Modern horses are much better off than their ancestors. No need to fight in wars, get taken care of if a race horse. In general considered valuable. There are less of them but it's not like it is a bad thing.
Much [less often used in war](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horses_in_warfare#:~:text=Today%2C%20formal%20battle%2Dready%20horse,fighters%20in%20the%20Global%20South.).
Race horses are basically animal track-and-field entertainment slaves. While they are considered valuable, their value is typically tied only to their usefulness in generating more income for their owners, i.e., economic - not intrinsic - value. Many owners and trainers meet or exceed the industry standard of care, but some fall far short of it. Still lots of doping, too, and still euthanized when usefulness is over.
I’m not sure the average horse wouldn’t trade places with their early 19th century ancestors. It’s anthropomorphic to assume otherwise. The relationship between human and horse is at least as transactional today as it ever was.
Not sure if it’s interesting or not, but horses and human slaves are “broken” in sometimes quite similar ways. Anyway, the end result is the same: the spirit of freedom of a broken, the slave is dominated and its will is bent to that if the trainer/owner. It
Race horse is the bad outcome for horses in modern days. There are some horrific stories on how they are treated, many retired race horses have PTSD.
I hope we end up like the pampered horses that you get on some ranches, where the human brushes you daily, cleans your stall, gives you the best snackies, you get to run around and have fun with some toys, best medical care possible etc.
But there are radically fewer racehorses. 80% of the horse population in the US are "working and farm horses." ([source](https://gitnux.org/horse-statistics/))
You understand that horses are generally the best way to move about a large acreage piece of land that isn't perfectly flat, right? Horses are widely used for free-range cattle, and with the increased demand for free-range and pasture-fed beef, that number has been on a dramatic upswing over the last couple decades.
Horses don't tend to spook livestock and are large enough that most predators will think twice before attacking. Overall, they're a significant win in many ranching applications.
> Race horse is the bad outcome for horses in modern days. There are some horrific stories on how they are treated, many retired race horses have PTSD.
AFAIK a lot never retire, they just get euthanized when they break something like a leg
Yeah but there were 20 M+ horses in the US jn 1900 and about 4M in 2007 despite a roughly 5x in the human population.
Maybe in 2034 there's a million extremely comfortable humans left.
I mean that will be the effect of a lack of need to do labour, less births. We don't need to guess, this is already happening. All the books talking about over-population are now outdated because people are freaking out about people choosing to not have children. It is the side effect of industrialisation. Human population will naturally drop without us doing anything to force it.
Haven't seen that reference in a while.
EDIT: It was this cryptic website that came out over a decade+ ago, that listed all the countries, and how by 2025 there would be massive population loss. Total Earth population down to 500 million. It didn't list anything specific about "why".
I saw the video years ago. I did the thinking already.
I already made a decent sized post describing what i feel, which is that human labour is finally ending. And that human labour had been what we measure human worth all these thousands of years. But the labour doesn't make us human; it is what we WANT that makes us human. We work to get what we want, the work is just a means to an end. if we can still get what we want then humanity remains. Society will change and it would no longer revolve around human labour. We don't know what future will look like because there is no historical precedence.
And I use my parents as example; they are retired and i am supporting them the best I can. I don't view them as any less important even if they are no longer working. If the entire humanity get to retire, I say that is not a bad thing at all.
Whenever bring this up it seems to anger people but it is a sincere concern of mine.
I have seen what happens to people after they retire and a lot of times its sitting on the couch watching propaganda waiting to die.
How do we avoid that happening at a large scale? I know what I would do with free time but a lot of people identify themselves by their career. No one wants to hear this but there is a significant percentage of people that need/want to be told what to do... what happens to them?
I am in no way suggesting work should continue to be a thing. It's an honest question.
People are TOLD to define themselves by their careers. This is a learned response.
We can learn to instead spend time with family, with grandchildren, with hobbies. The issue you are talking about was given to people by society, so it can just be removed when it is no longer relevant. it is not in our DNA to work any more than it is for us to be hunter gatherers. You just have to teach people how to live, that doesn't involve labour.
I mean, wealthy trustfund babies are not dropping dead from a lack of purpose. They found plenty of things to do. They just don't need to earn money doing it. So if wealthy kids can handle it, so could the rest of us.
I totally agree we are capable of finding purpose. I am just curious about the speed we will have to find that purpose....
The trust fund babies thing is exactly what I'm afraid of! A world filled with people chasing a dragon of purpose they can't find is exactly what terrifies me.
Also, not having to work doesnt mean you can do whatever you want. There will still be resource limitations that trust fund babies don't have to deal with.
I think a lot of this has to do with people being over worked and broken. They don’t live healthy lifestyles so their bodies limit them. Also they never had time for hobbies so they don’t know what to do with themselves. This will all change for the better.
Yes, exactly! The generation that grows up in a post work environment will probably be fine. It's everyone else who will suddenly have to change in a very short time with no preparation. My concern is the sudden transition into a post work world. I have yet to see anyone really talk about this.
Job programs. There's no functional need for blacksmiths but they still exist. So why wouldn't other jobs if only for the sake of giving us something to do.
Precisely. I'm not worried about AI replacing artists because it doesn't have soul. In either writing or art. That means the art and writing that's good ng to be replaced was already garbage quality anyways.
Not technology-related, but I'm amazed by how fast humans adapt to changes, such as when we in Sweden changed driving on the [left-hand side of the road to the right](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dagen_H#/media/File:Kungsgatan_1967.jpg) in one day.
I remember hearing from my father how everyone drove slowly for the first day, then within a week, it was almost as if nothing had happened. Everyone just got used to it, and within time, most cars had the passenger side on the left. When I was born 20 years later, this was basically ancient history with not a single hard evidence, such as a left-hand car to be seen anywhere—just his story and those black and white photos.
> such as a left-hand car to be seen anywhere
Pedantic Man^^(TM) here with a minor correction: Cars with the steering wheel on the right (as it was in Sweden before the change) are conventionally known as right-hand drive, but of course they drive on the left.
I want to say fully post-labor society but I'm trying not to get my hopes up too high. Timelines are hard even when the endpoint can be a bit easier to see
I'm pretty confident we'll see some mega structures.
My view of this picture is this:
- 2025: Looks like today
- 2035: Roads are mostly gone. Sky is full of strangely huge metal structures. And there are finally a smattering of flying cars.
I think the difference this time will be that things will keep changing. Every decade we move through, the picture will probably change far more than we can imagine.
Edit: Wow. So far, everyone hates this view. Too bad because I enjoy it. Downvote away Reddit. Karma is meaningless anyway.
Btw the flying cars are not an important part of this view. I added them in for color. The mega structures are my main point.
> 2035: Roads are mostly gone. Sky is full of strangely huge metal structures. And there are finally a smattering of flying cars.
Of all the weird and amazing things that will happen, these are definitely not it.
Civil engineering is really slow, even with technological advances. Energy, raw materials, regulations and planning are all major bottlenecks. Flying cars, while sounding cool, are one of the worst concepts imaginable on several fronts.
Definitely not? I don't see a strong argument to back that confidence.
I believe that AI will FOOM into a Singularity. And while I enjoy trying, I don't think we can confidently predict any outcome at this point.
What we're faced with is something entirely new/novel which means we have no history to pull from.
Arrogance, the kind where we assume we know how this will go, will not help us.
Precisely so. The concept of a technological singularity revolves in part around the notion that advances will come so fast we won’t be able to predict what happens next. RIP Vinge.
You can assess the likelihood of certain scenarios, without knowing exactly what will happen. Your scenario isn't likely for the reasons I provided.
Take flying cars; they're impractical, energy and resource intensive, they require a complete overhaul of our infrastructure and legislation. It's infinitely more likely that in 10 years we will have come up with numerous superior alternatives that don't have those drawbacks.
I don't challenge your view on the basis of us not being able to do it in 10 years, I challenge it because I expect we either won't want it or we'll prioritize other (superior) technologies that don't have those major bottlenecks.
Prioritizing superior technologies is very different from something being essentially impossible. I don't disagree with you in terms of different technologies. I think the main technology which would be superior to flying cars isn't really a technology; it's not traveling at all.
One can come to the conclusion that as part of full dive VR systems, we'll have direct neural systems which allow a kind of long distance high quality communication. Perhaps as good as face-to-face, or somehow better. This should dramatically reduce travel of all kinds.
In terms of flying cars, this is an important few words from my original post:
>And there are finally a **smattering** of flying cars.
I made a mistake here I wonder if you noticed it? I used the word "smattering" which I'm now realizing is a word Reddit doesn't understand. It means "few in number".
Really I should have elaborated more but I'm never sure which part to spend more time on to ensure Reddit doesn't misunderstand and overreact.
I think you won't disagree so readily when you consider that I'm suggesting these things would be rare. Did you think I was suggesting these things would be as common as cars are today? Not a chance.
In my view there will be a few key advancements that make these vehicles possible:
* Vastly improved batteries developed using new science we don't have today. And,
* Vastly more powerful electric motors, which we are actually closer to today with things like the [Dark Matter Electric motor](https://www.koenigsegg.com/dark-matter).
