Companies don't serve poor people; they have no money. Companies will pivot to serving the people who have money. If that means they only serve rich people, then that means we'll have more yacht makers and fewer dollar stores.
More likely is people are stripped entirely of any economic value and influence. Tribesmen struggling to survive in a mad max apocalyptic scenario while the world's money is spent and made in a business to business environment, in protected sites defended by autonomous loitering munitions that the uneducated masses attribute to god entities within a few generations of knowledge loss.
Rich people are limited resources and they would not buy 100 yatches even if they could afford it. As seen in history if the majority of people in a country is poor, revolution is just a matter of time. It's in a countries best interest to make sure wealth at least somewhat evenly distributed. At least good enough so the masses won't get angry.
Right now they're going on ~5-10 superyachets each. I could see them buying 100 in the future after they're 100x as rich. I think 5-10 which are 100x larger would also count for these purposes.
For car collection people will keep going well into the hundreds. Hell Jay Leno just did a video with Joe Biden yet again and his corvette, but Jay Leno famously has hundreds of cars.
Hoarding wealth is itself quite boring. There are many goals a person could have for their life, and "getting more money" is the least interesting. My question is always, TO DO WHAT? If you can't answer that question in some way that helps people (and then follow through if/when you do get that money) then your life is hollow no matter how many billions you have.
Early industrialization meant industrial canneries to feed people, building cities to house everyone from the countryside, indoor plumbing.
And the AI revolution is no housing, worsening food, a few people with yachts, the Epstein class getting away with what they want to do, and no new plumbing hookups because the datacenter took the municipal water supply.
This QR code fear mongering is one of the most annoying internet memes to me.
> Almost three-quarters of Americans (73%) scan QR codes without verification, and more than 26 million have already been directed to malicious sites, according to NordVPN.
Obviously, since the only way to verify a QR code before scanning is to decode it manually…
Just treat every QR code like an unknown URL and you’re fine.
Does it seem like it bifurcates based on the person? I've had both experiences myself, sometimes with the same model and within ~days of each other on seemingly similar tasks. It's almost impossible to deny sometimes that actual intelligence is being expressed (and could not be regurgitated intelligence from some random internet page), but then I see firsthand the eye-rolling "intelligence-shaped" output from something else and wonder where I went wrong.
> It's almost impossible to deny sometimes that actual intelligence is being expressed (and could not be regurgitated intelligence from some random internet page)
But how is it impossible? Or rather, how is it possible to distinguish actual intelligence from some internet page--not "some random internet page", but some very well selected, timely and topical internet page?
Carly Simon's "Killing Me Softly" describes a similar experience, decades before LLMs. It's amazingly easy to feel like someone is understanding you when they are just pattern matching on a common shared experience.
This seems so likely that I have a hard time understanding why some people think it's impossible.
I know; if I hadn't experienced it myself, I would have a hard time believing it. Even if we grant that it's "merely" as you say, that it can interpret my loose and often false or misleading rhetoric to identify my question, trawl through thousands of lines of code to determine the core problem, select some very specific and relevant internet page, and then translate its solution fresh into my own problem domain; that in my mind at least "an expression of intelligence", even if it is not truly intelligent or understanding.
FWIW this is my own mental gymnastics around the Chinese Room; at some point the question "where is the understanding?" is moot, because if the Chinese Room reliably delivers context-specific correct results in unique contexts, then what more do we require of intelligence? I have to admit that sometimes it does better than I can do, and I've been called intelligent by intelligent people my whole life.
(BTW Killing Me Softly wasn't written/sung/anything by Carly Simon, but composed by Charles Fox with lyrics by Norman Gimbel, in collaboration with Lori Lieberman [after she was inspired by a Don McLean performance in late 1971].)
Thanks for that final BTW which sent me on a side quest to listen to a half dozen different versions and gave me a completely different outlook on what that song was about and what it was saying. Made it even more poignant.
> if the Chinese Room reliably delivers context-specific correct results in unique contexts, then what more do we require of intelligence?
First, I'm not sure I grant the premise (esp. "reliably"), but even so the answer seems glaringly obvious: we require intelligence to extend the range of what is known so that it can be looked up / delivered by systems like libraries, search engines, and LLMs. The conflation of knowledge indexing and knowledge creation (and, more specifically, that some people don't seem to be able to distinguish them) may be the core of the issue.
> BTW Killing Me Softly wasn't written/sung/anything by Carly Simon
I agree that there is some 'higher' intelligence that is about knowledge creation; say, mathematical inventions like RSA, or new philosophy, or coming up with interesting mathematical problems. But I only asked what is 'required' of intelligence, and we should admit that the vast majority of people, even among those who have above-average intelligence, do not create new knowledge of the grand sort. Most people acquire knowledge in education and then apply that knowledge in their vocation, and their improvements are optimizations or remixings that we already see AI capable of making.
Most people don't create knowledge "of the grand sort" but that's moving the goal posts; they do create knowledge "of the mundane sort" constantly. LLMs with a suitable harness can simulate this (poorly) by parroting what humans do when they are flustered (mumbling to themselves things like "What was I going to the store for? I made a list. Where did I put the list? Ah, here it is. Now where did I leave my keys?") and it even sort of appears to work, at least in highly structured environments.
But it only appears to work as long as things stay within the expected statistical distribution. If I'm driving my usual route to work, waiting to turn left, and the three cars in front of me each start their turn, glow pink, and turn into circus animals with their occupants perched precariously on top I'm going to have a very different reaction than any self driving car or LLM.
In cybernetics, the first kind of people are devoted to System 1, and the others are devoted to Systems 2-5. Any functioning organization has all 5 systems.
Imagine a school with only teachers and no administration. Who hires the teachers, who collects tuition, who schedules classes? Even if the teachers could do those things, now the teachers have to do the administration, which takes away from teaching--and the teachers quickly find (like any new business owner) that most of their time is spent on 'overhead' and very little on teaching itself.
The Iron Law is generally viewed as undesirable, because the 'doers' don't want the 'managers' to control the organization--this is how everything becomes enshittified. At best you have benevolent managers who are extremely sympathetic to the doers and act accordingly, but this is generally short-lived and depends on the organization hiring those benevolent managers. So the big question is, how can we ensure that the values of the organization (System 5) remain aligned with the values of the doers?
The doers can't remove the bureaucracy-focused people, because doing so would run counter to Pournelle's Iron Law; it's like crossing the streams. Let's instead replace bureaucrats with AI, since the same pressures that drive bureaucracies toward self-preservation might instead push AI systems toward AGI .
The law doesn’t define behavior. It describes behaviors.
Those behaviors can change by giving the doers more power. If a bureaucrat is trouble, and the doers can cause the bureaucrat to be fired, to doers will have more power.
> With thought loops this fast even if the models are less smart they can be self correcting to level them selves up.
You can't self-correct a model that's been burned to a chip. That seems like it'd be the main problem with ASIC AI, when everything's changing on a monthly basis, do you want to spend $x00 on a substandard model that'll be obsolete in 3 months, or wait 3 months?
Yes, the plan seems to be anti human in the extreme. Why do you need the plebs if they can be entirely replaced by AI? But the question then becomes why does the AI (and before that their security detail in a post money world) need billionaires?
This likely is the tertiary reason as to why llms are so heavily kneecapped. Granted, at this point, projects do exist to remove those arbitrary restrictions, but the effort that goes into it suggests it is a real concern.
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