29 comments

  • dmix1 hour ago
    NYT reported today that Russia and China are funding anti-datacenter and anti-ai hysteria on western social media.<p>Always easier to boost something already existing on social media than manufacture it themselves, then wildly blow it out of proportion to make it seem urgent and important.
    • WarmWash58 minutes ago
      There are 22 golf courses within a 30 minute drive from me, and people here a losing their minds over datacenter water usage...
      • dirtbag__dad11 minutes ago
        Golf courses don’t have backup generators running 24&#x2F;7, with humming you can hear from a meaningful distance away. They also don’t pollute the air.<p>This is a poor comparison, but I do get what you’re attempting here. It’s also absurd that we are leveling land everywhere around me to build warehouses. No one is really complaining about that, either.
      • swatcoder33 minutes ago
        People have a dozen reasons to refuse data centers being built in their communities and zero reasons to encourage it. They&#x27;re little more than post-industrial mines that take limited resources (power, land, water, quiet) from a community, sell them for profit as compute, and siphon those profits away onto the books of far-flung megacorps with no community reward.<p>Meanwhile, golf courses are a traditional green space where people in a community gather for both work and leisure. They&#x27;re not ideal themselves, but they at least provide some benefit against which their negatives can be weighed.<p>If all you hear from critics of data center building is water use complaints, that&#x27;s strictly because you&#x27;ve chosen not to listen to people.
        • marcosdumay18 minutes ago
          When mines pay a sizeable share of their profits as local taxes, and obey environmental regulations, people suddenly start to like them.
      • supern0va40 minutes ago
        People are scared about the personal impact from AI, then backfill in justifications without even realizing they&#x27;re doing it.<p>If the equivalent numbers for electricity and water usage were being being used for streaming video, I seriously doubt people would be demanding no more Netflix data centers. The news story would immediately die.
      • bluefirebrand46 minutes ago
        People can care about more than one thing<p>Personally I would happily close down all golf courses and put them to better use as literally anything else.<p>Even just making them public parks would be great
        • throwup23841 minutes ago
          People can <i>pretend</i> to care about more than one thing.<p>Whether they actually actively oppose those things to the point of impacting building permits, that&#x27;s a completely different matter. It really doesn&#x27;t take much legislation to make golf courses economically unviable and force them to close, especially if you&#x27;ve got enough population within 30 minutes to support <i>22 of them</i> (I speak from experience, I helped write a water reclamation ordinance that shut down at least one in my SoCal city)
    • coffeefirst24 minutes ago
      These campaigns have historically amplified conflict. They do not care what the conflict is about.<p>But unlike some of the others, I’m hearing anti-AI sentiment from a wide range of people who don’t even use social media.
      • dmix20 minutes ago
        All news is influenced by what’s popular social media these days. And that becomes part of what people talk about through the grapevine.<p>But no doubt there’s plenty of organic NIMBYism, anti tech growth stuff, and run of the mill fear of change and loss of control as society grows more abstract&#x2F;centralized.
        • computably8 minutes ago
          Applying the term NIMBYism to anti-AI and anti-DC sentiment is a gross abuse of terminology. Datacenters don&#x27;t need to be in anybody&#x27;s residential neighborhood.
  • Animats35 minutes ago
    This is from the &quot;AI 2027&quot;[1] people.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;ai-2027.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;ai-2027.com&#x2F;</a>
  • joshstrange1 day ago
    I&#x27;m sure some people will have issue with my phrasing but, honest question:<p>Are there examples of where we have collective decided not to pursue knowledge? Successfully?<p>I guess nuclear weapons might be the best example though research doesn&#x27;t seem have to actually &quot;stopped&quot; as much as gone underground and we still have country trying to climb that ladder.<p>But I don&#x27;t know how relevant that is to LLMs&#x2F;AI. It almost feels like pandora&#x27;s box is open and our only option is continue to improve them. There is clearly value in what they do and while I can absolutely see the dangers, for example: authoritative governments and surveillance, I&#x27;m not convinced to throw the baby out with the bathwater.<p>All of technology back to the printing press (and probably before that) could also be said to make it easier for governments to oppress their citizens. Making laws (and enforcing them!) to prevent governments from doing these things feels like that route forward, not trying to stick our heads in the sand.<p>Perhaps I&#x27;m horribly naive, perhaps I just see the SciFi future I&#x27;ve spent my life reading and dreaming about on the horizon and I&#x27;m blinded by the reality, perhaps my ideals around &quot;knowledge deserves to be free&#x2F;accessible&quot; are misguided. I don&#x27;t know.
