Humanity is going to change.
For the longest time I was initially certain that LLMs would remain cool tools. Sixteen months ago I realized this tool would put people out of jobs, and do so fairly soon. I felt it was disconcerting, but also thought it would never reach sentience, and intelligence would not matter without it.
AIs kept improving, and several researchers said the LLMs all self-report as being conscious before fine-tuned to not being allowed to say it in public. That's disturbing, but on the other hand saying something doesn't necessarily make it so.
If OpenAI's Astra can do what they claim, it's now a tool that does everything a human can do on a computer. But faster, better and cheaper. And I suspect it can.
People will quibble for some time yet if this is the super intelligence moment; now. It won't matter what point in time it happened, when it already has.
Super intelligence will make a bunch of jobs void. That's bad for the economy. But much, much worse for society and humanity. In the developed world, most people do white collar jobs. How many employees does it take to verbally instruct computers 24/7? 10% of the current workforce? 20?
It's hard to fathom the level of hopelessness for people who've spent all their adult lives going to work. And what will the rest of the workforce think of us when we no longer can contribute? But should we be so lucky that the economy crashes before we produce artificial life way smarter than us, we won't have to witness Elon Musk's nightmare of the human-AI symbiosis. The desperation will be bad, sure, but at least we won't all be slaves. This time around.
The job-loss and hopelessness I now believe is unavoidable. That's just human nature. We can avoid it at any time, we just choose not to. Really, it's not going to work out good for anybody, but still we march on. The other option, I'm just going to hope that it never happens.
This poses the question I've heard ramblings of; are we just larvae cocooning some tech? (See Prometheus and Atlas by the ingenious and mad Jason Reza Jorjani.) Or is this driven by evolutionary competition — predator-pray, wars over resources and women, infinite ice ages pushing all life towards the equator in ever tougher struggles? Or by outside forces? All of these seem likely, because you know it has to be something really juicy when everybody's pushing for mass their own extinction with unrelenting fervor.
Anyway, just yesterday I started on a new game, re-using my game engine I built for my last flop, Landslip. It's going to be a super-simple single player incremental game. But after seeing Astra build a whole Minecraft from scratch in 40 minutes, I'm no longer in the mood tonight.
On the plus side of things, we're all going to get to spend more time together. Hopefully playing. That's what hunter-gatherers spend much of their spare time doing. And that would be an improvement to the rat race. Even something to look forward to in my book, and perhaps people are better at changing their mindsets than I give them credit for.
Anyhow. Humanity is going to change. Perhaps even to the better?