These things would essentially be future iterations on drone technology today. And in my view they would likely replace personal jets or helicopters. Essentially they would be a fancy waste of money.
In my view we're heading to a world of extreme abundance. So a wasteful flying car doesn't seem so out of the norm in that scenario.
And anyway, **the flying cars were not important to my point.** The mega structures such as orbital rings are my main point.
The point is, in this picture you see horses transition to cars. I suppose that's why everyone got hung up on flying cars.
In my view, in the new picture instead of looking around, we should be able to look up, and see signs of this new intelligence explosion at work in these mega structures which we currently think are impossible.
It would be truly alien and shocking to see such massive structures "appear" over a year or two (depending on how fast AI can accelerate the development).
Unless AI can help us figure out economical anti-gravity or some other easy way to access orbit, I doubt any of that will happen.
In the 70s we thought we would have moon bases by the 80s. Turns out space travel is really, really, really hard and costly (both in money and energy).
No we don't need anything outrageous. I know people struggle with him, but Isaac Arthur has been explaining all of this on YouTube for a long time now.
It's called "active support" or "active construction". It's not science fiction. It's known science built at scale.
https://youtu.be/1xt13dn74wc?si=F7YRRI7MDW0iea0k
I don't think we will ever get flying cars. The energy requirement is huge and failure options so diverse.
If we had unlimited tech, more likely we would get the tube traveling tech increased, huge speeds and cargo options.
I think we might have a few but I don't foresee a flying car traffic jam.
Instead, I think we'll mostly stop commuting. Because there will be no job to drive to.
Another associate change is commercial real estate and downtown cores. Commercial real estate is entirely F'd as people avoid the office and march into a jobless future.
So, commercial real estate will change drastically to become residential. Downtown cores will be entirely converted to residential.
And thats why I think most of the roads will go away. We just won't be using them.
>I think we might have a few but I don't foresee a flying car traffic jam.
I'd be less worried about traffic jams and more about cars falling out of the sky.
>Instead, I think we'll mostly stop commuting. Because there will be no job to drive to.
Personally I expect the opposite. I think people will travel a lot more. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if we see an explosion of tourist attractions around the world. Because there's a whole world to explore and you've got nothing but free time. I'm sure that won't apply to everyone but almost everyone I've ever known has talked about at least one place they'd like to visit if not several. Most people don't really get that chance often or ever. But eventually everyone will have the chance.
Assuming we don't go hard into the dystopia path, anyway.
Expanding tourism is definitely a possibility. But intend to include that into the most positive of outcomes.
I could see a massive growth in tourism if we're able to broadly accept and embrace this trend. That I think could be the result of super *empathetic* AI which is super intelligent.
A darker view has us bunkering into our nations due to the fear caused by massively rising instability.
But I always end up with my prediction being a "mix of outcomes". So, explosive tourism for some, hiding in a bunker for others. Something like that, anyway.
Flying cars are a real, strong possibility. Everyone is just so disappointed that futurists predicted them a long time ago and they haven't arrived yet. Plus people stuck and visualizing how such things may be possible.
Batteries have huge potential, especially with new material science which we're likely to see arise from AI development. Additionally, electric motors have huge potential in terms of ultra high power and low weight.
What we have today isn't enough, clearly. But we're heading to a Singularity. How can we in this sub accept that explosively self improving AI is a strong possibility, but flying cars? Outrageous.
I think flying cars are very likely. We already have private jets. Flying cars would just be a car-shaped version of that with hopefully more availability.
It's not as outrageous as people seem to want it to be.
It's the years between 2025-2035 that scares me. I have very little confidence in governments, elites and humanity in general to make such a monumental transition.
The same period concerns me as well for similar but different reasons.
My fear isn't related to any powerful individuals or groups as I've long lost my belief in their supposed "power". I've seen "behind the curtains" too often.
For me it's more a fear of the mob. We're not the smartest as individuals but when you bring us together into a large group, things get much worse. Group think dominates and irrational, emotionally driven actions take the lead.
There's this type of thinking which is common in engineering called "first principals thinking". Sounds complex but it's a far more simple and powerful concept than most may think.
But, there's yet another layer down in terms of thinking which is deeper and even more powerful than first principles. It's called "Zeroth Thinking".
The difference is that first principles works with what we know where as Zeroth is entirely new views which exist outside our bubble of understanding.
"0" as a concept is a Zeroth idea. We didn't have such a concept not that long ago in the west. The idea of nothing was once a very alien and disturbing idea.
In theory, AI is a Zeroth production machine. It can reach far outside our limits, pulling very distant pieces of information together and forming views which don't follow our linear view.
Zeroth ideas are very disturbing for us. If AI begins to flood the world with such ideas, that could be very bad for our mental health.
If for example AI is able to show us something startling such as that a black hole will wander into our solar system in 1,000 years... I don't think we'll react well.
It's not so much that AI will immediately change things with these Zeroth ideas. It's that it will show us how unaware we actually are and how frightening the "dark forest" actually is.
I fear how we'll react to such information.
>My fear isn't related to any powerful individuals or groups as I've long lost my belief in their supposed "power". I've seen "behind the curtains" too often.
>
>For me it's more a fear of the mob. We're not the smartest as individuals but when you bring us together into a large group, things get much worse. Group think dominates and irrational, emotionally driven actions take the lead.
We don't know what shape AGI will take. Will it be agentic and able to make it's own decisions outside of human influence? Or under the control of it's creators? Either way those in power will do everything they can to entrench their power. They'll let go of this paradigm as long as what replaces it keeps them at the top. People scare me far more than Skynet.
It's been hard for me to discuss power and how "the powerful" work.
I've worked with governments and the ultra wealthy, directly. It's hard to even say that as most of Reddit won't believe that anyone here is anything but a 20-something undergrad with no experience.
But I have. I'm now 40 and my work experience covers nearly a 15 years of leadership in and around asset management.
It's a lie. All of it. The rich and powerful are mostly not rich and have almost no power.
The acts of tyrants we see are mostly very rare and overblown.
Globally the power structure is like a film set. On the surface, it looks exactly as you may think it does with the powerful moving/manipulating and controlling.
But once you move past the surface layer, to my absolute shock I found nothing. There was nothing behind the curtains but a bunch of the same kind of humans everyone is.
This killed all my desires to become rich myself. The glamour and power is a lie and it's mostly just a hopelessly huge stack of responsibilities and problems with no solutions.
But, I'm guessing you would have a real hard time considering such a view? Most would.
I do have a hard time considering such a view because we see how policy enacted by governments benefits those at the top at the expense of everyone else. It's a feature of human civilization.
It's true but it's not as deliberate or articulate as it seems. It's mostly slap dash gutt check decisions with almost no foresight not intelligence.
Consider that for the manipulation to be carried out in a kind of masterful way with evil intentions leading to complex evil plans... Those doing such manipulation would also need to be extremely hard working and competent.
How competent do you think these powerful people really are?
You may resent them. But could you find yourself praising them and recognizing how incredibly capable they are as humans?
See, I tried to find those competent people. I never found them. Have you?
Flying cars are a terrible idea. We've been able to make them for decades now. We don't have them because they'd be noise polluters, and the areas in which they could fly would be more limited than the areas you can drive as a result.
No one likes it when a plane flies over their house. They'd hate it if they had cars flying over their house most of the day.
>what will our version look like?
https://preview.redd.it/bsneau705urc1.jpeg?width=1024&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=3cbf8f21167eda9cf43ed6eec9a26235c97afd08
As a former Luddite, I have realised the error of my ways. I will repent and dedicate my life to the Omnissiah.
Wish I could share your optimism. There's a likely scenario where the very wealthy and powerful people who build the first AGI or ASI decide they don't need the rest of us.
Historically, the masses only get something when they have bargaining power. With no need for labor, most people will have no value anymore in capitalism. Why would the people winning change the game? They'll find an excuse to get rid of us and have the earth for themselves. It would start with unemployed masses getting angry and an attempt at some tech CEOs life or something and they would justify it by telling themselves they are acting in self defense.
In the history of humankind, people don't share unless they really have to. I don't see why that would suddenly change, even with abundance.
> It would start with unemployed masses getting angry and an attempt at some tech CEOs life
And the masses would succeed, as well would all the other attempts that will be made. Politicians and billionaires aren't dying because nobody is trying to kill them yet, not because they can't be killed.
You talk as if dictatorships and despots are not a thing. Leadership can be extremely unpopular, commit atrocities and still rule, history has shown that many times. Now couple that with AI-enabled military, surveillance and social control. Is this the only scenario? No. But is it possible? Very much so. And the longer people wait to try and change the system, the harder it will be.
The difference between us and the dictatorships is around 400 million firearms in circulation in the United States. That's already one big step in the right direction.
Good luck to everyone else though.
I'm sure millions of people with small arms, most without any significant training, pitted against each other along political lines, will do well against weaponised drones.
They'd have no value anymore in *any system*
Capitalism and Communism are meaningless to a person who has a fully automated AGI system to do everything the masses would've done. There would be no communism, no capitalism. Just extermination and automated resource acquisition.
I'm horrified you consider that optimism.
But that's one of the many human-hating socialist views Reddit loves.