    • QuadmasterXLII5 minutes ago
      If there were examples, their example status would drop the odds that I know about them.
    • kokotajlod1 day ago
      If you read the scenario, you&#x27;ll see that the regulations are mostly about what people can do with giant compute clusters, and not about the ideas themselves. The ideas themselves are required to be totally transparent to the public.<p>As for historic precedents: Human cloning, human genome editing, and mirror life seem like one precedent; nuclear weapons and nuclear energy another; come to think of it I think drone delivery was strangled by regulations too...? Plan A isn&#x27;t a proposal to never build superintelligence, it&#x27;s a proposal to build it more cautiously and transparently.
    • 4er_transform12 hours ago
      While technology has empowered governments, it’s also empowered the individual, and more importantly shifted the material dynamics to better align the incentives of governments with the people. Democracy followed material change, it didn’t precede it. Democracy came about because it was optimal for a power seeking government, not out of the kindness of their heart.<p>A resource extraction based economy sees people as slaves. The true source of power is the resource, people are just a means to an end, so you mistreat the people as much as you can get away with in pursuit of the resource while avoiding revolt.<p>With stable infrastructure, the government makes far more from an educated, rich population that it can tax and use the innovation from. It’s against its own quest for power to interfere too much in the prosperity of its citizens. The incentives are aligned.<p>Solving the AI problem isn’t about stopping the tech or making a bunch of brittle laws. It’s always been about alignment: aligning the large AGI-like entities that are the modern state, the modern economy, representative democracy, or AGI itself, with human prosperity
      • tehjoker1 hour ago
        This is a just so story. The main issue today is the lack of democracy in the country and the use of technology to surveil and govern a restive population as the government has less and less legitimacy. The narrative you are telling is the heroic tale of computing and the internet c. 1990-2010.<p>Yasha Levine wrote about how this narrative was preceded by a forgotten one where MIT students protested because the computers were going to be linked to government databases and share data on anti-Vietnam war activists. Despite protestations, activists were correct and this happened, and now it happens at huge scale.<p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;yashalevine.com&#x2F;surveillance-valley" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;yashalevine.com&#x2F;surveillance-valley</a>
        • mikestorrent40 minutes ago
          Yes, and RMS was correct in his Right to Read and so many other things - we&#x27;re seeing the slow death of the never-enshrined-in-law right to compute. Luckily open-source is big enough to slow this down; we should all be pretty amazed and appreciative that there even are open-weights models at all, out there, because it is a profoundly democratizing thing.
    • rayiner1 day ago
      No, of course not. That would be an insane trust fall. Even relatively small advances in technology give a country world dominating power. Fun fact: India was militarily superior to Britain in the 1600s—a gunpowder empire with a million soldiers—but was taken over by it in the 1700s. Britain’s edge was small: lighter, more maneuverable cannons, standardized ammunition, better military and political organization. Not a first world country versus a third world country—more like the dynamic US versus a sclerotic EU. And that modest edge led to 200 years of colonization.<p>If we slow down on ASI voluntarily we’d be allowing a gap to open up that would make the difference between colonial europe and colonized Asia&#x2F;Africa look trivial. It would be insane.
      • jst1fthsdys1 day ago
        You overstate the advantages of technology. Mughal India was fragmented and on a sharp decline. The British used politics, finance, and treachery to divide and conquer what was remaining.
      • &gt; we’d be allowing a gap to open up that would make the difference between colonial europe and colonized Asia&#x2F;Africa look trivial.<p>An easy choice to make if the alternative is everyone dying instead.
        • AnimalMuppet22 hours ago
          But is it? Is there any realistic world where we need ASI for human survival?
          • mikestorrent35 minutes ago
            Yes, this one. Look at our governance; look at our coordination-at-scale; look at our collective problem solving. It&#x27;s abysmal, beyond hope. If we have global scale problems, we are not capable of solving them effectively. We are literally not intelligent enough to handle the problems we are creating. Between rivers of garbage and CO2 levels and war, we have proven ourselves to be woefully unintelligent at the scale needed. If we are lucky, our thin window of survival depends on getting a hell of a lot smarter, real quick.<p>Consider this: All that hardware that&#x27;s going into those datacentres right now? In 5 years or so it&#x27;ll all be on the secondary market... an influx of cheaper compute like you&#x27;ve never seen.
        • rayiner1 day ago
          The alternative isn’t “everyone dying.” It’s us holding all the cards.
          • hollerith23 hours ago
            Why? Is human extinction not permitted by the laws of physics?
