Comment by vcanales
11 days ago
> The pole at ts8 isn't when machines become superintelligent. It's when humans lose the ability to make coherent collective decisions about machines. The actual capabilities are almost beside the point. The social fabric frays at the seams of attention and institutional response time, not at the frontier of model performance.
Damn, good read.
We are already long past that point…
Yeah, it's easy to see the singularity as close when you see it as "when human loose collective control of machines" but any serious look at human society will see that human lost collective control of machines a while back ... to the small number of humans individually owning and controlling the machine.
Even the humans at the top don’t have commanding control of the machines, however. We live in an age where power is determined by the same ineffable force that governs whether a tweet goes viral.
Since Luddites smashed textile machines in England three hundred years ago, it seems technology didn’t care, it kept growing apace due to capitalism. Money and greed fed the process, we never stood a chance of stopping any of it.
It doesn’t help when quite a few Big Tech companies are deliberately operating on the principle that they don’t have to follow the rules, just change at the rate that is faster than the bureaucratic system can respond.