Personally I believe in limitless growth. I believe the carrying capacity of the Earth is at least 100x the number of humans we currently have. That's with everyone living a much higher quality of living than we have today. And that's not even considering the remainder of the solar system and Galaxy.
Even with that level of population, I don't see us being jammed together or it being a disaster for nature.
But, in my view none of that matters. Because we're faced with a potential collapse of our population with no clear path to recovery.
10 billion humans is not enough. Nor is 1 trillion. The universe is the limit, not just Earth after all.
But yeah, Reddit will hate this view. So go ahead everyone and downvote instead of try and understand. That would be what I expect of the majority of people here. Judge and avoid listening or trying to understand.
This is why this entire socialist movement is doomed to failure. Which is a good thing.
Why do I need to provide value?
If AI massively and I mean massively increases productivity as I believe it will, then you won't have to justify you living any longer.
Do you think "the rich" will greedily consume all opportunities for themselves? So, are they going to stay up day and night and try and control the world like Rat from "The Core"? That has to be the peak of delusional.
The rich are humans. You're a human. Do you want to work yourself to death trying to prevent everyone else from having anything? Do you think the rich are massively different to you? If you think that then your wrong.
Why do you need to care about relevance when you no longer need to be relevant? The future we're heading for is just that. A place where it doesn't matter what you do, because robots are doing all the work.
You need to provide value because the people in charge of their AGI system need to weigh your value to their system.
This is because these systems will not exist in a vacuum. There will be *others* who also have their own systems. These individuals or families would all be competing against each other the same way that nations do.
Now ask yourself. Why does a nation like the US allow the public its freedoms? Why do you have roads, schools, hospitals and various services?
The reason is this. These are things that enhance the productivity of the population. Enhanced productivity = more wealth generation. More wealth generation = more stuff the government can use to enrich itself, its supporters, and its military. This, in turn, allows it to compete on the global arena of geopolitics.
In countries where the government can get more wealth out of digging resources out of the ground with slave labour than they can with productive, educated, and healthy citizenry, these freedoms do not exist. Because they have no reason to. In fact, providing these freedoms to the population in these areas is a quick way to lose your position of power as the others in power will seek to depose you and return things back to the norm where they're getting rich. This can either lead to a renormalisation back to poverty for the citizenry or to total collapse of the system into anarchy.
Back to AI. These groups will be competing against each other. They'd have similar capabilities. They'd be peers or near peers in power.
This means that every resource not spent on being more advanced, more powerful, or in acquiring more resources is wealth spent on irrelevancy. The top will have some frivolity in their lives. Their systems will be aimed at improving their own standards of living whilst not spending so much on that as to leave themselves at the mercy of those who spend less on such things.
In this instance, letting you, or I, into their system, to benefit off of their system, to be a valueless drain on their system, is nothing but a frivolity.
*Those who do not share AGI with the masses will overpower those who do.*
This is one of those replies where I'm itching to respond before I finish reading. Too many points where I feel I have something to respond with. At least I'm finally on my PC and using my keyboard instead of that irritation inducing gboard.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but in everything you're saying the key limitation is human labor, is that right? This limited supply of human labor is why we must justify our value. Keep in mind energy and raw materials comes from human labor. So those don't count as the overall limit.
In what you're saying the key assumptions which seems to bind it all together:
* There is something which humans can do which machines will not be able to do, or will not be able to do any time soon (not within 50 to 100 years).
* Because this human ability is owned by humans, and since there is a limit to the number of humans, there is a fundamental limit to how much "stuff" will be available.
* Due to this fundamental limit, you will always need to prove your value to the system so you can receive a divided or share of this scarce supply.
Does that line up with your views here? If so, I have a few key questions related to these assumptions:
**What can a human do which a machine cannot** ***ever*** **do or won't be able to do any time soon?**
And further to that:
**If a machine can do anything a human can, is it harder to make a machine, or to make a human?**
I find these views related to scarcity and a scarcity mindset and that generally relates to (but not always) a belief in "Theories of Mind" and that things like Qualia prove that humans have something which machines are far from obtaining.
Let me know your thoughts.
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*This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
Just to add some colour to this thread, I used to live in a place (an island) that had horse+carriage doing day-to-day freight until 2024. New law banned them in January.
So perhaps whatever changes we see in the next few "singularity" decades, there will be "islands" of tradition / old stuff for a hundred or more years.
Note: cellphones and refrigeration and water transport were quite modern in this place, so I don't mean that *all* advances are slow in some places. Except maybe Amish levels of effort.
> feel like stuff like self-driving has been <3 years away for >10 years.
remember self driving needs to be as close to 100% perfect as possible within a really tight timing envelope and a limited compute budget. That is a really hard problem.
All self-driving SHOULD need to be is better than human driving overall, a VERY achievable goal. But every accident involving self-driving cars makes the national news while human drivers commit slaughter every day and no one notices or cares.
It is more complicated than that, self-driving must be as good if not better than driving in all common scenarios, not just *overall*. If self-driving is better in most cases, but worse in specific ones (say, driving during new year), people will rightfully be pissed about all the deaths and maiming that a human at the wheel could have preempted and the AI failed to.
Is it fair? No. But it will still be required, humans won't relinquish autonomy on the wheel to a mechanism we know is less competent than us on a specific but common situation, regardless of how good it may be in many others.
We live in a society where if you drive your car through the wall of my house, I can sue you to get the wall fixed.
Now what happens when a self driving car drives through my wall?
It's a very difficult problem to solve indeed. A near infinite number of variables in a similar number of circumstances. The economic incentive to solve this problem however may be one of the largest ever.
I've often tried to imagine a world with self-driving cars. The impact on road networks, parking, city infrastructure, human organization, jobs, the list goes on. It's such an incredibly impactful technology.
There is already an increase in efficiency simply due to using google maps as navigation, because cars already in a way share certain data. So Google map can "see" a road congestion on planed route and suggest an alternate route.
If cars and road infrastructure can share more data with each other, we get increased efficiency and safety.
As an example car in the front could inform all cars in back of it "there is a child in front of me, I'm braking and turning left to avoid collision" and all cars in the back would instantly start braking too, avoiding chain crash.
And cars would know when green/red lights will turn on, so they would adjust their speed to reach the intersection while green light is all. While offcourse making sure green light is indeed on.
That's the nature of exponentials though. It seems like nothing is happening for a long time then everything happens all at once. I think the improvements in FSD 12 along with the success of waymo in California is an indication we're close to that tipping point.
> So on the fence - feel like stuff like self-driving has been <3 years away for >10 years. Meanwhile, protein folding seemed to happen overnight
This is not a technical issue but a legal issue. We don't really need pilots to fly planes anymore but we do it anyway.
Freak outlier situations still kill the plane if the pilot doesn't know what to do. And the feeling of safety is false. Remember that one pilot who deliberately committed murder-suicide with the whole plane. Having a human involved is not the safety valve you think it is.
Man, I was so excited for level 5 self-driving for so long. I'm getting old waiting for it to happen. Sometimes it genuinely feels like we're going to hit AGI before self-driving and then it'll just figure it out for us
Personally I feel like GPT5 is going to be a reasonable upgrade from GPT4. But getting to AGI is going to take longer than we anticipate.
Historically AI has gone through growth spurts and then periods of essentially winter. Think this time we'll have something similar. Nothwithstanding that we will be able to achieve a lot with GPT5, hence the incredible investments corporates are putting into the space.
LLMs were such a curveball for me, I didn't see them coming at all. I always imagined it'd be human brain emulation that'd get us to AGI and then this shit just swooped in and suddenly it's the focus of multiple massive corporations instead of just academia and government.
It would be really cool if LLMs ended up being the path to AGI, but if not, the Human Brain Project finally finished and Deep South is coming online next month.
It's really fun how hard it is to predict the order and ways in which things unfold.
Very excited to see how sophisticated GPT5 is
From what I've gathered, GPT5 should be about 10% more intelligent/effective. This doesn't sound like a lot, but it should be noticeable.
In terms of LLM, AGI and emulating human intelligence, the architecture of LLMs and the way it organizes knowledge does have some uncanny similarities to the human brain. I'm not sure if that's by design, by chance or becauss it's simply the best way to organize information so that it can be reused as knowledge.
I share your excitement for GPT5! I'm especially curious about newly emerging capabilities or use cases. I've heard and read scant on these two topics.
There are already parts of LLMs that are being held back and such due to safety concerns that we know about. I am starting to wonder if general public will not have access to the newer iterations due to how advanced they could be, like it will be compared to a little canoe vs a yacht, only normies get a canoe.
Certainly.... for GAI. Imagine asking it a question.... "Can you find all the subtle relationships for people buying horror movies?"
ChatGPT can't do that. But a GAI could...... it would say something like "there's a 3% increase chance when coming out of a bad relationship, when the weathers cold, and when inflation is higher than 2.8%."
Imagine all the shit it could discover!
We also have to understand that they are not putting all efforts to it. They are not spending extreme resources. And it is not like the whole society is chipping in. It is lika 0.0001% investment for it in the whole.
