"He looked at me incredulously. Surely, a smart person like me should know that AI, or better said, AGI will be hyperpersuasive soon – already on a bunch of benchmarks it exceeds professional debaters at persuasion." I'm always tickled by this tic of this kind of person, that human traits are something that we can maximize to infinity. That if we trained a robot to tell jokes, it would eventually tell jokes so funny we'd die laughing etc. You can't convince someone who doesn't want to be convinced.
In my work, I have always found that the main "blocker" (I hesitate to use the term "bottleneck"), is human nature.
If we design stuff to be used by humans (what I generally do), then it's imperative to take basic human nature into account, and that can be incredibly annoying.
Annoying, or not, human nature is a major factor, and won't go away, no matter how many times we tap our heels together. I think it was Philip K. Dick that said "Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away."
Designing stuff for processes and machines to consume, is pretty straightforward. Designing stuff for humans, however, is really challenging (which is one of the reasons that I like doing it).
I would go further and say that the human should be the bottleneck/blocker. If not designed for and to serve humans, which means to have human in the position of power and control and take in account all the various human oddities, why are we building all of this?
You sort of side stepped the author's point, though.
> In medicine you have the modern labs which automate a lot and you have the old labs. These 'neolabs' are better because of intelligence.
The author is not denying that a lab can be more effective with intelligence, they're arguing that this entire phase of the process of improving health is not the bottleneck.
Alan Kay said "A change in perspective is worth 80 IQ points,".
A change in perspective is often brought about by communication or I/O. In my experience this often bears out. The people who communicate get more done than the clever person who doesn't get out into the problem domain. The limit is I/O not intelligence.
Indeed - if access to data or the permission to act on that data is limited by human gatekeepers (individual or bureaucratic), intelligence is often not the primary bottleneck.
OP points out that this is usually the case in biology/medicine where regulatory bottlenecks dominate.
> Some have been waiting for a year for the NIH to release imaging datasets they can use to produce better biomarkers. If one needs to interact with the FDA to get their endpoint validated, it is even worse: I have previously written about how the validation of Bone Mineral Density (BMD) for use as a surrogate endpoint in osteoporosis trials took 12 years (!), despite the fact that the data to support it already existed in full and the analyses done were basically regressions.
> no matter how “intelligent” AI becomes, intelligence is often not the main bottleneck to things changing in the real world
A mathematician Terrence Tao said something similar in a recent talk [1]. That, intelligence is bottlenecked by human understanding. Say there is an alien that brings an alien book containing math humans havent seen before. Using said math is bottlenecked by humans comprehending it first.
I think the next bottleneck is embodiment. AI can lay the best laid plans, but who will execute it?
I think a possible solution to the dual problems of AI embodiment and unemployment is humans becoming avatars for AI.
Imagine one of the unskilled masses donning a headset and being guided through all manner of work?
It‘s actually stunning how inhumane this suggestion is. Especially, in the way it‘s made in the purely functional sense of human value as means of productivity and efficiency.
Robots being able to perform any task a human can do, physically, doesn't seem that far off. They would be powered by AI of course.
The question is: do we still have to work? If not, who will take all the wealth?
We thought the washing machine would have giving us so much free time, because it used to take a full day a week. Instead, we only got more frantic it seems and started putting in more labor. But what will happen when that labor is worthless?
In a dystopian world, the elite may be better off just killing the lower, middle and even the higher classes. Keep just enough people to have an interesting gene pool around. Because even in the space mines there will be no need for human labor anymore.
I think the guy is right on point at least when it comes to therapies. But he is also missing one major angle: we are no longer in control; our systems are. If we were to vote on the issue, I suspect that a narrow majority would prefer cheaper housing, and a total majority would prefer cancer to be cured. But there's no direct mechanism of any kind to exercise that vote. Not in USA, not in Europe, not in China. When/where there's democracy, nobody runs in a campaign of advancing immune therapies[^1]. The closest proxy we have to a vote is "regulated markets", and my recent experience losing a loved one to cancer taught me that cancer is not a disease for the streams of money moving through that system. Far from it.
I'm frankly pessimist that we will be able to fix those systems in a humanist way, at least not in my lifetime. If we were any good at it, we wouldn't have extreme inequality, nor our educations systems would be in tatters, and we wouldn't cast ballots propping up politicians whose best skill is ragebait.
However, if fixing the system is not an option, access to cheap technology and intelligence could help a lucky few circumvent those systems. And guess what the lucky few at the head of the AI companies will say then... Not necessarily the worst outcome, since most people will find more viable to equip a private biolab in the basement of their countryside manor than fixing the medical system of first world economies.
[^1] For the record, I think that would be better than running on xenophobic slogans.
Essence of Decision is a great book that explores this idea. It looks at different models for understanding how organizations make decisions, and arrives at broadly the same conclusion: a model that assumes people are particularly in control is inadequate for explaining real world events.
"He looked at me incredulously. Surely, a smart person like me should know that AI, or better said, AGI will be hyperpersuasive soon – already on a bunch of benchmarks it exceeds professional debaters at persuasion." I'm always tickled by this tic of this kind of person, that human traits are something that we can maximize to infinity. That if we trained a robot to tell jokes, it would eventually tell jokes so funny we'd die laughing etc. You can't convince someone who doesn't want to be convinced.
In my work, I have always found that the main "blocker" (I hesitate to use the term "bottleneck"), is human nature.
If we design stuff to be used by humans (what I generally do), then it's imperative to take basic human nature into account, and that can be incredibly annoying.
Annoying, or not, human nature is a major factor, and won't go away, no matter how many times we tap our heels together. I think it was Philip K. Dick that said "Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away."
Designing stuff for processes and machines to consume, is pretty straightforward. Designing stuff for humans, however, is really challenging (which is one of the reasons that I like doing it).
