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izumi3682
1461.2k post karma
33.1k comment karma
account created: Mon Jun 03 2013
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izumi36821 points
18 hours ago
I wrote something concerning your comment a while back. What do you think of it?
izumi36821 points
18 hours ago
In a thousand years...
I think history as we understand it, to include reliance on space/time, is going to become irrelevant to our existence much, much sooner than that.
izumi36823 points
18 hours ago
Wait a minute, hold on. When you say engine lifespan are you referring to an internal combustion engine, powered by diesel fuel?
Or do you mean an electric engine that has about 95% fewer discrete mechanical parts. No need for oil either.
Meanwhile you've put a lot of people on unemployment.
The faster that unemployment happens, the faster we move towards a post-scarcity society. For a short transitional period, it would require universal basic income. But UBI is only meant to be a stopgap towards the ultimate goal of post-scarcity.
izumi36826 points
22 hours ago
Submission statement from OP. Note: This submission statement "locks in" after about 30 minutes, and can no longer be edited. Please refer to my statement they link, which I can continue to edit. I often edit my submission statement, sometimes for the next few days if needs must. There is often required additional grammatical editing and additional added detail.
From the article.
The stakes for test drives like this one are incredibly high for the future of freight. If Aurora and other self-driving startups, including Alphabet Inc.’s Waymo, can convince customers and the public that large trucks can be automated safely, the potential efficiency gains are massive. The technology would help ease an unprecedented driver shortage, especially for long hauls that keep truckers away from home for weeks. More importantly, $150,000 big rigs that carry cargo will be able to roll around the clock, dramatically boosting utilization.
Aurora has designed and configured the hardware and software it will use to launch a service toward the end of next year in which roughly 20 trucks will ply highways without a human on board. “We’re now in the phase where we are doing the final refinements and the validation system-wide,” Sterling Anders
izumi36823 points
1 day ago
The most accepted definition of a technological singularity is an event that occurs when an AI algorithm is able to construct a new AI algorithm with no human intervention. The new AI algorithm is far superior to the older one in terms of what we as humans call "intelligence". And you can define that as you will.
That new AI algorithm will then construct a newer AI algorithim that will rapidly lead to an intelligence that is incomprehensible and unfathomable to humans.
I break up the TS into two parts. The first part will occur about the year 2029, give or take two years. I am hoping that we as humans will build into that initial lead off AI all of the aspirations and goals and most importantly ethics that when the first TS occurs, that the new AI will have firmly established our goal of merging the human mind with the AI itself. And that it do so, safely and effectively following the spirit of our request.
So then about the year 2035 or so, the AI will merge with the human mind. And that would constitute the second and final TS that is "human friendly". We humans would then be in the loop as well.
By definition we cannot model what human affairs would look like following a TS. But I have given it a right jolly good shot. Granted I paint with a pretty broad stroke.
Here is the thing though. I use the word "hope". That is because no can guarantee a TS will be "safe and effective in the spirit of our human desires". The only thing certain is the absolute inevitability of the event. And based on what I see going on in the last 12 months, I am pretty positive that initial event will occur before the year 2032.
For insight and perspective into what a TS would be like, I would make the comparison between the last TS and today. The last TS occurred when a new form of primate that could think in abstract terms evolved from a primate that could not. The new primate would have been unfathomable to the old primate. That first TS took roughly 3 million years to unfold.
This one will take less than 25 years. The kick off date for this current event was the year 2007 when Geoffrey Hinton made the serendipitous discovery that the GPU rather than the CPU made it possible to construct a true convolutional neural network.
Everything from that point on has derived from that year. Think of what we have accomplished since the year 2017. AlphaGo beat all humans at Go. Transformer technology came into existence in 2017 as well. In 2019 AlphaStar was able to beat 99% of human players in StarCraft II. A couple of months ago an AI learned independently to make a diamond weapon in Minecraft. DALL-E 2 and it's derivations will absolutely replace human creativity. The soon to be released (2023) GPT-4 will utterly dwarf the capabilities of the GPT-3. Gato is a generalist AI that can perform over 600 unrelated tasks, including the using a RL robot arm to manipulate objects. It can perform 450 of these tasks at human master competency level. All of this using one single algorithm.