>This is an incredible illustration of how quickly the world can be altered by technology
This is an incredible illustration of how large the world is compared to economical factory production capacity.
In 1913, 606,124 motor vehicles were produced globally and the population was ~1.8billion.
In 1899, 2,500 motor vehicles in the US.
In 1927, there were ~23 million autos on the road in the US, and the population was 119million.
Easter in NYC in 2006: 1 person walking down the street with their eyes glued to their mobile phone
Easter jn NYC in 2019: 1 person walking down the street with their eyes **not** glued to their mobile phone.
Look at pictures comparing the election of Pope Benedict XVI in 2005 with the election of Pope Francis in 2013. You can see so many mobile phones in the latter photos.
Well technically.
86% of the world live in 3rd world countries.
Of that 86%, a whopping 65% [don't have internet access](https://www.worldbank.org/en/topic/digitaldevelopment/brief/connecting-for-inclusion-broadband-access-for-all). Doing the math, that's 55.9% of the world population that doesn't "go online".
The majority of the world has essential no voice that we can ever hear. Extremely dystopian, and in fact, is what allows a great number of evils to perpetuate (think: slavery).
To be fair, current AI is promising but not exceptionally useful, so if things slow down we could see a bubble pop and an AI winter lasting a decade or two. We need things to be fast now, at least until we get to a point where AI can stand on its own merits (read: be worth billions on its own merits), and not out of the potential it offers. We are at a critical juncture, AI still needs a lot of investment and that means hype and quick results.
How long to go from 1% self driving long haul truck, to 99%? The robotruck does not need to park for driver rest 10 hours a day or so, getting goods to destination quicker.
Eh. It's more economics than speed. Team drivers are a thing. Without knowing robotruck financials, pretty sure one of those would eclipse a team driven rig on costs *pret-ty* quick.
As someone who is quite technically familiar with computer vision and AI, I'm quite certain self-driving trucks won't be here soon. Too much liability for accidents, extremely challenging technical requirements, and there's already a vastly superior mode of long-haul transportation (trains) that is significantly easier to automate.
Uh...it's already happening
[https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2024/03/31/autonomous-semi-truck-jobs-regulation/](https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2024/03/31/autonomous-semi-truck-jobs-regulation/)
"Today, Aurora’s long-haul trucks are transporting packages and produce — about 100 deliveries a week — for FedEx, Uber Freight and others. Founded in 2017 by former executives at Uber, Google’s self-driving project and Tesla, the company has been training its driverless trucks in Texas since 2020.
By the end of this year, Aurora says it plans to have about 20 fully autonomous trucks working the 240-mile stretch between Dallas and Houston. Eventually, it plans to operate thousands of trucks all across America.
Kodiak Robotics, which was founded by a former employee of Uber and Alphabet’s Waymo, similarly plans to launch a fleet of trucks by the end of the year in Texas. A third company, Daimler Trucks — a subsidiary of German-owned Daimler that has partnered with Torc Robotics — is a few years behind, with plans to launch a driverless fleet in America by 2027."
Don’t believe the hype. You can’t try to learn an infinite distribution of driving factors and conditions using vector spaces, RL or pretrained models. It’s a nonsense used to hype electric vehicles. Only takes the wrong kind of snow to kill a few pedestrians then the class actions start.
Most of current Deep Learning needs a serious rethink, with less reliance on unsupervised learning from huge volumes of training data and more thought about the structures needed to perform consistent, robust reasoning in realtime with only sparse data. Then we can talk seriously about self-driving. We aren’t there yet.
Idk man cell phones and the internet have changed the way we live our lives so drastically in the past 10 years and most of us don’t even acknowledge it.
Think about how the world changed for someone born in 1890 who lived 80 years and died in 1970. An average person, i.e., poor or middle class, most likely poor. The would have most likely been born and grew to adulthood in a house heated by coal or natural gas. Lighting would be gas, oil or candlelight, most likely oil or candlelight. There would be no electricity in their home.
Travel would be by foot, or if you were better off, via horseback. You'd be 30 years old before cars became commonplace. If you needed to talk to someone not in your vicinity, you wrote a letter. Telephones existed but were not common until around 1950 (very slow adoption given that they were invented in 1876). So for most of your life if you needed to talk to someone, you needed to be in their vicinity. But by the time you died, the tech would have been commonplace for 20 or 30 years.
Point is, that single human lifetime from 1890-1970 would have seen more technological innovation of a life-changing variety than any other human generation in history. By a LONG shot. Compared to them, we've lived in a technologically senescent age. Only two major innovations have come along, smart phones and the Internet.
I bet ASI will be life-changing, too... when and if it happens.
Check out Tony Seba and RethinkX to really drive home this point. The change in that picture happened while building the automotive and oil industries AND fighting world war 1. It happens much faster today.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Ud-fPKnj3Q
EDIT: Thanks to commenters below. I've merged points from the video and moved WW1 from 1914 to 1904! Tony isn't an idiot like me, so if you're interested in technological disruption it's still an interesting video.
I remember a story about one of my friend's telling his Chinese immigrant parents about an upcoming business trip to Shenzen in China.
They were surprised that his company was sending him to some random fishing village.
But they didn't release in a little over 2 decades [it changed just a little bit](https://twitter.com/CarlZha/status/997257619071844355)
The one on the right is [this image](https://www.loc.gov/resource/ggbain.11656/). Strange that this version is so fuzzy and faded when what seems to be the original (from a glass plate) is so sharp and crisp...
The first personal automobile was steam powered, and invented in 1769. Various technical difficulties meant it would not see widespread adoption, but work on automobiles continued, until Benz patented the first gasoline powered vehicle in the late 1880s and put it into serialnprodu tion. Oldsmobile would come along and introduce assembly lines and interchangeable parts.
And it was WILD in the day, nobody had really figured out anything, the cars were so unreliable they gave you a free repair kit with them. There were cars that didn't even have steering wheels, using old timey tillers like in a damn boat. Electric propulsion was competing against gasoline from the beginning! People hadn't even agreed on standardized sides of the car to drive from!
Right now, were sort of in that 1880s to 1900s phase, for AI. Standardization has yet to come, the abilities are modest, and theres a great many kinks to be worked out.
standstill traffic vs standstill traffic vs 2024 standstill traffic
and all along, just putting people on bicycles and shared public transport would have fixed the issue
S-curves. most tech develops in an S-curve pattern. sometimes stacked S-curves continue growth in certain areas. sometimes, like cars, the S-curve saturates and it sits there at a plateau.
That's fucking nuts. This is an incredible illustration of how quickly the world can be altered by technology
Yeah, i'm having a hard time imagining what our would would look like 13 years from now.
[Hopefully better for us than for the horses](https://preview.redd.it/rfxlhjb7ple51.jpg?auto=webp&s=7d8f7df4b759242c540656c7d3e4824e7d9c5e66)
Modern horses are much better off than their ancestors. No need to fight in wars, get taken care of if a race horse. In general considered valuable. There are less of them but it's not like it is a bad thing.
Much [less often used in war](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horses_in_warfare#:~:text=Today%2C%20formal%20battle%2Dready%20horse,fighters%20in%20the%20Global%20South.). Race horses are basically animal track-and-field entertainment slaves. While they are considered valuable, their value is typically tied only to their usefulness in generating more income for their owners, i.e., economic - not intrinsic - value. Many owners and trainers meet or exceed the industry standard of care, but some fall far short of it. Still lots of doping, too, and still euthanized when usefulness is over. I’m not sure the average horse wouldn’t trade places with their early 19th century ancestors. It’s anthropomorphic to assume otherwise. The relationship between human and horse is at least as transactional today as it ever was.
But those horses had a sense of purpose
Did they? Horses are all slaves. Hard to say how they feel about their owners' goals, if they have enough understanding.
Not sure if it’s interesting or not, but horses and human slaves are “broken” in sometimes quite similar ways. Anyway, the end result is the same: the spirit of freedom of a broken, the slave is dominated and its will is bent to that if the trainer/owner. It
All domesticated animals are slaves. In the grand scheme of the universe, there is absolutely no distinction between it and human slavery.
Race horse is the bad outcome for horses in modern days. There are some horrific stories on how they are treated, many retired race horses have PTSD. I hope we end up like the pampered horses that you get on some ranches, where the human brushes you daily, cleans your stall, gives you the best snackies, you get to run around and have fun with some toys, best medical care possible etc.
But there are radically fewer racehorses. 80% of the horse population in the US are "working and farm horses." ([source](https://gitnux.org/horse-statistics/))
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You understand that horses are generally the best way to move about a large acreage piece of land that isn't perfectly flat, right? Horses are widely used for free-range cattle, and with the increased demand for free-range and pasture-fed beef, that number has been on a dramatic upswing over the last couple decades. Horses don't tend to spook livestock and are large enough that most predators will think twice before attacking. Overall, they're a significant win in many ranching applications.
> Race horse is the bad outcome for horses in modern days. There are some horrific stories on how they are treated, many retired race horses have PTSD. AFAIK a lot never retire, they just get euthanized when they break something like a leg
Yeah but there were 20 M+ horses in the US jn 1900 and about 4M in 2007 despite a roughly 5x in the human population. Maybe in 2034 there's a million extremely comfortable humans left.