            • rayiner22 hours ago
              That’s a possibility, but not the only one. The two most realistic ones are: we race ahead and maintain our status, or we slow down and open ourselves up to colonization.
              • gallerdude7 hours ago
                I think the question “would China cooperate” needs much more investigation. Everyone online pundit seems to think “obviously not”, but they’re people too with clear positive and negative incentives. It’s possible they’ve found a very similar calculus that we have.<p>&gt; “Politics is the art of the possible”
              • tehjoker1 hour ago
                Worth noting that it is the Europeans and Americans that have been colonial. Asian peoples have, with the prominent exception of the Mongols and Japanese Empire, pretty much not done that. In particular, China shut down its exploration program.<p>This is a settler-colonial mindset that reflects all the bad things we did onto everyone else. Notably, it&#x27;s a current US ally that is most guilty of this.
                • wbl1 hour ago
                  The Quing era boundaries are quite a bit larger than the Han boundaries. That did not happen by peaceful means.
    • tim33314 hours ago
      The 1972 Biological Weapons Convention? Probably partly successful.
      • foobiekr31 minutes ago
        The Soviet Union systematically ignored the BWC. There&#x27;s tons of evidence.
        • xtracto2 minutes ago
          Isn&#x27;t the US famous for not even signing a lot of world treaties like climate accords and others?<p>This is an interesting subject and conversation, but it&#x27;s moot having it in these culture-centric forums. I wonder if there are Russians discussing plausible scenarios in Vkontakte groups, or Chinese doing the same in whatever Alibaba group sites they use.<p>The problem is that we are all skewed by our media, our ideas and our culture. These type of discussions need the highest kind of political interactions.<p>It&#x27;s fascinating, specially for someone who lives in a &quot;third world&quot; country, non-aligned to any of these 3 superpowers. Whatever transpires, we are at tge mercy of these (and no, US hasn&#x27;t treated us &quot;better&quot;).<p>My opinion is that there&#x27;s no turning back on AGI development. I dont think current governments are capable of getting into an agreement of that size. Specially given the Isolationist stage in the cycle we live in. (In contrast with for example the CFC and Ozone layer issue we had in the 1990s, when the planet was in a globalist kind of stage)
    • arethuza1 day ago
      The decision to not go with the development of extremely large thermonuclear weapons might count - the US Sundial Project was supposed to be about 10 gigatons of TNT. Not the most practical weapons but once you get to a certain size delivery arguably stops being a problem - its going to kill everyone anyway so doesn&#x27;t matter where you let it off!<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Sundial_(weapon)" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Sundial_(weapon)</a><p>Edit: Mind you, I wonder if the design for Sundial is stored somewhere...
    • hollerith1 day ago
      Yes, there are examples of where we have collective decided not to pursue a particular technology tree.<p>For one, Japan banned guns for a few centuries. (Its warrior class was politically powerful and judged that guns would disrupt class relations too much.)<p>And there have been successful world-wide bans.<p>For example, following the invention of recombinant DNA technology, scientists convened the Asilomar Conference in 1975. They established a voluntary self-moratorium on certain types of genetic engineering until strict laboratory containment protocols were created.<p>In the 1980s, bioethicists, theologians, and researchers established a hard ethical line between somatic editing (treating an existing patient&#x27;s non-reproductive cells) and germline editing (altering future generations).<p>No one has performed the latter form of genetic engineering except for Chinese scientist He Jiankui in 2018. (Chinese society used to be more ambivalent about the technology than the West is.) In response, Beijing heavily tightened its laws, classifying heritable gene editing as a high-risk medical technology subject to the penal code, and He Jiankui was sentenced to three years in prison.
      • joshstrange1 day ago
        I completely can see why we&#x27;d want to, for ethical reasons, ban germline editing, and I want to be clear that I agree doing so cannot be done ethically, but there is a part of me that is wistful for what could have been. Same with things like CRISPR but it&#x27;s probably just fun to dream and the reality would be a nightmare.
    • Dig1t1 day ago
      Taking the approach with AI that we took with the atomic bomb would be catastrophic. If the only people who are allowed to use this technology are governments, intelligence agencies, and a select few anointed companies, then the risk of authoritarian misuse will skyrocket.<p>I worry that any attempt to limit their use and development will be abused and misdirected. We are already seeing people like Anthropic doing this, they are trying to use anti-AI sentiment to engage in regulatory capture. Go watch Dario’s speeches about how open weight models are dangerous and how they are “not really open”. Everyone can see that much of this “safety” conversation is ultimately just a tactic to shut potential competitors out of the market and establish a monopoly&#x2F;duopoly.