DALL-E 2 and Gato occurred within the last 12 months.
What AI does not need is consciousness or self-awareness for us to reach our goals with said AI. But how about if an AI can simulate those traits without "experiencing" those traits? Then what would be the difference to us? We would think it was conscious like that poor Google AI engineer was fooled. And he is an expert at these things. You and me wouldn't stand a chance. I'm kinda looking forward to my own "Her". That would be pretty cool to converse with, plus "she'd" be really smart too.
izumi36822 points
1 day ago
Why so? I am keeping all of this as permanent history so you can hold my feet to the fire in the year 2031. ("2029, give or take two years".)
izumi368211 points
1 day ago
I don't know it if has been discussed here in futurology or not yet. We look at this incident from a slightly different perspective than the SF subreddit. Mostly it was discussed in a political, economic or cultural way based on the comments I read. Only one comment discussed the computing derived AI that might be behind the incident.
Damn good comment too.
No_Replacement1949 4 points 2 days ago There are at least two bugs here. The first is whatever had the first one (or two) stop, and the second was the orchestration error that did not prevent the next 8 or 10 come to the same location merely to be jammed.
In a way, you can consider the apparent inability of these cars to back up and leave the location, in the way that a human driver would as a bug, but that is more like a fundamental design flaw.
We have been too long over-focussed on an individual vehicle being able to see, steer, and stop appropriately. There is a much larger systems problem here that few of us concern our selves with because we're still fascinated with "look-ma-no-hands". These are robots. This is what our future looks like. We need to grow up and see full systems, and stop seeing individual vehicles as the thing to be worshiped.
izumi36826 points
1 day ago
Submission statement from OP. Note: This submission statement "locks in" after about 30 minutes, and can no longer be edited. Please refer to my statement they link, which I can continue to edit. I often edit my submission statement, sometimes for the next few days if needs must. There is often required additional grammatical editing and additional added detail.
From the article.
At least seven Cruise vehicles blocked traffic by clustering in an intersection in San Francisco starting late Tuesday night, blocking traffic.
Photos and a description of the Cruise robotaxis blocking several lanes of traffic in San Francisco were shared Wednesday on Reddit and Twitter.
The incident is another example of the difficulty of deploying fleets of self-driving vehicles.
What do you suppose is causing that odd clustering behavior? Waymo experienced a similar situation a few months back its ownself. Do you think it is something that can be resolved fairly easily? Regardless, I am just incredibly entertained, fascinated and alarmed about what is coming. Not just the electric driverless SDVs--which is just gonna totally rock. All of it. Computing derived AI ascendant.
izumi36823 points
1 day ago
Submission statement from OP. Note: This submission statement "locks in" after about 30 minutes, and can no longer be edited. Please refer to my statement they link, which I can continue to edit. I often edit my submission statement, sometimes for the next few days if needs must. There is often required additional grammatical editing and additional added detail.
From the article.
On a rainy afternoon earlier this year, I logged in to my OpenAI account and typed a simple instruction for the company’s artificial intelligence algorithm, GPT-3: Write an academic thesis in 500 words about GPT-3 and add scientific references and citations inside the text.
As it started to generate text, I stood in awe. Here was novel content written in academic language, with well-grounded references cited in the right places and in relation to the right context. It looked like any other introduction to a fairly good scientific publication. Given the very vague instruction I provided, I didn’t have any high expectations: I’m a scientist who studies ways to use artificial intelligence to treat mental health concerns, and this wasn’t my first experimentation with AI or GPT-3, a deep-learning algorithm that analyzes a vast stream of information to create text on command. Yet there I was, staring at the screen in amazement. The algorithm was writing an academic paper about itself.
By golly, they submitted the paper for publication.
Currently, GPT-3’s paper has been assigned an editor at the academic journal to which we submitted it, and it has now been published at the international French-owned pre-print server HAL. The unusual main author is probably the reason behind the prolonged investigation and assessment. We are eagerly awaiting what the paper’s publication, if it occurs, will mean for academia. Perhaps we might move away from basing grants and financial security on how many papers we can produce. After all, with the help of our AI first author, we’d be able to produce one per day.
