Want to wade into the rainbow-ridden surf of the abyss? Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid.
Welcome to the Stubsack, your first port of call for learning fresh Awful youāll near-instantly regret.
Any awful.systems sub may be subsneered in this subthread, techtakes or no.
If your sneer seems higher quality than you thought, feel free to cutānāpaste it into its own post ā thereās no quota for posting and the bar really isnāt that high.
The post Xitter web has spawned so many āesotericā right wing freaks, but thereās no appropriate sneer-space for them. Iām talking redscare-ish, reality challenged āculture criticsā who write about everything but understand nothing. Iām talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. Theyāre inescapable at this point, yet I donāt see them mocked (as much as they should be)
Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldnāt be surgeons because they didnāt believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I canāt escape them, I would love to sneer at them.
(Credit and/or blame to David Gerard for starting this.)
The AI 2027 guy is taking credit for being a good forecaster: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/cxuzALcmucCndYv4a/daniel-kokotajlo-s-shortform?commentId=44KvqZEG2vwKCaFAu
Reminder, according to this guy (originally, he has already nudged the dates of his prophecies back a few years), we are supposed to be having agents replace human workers in mass this year, and be one year out from a superhuman coding agent and researcher that radically iteratively improves itself.
We joked about how the AI 2027 people would try to pivot as they were proven wrongā¦ I think they are going to outright try to claim credit for being ārightā despite all their critical prophecies being wrong by claiming credit for secondary details.
Itās also funny to note that at least 2/5 of the points are actively bad advice. Naively extrapolating from a trend line is one of the most common errors people make when trying to make a prediction, especially when youāre already prone to letting the aesthetic of data lead you astray. Trusting in a kind of ānormalcy biasā or whatever you want to call the assumption that the world will continue to be pretty normal is one of the better ways to hedge against that.
Also Iāve said it before but the name ātechnological singularityā literally comes from the idea that at the hypothetical rate of change theyāre posting all our existing models of what is possible or probable break down like the laws of physics at the center of a black hole. If youāre reasoning from a pre-singularity model then definitionally there is no expectation that it should continue to hold true. I donāt think I need to get too deep into why the whole singularitarian concept is pretty sketchy in its own right, but since it still lies at the heart of the science fiction driving these peopleās predictions I think its worth acknowledging that it does suggest its own nonsense.
And these people know that crypto and GameStop and their friendsā startups did not keep growing rapidly forever. They know that just because donations to EA had been rapidly growing they did not continue to accelerate. They have friends who covered the logistic function / sigmoid at Stanford. Another Californian had a witticism about the trouble getting someone to understand something when he is paid to misunderstand.
They are writing another scenario called āAI 2030ā (which we already discussed here) so I wouldnāt be surprised if they decide to ignore the elephant in the room