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'm not necessarily sure this is a bad thing: the buildout plans were so large that I didn't really think they were practical anyway. Were we really going to grow grid capacity by 300% in under a decade? I buy that it'll be game changing in lots of ways, but is the demand really there to pay for infinite tokens? The models have gotten both better and more efficient recently, too: do we need as much compute as we thought?
Slowing over-eager investment in boom-bust cycles could be stabilizing, even.
I think that we will eventually swallow all that capacity and more. Superintelligence can be used to solve, by definition, almost any problem, and there are functionally infinite problems. How to drive cars, how to design a new rocket ship part, how to identify defective potatoes on the factory line, how to build robots to paint your house, how to build more efficient chips to power the robots, how to build factories to build the chips. ChatGPT, process these dexa scans and blood work and design a diet for me to lose twenty pounds by summer. Make it more suitable for an Asian palate. Automate a weekly grocery list on a $120 budget and ship everything to my address. Find a cheap vacation rental near the beach in August. Scan this satellite imagery of Nunavik for likely undiscovered oil reserves. Design a 3D print of an art deco cornice to be glued above my mantle. Scan this image to match this color of paint. Spitball ideas for how to process and sell 3,000 pounds of spinach before it rots. Design the marketing. Anything.
That this hasn't happened yet is because 1) the AI isn't quite good enough yet 2) most people do not understand the scale of change or even what's possible.
At the same time I'm not meaningfully worried by a pause. A pause can basically be marketing. A pause might even lead to a buildout, if voters are assuaged that datacenters have been defeated forever so now we're going to give "compute campuses" a try.
Please, please, please, for the love of Ahura Mazda, stop this.
I know, it's petty, and of all the things Trump has done that I dislike, declaring that AI should be called "Superintelligence" shouldn't be at the top of my list, but it is absurdity of the highest order to issue an Executive Order based on a shower thought. "Superintelligence" actually has a meaning in the AI field, and other than trolling people I can't even see what Trump's point was in doing this. Is it supposed to "own the libs" who hate data centers? Why the heck would you immediately switch to the new term like a Party member just notified of the latest un-words?
I agreed with most of the points in your top-level and thought it was a good and thoughtful post, for whatever that is worth.
I use both terms interchangeably and in fact “Superintelligence” expresses my argument in that sentence better than “Artificial intelligence”. “Superintelligence can be used to solve, by definition, almost any problem.” “Artificial Intelligence” does not carry the same semantic meaning here.
I generally prefer “Superintelligence” to “Artificial Intelligence” but “AI” to “SI”. I use it because it is genuinely a better term to describe what we are talking about in most applications. (Which, for what it’s worth, is also why Trump picked it.)
No, it isn't. Superintelligence does not exist yet.
I am speaking in the hypothetical. Yet-to-be-built compute will be used because demand for Superintelligence approaches infinity.
If Trump were talking about a hypothetical future when SI exists, I would shrug and think he's being optimistic and grandiose, as usual, but he literally issued an Execute Order requiring the federal government to call existing AI "SI." You calling it "superintelligence" just reads like you using Dear Leader's newly-minted buzzword. I mean, I don't recall you ever using that phrase until five minutes after Trump's EO.
Yeah, Trump started using “Superintelligence” and I thought “that is better in certain contexts”. Such as the one in which I used it. You yourself were arguing that SI has a distinct meaning from AI — would you not use SI at all now even when it’s the better term?
I would use SI when talking about something that actually qualifies as superintelligence (generally speaking, the hypothetical future point at which AI has surpassed AGI and become literally superintelligent). No existing AI comes remotely close to that. A list of all the things AI can or will be able to do does not make it "superintelligence," because the key word there is "intelligence." We don't consider calculators superintelligent because they can do math thousands of times faster than a human; artificial neural networks obviously can do much more than calculate, but they still are nowhere near that quantum leap into superintelligence.
If you want to make a new definition for superintelligence that is different from what the industry and the AI field uses, okay, go you. But I'm absolutely going to continue to think it's retarded to call ChatGPT and Gemini and Opus "superintelligence," which Trump's Executive Order literally requires the federal government to do.
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
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link