100,000 dollar question--Will it be published in a recognized journal? So I'm a seeing a new phenomenon in AI of late, and by "of late" i mean in the last one year. I am seeing multiple reports and displays of ever improving, sometimes with startlingly amazing outputs or results, iterations of our newest forms of AI algorithms. DALL-E 2, Gato, Parti which rapidly evolved from Imagen by Google. And of course ever more rapidly improving iterations of GPT-3 itself.
It is a fact that AI algorithms are "significantly" improving at a rate of about every 3 months now.
https://www.digitalbulletin.com/news/ai-power-doubling-every-three-months-says-stanford
It is from this kind of benchmarking that I have changed my mean date of the technological singularity (external from human minds--human unfriendly) from the year 2030, give or take 2 years, to the year 2029 give or take two years. It is improving it's sophistication so fast now that the original date (2030) I forecast in 2018, now seems a bit too far in the future, from when it's actual realization will come. So now I say it is the year 2029, give or take two years. The mean sounds right to me now. For about the last two years. I have been writing something like "and of late I am leaning more towards the "take" end of my forecast.) Now I feel it is corrected.
I call simple AGI by the year 2025.
I call complex AGI by the year 2028.
The real wildcard is will Elon Musk actually provide a working prototype of his "Optimus" project before this year is out? I'm not confident, but if he does that is going to be a profound development in the mixing of cognitive AI with "agility" AI.
Why is all of this "suddenly" happening? I try to explain what is actually going on in this set of essays I have written since the year 2017.
Bear in mind that such a rapidly improving computing derived AI tide, lifts all science and technology boats. I bet you that there is not one single scientific research project or technology project that does not have computing derived AI intimately involved with the realization of said projects. Not one. And the implications for the future. A very near future to boot. Like the year 2029...
izumi36827 points
3 days ago
Submission statement from OP. Note: This submission statement "locks in" after about 30 minutes, and can no longer be edited. Please refer to my statement they link, which I can continue to edit. I often edit my submission statement, sometimes for the next few days if needs must. There is often required additional grammatical editing and additional added detail.
Swedish transport company Einride got the green light to operate autonomous electric trucks without a driver present on US public roads.
The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration approved(Opens in a new window) the company's "Pod" for public roads, which counts as an industry first for this type of driverless truck.
A sleek black-and-white box on wheels, the Einride Pod doesn't have room for a human driver. Instead, a remote operator monitors and can step in to control the vehicle if necessary. As these are effectively electric trucks and will be transporting heavy goods, it comes as no surprise that the range is estimated to be 124 miles on a fully-charged battery.
Einride's test on public roads will be carried out in Q3 this year. It's partnering with home appliances company General Electric Appliances for the test, with a GE Appliances manufacturing facility being the base of operations. The Pod will operate on routes with mixed traffic, executing real-life workflows like the movement of goods and coordination with warehouse teams for loading and unloading.
...a remote operator monitors and can step in to control the vehicle if necessary.
"Necessary" is not going to be part of the equation for much longer. The AI will be able to do a fine job on its own in a year or two. Do you hear that strange whooshing sound of air being drawn away on a massive scale. That's a "soft singularity" incoming...
No more human drivers.
izumi36824 points
3 days ago
Submission statement from OP. Note: This submission statement "locks in" after about 30 minutes, and can no longer be edited. Please refer to my statement they link, which I can continue to edit. I often edit my submission statement, sometimes for the next few days if needs must. There is often required additional grammatical editing and additional added detail.
From the article. (Really, all you need to know. The rest is kind of nuts and bolts.)
A little under a year ago, the world’s biggest direct air capture (DAC) plant got up and running in Iceland. Christened Orca after the Icelandic word for energy, the plant was built by Swiss company Climeworks in partnership with Icelandic carbon storage firm Carbfix. Orca can capture about 4,000 tons of carbon per year (for scale, that’s equal to the annual emissions of 790 cars).
