wow, that must feel quite surreal. i’ve been using the internet since 2001-02 and became a web dev in 2006-08 (discovered what js was), and even I find this impressive & fun (especially that the code isn’t written by a person). But to see both JS and Quake as fresh new things to here in 30 years would feel crazy.
I concur. Climate change and ecological collapse are thing we should be focusing on. And I’m hopeful that AI in the long term might help us towards solving them. But to be honest, most normal people are just worried and scared about their jobs/financial impact which are their most immediate concerns and that’s what got most people in a frenzy. The AI gonna destroy world crowd is a bit of an outlier imo.
Climate change was killing hundreds yesterday, is killing tens of thousands today, and if the trend continues, will kill millions tomorrow. AI made like 5 people kill themselves today. Pardon me if I don't pay attention to the mellow threat and want to focus on the iss that actually threaten us.
Climate change is slow, and relies on a few highly indirect mechanisms like agricultural failures and famines to kill civilization-level-significant amounts of people. This is a hard ceiling for it.
An advanced AI threat is a civilization of one. It can act, adapt and adjust rapidly, like humans do. Potentially faster than humans do. It has access to all the tools that human civilization has already invented that it can reproduce, obtain or subvert - and potentially more. It's not limited to having just one big slow lethality mechanism. It can unleash multiple civilization-scale threats in a quick succession, and keep piling them until recovery becomes impossible. Humans can adapt to a lot, but an intelligent adversary adapts back.
The threat class isn't the same, and it's not even close. Climate change is an "otherwise avoidable death and suffering" risk. AI is an actual "extinction of humankind" risk.
Are you talking about LLMs+harnesses? No. The day a LLM can play chess without harness, or make it's own harness I might listen to you, until then I'll work on actual threats. No object permanence makes any world conquering _really_ difficult.
I look at this and I feel the reverse: what do the wealthy bring to the table now?
previously we had to work for them cause anything worth doing that could become a business needed a bigger team. now, a developer doesn’t need anybody above him to make stuff, and can potentially work on doing things they find valuable which imo something we always strived to but couldn’t afford to. in my mind, it’s really about ideas and execution now. and execution i bet a developer who wants to make something can do better than anybody higher up the chain for the forseeable future.
sure there’s things you still need investment and a physical presence for. but i reckon there is money and careers to be made in purely software based businesses still, and i think that value will mostly be captured by individuals and small teams moving forward.
The wealthy bring the capital required. The problem is fundamentally the commoditization of intellectual labor. It will simply be a game of whoever spends the most wins.
even in software historically, larger teams/more money have never produced better software. sure, not disagreeing that may be they’ll have all the best LLMs and the hardware to use them for a while. But I don’t foresee open source weights to the public to lag that far behind, and hardware that can run them to become more affordable.
you know who _own_ the means of production more than ever? the rich. they control your labour environment. they control politics. so you're the opposite of independent from them.
i could setup a local llm that’s nearly frontier level if i wanted to. i doubt i’ll ever need to though since tokens are becoming so cheap. although i am well off, i am not wealthy. and i only foresee this becoming more affordable in the future. may be i am wrong but imo an era when capital is less important is already here for the purposes of what i described.
my point was that for anyone who wanted to make software they couldn’t due to lack of free time or funds, they likely can give that a go now.
Ok to post about NSFW games? My game’s making over 200 usd a month. Grown slowly over the last 9-10 months. Haven’t put too much effort into promoting it yet. Just recently got my engine to a place where I can tell the stories I wanna tell.
Built a mostly hand built engine over three.js that lets my 3d game work from VR to iphones.