I would go further and say that the human should be the bottleneck/blocker. If not designed for and to serve humans, which means to have human in the position of power and control and take in account all the various human oddities, why are we building all of this?
There's a lotta humans, not just one, and some have power over others.
Oh, sweet summer child
What a great quote from PKD! He had so much insight into what the future would become.
Thats just not true and we see this in medicine and research.
An expert in physics still needs to write code in python to do their math and analysis. Its an intelligence issue. That person needs to learn a tool.
In medicin you have the modern labs which automate a lot and you have the old labs. These 'neolabs' are better because of intelligence.
A doctor doing a diagnosis can say 'no clue' or can give you a proper answer. The more intelligent this person is, the better the answer.
You sort of side stepped the author's point, though.
> In medicine you have the modern labs which automate a lot and you have the old labs. These 'neolabs' are better because of intelligence.
The author is not denying that a lab can be more effective with intelligence, they're arguing that this entire phase of the process of improving health is not the bottleneck.
Alan Kay said "A change in perspective is worth 80 IQ points,". A change in perspective is often brought about by communication or I/O. In my experience this often bears out. The people who communicate get more done than the clever person who doesn't get out into the problem domain. The limit is I/O not intelligence.
The systems will reflect the cultures communication structure for better or worse. =3
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway's_law
Indeed - if access to data or the permission to act on that data is limited by human gatekeepers (individual or bureaucratic), intelligence is often not the primary bottleneck.
OP points out that this is usually the case in biology/medicine where regulatory bottlenecks dominate.
> Some have been waiting for a year for the NIH to release imaging datasets they can use to produce better biomarkers. If one needs to interact with the FDA to get their endpoint validated, it is even worse: I have previously written about how the validation of Bone Mineral Density (BMD) for use as a surrogate endpoint in osteoporosis trials took 12 years (!), despite the fact that the data to support it already existed in full and the analyses done were basically regressions.
> no matter how “intelligent” AI becomes, intelligence is often not the main bottleneck to things changing in the real world
A mathematician Terrence Tao said something similar in a recent talk [1]. That, intelligence is bottlenecked by human understanding. Say there is an alien that brings an alien book containing math humans havent seen before. Using said math is bottlenecked by humans comprehending it first.
[1] https://teorth.github.io/tao-web/slides/age-of-ai-icm-2026.p...
I think the next bottleneck is embodiment. AI can lay the best laid plans, but who will execute it?
I think a possible solution to the dual problems of AI embodiment and unemployment is humans becoming avatars for AI. Imagine one of the unskilled masses donning a headset and being guided through all manner of work?
Roofing, ACHVAC, stocking shelves, etc…
No need to train anybody.
It‘s actually stunning how inhumane this suggestion is. Especially, in the way it‘s made in the purely functional sense of human value as means of productivity and efficiency.
Maybe I‘m missing the joke though.
> Imagine one of the unskilled masses donning a headset and being guided through all manner of work?
No need to imagine nor AI for this, it can be either JSON guides on AR, e.g. Daqri for more than a decade, or remote work in VR (6 years ago or more https://www.inceptivemind.com/remote-controlled-model-t-robo... )
"Solution" seems rather euphemistic for making people literal slaves of AI.
Not of AI, of the owners and steerers of the AI systems.
Robots being able to perform any task a human can do, physically, doesn't seem that far off. They would be powered by AI of course.
The question is: do we still have to work? If not, who will take all the wealth?
We thought the washing machine would have giving us so much free time, because it used to take a full day a week. Instead, we only got more frantic it seems and started putting in more labor. But what will happen when that labor is worthless?
In a dystopian world, the elite may be better off just killing the lower, middle and even the higher classes. Keep just enough people to have an interesting gene pool around. Because even in the space mines there will be no need for human labor anymore.
It is total wonder why people hate pro-ai crowd ...
> but who will execute it?
AI?
Intelligence Is Not the Main Bottleneck - being allowed to apply intelligence to the problem is.
And that has been true for centuries, not just since AI.
Allowing intelligence means ceding control over the outcome. And that is often a bigger issue than the actual issue.
I think the guy is right on point at least when it comes to therapies. But he is also missing one major angle: we are no longer in control; our systems are. If we were to vote on the issue, I suspect that a narrow majority would prefer cheaper housing, and a total majority would prefer cancer to be cured. But there's no direct mechanism of any kind to exercise that vote. Not in USA, not in Europe, not in China. When/where there's democracy, nobody runs in a campaign of advancing immune therapies[^1]. The closest proxy we have to a vote is "regulated markets", and my recent experience losing a loved one to cancer taught me that cancer is not a disease for the streams of money moving through that system. Far from it.
I'm frankly pessimist that we will be able to fix those systems in a humanist way, at least not in my lifetime. If we were any good at it, we wouldn't have extreme inequality, nor our educations systems would be in tatters, and we wouldn't cast ballots propping up politicians whose best skill is ragebait.
However, if fixing the system is not an option, access to cheap technology and intelligence could help a lucky few circumvent those systems. And guess what the lucky few at the head of the AI companies will say then... Not necessarily the worst outcome, since most people will find more viable to equip a private biolab in the basement of their countryside manor than fixing the medical system of first world economies.
[^1] For the record, I think that would be better than running on xenophobic slogans.
Essence of Decision is a great book that explores this idea. It looks at different models for understanding how organizations make decisions, and arrives at broadly the same conclusion: a model that assumes people are particularly in control is inadequate for explaining real world events.
Just wanting to cure doesn't mean it would be accomplished - vote or not.
Ingenuity is the actual bottleneck. And AI so far hasn’t shown any
What is ingenuity?
The use of imagination and creativity to solve real-world problems.
Society advances at the rate of emotional validation of the median voter.