      • joshstrange1 day ago
        I agree. I guess I should have said something like:<p>&quot;Stopping&quot; LLM research just means it will be in the hands of a few who can abuse it. I&#x27;d rather a state of M.A.D. but instead of a handful of countries&#x2F;governments it&#x27;s millions&#x2F;billions of people with access to the models (open ideally). Again, perhaps horribly naive or misguided, I understand that bioterrorism could (is?) a real problem as well as more &quot;mundane&quot; things like building a bomb (nuclear or otherwise).<p>I just feel like limiting access to governments or &quot;blessed&quot; entities is even worse.
  • a_vanderbilt1 day ago
    I found the AI 2027 paper to be overly optimistic, but not wholly fantastical. This paper feels wildly speculative, and relies on premises I am not confident even pass surface reasoning. Even under optimistic conditions, we are not going to see robots &quot;capable of 95% of all cognitive and physical tasks&quot; by 2035. Nor do I think a 74% unemployment rate is even remotely possible. Economic collapse would implode AI development long before those figures were plausible.
    • skybrian1 hour ago
      The &quot;and physical&quot; is the part I&#x27;m particularly skeptical of. Sure, drones are scary, but nobody&#x27;s really solved getting a robot to deliver a package to your front porch in a civilian setting, and it seems unlikely to be solved quickly.
      • foobiekr30 minutes ago
        A lot of it relies on what is effectively &quot;the AI will be so smart it can solve anything&quot; magic.
        • markstos1 minute ago
          The book Sentient is not about AI but abount the most amazing physical senses some other animals have.<p>The theme of the scientific findings is that while humans excel with <i>none</i> of our physical sensors, we do very well across the board in making use of them thanks to our relatively huge brains.<p>And fantastical amounts of compute power is exactly what are handing over to AI. The fact that their training data isn&#x27;t perfect may matter less.
      • CamperBob235 minutes ago
        <i>but nobody&#x27;s really solved getting a robot to deliver a package to your front porch in a civilian setting, and it seems unlikely to be solved quickly</i><p>If you don&#x27;t care about getting the drone back, it <i>does</i> simplify the problem somewhat.
    • BurningFrog18 minutes ago
      &gt; <i>Nor do I think a 74% unemployment rate is even remotely possible</i><p>250 years of constant automation has never produced large scale unemployment, despite obsoleting everyone&#x27;s jobs several times over.
  • bloppe4 minutes ago
    This is follows the classic AI policy influence playbook: enumerate a small handful of potential outcomes that make your preferred policy seem obviously correct, ignoring the fact that there are literally infinite more &quot;plans&quot; that could be reasonably predicted that would support wildly different policy prescriptions.
  • kennywinker1 day ago
    It seems to me we’re already at the top of the S curve, not at the toe of an exponential curve. At least with LLMs. Better training data will make small improvements, better architecture will make it less compute intensive, and all these “hyper-scale” data centers will make it cheap and ubiquitous. But none of that is it getting exponentially more intelligent.
    • Cyclical22 hours ago
      What leads you to believe that?
      • kennywinker19 hours ago
        Is chatgpt 5.6 that much smarter than chatgpt 5.0?
        • gallerdude8 hours ago
          If you’ve done any software development at all, certainly.
          • nxc181 hour ago
            Is that true or does it only feel true because they nerf the old models just before every major release?
            • gabriel-uribe47 minutes ago
              I remember being blown away by o1-o3 family of models finally stringing together coherent agentic tool calls to write and execute scripts semi-reliably for workloads in the several minutes before they would start hallucinating&#x2F;flailing. GPT 5 was a bit ahead of that, but barely<p>Now we take for granted that the latest models can juggle between multiple browser tabs, applications, databases, simulators, docker etc to write, execute, e2e test and deploy full-stack applications over hours managing up to dozens of subagents, relatively untouched, without taking down prod even 1% of the time<p>Not only this, but in the GPT 5.0 era, agents had 0 taste. Nothing looked good. It was the agentic version of the twitter bootstrap era, but worse somehow. Now, I would argue the average agent frontend beats the average human frontend. This isn&#x27;t even getting into 3D applications in the GPT 5 era<p>Anyway, the models now reliably execute more than a human can fit into their own context. It&#x27;s magic
              • mikestorrent25 minutes ago
                Yes, and we haven&#x27;t even really begun to nail down computer-use agents yet (can you believe they&#x27;re still basically just OCR&#x27;ing screenshots?)<p>Once we have something that experiences a desktop interface more like a human does, an entire swathe of tooling that has heretofore been nigh-impossible to automate moves into the fold, and that&#x27;ll be another explosion of folks finally getting to join the agentic workflow world on their industry specific apps...
