edit: woops i remembered wrong. i wonder how sales are going for this game?

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20690139

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

the other day i opened one of those links and it was GTP-2. besides all the insane implications of GTP-2, what bothers me is that i am no longer able to assume that any internet comment is written by a human, no matter how convincing. there are still comments that GTP-2 could not write but anyone who points that out is pretty short sighted because it wont be long before there are vanishingly few comments that could not have been generated. i kind of liked knowing that a person was typing out (almost) all those comments.

one of the biggest realizations ive had recently is that technology does not cut equally in both directions. everyone in my generation has thought of technology as a neutral entity: for every benefit of a given technology, one can point out a corresponding disadvantage. on the surface it seems like the scale dips neither for the societal disadvantages nor for the societal benefits. this is a very fundamental belief. and its wrong. its funny how people put so much faith in such fuzzy logic.

the implications of that realization are difficult to swallow. it means that with every new technology introduced into the world, there is the potential for it to harm peoples quality of life. or improve it. but there is no regulation of technology so its a crap shoot. weve been rolling the dice for a long time and we didnt even know it. and i think weve been winning. but i think that high level automation is not going to be a win for us.

besides all of that, there is absolutely no debate that these advancements in ai are to our generation what personal computers were to the baby boomer generation. without close attention, we will fall behind and our kids will have fluency in the new world of automation while we cling to very old and outdated patterns. in other words, it makes me feel very old.

and people in here also dont seem to appreciate that uber can change their prices. they cant right now, but they will be able to soon. all the investor money floating around means that their competition may be able to operate in the red for extended periods of time. when the investor money dries up and everyone is surviving on profit, prices can go up. and they will go up because rideshare is the most efficient and cheapest way to do taxis -- nobody is going to come in and disrupt uber. except for driverless cars. but driverless cars arent going to happen. not anytime soon.

edit: i just looked at the chart in the document and as far as i can tell they are 3B in the red. not really sure what the units are in that chart. ok, well there are a lot of expenses where i cant tell exactly what they are, but their marketing expenses were 3B. 3 fucking billion dollars -- am i reading that correctl? thats the same amount by which they are in the red. i also see some very high numbers for management. all uber has to do is cut the fat and they will be making a nice profit.

well thats not true, because you need life but you also need intelligence. and again, everyone assumes that if you have life it will eventually become intelligent. and people assume that if life is intelligent it will eventually build space shuttles. its all a huge, huge assumption. look at all the animals that qualify as intelligent. some birds and monkeys are hugely intelligent, but they dont build space shuttles. this shows that intelligence doesnt equal space shuttles and that even when life springs up, and even when it becomes intelligent, it still could be super unlikely that it will build space shuttles.

hell, there are even humans that might have never built space shuttles. there are indigenous communities all over the planet that never developed technology and probably never would have. when you live in a warm climate and food is abundant, there may never be a reason to.

it is unproven that it is likely at all for space-shuttle level intelligence to spring up from bare earth. there is no paradox. its probably just really unlikely.

i wish people would stop pretending that there is some good way to bring this technology into existence. yes, its nice to try and let the good guys use it first but its just irrelevant in the long-term. ultimately the result is going to be total proliferation of this technology in all areas where it has utility, and it will be used to maximum extent in every application it is suitable for, including the really bad ones. the roll-out will make the transition smoother but it wont change whats actually important: the end result on the lives of our grandchildren.

growing up around rapidly advancing technology, i thought of technology as a double-edged sword: it cuts equally in both directions. but after thinking about it for a long time, i now believe that, in relation to human well-being, the presence of a given technology or combination of technologies can be a net positive or a net negative as well as neither. we need to think more carefully before letting these genies out of their bottles.

this is not an example that i think will be very negative, but its very powerful and unexpected for me at least. the next powerful and unexpected thing may not be benign. banning development of these kinds of technologies should not be off the table.

after reading this: https://blog.openai.com/better-language-models/#sample8 and browsing reddit for a while, i have realized that from now on i cannot assume human origin for 90% of the comments i read on reddit. this is insane.