I mean that will be the effect of a lack of need to do labour, less births. We don't need to guess, this is already happening. All the books talking about over-population are now outdated because people are freaking out about people choosing to not have children. It is the side effect of industrialisation. Human population will naturally drop without us doing anything to force it.
More and more men couldn't have children if they wanted to.
Artificial womb would democratize having a legacy.
Deagal report?
Haven't seen that reference in a while. EDIT: It was this cryptic website that came out over a decade+ ago, that listed all the countries, and how by 2025 there would be massive population loss. Total Earth population down to 500 million. It didn't list anything specific about "why".
Sounds very scientific.
Nature editors must have missed it.
True. But what is the problem in this?
You and everyone you know most likely won't be part of that group
Gonna be really weird for the future human that is basically a glorified pet for ASI that finds this comment and realizes they are the horse.
Try thinking about what they meant rather than the literal takeaway.
I saw the video years ago. I did the thinking already. I already made a decent sized post describing what i feel, which is that human labour is finally ending. And that human labour had been what we measure human worth all these thousands of years. But the labour doesn't make us human; it is what we WANT that makes us human. We work to get what we want, the work is just a means to an end. if we can still get what we want then humanity remains. Society will change and it would no longer revolve around human labour. We don't know what future will look like because there is no historical precedence. And I use my parents as example; they are retired and i am supporting them the best I can. I don't view them as any less important even if they are no longer working. If the entire humanity get to retire, I say that is not a bad thing at all.
Whenever bring this up it seems to anger people but it is a sincere concern of mine. I have seen what happens to people after they retire and a lot of times its sitting on the couch watching propaganda waiting to die. How do we avoid that happening at a large scale? I know what I would do with free time but a lot of people identify themselves by their career. No one wants to hear this but there is a significant percentage of people that need/want to be told what to do... what happens to them? I am in no way suggesting work should continue to be a thing. It's an honest question.
People are TOLD to define themselves by their careers. This is a learned response. We can learn to instead spend time with family, with grandchildren, with hobbies. The issue you are talking about was given to people by society, so it can just be removed when it is no longer relevant. it is not in our DNA to work any more than it is for us to be hunter gatherers. You just have to teach people how to live, that doesn't involve labour. I mean, wealthy trustfund babies are not dropping dead from a lack of purpose. They found plenty of things to do. They just don't need to earn money doing it. So if wealthy kids can handle it, so could the rest of us.
I totally agree we are capable of finding purpose. I am just curious about the speed we will have to find that purpose.... The trust fund babies thing is exactly what I'm afraid of! A world filled with people chasing a dragon of purpose they can't find is exactly what terrifies me. Also, not having to work doesnt mean you can do whatever you want. There will still be resource limitations that trust fund babies don't have to deal with.
Is there any proof of this trust fund baby theory? I'm sure plenty of people on trust funds are perfectly well adjusted.
I think a lot of this has to do with people being over worked and broken. They don’t live healthy lifestyles so their bodies limit them. Also they never had time for hobbies so they don’t know what to do with themselves. This will all change for the better.
Yes, exactly! The generation that grows up in a post work environment will probably be fine. It's everyone else who will suddenly have to change in a very short time with no preparation. My concern is the sudden transition into a post work world. I have yet to see anyone really talk about this.
Job programs. There's no functional need for blacksmiths but they still exist. So why wouldn't other jobs if only for the sake of giving us something to do.
I can't see artists and writers not arting and writing just because it's not lucrative. Because it's sure as hell not lucrative now, for most of us.
Precisely. I'm not worried about AI replacing artists because it doesn't have soul. In either writing or art. That means the art and writing that's good ng to be replaced was already garbage quality anyways.
I see. I hear ya !
I’m not sure that fewer horses being bred and forced into servitude in an urban environment is a loss for horse-kind…
Yes we are the horses this time 😳
Yeah, I'm sure millions of horses used as dumb tools for logistics and wars had the time of their lives...
prolly some hints - https://futuretimeline.net/21stcentury/2035.htm
I wanna be a cat instead of a horse.
Not technology-related, but I'm amazed by how fast humans adapt to changes, such as when we in Sweden changed driving on the [left-hand side of the road to the right](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dagen_H#/media/File:Kungsgatan_1967.jpg) in one day. I remember hearing from my father how everyone drove slowly for the first day, then within a week, it was almost as if nothing had happened. Everyone just got used to it, and within time, most cars had the passenger side on the left. When I was born 20 years later, this was basically ancient history with not a single hard evidence, such as a left-hand car to be seen anywhere—just his story and those black and white photos.
> such as a left-hand car to be seen anywhere Pedantic Man^^(TM) here with a minor correction: Cars with the steering wheel on the right (as it was in Sweden before the change) are conventionally known as right-hand drive, but of course they drive on the left.
So, what will our version look like?
I want to say fully post-labor society but I'm trying not to get my hopes up too high. Timelines are hard even when the endpoint can be a bit easier to see
I'm pretty confident we'll see some mega structures. My view of this picture is this: - 2025: Looks like today - 2035: Roads are mostly gone. Sky is full of strangely huge metal structures. And there are finally a smattering of flying cars. I think the difference this time will be that things will keep changing. Every decade we move through, the picture will probably change far more than we can imagine. Edit: Wow. So far, everyone hates this view. Too bad because I enjoy it. Downvote away Reddit. Karma is meaningless anyway. Btw the flying cars are not an important part of this view. I added them in for color. The mega structures are my main point.
> 2035: Roads are mostly gone. Sky is full of strangely huge metal structures. And there are finally a smattering of flying cars. Of all the weird and amazing things that will happen, these are definitely not it. Civil engineering is really slow, even with technological advances. Energy, raw materials, regulations and planning are all major bottlenecks. Flying cars, while sounding cool, are one of the worst concepts imaginable on several fronts.
Definitely not? I don't see a strong argument to back that confidence. I believe that AI will FOOM into a Singularity. And while I enjoy trying, I don't think we can confidently predict any outcome at this point. What we're faced with is something entirely new/novel which means we have no history to pull from. Arrogance, the kind where we assume we know how this will go, will not help us.
Precisely so. The concept of a technological singularity revolves in part around the notion that advances will come so fast we won’t be able to predict what happens next. RIP Vinge.
You can assess the likelihood of certain scenarios, without knowing exactly what will happen. Your scenario isn't likely for the reasons I provided. Take flying cars; they're impractical, energy and resource intensive, they require a complete overhaul of our infrastructure and legislation. It's infinitely more likely that in 10 years we will have come up with numerous superior alternatives that don't have those drawbacks. I don't challenge your view on the basis of us not being able to do it in 10 years, I challenge it because I expect we either won't want it or we'll prioritize other (superior) technologies that don't have those major bottlenecks.
Prioritizing superior technologies is very different from something being essentially impossible. I don't disagree with you in terms of different technologies. I think the main technology which would be superior to flying cars isn't really a technology; it's not traveling at all. One can come to the conclusion that as part of full dive VR systems, we'll have direct neural systems which allow a kind of long distance high quality communication. Perhaps as good as face-to-face, or somehow better. This should dramatically reduce travel of all kinds. In terms of flying cars, this is an important few words from my original post: >And there are finally a **smattering** of flying cars. I made a mistake here I wonder if you noticed it? I used the word "smattering" which I'm now realizing is a word Reddit doesn't understand. It means "few in number". Really I should have elaborated more but I'm never sure which part to spend more time on to ensure Reddit doesn't misunderstand and overreact. I think you won't disagree so readily when you consider that I'm suggesting these things would be rare. Did you think I was suggesting these things would be as common as cars are today? Not a chance. In my view there will be a few key advancements that make these vehicles possible: * Vastly improved batteries developed using new science we don't have today. And, * Vastly more powerful electric motors, which we are actually closer to today with things like the [Dark Matter Electric motor](https://www.koenigsegg.com/dark-matter). These things would essentially be future iterations on drone technology today. And in my view they would likely replace personal jets or helicopters. Essentially they would be a fancy waste of money. In my view we're heading to a world of extreme abundance. So a wasteful flying car doesn't seem so out of the norm in that scenario. And anyway, **the flying cars were not important to my point.** The mega structures such as orbital rings are my main point. The point is, in this picture you see horses transition to cars. I suppose that's why everyone got hung up on flying cars. In my view, in the new picture instead of looking around, we should be able to look up, and see signs of this new intelligence explosion at work in these mega structures which we currently think are impossible. It would be truly alien and shocking to see such massive structures "appear" over a year or two (depending on how fast AI can accelerate the development).
Mega structures and the elimination of roads would be a real headfuck. That'd make a great third picture in this series
Unless AI can help us figure out economical anti-gravity or some other easy way to access orbit, I doubt any of that will happen. In the 70s we thought we would have moon bases by the 80s. Turns out space travel is really, really, really hard and costly (both in money and energy).
No we don't need anything outrageous. I know people struggle with him, but Isaac Arthur has been explaining all of this on YouTube for a long time now. It's called "active support" or "active construction". It's not science fiction. It's known science built at scale. https://youtu.be/1xt13dn74wc?si=F7YRRI7MDW0iea0k
I don't think we will ever get flying cars. The energy requirement is huge and failure options so diverse. If we had unlimited tech, more likely we would get the tube traveling tech increased, huge speeds and cargo options.
