting at.
However I am not sure it will stay this way. Using LLMs [and other AI: LLMs may not be the best model to actually accomplish this, and at best they are probably only part of the puzzle] to do object manipulation will likely become a thing. CAD is already real, 3D printing/cutting is already real, throwing LLMs into the mix comes with real risks but also real upsides.
Everyone is very enamored of software, but robots building houses, if possible (and I expect it will be) will probably be where the money is actually at. I think that AI companies have over-focused on using AIs to write software (although, to be fair, it's the lowest hanging fruit) to the detriment of pushing more mundane but vastly more important and, over the long term, remunerative physical labor.
I usually try to say 'LLMs' or 'bots' because I don't think the systems we're currently talking about are 'artificial intelligence'. Unfortunately 'AI' is the term that the companies themselves use and which the media seems to have accepted, but from where I'm standing, calling these systems 'AI' is a kind of marketing gimmick. I think I would reserve the term 'AI' for something that's genuinely intelligent.
In any case, I'm not sure I buy the leap into the material world? We've had CAD for decades. 3D printing is mostly a hobby technology, isn't it? At any rate, the best case scenario here is, what, that you can use an LLM or similar system to help produce models for 3D printing?
You're right, I think, that what would really make a difference is automated construction. But I don't yet see any reason to think that's on the horizon. Manipulating language is one thing, but we still very much struggle to build robots capable of interacting with material reality.
This is an inane but weirdly popular talking point that would have been a lot fairer (if lower-stakes and off-puttingly pedantic to normies) to bring up literal decades ago when "AI" was commonly being used to refer to simple single-purpose algorithms in charge of a vaguely anthropomorphic object, like "enemy AI" in a video game. I think it would have been fair to object that those aren't actually AI. But at this point, with the LLMs, people trying to invoke the same argument are dealing with an increasingly clear invisible-unicorn-in-the-garage situation, where the actual underlying belief is that they can't be AI because AI is inherently impossible, but they often know on some level that that's silly because materialism, so they try to launder it through asserting that actually, the essence of real intelligence is the ability to pass whatever specific tests we haven't managed to get the AI up to human level performance at yet.
Like, people know that par-human capability in everything wasn't ever how people defined AI, right? That's closer to a definition of ASI.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I think they're trying harder than ever, but it just turns out that building general-purpose robots is friggin' hard (sorry, Asimov). Human-level intelligence is a tiny little evolutionary whoopsy that's like a million years old. Language? Maybe 100k years. Programming? Don't make me laugh. But processing sensory data and navigating the real world? Evolution has been selecting for that since the beginning of time. We have, uh, a little catching up to do.
What's funny is that I think LLMs are already at a level where they could handle the high-level organization of a robot's work (albeit perhaps not cost-effectively). e.g. looking at the environment and seeing where the laundry is and where to put it. But they're not very helpful for the dumb low-level motions (what we think of as muscle memory). I believe we're making progress on it, but there hasn't been a giant spike in capability like with LLMs.
The technology does generalize surprisingly well, but it's the space with the least good returns on investment and the hardest economic overhead.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link