My personal way is just not expect thing and just see how impresses I am by the tech when it comes out

No One actually wants the singularity bro...

Your honesty is refreshing. Thank you.

UX designer here. This tech is pretty exciting for us tbh, it means less time building design system components and flows and more time empathising with our users, understanding their pain points and finding solutions. When the AI can truly understand a human's needs and empathise with them i'll dust of the Resume.

I think most people are still busy having their mind blown away that AI can make art and voice acting. Nearly every tech source was saying accounting and labor jobs would be automated by 2025 and that art would be nearly impossible for AI to replicate. That 180 turn with art being the first thing to be automated has absolutely shattered peoples' minds into believing AI can do anything.
While I do find it hilariously ironic, I understand a lot of peoples' frustration with AI. I knew people who thought they were making the right call by majoring in creative /business fields because, "AI will automate numbers before art". Now it seems most creative/office work can be automated which has admittedly upset a lot people.
Now when it comes to the singularity I believe the concept has ascended to a religious-like status for some people since having their minds blown. There haven't been any charlatans, yet, but I suspect "the singularity" becoming a more mainstream movement.

Who leads content lives? The 99% of people who work 8 hours a day in their repetitive jobs and if they aren’t exhausted have maybe a few hours free time a day?

Every crisis brings them on the bring of unemployment or makes them poorer

Anyway, being an optimist is healthier than being an pessimist and it seems pessimists have a much bigger problem with optimists than the other way around and try to insult them.

I personally think we're on the cusp of massive political change, at least in the US. AI is going to rip apart the social fabric and completely upturn the markets within the next few years that people are going to realize just how inefficient the government is. Then they're going to realize (the harsh way ofc) that the current system of government is too slow to accommodate technological/sociological change and are going to reform it.

I think there's going to be more populist movements because of AI. There are still plenty of Gen X and Boomer politicians who still remember when globalism wrecked America's domestic industry to China and Mexico. A luddite movement is definitely possible.

I think overseas we're going to see totalitarianism exceed to new heights. New AI will create all-seeing governments Orwell could've never anticipated. This lingering fear of an AI-fueled dictatorship will keep most people very scared of big corporations and government, so much so to influence their vote against establishmentarianism.

2030: robots do most manual labor, white collar jobs are already automated: "They are just a bunch of computers predicting what will happen next based on calculations! This is not real AI!"

Because there were always things that humans could do. With AGI it can adapt faster than we can. So every new job could also be done by AGI.

The society is based on necessity and if middle class is no longer necessary, which seems to be the case, why not go back to feudalism? It truly doesn't matter if everyone gets to live well and spawn future generations or only a few do. It will all be forgotten in the end.

People confuse full replacement with unemployment. You don't need AGI if you don't replace everyone. There will be large unemployment by end of this decade. Large enough to make governments do something about it

The folks that want to change aspects of commodity culture to suit their tastes are solipsistic, but the maintenance of some arbitrary sociocultural hierarchy that constrains cultural production to a (primarily) profit-motivated elite isn't?

Maybe if there actually existed a cultural vanguard that took its social role seriously I could entertain a more authoritarian position with respect to who has the right to define the culture- for the common good. But creatives lost their souls to Moloch and to their own ego at the fall just like the rest of us- they are just as much solipsists, and just as much philistines, as every other man- lest we forget that even the Mona Lisa was painted to keep its creator solvent, and commissioned to stroke a noblewoman's ego. Where art the lofty, noble goals of the so-called "enlightened" in such banal affairs of men? Daydreams and farts, one and the same.

Profit, fame, even self-expression- these are all fundamentally solipsistic ends. The person who produces culture or commissions the production of culture for the sake of the greater good rather than the self is an ideal- the vast majority of culture is already produced; and the vast majority of creative potential spent; furthering egos. AI-generated art just allows creatives and their patrons to see what they really are when their monopoly on cultural production is taken from them- mere men.

The potential for the masses to produce culture doesn't threaten to dilute the Geist, which was already unceremoniously slaughtered at the hands of the higher social classes, first for the vanity of the noblesse and then for the profit of the bourgeois- it only threatens egos. Or are the writers at HBO truly unparalleled cultural paragons, fearlessly producing what is ordered of them and collecting their paycheques in turn? Alas, which of us mere mortals could hope to rival them?

Perhaps the decommodification of art due to this technology will mark the beginning of our collective journey out of this hellish reality- one can only hope.