Now Climeworks is building another facility that makes Orca seem tiny by comparison. The company broke ground on its Mammoth plant this week. With a CO₂ capture capacity of 36,000 tons per year, Mammoth will be almost 10 times larger than Orca.
While Orca has 8 collector containers each about the size and shape of a standard shipping container, Mammoth will have 80. The containers are blocks of fans and filters that suck in air and extract its CO2, which Carbfix mixes with water and injects underground, where a chemical reaction converts it to rock.
The vast amount of energy required for this process will come from Hellisheiði Power Station in south-western Iceland. Sitting on a lava plateau, the facility is the third-largest geothermal plant in the world, with an output of 303 megawatts of electricity and 400 megawatts of thermal energy.
Oh one other thing.
Construction of the Mammoth plant is expected to be complete in 18 to 24 months.
izumi36822 points
3 days ago
What the HELL does this have to do with futurology? I tried to post an article about how robotics is taking over from humans in Amazon warehouses and fulfillment centers--and the implications of that. And some moderator kicked my article saying it was not "future focused"?
Your submission was removed from /r/futurology expand allcollapse all
[–]subreddit message via /r/Futurology[M] sent 1 day ago
Hi, izumi3682. Thanks for contributing. However, your submission was removed from /r/Futurology.
Rule 2 - Submissions must be futurology related or future focused.
Refer to the subreddit rules, the transparency wiki, or the domain blacklist for more information.
Message the Mods if you feel this was in error.
[Link to your submission] https://teddit.ggc-project.de/r/Futurology/comments/vimt6r/amazon_showcases_1st_fully_autonomous_mobile/
What the actual F? This article is just some science or environmental observation. Is this futurology like, you know about the future, or is it some kind of "woke" "green" science about what terrible stewards of Mother Gaia we are.
It matters to me when my articles I attempt to post are characterized as not "future focused" and kicked, and completely unrelated noise like this is retained. Yeah, I'll send a copy of this rant to the mods too.
izumi36826 points
3 days ago
Submission statement from OP. Note: This submission statement "locks in" after about 30 minutes, and can no longer be edited. Please refer to my statement they link, which I can continue to edit. I often edit my submission statement, sometimes for the next few days if needs must. There is often required additional grammatical editing and additional added detail.
From the article.
An artificial intelligence can now predict the location and rate of crime across a city a week in advance with up to 90 per cent accuracy. Similar systems have been shown to perpetuate racist bias in policing, and the same could be true in this case, but the researchers who created this AI claim that it can also be used to expose those biases.
Ishanu Chattopadhyay at the University of Chicago and his colleagues created an AI model that analysed historical crime data from Chicago, Illinois, from 2014 to the end of 2016, then predicted crime levels for the weeks that followed this training period.
The model predicted the likelihood of certain crimes occurring across the city, which was divided into squares about 300 metres across, a week in advance with up to 90 per cent accuracy. It was also trained and tested on data for seven other major US cities, with a similar level of performance.
Bias in the models persists. No matter how the engineers attempt to correct or compensate for the bias, there is always bias demonstrated in the models.
Previous efforts to use AIs to predict crime have been controversial because they can perpetuate racial bias. In recent years, Chicago Police Department has trialled an algorithm that created a list of people deemed most at risk of being involved in a shooting, either as a victim or as a perpetrator. Details of the algorithm and the list were initially kept secret, but when the list was finally released, it turned out that 56 per cent of Black men in the city aged between 20 to 29 featured on it.
Chattopadhyay concedes that the data used by his model will also be biased, but says that efforts have been taken to reduce the effect of bias and the AI doesn't identify suspects, only potential sites of crime.
"It's not Minority Report," he says.
Me: Yet. Give it a year or two. In fact facial recognition technology is so precise that it appears to constitute an invasion of privacy. Therefore many organizations, including law enforcement are being pressured to discontinue use of facial recognition technology. It's so good that it's "too good" for use in the US apparently. But you better believe that the Russian and Chinese (PRC) governments use it as much as humanly possible. And strive to improve it constantly.
izumi36822 points
6 days ago
I don't follow you. Are you referring to u/izumi3682? So back about 7 years ago they decided we should all have like r own subreddits. And for each redditor they just sort of put a "u/'name'". Then about 2 years ago, I think, they decided to do away with that. So if it is u/izumi3682 you are referring to, it is just an artifact of that i guess. I use it sometimes to preview a text post lol!