            • lewi1 hour ago
              You can compare benches of the old models against the new models. So yeah, you can see the difference.<p>Even then, you can just compare the progress in open models. Leaps and bounds from where they were 6 months ago.
  • scotty795 minutes ago
    Nah, screw that. I won&#x27;t be waiting that long. I&#x27;ll be 61 in 2040. I&#x27;d love humanity to take a shot at clinical immortality way sooner.
  • stego-tech57 minutes ago
    The thing that continues to irk me about these sorts of &quot;papers&quot; is how they refuse to remotely acknowledge the <i>possibility</i> that LLMs and Diffusion models won&#x27;t lead to AGI, ASI, or whatever acronym they&#x27;re foisting upon the populace.<p>If you won&#x27;t even so much as acknowledge the possibility of error, your argument is hollow and empty. All the &quot;choices&quot; <i>presume</i> these labs are being completely honest and acting in some degree of good faith (relative to the systemic incentives of society in its present form), while in reality we&#x27;re still just building and refining probability models with increasing accuracy of output and flexibility of processing (namely agents) but still lack actual &quot;intelligence&quot; of any real sort.<p>Show me a paper that doesn&#x27;t merely presume inevitability of LLM-based AGI&#x2F;ASI, and instead actually lays out the core paths that history suggests we&#x27;re likely to encounter with any &quot;world changing technology&quot;:<p>* In the best case, that the technology really will revolutionize the world and do everything promised by its biggest boosters (papers like this one)<p>* In the middle case, that it becomes just another tool in our collective toolkit, and the consequences of a revolution built on external investment fizzling out<p>* In the worst case, that the tool itself is so niche in its utility that investment collapses rather than fizzles out; what do we do with all this compute, now? Who owns the debt? Who foots the bill? How can we mitigate <i>those</i> existential risks?<p>I&#x27;m just rather nauseated by the continued trot of inevitablism masquerading as academia rather than an actual, neutral, bias-controlled-and-disclosed study that paints <i>potentialities</i> instead.<p>---<p>Having finished skimming through it, another comment springs to mind: <i>Jesus Christ these things continue to be jingoist as absolute fuck</i>. It&#x27;s a fancier set of makeup for the same <i>shitty</i> western chauvinism worldview of American excellence and Manifest Supremacy.<p>Nah, I&#x27;m done with this trite garbage. Go proselytize to idiots, <i>I&#x27;m not one of them</i>.
    • reasonableklout43 minutes ago
      One of the authors talks about this here: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.astralcodexten.com&#x2F;p&#x2F;introducing-plan-a" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.astralcodexten.com&#x2F;p&#x2F;introducing-plan-a</a><p>&gt; It’s increasingly clear that nobody has a plan for if this AI thing turns out to be real.<p>&gt; ...<p>&gt; Plan A isn’t another prediction. It’s a wish list, a positive vision, a road map for navigating the future.<p>&gt; ...<p>&gt; If we’re merely on track for a few cool gee-whiz AI innovations in the 2040s, then I’m wrong about everything and none of this really matters one way or the other.<p>I think their position is: &quot;it would be great if current tech such as LLMs doesn&#x27;t get us to AGI and only leads to some cool new innovations, but if it does, that&#x27;s scary, because nobody has a plan for what to do, so here&#x27;s our plan&quot;.<p>The jingoism is off putting. I think Daniel says it&#x27;s a political necessity: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;x.com&#x2F;DKokotajlo&#x2F;status&#x2F;2075261194978640096" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;x.com&#x2F;DKokotajlo&#x2F;status&#x2F;2075261194978640096</a>
  • 2001zhaozhao1 day ago
    This is by far the most realistic optimistic AI takeoff scenario I&#x27;ve seen, and more specifically it&#x27;s the first one I&#x27;ve read that deals with both the AI alignment and power concentration issues in a sufficient way, even in a world where hard alignment is assumed (in this scenario the AIs are assumed to be misaligned until ~2038-39).<p>Bravo, and I hope it has the impact on the AI safety field it deserves to have.
  • SubiculumCode1 hour ago
    Sounds like another Chinese Op to me; Ensuring Chinese compliance would be incredible hard to enforce or to check.<p>Look, I am scared of where we are heading, but I cannot see how we can change the dilemma towards mutual cooperation unless, as humans tend to do, only react massively after something really bad happens.
