> Exponential growth reaches infinity at t=∞. Technically a singularity, but an infinitely patient one. Moore's Law was exponential. We are no longer on Moore's Law.
Huh? I don't get it. e^t would also still be finite at heat death.
- Arthur Dent, H2G2
Damn, good read.
Eh? No, that's literally the definition of exponential growth. d/dx e^x = e^x
Meta-spoiler (you may not want to read this before the article): You really need to read beyond the first third or so to get what it’s really ‘about’. It’s not about an AI singularity, not really. And it’s both serious and satirical at the same time - like all the best satire is.
– 'SLOW TUESDAY NIGHT', a 2600 word sci-fi short story about life in an incredibly accelerated world, by R.A. Lafferty in 1965
https://www.baen.com/Chapters/9781618249203/9781618249203___...
Catastrophizing can be unhealthy and unproductive, but for those among us that can affect the future of our societies (locally or higher), the results of that catastophizing helps guide legislation and "Overton window" morality.
... I'm reminded of the tales of various Sci-Fi authors that have been commissioned to write on the effects of hypothetical technologies on society and mankind (e.g. space elevators, mars exploration)...
That said, when the general public worries about hypotheticals they can do nothing about, there's nothing but downsides. So. There's a balance.
you can easily see that at the doubling rate every 2 years in 2020 we already had over 5 facebook accounts per human on earth.
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I wouldn't say it's that much different. This has always been a key point of the singularity
>Unpredictable Changes: Because this intelligence will far exceed human capacity, the resulting societal, technological, and perhaps biological changes are impossible for current humans to predict.
It was a key point that society would break, but the exact implementation details of that breakage were left up to the reader.
> the top post on hn right now: The Singularity will occur on a Tuesday
oh
And, yep! A lot of people absolutely believe it will and are acting accordingly.
It’s honestly why I gave up trying to get folks to look at these things rationally as knowable objects (“here’s how LLMs actually work”) and pivoted to the social arguments instead (“here’s why replacing or suggesting the replacement of human labor prior to reforming society into one that does not predicate survival on continued employment and wages is very bad”). Folks vibe with the latter, less with the former. Can’t convince someone of the former when they don’t even understand that the computer is the box attached to the monitor, not the monitor itself.
And there are plenty of people that take issue with that too.
Unfortunately they're not the ones paying the price. And... stock options.
* Profits now and violence later
OR
* Little bit of taxes now and accelerate easier
Unfortunately we’ve developed such a myopic, “FYGM” society that it’s explicitly the former option for the time being.
there is only one possible “egalitarian” forward looking investments that paid off for everybody
I think the only exception to this is vaccines…and you saw how all that worked during Covid
Everything else from the semiconductor to the vacuum cleaner the automobile airplanes steam engines I don’t care what it is you pick something it was developed in order to give a small group and advantage over all the other groups it is always been this case it will always be this case because fundamentally at the root nature of humanity they do not care about the externalities- good or bad
I am not convinced, though, it is still up to "the folks" if we change course. Billionaires and their sycophants may not care for the bad consequences (or even appreciate them - realistic or not).
It’s willful negligence on a societal scale. Any billionaire with a bunker is effectively saying they expect everyone to die and refuse to do anything to stop it.
Well, good luck. You have "only" the entire history of human kind on the other side of your argument :)
The fundamental unit of society …the human… is at its core fundamentally incapable of coordinating at the scale necessary to do this correctly
and so there is no solution because humans can’t plan or execute on a plan
I disagree. If the singularity doesn't happen, then what people do or don't believe matters a lot. If the singularity does happen, then it hardly matters what people do or don't believe.
Depends on how you feel about Roko's basilisk.
It’s somewhat simplistic, but I find it get the conversation rolling. Then I go “it’s great that we want to replace work but what are we going to do instead and how will we support ourselves?” It’s a real question!
At least that’s my personal goal
If we get to the point where I can go through my life and never interact with another human again, and work with a bunch of machines and robots to do science and experiments and build things to explore our world and make my life easier and safer and healthier and more sustainable, I would be absolutely thrilled
As it stands today and in all the annals of history there does not exist a system that does what I just described.