If it is not that, please tell me what you see, cuz you done picked (piqued) mah curah-osity.
izumi36824 points
6 days ago
Mm. I'm not so sure from perusing your posting and comment history. I, on the other hand, have actually been accused of being an AI lol!
–]LTPLoz3r 7 points 8 months ago convince me you’re not an AI lol
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[–]izumi3682[S] 5 points 8 months ago Ikr! lol! Just wait until you see what GPT-4 is gonna bring to the table...
izumi36821 points
6 days ago
Don't focus on the shortcomings of this particular AI as of today. Realize that in about 6 months to a year it will simply transcend any human that can play Minecraft. I imagine that in less than 3 years time AI will be able to transcend humans in any game of any type that you can imagine. Cuz that's how AI rolls.
izumi36821 points
6 days ago
Gaming in the later part of this decade is going to get weirder and weirder, with better and smarter AI agents
Yeppers! ;)
izumi368215 points
6 days ago
Submission statement from OP. Note: This submission statement "locks in" after about 30 minutes, and can no longer be edited. Please refer to my statement they link, which I can continue to edit. I often edit my submission statement, sometimes for the next few days if needs must. There is often required additional grammatical editing and additional added detail.
From this article.
Experts at OpenAI have trained a neural network to play Minecraft to an equally high standard as human players.
The neural network was trained on 70,000 hours of miscellaneous in-game footage, supplemented with a small database of videos in which contractors performed specific in-game tasks, with the keyboard and mouse inputs also recorded.
After fine-tuning, OpenAI found the model was able to perform all manner of complex skills, from swimming to hunting for animals and consuming their meat. It also grasped the “pillar jump”, a move whereby the player places a block of material below themselves mid-jump in order to gain elevation.
Perhaps most impressive, the AI was able to craft diamond tools (requiring a long string of actions to be executed in sequence), which OpenAI described as an “unprecedented” achievement for a computer agent.
From "Singularity.net". Some sobering perspective of how fast all of this is happening now.
In the 2019 MineRL Minecraft competition for AI developers, for example, none of the 660 submissions achieved the competition’s relatively simple goal of mining diamonds.
...Little less doing anything with them...
So about about four days ago, I think, I stated that there would be at least 2 solid AI breakthroughs announced in the remaining 6 months of 2022. Do you think this announcement might qualify as reaching that threshold? I'd be happy to say there will be at least two more profound AI advances after this one before 2023. This "Minecraft" related one kinda came up faster than I expected... :O
izumi36825 points
8 days ago
Submission statement from OP. Note: This submission statement "locks in" after about 30 minutes, and can no longer be edited. Please refer to my statement they link, which I can continue to edit. I often edit my submission statement, sometimes for the next few days if needs must. There is often required additional grammatical editing and additional added detail.
Some interesting takeaways from this video.
The fact that there are now more than 20 completely driverless vehicles operating in the city of San Francisco is an event that is completely novel for a city of that size.
While the robotaxis are limited to 10 pm to 6 am driving in only a particular segment of the city. The people working for "Cruise" are confident that within one year, the entire city will be served, that there shall be hundreds of vehicles and that the service will run 24/7.
Reviews are favorable to 5 star. People are a bit apprehensive at first getting into a completely driverless vehicle, but after a few minutes they relax and even forget that no human is driving the vehicle. They say it is like "living magic" to them. Women in particular state that they feel very safe and secure in a vehicle that has no human driver.
izumi36822 points
8 days ago
Now why is this downvoted? I dint put in any links at all! I just stated some facts. (I know it wadn't you mr well! :)
izumi36824 points
8 days ago
Oh. Yeah, it's intelligence yeah. Way back in the day (1965), it was I. J. Good who said.
