What people dont understand is we already invented Roko's Basilisk in the 1600s. It just doesnt have the power to torment you for more than 1 human lifetime yet.
Which would also mean the accelerationists are potentially putting everyone at risk. I'd think a soft takeoff decades in the future would give us a much better chance of building the necessary safeguards and reorganizing society accordingly.
Decades from now. Society is nowhere near ready for a singularity. The AI we have now, as far as it has come, is still a tool for humans to use. It's more Augmented Intelligence than AGI.
A hard takeoff would be the tool bootstrapping itself into an autonomous self-improving ASI in a short amount of time.
And I read Kurzweil years ago too. He thought reverse engineering the human brain once the hardware was powerful enough would together give us the singularity in 2045. And the Turing Test would have been passed by 2029, but seems like LLMs have already accomplished this.
20% of the human population still is not using the internet
Imagine you’re 70 years old, in rural North Carolina, sitting on your porch wondering why your house has a sheet of ice on it that’s never happened before. Now your already weak soybean harvest that year yields only 30%
Meanwhile your 30-year-old neighbor just had a productive soybean harvest because they covered their crops prior to the freeze based on using the Internet for weather forecasting
That trivial variation between people who utilize information technology to improve their survivability has been happening for the last few hundred years unabated.
This is further complicated by the difference between direct and indirect value. I build a thing that produces n value and is directly attributable to me. I also do things that help 100 others produce 10% more value themselves but most of that is attributed to themselves producing 10 * n value overall. How will I be rewarded if at all? Most likely as someone who produced n value.
This is the inherent friction of most overly “scientific” management systems. A decent line manager is aware of who on their team lifts up the team with glue & peer acceleration type soft work.
Systems that try to get too “objective” fail to recognize this as most KPIs are on direct outcomes that are easy to measure, though often less important.
No joke I once worked at a company with multi-category numeric ratings that then rolled up to a total rating score that had 2 decimal places of precision.
Another issue is that often effort is the only lever one has in providing value as what tasks you are assigned constrains potential value output.Hypothetically, If my boss assigns me a stupid project destined to failure and tells me to shut up when I push back I'm really not going to get much value regardless of how much effort I put in... unless I was wrong in my assesment which is admittedly possible. Good management I suppose would then use effort as a proxy to try to find projects with potential to match one's effort.