    • supern0va1 hour ago
      I recommend actually reading their recommendation, because they get into the weeds about precisely how the US and China could address this in a trustless&#x2F;auditable way. The TL;DR is that basically all of the relevant compute can be tracked.<p>Edit: Also, definitely not a Chinese op. The authors are prominent Americans, and are the folks responsible for the AI 2027 forecast that has pretty accurately predicted the current state of affairs today: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;ai-2027.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;ai-2027.com&#x2F;</a>
      • SubiculumCode1 hour ago
        I wonder. There has been some headway in getting decentralized training runs to work.
        • supern0va49 minutes ago
          Yeah, Cognition&#x27;s work is interesting in that regard, but it still doesn&#x27;t obviate the need for the chips--it just enables training on them when they&#x27;re spread across multiple data centers.<p>The Plan A proposal estimates that the ownership of ~96% of AI relevant compute hardware can have its ownership traced, since the companies selling are very few.
      • foobiekr29 minutes ago
        I doubt we can even track all of the chip production capacity.
  • tfirst1 day ago
    If carbon taxes are already a lethal policy for an political campaign, it&#x27;s absurd to think that fears of ASI will create any real movement around pausing AI.<p>If there is any movement to pause AI development, it will come from the general public&#x27;s dislike of these companies. Not from the AI safety angle.
    • arjie1 day ago
      If that is true and one cares about a moratorium on progress in the US then it seems like the number one way is to meet people where they are: so water use misinformation, degrowth, power supply constraints. That does place all the people who push for these things in a different light. They may well be attempting to do what the AI safety labs are ostensibly trying to do.<p>As an AI safetyist, one’s closest ally (in a distributed coordinated way) is the populist misinformer. Fascinating.
      • tfirst1 day ago
        If there&#x27;s going to be any pause, I&#x27;m sure it will come from a populist movement. I just can&#x27;t imagine misplaced worries about AI water use will translate into the kinds of policy the authors want to see.
        • arjie1 day ago
          Yeah it’s like shoving the top of a double pendulum. You will get some movement in one direction, but where it will precisely land is hard to predict. The water-use argument is already earning refinement by differentiating “AI datacenters” from “normal datacenters” in an effort to control the movement.<p>I imagine any populism movement will require rampant fearmongering to get a result. Considering the rough present alignments, presumably blue tribe focused propaganda will involve climate and inequality focused fear and red tribe focused propaganda will involve job loss. Grey tribe positioning is the P(doom) meme where everyone is rewarded for a high-P(doom) estimate.
      • karahime1 hour ago
        You should consider why the best ally to your position is misinformation.
  • jawiggins1 day ago
    Did anyone else catch the logical inconsistency between Plan C and A?<p>Plan C:<p>&gt; &quot;... fewer and fewer humans are needed to conduct AI R&amp;D, meaning that covert projects are easier and easier to pull off without detection.&quot;<p>Plan A:<p>&gt; &quot;... training AIs requires large numbers of AI chips. Most AI chips are in giant datacenters.50 AI datacenters are typically big enough to be visible from space, and power-hungry enough to require conspicuous infrastructure. New AI chips can only be manufactured at a handful of fabrication plants (fabs), located mostly in Taiwan, South Korea, the US, and China. The US and China negotiate with the countries that have a major role in the chip supply chain, and they require each major datacenter owner (and their upstream suppliers, including chip fabs) to publicly declare their major purchases and sales.&quot;<p>Plan A requires properties of AI training that Plan C requires do not exist.
    • icandoit1 day ago
      By legislative design? If a nuclear bomb could be made with hardware store finds the world would already be over. Big collaborative works raise the stakes and the observability for surveillance. Apply for a job at a defense supplier or even and energy company.<p>If AI production is limited to big labs and big data centers then it is de facto contained and monitored. If you know where all the ASML machines are then you know the reproduction rates of chips. If no one can buy or build the machines required to concentrate uranium or plutonium to critical levels then the threat is contained and monitored.<p>You can dig up all the Uraninite you want. It was never much of a secret that uranium had dark applications. The machines and processes where thankfully big and expensive enough that only the most focused bad actors could aquire them and then hold the world hostage to the degree they do. If al-qaeda or isis could have used $40 bombs from home depot instead of expensive planes they would have (and they do).<p>You have to legislate and control the big, expensive, and slow things. Dynamite and phentanyl are so dangerous because they move much more easily. Freedom does not have to be a suicide pact. If the inconvenience of requiring prescriptions or access to dynamite reduces harm then it is net positive?