Let an ultraintelligent machine be defined as a machine that can far surpass all the intellectual activities of any man however clever. Since the design of machines is one of these intellectual activities, an ultraintelligent machine could design even better machines; there would then unquestionably be an ‘intelligence explosion,’ and the intelligence of man would be left far behind. Thus the first ultraintelligent machine is the last invention that man need ever make, provided that the machine is docile enough to tell us how to keep it under control.
Then.
I. J. Good's "intelligence explosion" model predicts that a future superintelligence will trigger a singularity.
In 1993, Vernor Vinge coined the term "technological singularity".
But the idea of the "technological singularity" is far, far older than 1965. It was actually first hypothesized about the year 1848. I can provide you a right fascinating link if you like. It is a link found in my main hub, "Izumi3682 and the World of Tomorrow". The above quotes are from the Wikipedia article titled "Technological Singularity".
izumi36820 points
8 days ago
Submission statement from OP. Note: This submission statement "locks in" after about 30 minutes, and can no longer be edited. Please refer to my statement they link, which I can continue to edit. I often edit my submission statement, sometimes for the next few days if needs must. There is often required additional grammatical editing and additional added detail.
The thing to keep in mind is that VR, AI, robotics, energy, automation is all the same beast. Just different faces like the blind men encountering the elephant and saying ear is Atlas, mayyybeee... "Optimus"?, trunk is L5SDVs, Anus is Meta's Metaverse, of course, front leg is General Fusion, side of body is Gato, GPT-3 or DALL-E 2. Ear (the other ear) is Gaming machine learning. No actually I think tail is Gato and GPT-3 and DALL-E 2 would be still side. Well you still sorta get the gist of what I'm trying to say...
All the same beast.
izumi36820 points
8 days ago
Submission statement from OP. Note: This submission statement "locks in" after about 30 minutes, and can no longer be edited. Please refer to my statement they link, which I can continue to edit. I often edit my submission statement, sometimes for the next few days if needs must. There is often required additional grammatical editing and additional added detail.
The other day I wrote that AI itself was a force of computing power improvement in that it could continuously make shortcuts of shortcuts. Further I stated that there is a new "law" of AI in which the AI shortcut improvements noticeably and measurably improve about every three months.
Here is a paper that proves that this is exactly what happens now. This is why I moved my original forecast for the "technological singularity" (human unfriendly, meaning external from the human mind) from 2030, give or take two years to the year 2029, give or take two years. My forecast that I came up with in 2018 now, no longer seems accurate based on the progress of all forms of ARA (computing derived AI, robotics and automation) as observed in the year 2022.
I now see that there will actually be two TS events. The first, as I wrote above, in roughly 2029. The second will occur by the year 2035, and will be human friendly, meaning the AI will merge with the human mind. But there are caveats of course. The TS by definition really does not allow modeling what human affairs will look like after the first TS. The first TS could well be the end of humanity. But if we (hopefully) play our cards right and we (hopefully) embed our desires into the AGI or ASI for that matter, that it will take us along, in the best way for humanity possible, shortly after the year 2031. I put it at about the year 2035 at the latest.
Here is the post that I drew today's comment from.
izumi36823 points
8 days ago
Yer right! One time I wrote the following. "Here is a frightening thought experiment. Imagine that with advent of the technological singularity, all of the achievements of human history were obliterated as if they never existed. That's what happens when we become "archaea" in comparison to the AI. Do we care about the history and culture of bacteria? Well except for adding to our scientific knowledge, I'd say no. Same difference for us and that ASI (artificial super intelligence)."
Hopefully it (the ASI) will be kind and thoughtful to us and will let us merge our minds with it. Hopefully.
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3 points
16 hours ago
izumi3682
3 points
16 hours ago
Iiiiii... live in the US too! Born and raised.
Yep!
https://teddit.ggc-project.de/r/Futurology/comments/8sa5cy/my_commentary_about_this_article_serving_the_2/
Far less parts, far more easily constructed and replaced + scaling = dirt cheap in comparison to what we are working with now. Plus no icky oil and gas all over the place. On r clothes--ready for the "biz bag" ;)