(I'm perhaps being a bit hyperbolic here, but you get the point)

The issue is that the productivity/wage gap has been increasing since the 1970's and the people in power (read: the people with the resources to develop AI) have the system working perfectly as designed, where they can pocket larger and larger percentages of surplus wealth generated by workers. Without a large-scale societal rethinking, we can't naively expect AI innovations to result in a wealth redistrubtion as this would completely buck the 50-year established trend of technological progress increasing wealth inequality.

This is not an AI problem but a socioeconomic problem. It's easy to imagine AI-oriented solutions to AI-oriented problems but it's harder to imagine an AI-oriented solution to a socioeconomic problem, since they operate in such different arenas. UBI is an interesting solution idea from the socioeconomic space, but in my understanding, at this point it remains mostly untested at larger scales (scales large enough to affect things like inflation, etc.).

I think it's understandable that there is a lot of pessimism around increased automation, when most individuals from gen X and forward have broadly not been able to enjoy the full fruits being beared from automation relative to those that own the systems being automated.

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Jail time with 3 square meals a day. You’re after the OG UBI I see!

This is an excellent point. Many of us are probably underestimating timelines based on a desire to believe. Motivated reasoning and confirmation bias are huge influences.

You probably shouldn't have mixed it with an argument for longer timelines. That will give an excuse to argue that and ig ore the point.

The reasonable estimate is very wide. Nobody knows how easy or hard it might be to create AGI. I've looked at all of the arguments, and have enough expertise to understand them. Nobody knows.

Personally that's not my narrative, I embrace change because we either accept or don't accept it and be frustrated, which would you choose? I also think this will help unite life on Earth, we're all one and connected on this small pale dot in space.

Yes. This is so true when your own job is about to be automated, people will start to make timelines that push the event to a time where they are safe from it's impact. Some a few years so that they can find a new job, some decades so that they can retire but all of it, even if the predictions are true, are copium. But humans/LLMs are designed to think that way. Think of a positive way to their goals even if it's absurd.

Because capitalism? We already don't keep everyone alive, fed and sheltered. Poverty and inequality are rampant both globally and within countries. It seems far more likely that extremely powerful technologies controlled by the biggest profit-seeking corporations will exacerbate these problems rather than solve them.

There is a strong case to be made for UBI or a more expanded social safety net more generally, but that also requires new revenues. How confident are you that governments will be willing to tax and/or expropriate the economic benefits of AI in order to redistribute it? I'm not saying it won't happen, but that is absolutely not the political-economic trajectory of the past 50 years in most Western countries.

humans cannot comprehend exponential growth in their day to day lives

as a former conservative, if a conservative looked at my life there is a good chance they would accuse me of "coping".

However I literally ditched their way of doing things because even the most allegedly forward looking subfactions were not in fact planning their lives while taking the future into account, which I now am, and doing so will lead to living a different life with different values lol.

which will have more impact on the future, having kids or writing reddit comments? the answer may turn out a bit surprising for 99% of humans...

It's not even uber optimism bro, let me give you my first "blackpill".

If you do a couple order of magnitude estimates, you will realize, it would take ~humans~ like ten thousand years to terraform mars or venus. Similarly, asteroid living a la kim stanley robinson isn't a sustainable alternative to earth. And guess what? HUMAN CIVLIZATIONS DO NOT LAST 10 THOUSAND YEARS BUDDY.

there was never an alternative, and in fact along a similar vein, greater than human intelligence shouldnt from first principles be that far off... (honestly who gives a shit if kurzweil is off by 10 or even 40 years, it just doesn't make a difference lol, (but if anything he looks right on the money for the most important predictions))

the first and greatest ethical principle of all humans is inertia, and that can lead to dumb conclusions when faced with a change in velocity, MUCH less ACCELERATION.

in summary. i would guess a 99% chance you are in fact the one coping by writing this post because the will of the universe/god is robots and not your genes (i know it can be hard for humans to realize this since their prefontal cortex is flooded with sex hormones during its maturation, but it is what it is)

>a model 2 years old is outdated to the point of obsolescence

Should we tell him?

Well I think it’s better to hope for a singularity than it is to hope for the return of Jesus which is what many Christians have been doing for thousand plus years

Could you explain why UBI or something like it is not inevitable? If more and more jobs are automated, and they are not replaced by equal numbers of new jobs, how else are we keeping people alive, fed and sheltered?

Sentience doesn’t matter for AGI. Only competence does. Regardless, it’s impossible to prove anyone but yourself is sentient. All humans could be highly advanced robots mimicking humans for all we know.

In all seriousness, Amen lol.