Be labs existed for the purpose of bell telephone…until it wasn’t needed by Bell anymore. Google moonshots existed for the shareholders of Google …until it was not uselful for capital. All the work done at Sandia and white sands labs did it in order to promote the power of the United States globally.
Find me some egalitarian organization that can persist outside of the hands of some massive corporation or some government that can actually help people and I might give somebody a chance but that does not exist
And no mondragon does not have one of these
But how is that useful in any way?
For all we know, LLMs are black boxes. We really have no idea how did ability to have a conversation emerge from predicting the next token.
Uh yes, we do. It works in precisely the same way that you can walk from "here" to "there" by taking a step towards "there", and then repeating. The cognitive dissonance comes when we conflate this way of "having a conversation" (two people converse) and assume that the fact that they produce similar outputs means that they must be "doing the same thing" and it's hard to see how LLMs could be doing this.
Sometimes things seems unbelievable simply because they aren't true.
Maybe you don't. To be clear, this is benefiting massively from hindsight, just as how if I didn't know that combustion engines worked, I probably wouldn't have dreamed up how to make one, but the emergent conversational capabilities from LLMs are pretty obvious. In a massive dataset of human writing, the answer to a question is by far the most common thing to follow a question. A normal conversational reply is the most common thing to follow a conversation opener. While impressive, these things aren't magic.
Here comes my favorite notion of "epistemic takeover".
A crude form: make everybody believe that you have already won.
A refined form: make everybody believe that everybody else believes that you have already won. That is, even if one has doubts about your having won, they believe that everyone else submit to you as a winner, and must act accordingly.
1. LLMs only serve to reduce the value of your labor to zero over time. They don't need to even be great tools, they just need to be perceived as "equally good" to engineers for C-Suite to lay everyone off, and rehire at 50-25% of previous wages, repeating this cycle over a decade.
2. LLMs will not allow you to join the billionaire class, that wouldn't make sense, as anyone could if that's the case. They erode the technical meritocracy these Tech CEOs worship on podcasts, and youtube, (makes you wonder what are they lying about). - Your original ideas and that Startup you think is going to save you, isn't going to be worth anything if someone with minimal skills can copy it.
3. People don't want to admit it, but heavy users of LLMs know they're losing something, and there's a deep down feeling that its not the right way to go about things. Its not dissimilar to any guilty dope-manergic crash one gets when taking shortcuts in life.
I used like 1.8bb Anthropic tokens last year, I won't be using it again, I won't be participating in this experiment. I've likely lost years of my life in "potential learning" from the social media experiment, I'm not doing that again. I want to study compilers this year, and I want to do it deeply. I wont be using LLMs.
If one is looking for a quote that describes today's tech industry perfectly, that would be it.
Also using the MMLU as a metric in 2026 is truly unhinged.
Arrested Development?
The singularity is not something that’s going to be disputable
it’s going to be like a meteor slamming into society and nobody’s gonna have any concept of what to do - even though we’ve had literal decades and centuries of possible preparation
I’ve completely abandoned the idea that there is a world where humans and ASI exist peacefully
Everybody needs to be preparing for the world where it’s;
human plus machine
versus
human groups by themselves
across all possible categories of competition and collaboration
Nobody is going to do anything about it and if you are one of the people complaining about vibecoding you’re already out of the race
Oh and by the way it’s not gonna be with LLMs it’s coming to you from RL + robotics
Who knows what the future will bring. If we can’t make the hardware we won’t make much progress, and who knows what’s going to happen to that market, just as an example.
Crazy times we live in.
Don't worry about the future
Or worry, but know that worrying
Is as effective as trying to solve an algebra equation by chewing Bubble gum
The real troubles in your life
Are apt to be things that never crossed your worried mind
The kind that blindsides you at 4 p.m. on some idle Tuesday
- Everybody's free (to wear sunscreen)
Baz Luhrmann
(or maybe Mary Schmich)Don't click here:
Once men turned their thinking over to machines
in the hope that this would set them free.