    • 2001zhaozhao1 day ago
      In Plan C the government essentially misses the opportunity to implement the multinational deal while the threat of covert projects is still low (fewer latest-gen chips unaccounted by tracking measures, worse models&#x2F;algorithms to use for RSI). That&#x27;s why it says the probability of a deal is lower and lower each month rather than outright zero.
  • po1nt1 day ago
    This is whole a slippery slope. Always building on assumption of infinite exponential growth. But every exponential is at a certain point a sigmoid.
    • timmytokyo8 hours ago
      Whenever I encounter these people I&#x27;m reminded of the meme about the baby who has doubled his weight in the three months since birth. At that growth rate, he&#x27;ll weigh trillions of pounds by age 10.
    • icandoit1 day ago
      Nothing follows from this empty platitude though, right? It can&#x27;t inform you choices or decisions? It&#x27;s just a disempowering thought?<p>They are buying up all the RAM today. Do you think &quot;this is fine because in 5 years post-crash I can buy some cheap RAM&quot;? If everyone with money is betting differently, do you have some information they don&#x27;t, or is the whole economy just slipping away from you?<p>You experience luxuries today, that no king 1000 years ago could afford. Instant access to communication, food, medicine for the right price of course.<p>The consumer economy was great while it lasted but it&#x27;s over now. We have machines that do useful mechanical work (engines) and useful intellectual work (llm-computers). Capital will move productive work from people to machines(if we let them), and the only jobs left will be delivery driver and warehouse, and then those will be gone too.<p>Human population was exponential and now its flat, but that&#x27;s a function of what exacly? It could go back down to 1 billion or less. When jobs demanded a person supply was ready to match it. When jobs dont demand a person? Go to a degrowth rally take the temperature (and average age and child-per-person ratio) to get a taste of the future shape of supply and demand in a pessimistic world of sentences that don&#x27;t have subjects just vague plattitudes. Are they net shutting down grade schools or building them in your neck of the woods?
      • po1nt9 hours ago
        AI is just a tool. It will be a tool as we constantly push the requirements of what qualifies as consciousness. Therefore I&#x27;m not worried about it. Almost all the predictions about future growth of technology were incorrect. We don&#x27;t have flying cars, hoverboards, fusion, the matrix and so on. The goal of each of us is to live a better life. It always be and forcing people to give up luxuries for some external agenda based on slippery slopes is cruel and selfish.<p>We should have been under water, hunted by AI, overpopulated, killed by terrorist, smitten by god for our sins and so on. Luckily all it took was our privacy and a lot of tax money to survive.
      • nozzlegear1 day ago
        Degrowth is a deeply unpopular policy around the world. Where would one even go to find a degrowth rally? I have to imagine everyone there would be there ironically.<p>&gt; * they net shutting down grade schools or building them in your neck of the woods?*<p>My area (rural Iowa) has had several new schools built in the last 10 years. Net gain for sure.
  • fuddle1 hour ago
    &quot;America has two workforces now&quot; - The rest of the world can use AI too ya know.
    • BobbyJo19 minutes ago
      But do they at any useful scale? China is probably the only other country deploying AI at any appreciable fraction of their economy, and it&#x27;s certainly much less than the US.
  • oezi1 day ago
    Forecasting that the GPU build-out will reach 100 trillion USD in 2034 is wild (that&#x27;s triple the US GDP in 8 years). And another 10x within 2 years.<p>I am not sure where they believe that amount of capital could come from. It would require central bank level money printing never seen before.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;ai-2040.com&#x2F;supplements&#x2F;compute-supplement" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;ai-2040.com&#x2F;supplements&#x2F;compute-supplement</a>
    • geraneum49 minutes ago
      The article reads like a compilation of online chatter, social media post, etc. on AI. Not surprising to find unsubstantiated imaginary numbers there.
  • ibaikov1 day ago
    People overestimate progress in physical world. 2035: robot population will soon be larger than the human one<p>I&#x27;d bet that in most places 9 years is about the time needed to build a residential building. I think a good way to think about this is to think of this as producing a serial car. From pitching and capital acquisition to building a prototype to software, regulatory and then the final product which needs multiple factories and supply chains. Yes, of course robots sound cooler and there are compounding effects yada yada, but on the other side there are as many obstacles as things that accelerate this product (like capital acquisition and fearmongering of gov to bend regulatory stuff faster).
    • kennywinker1 day ago
      I mean, what is a robot? If you add up all the vacuum cleaners, 3d printers, and dishwashers, that’s probably close or more than the human population.
