Looking at the shape it’s taken so far, do you really think you’ll be included in that singularity? Or will you be just another ape roasting to death as your brain rots? If it’s energy-intensive, then what matters is who controls the factors of production. They see you as a cost, not a useful friend who simped for Pascal’s Basilisk.

We could have a positive singularity, or we could have a malevolent singleton. And it depends on your rationality right now.

AI isn’t real, but it’s gonna ruin society anyway. There is absolutely zero possibility for genAI to develop intelligence because it’s just a probablistic chatbot. It doesn’t know anything; it’s just rolling dice to guess what word to spit out each time. A high school student who copies his friend’s calculus homework will eventually learn a little calculus. A chatbot will never learn any calculus. Claiming these genAI models will develop intelligence with better compute technology is like claiming a puppet will develop intelligence with better string technology.

I rank LLMs as game changing as Google Search when it first came out. It’s a tool, nothing more.

It does seem like it’s positioned to replace search engines

It is better at producing relevant information, but it may never be great, or even as good, at producing reliable information.

Yes I am a Luddite, a proud tech-loving Luddite. And if you think there’s a contradiction in that, then you need to read up on what the Luddites stood for.

The problem is not that AI tech exists. Machine learning has been around for quite a while, and the modern neural processor chips are a great evolution of it. The problem is that corporations are using the tech for exploitation, plagiarism on an industrial scale, and creating misinformation ant terrifying speed.

Though you reference to the Luddites is quite appropriate in that they opposed the replacement of skilled labourers with child workers, just as modern day opponents of AI slop seek to stem the tide of skilled programmers being replaced with vibe coders, artists and illustrators with prompt writers, and the myriad of workers being replaced with inferior imitations of intelligence.

“Once men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free. But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them.” Frank Herbert, Dune

I view this more like a Pandora’s Box situation rather than a genie. I agree though, we’ll never be able to go back to what it was like before LLMs, and that makes me sad. We just have to live with it now.

Frontier level models are finding novel solutions to decades-long unsolved maths problems.

Such as?

Because if you’re talking about that recent proof of the Collatz conjecture, I’ve got bad news.

Also let me know when they figure out how to stop making stuff up, or at least to understand the difference between a sequence of tokens that represents a true fact and one that does not.