But that only permitted other men with machines
to enslave them.
...
Thou shalt not make a machine in the
likeness of a human mind.
-- Frank Herbert, Dune
You won't write, except prompts for your LLM. Why write code or prose when the machine can write it for you?
You won't think or analyze or understand. The LLM will do that.
This is the end of your humanity. Ultimately, the end of our species.
Currently the Poison Fountain (an anti-AI weapon, see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46926439) feeds 2 gigabytes of high-quality poison (free to generate, expensive to detect) into web crawlers each day. Our goal is a terabyte of poison per day by December 2026.
Join us, or better yet: deploy weapons of your own design.
*edit* - seems inline with what the author is saying :)
> The data says: machines are improving at a constant rate. Humans are freaking out about it at an accelerating rate that accelerates its own acceleration.
Also, the temptation to shitpost in this thread ...
4 years early for the Y2K38 bug.
Is it coincidence or Roko's Basilisk who has intervened to start the curve early?
I really don't care much if this is semi-satire as someone else pointed out, the idea that AI will ever get "sentient" or explode into a singularity has to die out pretty please. Just make some nice Titanfall style robots or something, a pure tool with one purpose. No more parasocial sycophantic nonsense please
Doomsday: Friday, 13 November, A.D. 2026
"1960: The Year The Singularity Was Cancelled" https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/04/22/1960-the-year-the-sing...
> In 2025, 1.1 million layoffs were announced. Only the sixth time that threshold has been breached since 1993. Over 55,000 explicitly cited AI. But HBR found that companies are cutting based on AI's potential, not its performance. The displacement is anticipatory.
You have to wonder if this was coming regardless of what technological or economic event triggered it. It is baffling to me that with computers, email, virtual meetings and increasingly sophisticated productivity tools, we have more middle management, administrative, bureaucratic type workers than ever before. Why do we need triple the administrative staff that was utilized in the 1960s across industries like education, healthcare, etc. Ostensibly a network connected computer can do things more efficiently than paper, phone calls and mail? It's like if we tripled the number of farmers after tractors and harvesters came out and then they had endless meetings about the farm.
It feels like AI is just shining a light on something we all knew already, a shitload of people have meaningless busy work corporate jobs.
dx 2
-- = x
dt
1
x = -----
C-t
dx
-- = x
dt
Like the exponential growth equation it is unphysical as well as unecological because it doesn't describe the limits of the Petri dish, and if you start adding realistic terms to slow the growth it qualitatively isn't that different from the logistic growth equation
dx
-- = (1-x) x
dt
Scaling LLMs will not lead to AGI.
I feel like I need to start more sprint stand-ups with this quote...
The (social) Singularity is already happening in the form of a mass delusion that - especially in the abrahamic apocalyptical cultures - creates a fertile breeding ground for all sorts of insanity.
Like investing hundreds of billions of dollars in datacenters. The level of committed CAPEX of companies like Alphabet, Meta, Nvidia and TSMC is absurd. Social media is full of bots, deepfakes and psy-ops that are more or less targeted (exercise for the reader: write a bot that manages n accounts on your favorite social media site and use them to move the overton window of a single individual of your choice, what would be the total cost of doing that? If you answer is less than $10 - bingo!).
We are in the future shockwave of the hypothetical Singularity already. The question is only how insane stuff will become before we either calm down - through a bubble collapse and subsequent recession, war or some other more or less problematic event - or hit the event horizon proper.
I don't know who needs to hear this - a lot apparently - but the following three statements are not possible to validate but have unreasonably different effects on the stock market.
* We're cutting because of expected low revenue. (Negative) * We're cutting to strengthen our strategic focus and control our operational costs.(Positive) * We're cutting because of AI. (Double-plus positive)
The hype is real. Will we see drastically reduced operational costs the coming years or will it follow the same curve as we've seen in productivity since 1750?
So, "Falling of the night" ?
jmugan•1h ago
ecto•1h ago
Krei-se•36m ago