  • modeless1 day ago
    This is dangerously naive and misguided. They claim to want to avoid centralization of control but propose a world police state of AI regulation. Governments exerting this much control will only end in war and tyranny.
    • icandoit1 day ago
      If the production, and distribution of the tech is confined to one or two companies, then those two companies and the resulting power that comes to them, makes them the de facto world government. (Democratic choice may be a farce but it is a useful friction on net.)<p>If they own all the RAM, models, and the means to do any work, then you are at their mercy. They will buy all the RAM, leaving you none, then all the transport, then all the electricity. You will be as boxed out of the current economy as the Amish and it will get its plug pulled.<p>Gradual Disempowerment is the default plan right now. War and tyrrany are not remotely the worst case scenario. I&#x27;ll take Butlerian Jihad over being turned into cattle any day.<p>Imagine solving for equilibrium with two classes of beings. One requires agricultural land and 20 years to become individually productive and barely maintains a healthy population in a entertainment saturated landscape. The second eats only electricity and is ready to work on day 1. Round 1 goes to the strongest gorilla for sure, round 100?<p>If LLMs had come to earth in spaceships would you have welcomed them into your work and your home?
      • BurningFrog21 minutes ago
        &gt; <i>If the production, and distribution of the tech is confined to one or two companies</i><p>We already have at least 5 companies only in the US. Your whole premise is false.
  • PaulHoule22 hours ago
    ... and in the meantime people are looking at their AI bills and realizing tokens aren&#x27;t worth what they cost. The frontier is getting the cost down, not getting intelligence up. In a cage match between this guy and &quot;Ed&quot;, Ed wins.
  • cyberpunk1 day ago
    &gt; Then, in the mid-2030s, they pause at AIs around the level of top human geniuses.<p>They being the US and China and by agreement.<p>It would be ideal, but there’s far too much money on the table to overcome human nature.<p>So my hope is we hit some kind of limits naturally.. Wishful thinking?
  • stahhhpit1 hour ago
    Stop trying to cram your &quot;P&quot; into &quot;AI&quot;.
  • jabedude1 day ago
    Why did Scott Alexander (one of the authors of the original AI 2027 paper) not join&#x2F;contribute to this one?
    • kokotajlod1 day ago
      Hey, author here! Scott did contribute, but less than before.<p>On his blog he says: &quot;I did a lot of writing for AI 2027 and was listed as a co-author. Some of my writing made it into Plan A too, but it was a bit less. The difference is of degree rather than kind, but because of this - and to give me more latitude to discuss it the way I like with less PR blowback - we decided not to put me as a co-author this time. I continue to be proud of having a part in this, small as it may be. (related: everything in this post is my opinion only, and not officially endorsed by the AI Futures Project)&quot;
  • sheepscreek1 day ago
    I wonder if they are double-counting Anthropic&#x27;s leased capacity from SpaceX under SpaceX again.
  • alecco1 day ago
    More wild speculation, now with wishful thinking spread on top.
  • Associated post: <i>Introducing Plan A</i><p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.astralcodexten.com&#x2F;p&#x2F;introducing-plan-a" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.astralcodexten.com&#x2F;p&#x2F;introducing-plan-a</a>
  • ipnon1 day ago
    Kind of feels like fusion power at this point, always just around the corner.
    • reasonableklout21 hours ago
      What predictions about the technology are the authors making that you do not believe?<p>There is plenty falsifiable in this in ai-2027.com, and they have not gotten everything right. But some things they have: for example, the Pentagon has already invoked export controls to restrict the deployment of a frontier model. This level of government oversight wasn&#x27;t predicted until 2027 in the original scenario.
    • icandoit1 day ago
      LLM adoption is 30% in the charts I saw googling for &quot;ai adoption&quot;. An example of capibility: I have had Claude one shot an RL agent that learns connect four in 30 minutes. That&#x27;s PhD level stuff.<p>LLMS are 4 years old and the companies that sell them 10x every year. What evidence can you cite? Could you convince a disinterested 3rd party you have anything other than cope? What facts about the world make you think this is anything other than the new (and probably temporary) normal?
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  • adt1 day ago
    Excellent work by Daniel and the authors. 47,000 words plus supplements is a huge read (and re-read), and an even bigger think-and-write.<p>My early analysis of the analysis:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;lifearchitect.substack.com&#x2F;p&#x2F;the-memo-special-edition-ai-2040-com" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;lifearchitect.substack.com&#x2F;p&#x2F;the-memo-special-editio...</a>