Best Of
Re: The AI tsunami
I’ve noticed that a lot of the internet news and discussion scene seems to be about generating worry in readers. It’s a clickbaiting strategy — if you can make someone worried they are likely to dig deeper. I thought the video on Apple’s examination of AI to be quite thorough. They found that what the reasoning models were doing was more akin to pattern matching, than to true reasoning, and that reasoning performance dropped off steeply beyond about seven or ten logical steps.
Apple’s researchers attributed this to there being numerous examples on the internet of reasoning chains with that kind of length, and very few of longer chains. Even when given the algorithm for solving a puzzle in clear language, the models didn’t follow the steps. It seems that understanding and reason were not there.
So do we need a technology beyond LLMs to truly solve these issues? I think it is likely. I still think these problems are likely to be resolved, and we will have something resembling general AI in the next decade, things are moving rapidly at the moment.
Jeroen
Re: The AI tsunami
@lobster said:
We can indeed protect ourselves by:
Pausing. Wait after a 'life threatening' call from bank, relative, government etc
Scammers using AI are slower than you BUT try to rush you. This is one of the benefits of meditative calm.Use better software and encourage your circle to use
Use your gut feeling, experience and don't be a target
https://www.ncsc.gov.uk/section/advice-guidance/you-your-family
Good advice, it gets harder as people get older and the technology gets unfamiliar to them and cognitive capacity declines. My mother got half scammed once, they got her to respond and do a thing or two, thankfully she caught on and stopped.
The difficulties with our transition to an AI future goes well beyond that. How do people, and society as a whole protect themselves from being economically useless? Being exploited is one thing, but what happens to people when they no longer serve a purpose to the system?
person
Re: The AI tsunami
It’s especially going to affect people in so called “knowledge economies”, where most of the work being done is no longer manual labour. An economy like Ethiopia is not going to come out vastly different from what it is now.
But it will affect the concentration of wealth. All kinds of things will suddenly become cheaper to produce, like journalism, books, computer code, websites, apps, art and design, videos… the methods of production of these will suddenly become democratised, allowing people with very little means to produce pet projects and self publish them.
Jeroen
Re: The AI tsunami
In fact, “Capital in the Age of AI” poses interesting questions. If anyone will be able to hire a cloud AI agent to do genius-level work for them for just a few dollars an hour, this will have a huge influence on the production of anything mental. Instead of paying thousands of dollars to hire actual labour, you can get nearly anything you want done for cheap.
Jeroen
Waking Up and Growing Up
I liked this one.
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/how-to-deal-with-difficult-emotions-difficult-feedback/id1087147821?i=1000703709070
Diane Musho Hamilton, author and Zen teacher. She talks about something akin to spiritual bypassing. My take is something along the lines of devoted spiritual seekers over the centuries have removed themselves from society to pursue waking up, and necessarily so to reach such refined states. Living in the world involves dealing with other people and requires some sort of emotional maturity to do skillfully. I think I've very unconsciously made some efforts in that direction as I abandoned the idea of traditional renunciation, but maybe now that I've heard it framed in this manner can feel comfortable making more conscious efforts.
I think also what spoke to me is the way it was presented in this discussion at least, I found it fairly digestible. I'm much more practical and stoic than idealistic and sentimental, and I feel like much of emotional work gets framed in the latter more than the former manner.
person
Re: The Plant Medicine Path
One thing I hear is that the experience of ayahuasca has brought many who drink it to believe in a spirit world, and my own experience of occasional visions has inclined me likewise. So there are certain correspondences between those who have walked this path and myself.
Our modern world has been stripped of its visionary influences, its mythological components, by science and the tendency to investigate and disassemble. Those of us who do still have those experiences are not helped by modern mental health institutions, which encourage us to see these as hallucinations only and stick to a medical and materialist view of the world.
I find in the indigenous traditions a different wisdom, a rich tapestry of story and meaning linked to a much older world, where there were bards and storytellers and shamans and elders. These kinds of people are not found so much anymore in modern cities.
Jeroen
Re: The Plant Medicine Path
@person said:
Just wondering what your takeaway from this path has been in your life so far?
A question worth asking. It’s been a few years since I first heard of ayahuasca, the curanderos who make it, and the indigenous traditions connected to it. I approached it at first with curiosity, and later with reverence for its medicinal properties.
The thing is, I am ‘medically advised not to partake’, otherwise I might have tried taking the tea myself. So you could say I am still ignorant of the core experience of the plant medicine path. I have informed myself as well as possible about it, from videos and books.
Just that much has brought me to realise how divorced I am from nature. I live in a concrete box. I get food from the supermarket. I buy clothes online. At most I bicycle through the park, passing the place where the trees feel welcoming.
Jeroen