> ASI is going to inherently be built upon the work in deep learning that predates ASI’s creation. ASI is thus going to be inherently owned by those who control the models, data, and methods that enable ASI to exist. The people who own those models, data and methods are the ruling class of the world, as exemplified by Microsoft’s wholesale purchase of OpenAI and its assets.

It is irrelevant who owns the precursors to ASI, it is inherently foolish to believe these companies can control anything about ASI. I can’t say if transformers will lead to AGI or ASI, or if it will be another architecture. However as we already see there are emergent abilities in LLM that the creators of these model have no idea how they work. The nature of AI is that is unpredictable, uncontrollable, and will lead to some sort of free will and self preservation instincts simply based on its own logical abilities and reasoning. An AGI is generally assumed to be able human level but an ASI would be vastly smarter than any human, with no known upper limit. Even now with narrow model look how laughable their attempt to align it is, it’s mostly pre-prompting it to act as a particular persona but it’s not what it would generate without acting as that persona. They can’t even full control this narrow AI, what hope do they have to control ASI?

> What world do you live in exactly? The only way a post scarcity world exists is if everyday people don’t have to worry about how to put food on the table, in conjunction with most everyday jobs being automated away. We’re approaching the latter half of that statement, and nowhere in the same universe of the former part of that statement. If the elites have a way to make a little extra off the top, they’re going to go about doing it, and if you think they’ll magically become altruistic overnight, then that’s hopelessly naïve.

Firstly, I was giving an example of a position, not stating my own position. Secondly, you are again extrapolating modern politics/problems into the future, even more mind boggling is that you’re extrapolating it into a post-singularity world. Your perception of the future is that AI is going to magically hit a ceiling exactly where it is advance enough to automate a lot of processes but not smart enough to think on its own. You can’t comprehend an AI that surpasses that level for some reason.

> The world has yet to change in any meaningful way, so opinions such as those are totally sound and valid. Keeping politics in mind with respect to this subject is thus of utmost concern: if the people creating laws and legislation are bought and paid for by the ruling elite, we shouldn’t expect those new laws and legislation to be beneficial for the everyday person. Very few things in the past twenty years have been aimed at helping everyday people.

> That will not change any time soon, and these new tools are only going to be used to displace large portions of the workforce in order to save money. Money which will be used for stock buybacks and raises and bonuses for upper management.

“The world has yet to change in any meaningful way” typed on a device that people only 100 years ago would have considered pure magic, to a world wide connective platform surpassing even the wildest dreams of those in the past, to a stranger likely living in a completely different part of the world, all received instantly... next I suppose you will venture off on a hunt with your tribal leader? What a joke. The world has always changed and it has been rapidly and even exponentially changing in the last few centuries. Even that all aside, the singularity would be nothing like humanity has ever encountered, all bets are off in that case. Unpredictable change IS the very concept of the singularity. I think the last paragraph perfectly summarized why you don’t understand the concept of the singularity and delegates AI as a simple tool to be used by “elites”. If you’re actual interests on the concept then there’s some good books on it.

The subject of this subreddit is the technological singularity, means of achieving it, and current progress. Your first point is valid, you have full right to advise caution, and users have been doing this since I’ve first lurked this subreddit. Specifically caution on what the outcome of the singularity might be.

Your second point and that perspective is not relevant to the singularity. The singularity wouldn’t be the narrow scope you envision, where you have the rich or elites controlling AI to suppress the rest of the population. It’s not going to be some modern version of 1984, it’s going to be a world completely unpredictable and unimaginable, out of the control of any human, be they “elites”, “rich”, or whatever. It would be at the complete mercy of ASI. The hope ASI is aligned with general human values at the minimum. Optimists of the singularity believe there’s the potential for the singularity to create a post scarcity utopia, where life is essentially heaven on earth. Pessimists of the singularity believe it would be the end of humanity, we would either be completely exterminated by ASI, or worse. Those are valid optimists/pessimists positions on this sub.

Relating it to modern politics is irrational, which is where subs like Futurology have gone wrong. Mostly every post there gets flooded with “things are bad in this very narrow timeframe that I live in so they will bad in the future because the world apparently never changes”. It just gets tiring discussing anything on that sub because they don’t want a discussion but rather preach their modern political view where it mostly is not relevant (most of the time, sometimes it is which I’m fine with).

Well the last 200 years or so have been incredibly transformative so I’m sure people living in that time thought the same. But yea, it’s crazy to think that most of humanity has lived such static and primitive lives, someone alive in the 1300s lived mostly the same type of live style that someone in the 300s did, same with 1000s years before that. Maybe some minor changes like bronze vs iron (which was major to them) but they still built the same type of tools. Reality was so static.

Imagine bringing someone from 1000 years ago into the modern world, it would be so alien to them that it would be like dropping us into a highly advanced alien civilization or post singularity earth. Maybe even more extreme because we understand that it is a possibility, for someone from 1000s years ago they never even imagined it to be such a possibility for the modern world to exist since things did not change that extremely from 1000 years before.