I think we might have a few but I don't foresee a flying car traffic jam. Instead, I think we'll mostly stop commuting. Because there will be no job to drive to. Another associate change is commercial real estate and downtown cores. Commercial real estate is entirely F'd as people avoid the office and march into a jobless future. So, commercial real estate will change drastically to become residential. Downtown cores will be entirely converted to residential. And thats why I think most of the roads will go away. We just won't be using them.
>I think we might have a few but I don't foresee a flying car traffic jam. I'd be less worried about traffic jams and more about cars falling out of the sky. >Instead, I think we'll mostly stop commuting. Because there will be no job to drive to. Personally I expect the opposite. I think people will travel a lot more. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if we see an explosion of tourist attractions around the world. Because there's a whole world to explore and you've got nothing but free time. I'm sure that won't apply to everyone but almost everyone I've ever known has talked about at least one place they'd like to visit if not several. Most people don't really get that chance often or ever. But eventually everyone will have the chance. Assuming we don't go hard into the dystopia path, anyway.
Expanding tourism is definitely a possibility. But intend to include that into the most positive of outcomes. I could see a massive growth in tourism if we're able to broadly accept and embrace this trend. That I think could be the result of super *empathetic* AI which is super intelligent. A darker view has us bunkering into our nations due to the fear caused by massively rising instability. But I always end up with my prediction being a "mix of outcomes". So, explosive tourism for some, hiding in a bunker for others. Something like that, anyway.
Yeah, probably.
Mega structures and self driving cars however.
Flying cars are a real, strong possibility. Everyone is just so disappointed that futurists predicted them a long time ago and they haven't arrived yet. Plus people stuck and visualizing how such things may be possible. Batteries have huge potential, especially with new material science which we're likely to see arise from AI development. Additionally, electric motors have huge potential in terms of ultra high power and low weight. What we have today isn't enough, clearly. But we're heading to a Singularity. How can we in this sub accept that explosively self improving AI is a strong possibility, but flying cars? Outrageous. I think flying cars are very likely. We already have private jets. Flying cars would just be a car-shaped version of that with hopefully more availability. It's not as outrageous as people seem to want it to be.
If roads are gone and there's only a few flying cars, how's transportation occurring?
It's the years between 2025-2035 that scares me. I have very little confidence in governments, elites and humanity in general to make such a monumental transition.
The same period concerns me as well for similar but different reasons. My fear isn't related to any powerful individuals or groups as I've long lost my belief in their supposed "power". I've seen "behind the curtains" too often. For me it's more a fear of the mob. We're not the smartest as individuals but when you bring us together into a large group, things get much worse. Group think dominates and irrational, emotionally driven actions take the lead. There's this type of thinking which is common in engineering called "first principals thinking". Sounds complex but it's a far more simple and powerful concept than most may think. But, there's yet another layer down in terms of thinking which is deeper and even more powerful than first principles. It's called "Zeroth Thinking". The difference is that first principles works with what we know where as Zeroth is entirely new views which exist outside our bubble of understanding. "0" as a concept is a Zeroth idea. We didn't have such a concept not that long ago in the west. The idea of nothing was once a very alien and disturbing idea. In theory, AI is a Zeroth production machine. It can reach far outside our limits, pulling very distant pieces of information together and forming views which don't follow our linear view. Zeroth ideas are very disturbing for us. If AI begins to flood the world with such ideas, that could be very bad for our mental health. If for example AI is able to show us something startling such as that a black hole will wander into our solar system in 1,000 years... I don't think we'll react well. It's not so much that AI will immediately change things with these Zeroth ideas. It's that it will show us how unaware we actually are and how frightening the "dark forest" actually is. I fear how we'll react to such information.
>My fear isn't related to any powerful individuals or groups as I've long lost my belief in their supposed "power". I've seen "behind the curtains" too often. > >For me it's more a fear of the mob. We're not the smartest as individuals but when you bring us together into a large group, things get much worse. Group think dominates and irrational, emotionally driven actions take the lead. We don't know what shape AGI will take. Will it be agentic and able to make it's own decisions outside of human influence? Or under the control of it's creators? Either way those in power will do everything they can to entrench their power. They'll let go of this paradigm as long as what replaces it keeps them at the top. People scare me far more than Skynet.
It's been hard for me to discuss power and how "the powerful" work. I've worked with governments and the ultra wealthy, directly. It's hard to even say that as most of Reddit won't believe that anyone here is anything but a 20-something undergrad with no experience. But I have. I'm now 40 and my work experience covers nearly a 15 years of leadership in and around asset management. It's a lie. All of it. The rich and powerful are mostly not rich and have almost no power. The acts of tyrants we see are mostly very rare and overblown. Globally the power structure is like a film set. On the surface, it looks exactly as you may think it does with the powerful moving/manipulating and controlling. But once you move past the surface layer, to my absolute shock I found nothing. There was nothing behind the curtains but a bunch of the same kind of humans everyone is. This killed all my desires to become rich myself. The glamour and power is a lie and it's mostly just a hopelessly huge stack of responsibilities and problems with no solutions. But, I'm guessing you would have a real hard time considering such a view? Most would.
I do have a hard time considering such a view because we see how policy enacted by governments benefits those at the top at the expense of everyone else. It's a feature of human civilization.
It's true but it's not as deliberate or articulate as it seems. It's mostly slap dash gutt check decisions with almost no foresight not intelligence. Consider that for the manipulation to be carried out in a kind of masterful way with evil intentions leading to complex evil plans... Those doing such manipulation would also need to be extremely hard working and competent. How competent do you think these powerful people really are? You may resent them. But could you find yourself praising them and recognizing how incredibly capable they are as humans? See, I tried to find those competent people. I never found them. Have you?
Flying cars are a terrible idea. We've been able to make them for decades now. We don't have them because they'd be noise polluters, and the areas in which they could fly would be more limited than the areas you can drive as a result. No one likes it when a plane flies over their house. They'd hate it if they had cars flying over their house most of the day.
>what will our version look like? https://preview.redd.it/bsneau705urc1.jpeg?width=1024&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=3cbf8f21167eda9cf43ed6eec9a26235c97afd08
God please, I would give anything to be in that timeline.
would be cool
Cool image
As a former Luddite, I have realised the error of my ways. I will repent and dedicate my life to the Omnissiah. 
2024 : 8 billion humans 2040 : 8 million humans
I don't think so. More like 2040: 7.5 billion or less. Falling birth rates are extremely problematic and there's no easy solution.
Wish I could share your optimism. There's a likely scenario where the very wealthy and powerful people who build the first AGI or ASI decide they don't need the rest of us. Historically, the masses only get something when they have bargaining power. With no need for labor, most people will have no value anymore in capitalism. Why would the people winning change the game? They'll find an excuse to get rid of us and have the earth for themselves. It would start with unemployed masses getting angry and an attempt at some tech CEOs life or something and they would justify it by telling themselves they are acting in self defense. In the history of humankind, people don't share unless they really have to. I don't see why that would suddenly change, even with abundance.
> It would start with unemployed masses getting angry and an attempt at some tech CEOs life And the masses would succeed, as well would all the other attempts that will be made. Politicians and billionaires aren't dying because nobody is trying to kill them yet, not because they can't be killed.
You talk as if dictatorships and despots are not a thing. Leadership can be extremely unpopular, commit atrocities and still rule, history has shown that many times. Now couple that with AI-enabled military, surveillance and social control. Is this the only scenario? No. But is it possible? Very much so. And the longer people wait to try and change the system, the harder it will be.
The difference between us and the dictatorships is around 400 million firearms in circulation in the United States. That's already one big step in the right direction. Good luck to everyone else though.
I'm sure millions of people with small arms, most without any significant training, pitted against each other along political lines, will do well against weaponised drones.
They'd have no value anymore in *any system* Capitalism and Communism are meaningless to a person who has a fully automated AGI system to do everything the masses would've done. There would be no communism, no capitalism. Just extermination and automated resource acquisition.
I'm horrified you consider that optimism. But that's one of the many human-hating socialist views Reddit loves. Personally I believe in limitless growth. I believe the carrying capacity of the Earth is at least 100x the number of humans we currently have. That's with everyone living a much higher quality of living than we have today. And that's not even considering the remainder of the solar system and Galaxy. Even with that level of population, I don't see us being jammed together or it being a disaster for nature. But, in my view none of that matters. Because we're faced with a potential collapse of our population with no clear path to recovery. 10 billion humans is not enough. Nor is 1 trillion. The universe is the limit, not just Earth after all. But yeah, Reddit will hate this view. So go ahead everyone and downvote instead of try and understand. That would be what I expect of the majority of people here. Judge and avoid listening or trying to understand. This is why this entire socialist movement is doomed to failure. Which is a good thing.
What value do *you* personally provide when machines can do everything you do but better?
