Yeah, with this mentality, we wouldn't have electricity today. You will never make transition to new technology painless, no matter what you do. (See: https://pessimistsarchive.org)
What you are likely doing, though, is making many more future humans pay a cost in suffering. Every day we delay longevity escape velocity is another 150k people dead.
There was a time when in the name of progress people were killed for whatever resources they possessed, others were enslaved etc. and I was under the impression that the measure of our civilization is that we actually DID care and just how much. It seems to me that you are very eager to put up altars of sacrifice without even thinking that the problems you probably have in mind are perfectly solvable without them.
Nah, it's death. People objectively are doing better than ever despite wealth inequality. By all metrics - poverty, quality of life, homelessness, wealth, purchasing power.
I'd rather just... not die. Not unless I want to. Same for my loved ones. That's far more important than "wealth inequality."
You don't mind living in a country with a population of billions [sic], piled on top of one another? You don't mind living a country ruled by gerontocracy and probably autocracy, because that's what you'll eventually get without death to flush them out.
"You/your loved ones should die because Elon would die too" is a terrible argument. It's not great, but it's not worth dying over. New rich bad people would take his place anyways.
"You should die because cities will get crowded" is a less terrible argument but still a bad one. We have room for at least double our population on this planet, couples choosing longevity can be required to have <=1 children until there is room for more, we will eventually colonize other planets, etc.
All this is implying that consciousness will continue to take up a meaningful amount of physical space. Not dying in the long term implies gradual replacement and transfer to a virtual medium at some point.
> People objectively are doing better than ever despite wealth inequality. By all metrics - poverty, quality of life, homelessness, wealth, purchasing power.
If you take this as an axiom, it will always be true ;).
One of the biggest factors in risk of death right now is poverty. Also what is being chased right now is "human level on most economically viable tasks" because the automated research for solving physics etc. even now seems far-fetched.
So it's bs but for money and therefore totally fine ? I think it's not ok if only a fraction comes true because some people believe in those things and act on those beliefs right now.
I didn't say it was bs. I was alluding to the timing of this essay being published but, clearly, I didn't articulate it in my message well. I also don't think everything he says is bs. Some of it I find a bit naive -- but maybe that's ok -- some other things seem a bit like sci-fi, but who are we to say this is impossible? I'm optimistic but also learnt in life that things improve, sometimes drastically given the right ingredients.
“We found that even state-of-the-art models which are optimally performant in data similar to their training sets are not optimal — that is, they do not make the best trade-off between overall and subgroup performance — in novel settings,” Ghassemi says. “Unfortunately, this is actually how a model is likely to be deployed. Most models are trained and validated with data from one hospital, or one source, and then deployed widely.”
What ? Stable diffusion doesn't have an underlying understanding that humans typically have two arms, two hands and five fingers per hand gathered from vast sea of training data ? That's a bold statement.
IIRR it’s a debate as to the difference between 99% of the time
It predicts the next pixel will be fleshy and the pixel next to it is background this making something that looks fingery (and so when presented with
An odd angle that 99% drops crazily” or that somehow there is a executive function that has evolved that gets a concept of finger with movement, musculature etc
It’s the “somehow evolved” part that is where I have my concerns.
Predictive ability based on billions images, sounds good. Executive function - how does that work? But at some point we are playing “what is consciousness” games.
Would love to hear more rigourous thought than mine - any links gratefully received:-)
I actually agree with you. I was a bit sarcastic. If I understand correctly there isn't a fundamental difference when it comes to text output vs pixel data output in this context. If so then it suddenly sounds much more of a stretch (intuitively) to claim that somehow stable diffusion understands the real world (like people claim to be the case with language models).
With 3.6B people in the workforce I'd argue there isn't a billion people in need of a computer, not to mention an ai subscription plan. I'm of course assuming most subscriptions for ai are work related.
Indeed, there is a massive gap between free and $1/month. Personally I outright refuse to buy anything digital involving monthly payments (except where there is no alternative like domain names, etc.)
I also pay for better AI. My - and probably your time - and the time saved by using superior tooling, is worth far more than the meagre few dollars spent each month on some subscription.
AI tooling that costs money does not provide anything better than the freely available tools. If you built some product upon it, I'm sorry but your product is not worth a dime.
Change 'check' to 'do' and we'll have a discussion.