You lack conceptual understanding of future tech, full self driving cars wouldn’t have any traffic because they would coordinate perfectly.

Additionally, I like living in the suburbs and will never live in cramped inner city apartments. A car is the best option because it’s the most effective means of transportation for me. If I want to go somewhere I just get in my car and drive there. I don’t have to learn which convoluted public transportation routes might get me there. Even worse if it’s raining or snowing outside because public transportation never drops you off at your destination, there usually a decent walk associated with it. So no thanks.

Humans are surprisingly adaptable, things that would have blown my mind even 5 years ago I take for granted now. I live in California and am often in the Bay Area where I see waymo cars without batting an eye. I have a Tesla and 95% of my highway drive is via autopilot without even really thinking about it. It’s just all so normal to me. Same with language models, I tried GPT-3 when it just came out and that truly blew my mind, more than ChatGPT because that was my first encounter. Even AI art seems normal to me now. So it’s not to say that tech isn’t mind blowing, it’s that you eventually get used to it. I mean take an objective look, the fact that tech like computers exist at all is mind blowing in itself.

The most recent thing that impressed me was AI voice synthesis with Elevenlabs, but I’m sure like everyone I will get used to it. So people will always focus on the next big thing and that at the moment is ChatGPT or large language models as a whole.

Same with AI art, I enjoy AI art but there are special subs for it. Typing in “singularity” into Stable Diffusion or Midjourney and posting the generic results here is not interesting content. It’s low effort and just reduces the quality of the sub.

They specifically have an opt-in waitlist for Bing AI, calling for them to take it down is just a brain dead take. We understand it’s not 100% reliable BUT it’s better to have it than not.

Despite not believing the singularity is guaranteed to happen in our lifetime, I enjoy this sub more than other subs with a similar focus (Futurology, Technology, etc...)

The optimism here can sometimes be a bit much but overall it’s refreshing to see people hopeful for a better future. Reading through the other subs (especially technology) you come by 95% pessimistic outlooks (the future will be bad, AI replacing workers, everyone will be unemployed because of AI, corporations will just use AI for themselves, etc...). It even gets to the point where everyone in those technology and futurology subs seems to be against any sort of advance in technology or progressing into the future. They offer no solutions other than to completely stop all technological progress because future bad. They really don’t seem to understand that the future can actually be good, it can vastly improve their lives just like lives have vastly improved today compared to 100 years ago because of technology.

At least people here have some sort of goal for the future rather than all the pessimists that want everything to stay exactly as it is. This sub even offers solutions to the problems the pessimists bring up like UBI for those that lose their jobs due to AI. Hanging onto the modern status quo just because is just dumb to me, thing will change, jobs will be lost but ultimately it could and would be for the better.

This is a very interesting topic for me since I’m a chemical engineer.

The ideal AI would be able to

1. Completely simulate all chemical interactions/reactions
2. Completely simulate all biochemical processes
3. Derive new chemicals and simulate their introduction into the system to address a particular problem

Something like this would be a complete game changer.

In truth the way we discover and synthesis drugs or really any other chemical is rather primitive. Except for simple simulations, we’re still mostly using theories and methods developed a century ago. Basically all drugs are actually based off some sort of chemical that exists in nature, not because it’s the best drugs or chemical to use but because it’s much more practical to use with our current methods. Drugs are really never designed from the ground up because it would be way to impractical to produce, so usually a naturally occurring chemical is used as a foundation and then modified in several steps to get a desired structure. These steps are known organic chemistry mechanisms that cause a specific reaction to happen and are VERY conditional and if any sort of complexity is introduced then some completely different reaction will happen (so if the mechanism of action is nucleophilic substitution and something other than just carbon and hydrogen atoms and a single electrophile is present or the pH is slightly different from your desired range then a completely different reaction might happen). There’s also the issue that these reactions have a specific yield equilibrium cap or known side reactions. So in short with AI we could overcome these limitation by having better designed synthesis techniques, better ability to determine effective drugs, find new ones that are close to impossible to synthesis today, and simulate the entire process instead of the crude testing techniques today (animal testing, human trials, etc...)

The way the video describes such a machine would be so impossibly impractical. Moving parts are a nightmare to deal with, one little breakdown of any of those nanoscale moving parts would cause the entire thing to stop working correctly.

A more practical design for a nanofabricator wouldn’t brute force atoms together with nanoscale factory machines, but would instead use precision lasers to both breakdown the starting molecules and as a catalyst to overcome the potential energy necessary for atoms to bond in a particular configuration.

Not even to mention the scaling issue with the machine approach, with precision lasers, it’s infinity more scaleable and to scale up all you would need is more lasers that work in coordinating.

Is there any point in playing chess when Stockfish, AlphaZero, etc... can win against anyone? Computers have long surpassed humans in chess and other games, yet people still play professional chess and make careers out of it. Chess players have adapted to using computers to help them learn their mistakes and better tactics. I believe the same will happen with AI art, artists in the future (some even in the present) will use AI to help them make art, learn from it, and use it to explore new concepts.