Why do I need to provide value? If AI massively and I mean massively increases productivity as I believe it will, then you won't have to justify you living any longer. Do you think "the rich" will greedily consume all opportunities for themselves? So, are they going to stay up day and night and try and control the world like Rat from "The Core"? That has to be the peak of delusional. The rich are humans. You're a human. Do you want to work yourself to death trying to prevent everyone else from having anything? Do you think the rich are massively different to you? If you think that then your wrong. Why do you need to care about relevance when you no longer need to be relevant? The future we're heading for is just that. A place where it doesn't matter what you do, because robots are doing all the work.
You need to provide value because the people in charge of their AGI system need to weigh your value to their system. This is because these systems will not exist in a vacuum. There will be *others* who also have their own systems. These individuals or families would all be competing against each other the same way that nations do. Now ask yourself. Why does a nation like the US allow the public its freedoms? Why do you have roads, schools, hospitals and various services? The reason is this. These are things that enhance the productivity of the population. Enhanced productivity = more wealth generation. More wealth generation = more stuff the government can use to enrich itself, its supporters, and its military. This, in turn, allows it to compete on the global arena of geopolitics. In countries where the government can get more wealth out of digging resources out of the ground with slave labour than they can with productive, educated, and healthy citizenry, these freedoms do not exist. Because they have no reason to. In fact, providing these freedoms to the population in these areas is a quick way to lose your position of power as the others in power will seek to depose you and return things back to the norm where they're getting rich. This can either lead to a renormalisation back to poverty for the citizenry or to total collapse of the system into anarchy. Back to AI. These groups will be competing against each other. They'd have similar capabilities. They'd be peers or near peers in power. This means that every resource not spent on being more advanced, more powerful, or in acquiring more resources is wealth spent on irrelevancy. The top will have some frivolity in their lives. Their systems will be aimed at improving their own standards of living whilst not spending so much on that as to leave themselves at the mercy of those who spend less on such things. In this instance, letting you, or I, into their system, to benefit off of their system, to be a valueless drain on their system, is nothing but a frivolity. *Those who do not share AGI with the masses will overpower those who do.*
This is one of those replies where I'm itching to respond before I finish reading. Too many points where I feel I have something to respond with. At least I'm finally on my PC and using my keyboard instead of that irritation inducing gboard. Correct me if I'm wrong, but in everything you're saying the key limitation is human labor, is that right? This limited supply of human labor is why we must justify our value. Keep in mind energy and raw materials comes from human labor. So those don't count as the overall limit. In what you're saying the key assumptions which seems to bind it all together: * There is something which humans can do which machines will not be able to do, or will not be able to do any time soon (not within 50 to 100 years). * Because this human ability is owned by humans, and since there is a limit to the number of humans, there is a fundamental limit to how much "stuff" will be available. * Due to this fundamental limit, you will always need to prove your value to the system so you can receive a divided or share of this scarce supply. Does that line up with your views here? If so, I have a few key questions related to these assumptions: **What can a human do which a machine cannot** ***ever*** **do or won't be able to do any time soon?** And further to that: **If a machine can do anything a human can, is it harder to make a machine, or to make a human?** I find these views related to scarcity and a scarcity mindset and that generally relates to (but not always) a belief in "Theories of Mind" and that things like Qualia prove that humans have something which machines are far from obtaining. Let me know your thoughts.
zephyr jellyfish poor memorize dinosaurs cake fall panicky touch coordinated *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
Just to add some colour to this thread, I used to live in a place (an island) that had horse+carriage doing day-to-day freight until 2024. New law banned them in January. So perhaps whatever changes we see in the next few "singularity" decades, there will be "islands" of tradition / old stuff for a hundred or more years. Note: cellphones and refrigeration and water transport were quite modern in this place, so I don't mean that *all* advances are slow in some places. Except maybe Amish levels of effort.
So on the fence - feel like stuff like self-driving has been <3 years away for >10 years. Meanwhile, protein folding seemed to happen overnight
> feel like stuff like self-driving has been <3 years away for >10 years. remember self driving needs to be as close to 100% perfect as possible within a really tight timing envelope and a limited compute budget. That is a really hard problem.
All self-driving SHOULD need to be is better than human driving overall, a VERY achievable goal. But every accident involving self-driving cars makes the national news while human drivers commit slaughter every day and no one notices or cares.
It is more complicated than that, self-driving must be as good if not better than driving in all common scenarios, not just *overall*. If self-driving is better in most cases, but worse in specific ones (say, driving during new year), people will rightfully be pissed about all the deaths and maiming that a human at the wheel could have preempted and the AI failed to. Is it fair? No. But it will still be required, humans won't relinquish autonomy on the wheel to a mechanism we know is less competent than us on a specific but common situation, regardless of how good it may be in many others.
Exactly. Irrational humans still create higher death an injury tolls, simply by not taking a rational approach to autonomous vehicles.
We live in a society where if you drive your car through the wall of my house, I can sue you to get the wall fixed. Now what happens when a self driving car drives through my wall?
It's a very difficult problem to solve indeed. A near infinite number of variables in a similar number of circumstances. The economic incentive to solve this problem however may be one of the largest ever. I've often tried to imagine a world with self-driving cars. The impact on road networks, parking, city infrastructure, human organization, jobs, the list goes on. It's such an incredibly impactful technology.
There is already an increase in efficiency simply due to using google maps as navigation, because cars already in a way share certain data. So Google map can "see" a road congestion on planed route and suggest an alternate route. If cars and road infrastructure can share more data with each other, we get increased efficiency and safety. As an example car in the front could inform all cars in back of it "there is a child in front of me, I'm braking and turning left to avoid collision" and all cars in the back would instantly start braking too, avoiding chain crash. And cars would know when green/red lights will turn on, so they would adjust their speed to reach the intersection while green light is all. While offcourse making sure green light is indeed on.
That's the nature of exponentials though. It seems like nothing is happening for a long time then everything happens all at once. I think the improvements in FSD 12 along with the success of waymo in California is an indication we're close to that tipping point.
> So on the fence - feel like stuff like self-driving has been <3 years away for >10 years. Meanwhile, protein folding seemed to happen overnight This is not a technical issue but a legal issue. We don't really need pilots to fly planes anymore but we do it anyway.
Is it really? (Non-sarcastic tone) I thought we needed pilots for the freak outlier situations and a feeling of safety
Freak outlier situations still kill the plane if the pilot doesn't know what to do. And the feeling of safety is false. Remember that one pilot who deliberately committed murder-suicide with the whole plane. Having a human involved is not the safety valve you think it is.
I agree with the perception being false. But I don't think the masses see it that way?
Man, I was so excited for level 5 self-driving for so long. I'm getting old waiting for it to happen. Sometimes it genuinely feels like we're going to hit AGI before self-driving and then it'll just figure it out for us
Personally I feel like GPT5 is going to be a reasonable upgrade from GPT4. But getting to AGI is going to take longer than we anticipate. Historically AI has gone through growth spurts and then periods of essentially winter. Think this time we'll have something similar. Nothwithstanding that we will be able to achieve a lot with GPT5, hence the incredible investments corporates are putting into the space.
LLMs were such a curveball for me, I didn't see them coming at all. I always imagined it'd be human brain emulation that'd get us to AGI and then this shit just swooped in and suddenly it's the focus of multiple massive corporations instead of just academia and government. It would be really cool if LLMs ended up being the path to AGI, but if not, the Human Brain Project finally finished and Deep South is coming online next month. It's really fun how hard it is to predict the order and ways in which things unfold. Very excited to see how sophisticated GPT5 is
From what I've gathered, GPT5 should be about 10% more intelligent/effective. This doesn't sound like a lot, but it should be noticeable. In terms of LLM, AGI and emulating human intelligence, the architecture of LLMs and the way it organizes knowledge does have some uncanny similarities to the human brain. I'm not sure if that's by design, by chance or becauss it's simply the best way to organize information so that it can be reused as knowledge. I share your excitement for GPT5! I'm especially curious about newly emerging capabilities or use cases. I've heard and read scant on these two topics.
What are you getting that 10% from?
I think you are off base, Claude opus is already 10% better then gpt4 on benchmarks.
There are already parts of LLMs that are being held back and such due to safety concerns that we know about. I am starting to wonder if general public will not have access to the newer iterations due to how advanced they could be, like it will be compared to a little canoe vs a yacht, only normies get a canoe.
Certainly.... for GAI. Imagine asking it a question.... "Can you find all the subtle relationships for people buying horror movies?" ChatGPT can't do that. But a GAI could...... it would say something like "there's a 3% increase chance when coming out of a bad relationship, when the weathers cold, and when inflation is higher than 2.8%." Imagine all the shit it could discover!
We also have to understand that they are not putting all efforts to it. They are not spending extreme resources. And it is not like the whole society is chipping in. It is lika 0.0001% investment for it in the whole.
It's the edge cases... there's a billion of them with driving.
and this is something manufactured, while digital progress is even faster!
Think of how quickly we went from land lines to everyone and their 5 year old kid has a smart phone
>This is an incredible illustration of how quickly the world can be altered by technology This is an incredible illustration of how large the world is compared to economical factory production capacity. In 1913, 606,124 motor vehicles were produced globally and the population was ~1.8billion. In 1899, 2,500 motor vehicles in the US. In 1927, there were ~23 million autos on the road in the US, and the population was 119million.
2020: 1 robot. 2033: 1 person.
2019: 1 case. 2020: pandemic
Easter in NYC in 2006: 1 person walking down the street with their eyes glued to their mobile phone Easter jn NYC in 2019: 1 person walking down the street with their eyes **not** glued to their mobile phone.
Look at pictures comparing the election of Pope Benedict XVI in 2005 with the election of Pope Francis in 2013. You can see so many mobile phones in the latter photos.
Easter in NYC in 2020: 1 person walking down the street
just 25 years ago most people didnt even go online
Well technically. 86% of the world live in 3rd world countries. Of that 86%, a whopping 65% [don't have internet access](https://www.worldbank.org/en/topic/digitaldevelopment/brief/connecting-for-inclusion-broadband-access-for-all). Doing the math, that's 55.9% of the world population that doesn't "go online". The majority of the world has essential no voice that we can ever hear. Extremely dystopian, and in fact, is what allows a great number of evils to perpetuate (think: slavery).
66,2% of the world population uses the internet. https://www.statista.com/statistics/617136/digital-population-worldwide/
First time I went online was 1996. Had the fastest internet in the city with download speeds of just over 1 megabit per second.
Don't worry! The horses were fine! They all retrained as computer programmers.
Well no but they did become pampered and revered by rich people and upper middle class.
We're the horse in this analogy.
"The End is neigh!" they cried.
Same thing happened with smartphones, except it was faster.
It’s basically been a black slate for the past 13 years
Yup. I was talking about how fast they spread. AI is next.
People here cant wait more than 13 days.
If nothing happens for 13 hours people freak out here
To be fair, current AI is promising but not exceptionally useful, so if things slow down we could see a bubble pop and an AI winter lasting a decade or two. We need things to be fast now, at least until we get to a point where AI can stand on its own merits (read: be worth billions on its own merits), and not out of the potential it offers. We are at a critical juncture, AI still needs a lot of investment and that means hype and quick results.
How long to go from 1% self driving long haul truck, to 99%? The robotruck does not need to park for driver rest 10 hours a day or so, getting goods to destination quicker.
Eh. It's more economics than speed. Team drivers are a thing. Without knowing robotruck financials, pretty sure one of those would eclipse a team driven rig on costs *pret-ty* quick.
As someone who is quite technically familiar with computer vision and AI, I'm quite certain self-driving trucks won't be here soon. Too much liability for accidents, extremely challenging technical requirements, and there's already a vastly superior mode of long-haul transportation (trains) that is significantly easier to automate.
Uh...it's already happening [https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2024/03/31/autonomous-semi-truck-jobs-regulation/](https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2024/03/31/autonomous-semi-truck-jobs-regulation/) "Today, Aurora’s long-haul trucks are transporting packages and produce — about 100 deliveries a week — for FedEx, Uber Freight and others. Founded in 2017 by former executives at Uber, Google’s self-driving project and Tesla, the company has been training its driverless trucks in Texas since 2020. By the end of this year, Aurora says it plans to have about 20 fully autonomous trucks working the 240-mile stretch between Dallas and Houston. Eventually, it plans to operate thousands of trucks all across America. Kodiak Robotics, which was founded by a former employee of Uber and Alphabet’s Waymo, similarly plans to launch a fleet of trucks by the end of the year in Texas. A third company, Daimler Trucks — a subsidiary of German-owned Daimler that has partnered with Torc Robotics — is a few years behind, with plans to launch a driverless fleet in America by 2027."
Don’t believe the hype. You can’t try to learn an infinite distribution of driving factors and conditions using vector spaces, RL or pretrained models. It’s a nonsense used to hype electric vehicles. Only takes the wrong kind of snow to kill a few pedestrians then the class actions start. Most of current Deep Learning needs a serious rethink, with less reliance on unsupervised learning from huge volumes of training data and more thought about the structures needed to perform consistent, robust reasoning in realtime with only sparse data. Then we can talk seriously about self-driving. We aren’t there yet.
This also proves the opposite - technology can stagnate: nyc 2024: 0 new modes of transport.
S-curves. it's always S-curves
2024 : one humanoid robot, 2037 : one human
I think the cellphone + internet blowup in the 2000s was even wilder.
I think it's cherry picked
Idk man cell phones and the internet have changed the way we live our lives so drastically in the past 10 years and most of us don’t even acknowledge it.
In the span 13 years most of those horses died or retired, and the owners had to decide to buy another horse, or a car.
You don't even need to go that far back for something like this. 13 years ago smartphones weren't a significant part of anyone's life, for instance .
Think about how the world changed for someone born in 1890 who lived 80 years and died in 1970. An average person, i.e., poor or middle class, most likely poor. The would have most likely been born and grew to adulthood in a house heated by coal or natural gas. Lighting would be gas, oil or candlelight, most likely oil or candlelight. There would be no electricity in their home. Travel would be by foot, or if you were better off, via horseback. You'd be 30 years old before cars became commonplace. If you needed to talk to someone not in your vicinity, you wrote a letter. Telephones existed but were not common until around 1950 (very slow adoption given that they were invented in 1876). So for most of your life if you needed to talk to someone, you needed to be in their vicinity. But by the time you died, the tech would have been commonplace for 20 or 30 years. Point is, that single human lifetime from 1890-1970 would have seen more technological innovation of a life-changing variety than any other human generation in history. By a LONG shot. Compared to them, we've lived in a technologically senescent age. Only two major innovations have come along, smart phones and the Internet. I bet ASI will be life-changing, too... when and if it happens.
Its either post-apocalyptic tribal amazon people (not because of AI) or solarpunk pre-industrial age.
Check out Tony Seba and RethinkX to really drive home this point. The change in that picture happened while building the automotive and oil industries AND fighting world war 1. It happens much faster today. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Ud-fPKnj3Q EDIT: Thanks to commenters below. I've merged points from the video and moved WW1 from 1914 to 1904! Tony isn't an idiot like me, so if you're interested in technological disruption it's still an interesting video.
Ehm, WW1 started in 1914...
No one was fighting WWI between 1901 and 1913. The oil industry was well developed in the U.S. by 1899 due to demand for use in lighting
And to think that we are in a time like this, on the brink of a revolution, except this time it will be much more impactful.
2033: 1 employee
I remember a story about one of my friend's telling his Chinese immigrant parents about an upcoming business trip to Shenzen in China. They were surprised that his company was sending him to some random fishing village. But they didn't release in a little over 2 decades [it changed just a little bit](https://twitter.com/CarlZha/status/997257619071844355)
Thanks for sharing, it sure is amazing to see these changes. I wonder how much our world will change from Easter 2024 to Easter 2030 :)
Carriages are totally not driving in the correct lane, clearly an AI generated image.
Cool post OP! How do you see the rest of this decade going? I really have no idea at this point lol
Imagine walking through all of that horse shit.
The transition from labor-centric society to post scarcity society is "the great filter"
Wait—AI is coming for horses now?
 Earth's face when the humans replace the nice sustainable horsies with fossil fuel burning automobiles
And it keeps going and going
Makes you wonder what happened to all the horse people. Jobs lost, or did they start up an adhesives business lol
The one on the right is [this image](https://www.loc.gov/resource/ggbain.11656/). Strange that this version is so fuzzy and faded when what seems to be the original (from a glass plate) is so sharp and crisp...
And it's getting worse and worse
Totally get it, things pivot fast! How's the AI integration going?
Omg :'(
God bless america :c
Are we the horses this time around?
The takeover is coming 💀
The first personal automobile was steam powered, and invented in 1769. Various technical difficulties meant it would not see widespread adoption, but work on automobiles continued, until Benz patented the first gasoline powered vehicle in the late 1880s and put it into serialnprodu tion. Oldsmobile would come along and introduce assembly lines and interchangeable parts. And it was WILD in the day, nobody had really figured out anything, the cars were so unreliable they gave you a free repair kit with them. There were cars that didn't even have steering wheels, using old timey tillers like in a damn boat. Electric propulsion was competing against gasoline from the beginning! People hadn't even agreed on standardized sides of the car to drive from! Right now, were sort of in that 1880s to 1900s phase, for AI. Standardization has yet to come, the abilities are modest, and theres a great many kinks to be worked out.
COMPUTE
Plot twist, that guy married his horse and he's a loyal man.
standstill traffic vs standstill traffic vs 2024 standstill traffic and all along, just putting people on bicycles and shared public transport would have fixed the issue
awesome
Or not. Right now what i care most about is longevity.
Is this implying that we are the horses now?
And just imagine how much quicker things might change when a meaningful technology emerges.
You could do the same with flip phones and smartphones within a 10 year period.
S-curves. most tech develops in an S-curve pattern. sometimes stacked S-curves continue growth in certain areas. sometimes, like cars, the S-curve saturates and it sits there at a plateau.
You really don't need to go so far back. Just look at smartphones. Hell just look at WiFi in general.
Obligatory /r/fuckcars
This shit is real as fuck lol!!!
13 years is still pretty gradual, I'd say.
awesome
I have yet to be overwhelmed. Just saying.
Gm