Comment by ivraatiems

A lot of people in my surroundings are not buying this life anymore; especially young people are asking why would they. Unlike in the US, they won't end up under a bridge (unless some real collapse, which can of course happen but why worry about it; it might not) so they work simple jobs (data entry or whatnot) to make enough money to eat and party and nothing more. Meaning many of them work no more than a few hours a month. They live rent free at their parents and when they have kids they stop partying but generally don't go work more (well; raising kids is hard work of course but I mean for money). Many of them will inherit the village house from their parents and have a garden so they grow stuff to eat , have some animals and make their own booze so they don't have to pay for that. In cities, people feel the same 'who would I work for the ferrari of the boss we never see', but it is much harder to not to; more expensive and no land and usually no property to inherit (as that is in the countryside or was already sold to not have to work for a year or two).

Like you say, people but more our govs need to worry about what is the point at this moment, not scifi in the future; this stuff has already bad enough to worry about. Working your ass off for diminishing returns , paying into a pension pot that won't make it until you retire etc is driving people to really focus on the now and why they would do these things. If you can just have fun with 500/mo and booze from your garden, why work hard and save up etc. I noticed even people from my birth country with these sentiments while they have it extraordinarily good for the eu standards but they are wondering why would they do all of this for nothing (...) more and more and cutting hours more and more. It seems more an education and communication thing really than anything else; it is like asking why pay taxes: if you are not well informed, it might feel like theft, but when you spell it out, most people will see how they benefit.

Well said. I keep reading these fearmongering articles and looking around wondering where all of these deep meaning and human agency is today.

I’m led to believe that we see this stuff because the tiny subset of humanity that has the wealth and luxury to sit around thinking about thinking about themselves are worried that AI may disrupt the navel-gazing industry.

People talk about meaning, but they rarely define it.

Ultimately, "meaning" is a matter of "purpose", and purpose is a matter of having an end, or telos. The end of a thing is dependent on the nature of a thing. Thus, the telos of an oak tree is different from the telos of a squirrel which is different from that of a human being. The telos or end of a thing is a marker of the thing's fulfillment or actualization as the kind of thing it is. A thing's potentiality is structured and ordered toward its end. Actualization of that potential is good, the frustration of actualization is not.

As human beings, what is most essential to us is that we are rational and social animals. This is why we are miserable when we live lives that are contrary to reason, and why we need others to develop as human beings. The human drama, the human condition, is, in fact, our failure to live rationally, living beneath the dignity of a rational agent, and very often with knowledge of and assent to our irrational deeds. That is, in fact, the very definition of sin: to choose to act in a way one knows one should not. Mistakes aren't sins, even if they are per se evil, because to sin is to knowingly do what you should not (though a refusal to recognize a mistake or to pay for a recognized mistake would constitute a sin). This is why premeditated crimes are far worse than crimes of passion; the first entails a greater knowledge of what one is doing, while someone acting out of intemperance, while still intemperate and thus afflicted with vice, was acting out of impulse rather fully conscious intent.

So telos provides the objective ground for the "meaning" of acts. And as you may have noticed, implicitly, it provides the objective basis for morality. To be is synonymous with good, and actualization of potential means to be more fully.

Please don't be offended by my opinion, I mean it in good humour to share some strong disagreements - Im going to give my take after reading your comment and the article which both seem completely OTT ( contextwise regarding my opinions ).

>meaning behind them is not dependent upon the perspective of an external observer.

(Yes brother like cmon)

Regarding the author, I get the impression he grew up without a strong father figure? This isnt ad hominem I just get the feeling of someone who is so confused and lost in life that he is just severely depressed possibly related to his directionless life. He seems so confused he doesn't even take seriously the fact most humans find their own meaning in life and says hes not even going to consider this, finding it futile.( he states this near the top of the article ).

I believe his rejection of a simple basic core idea ends up in a verbal blurb which itself is directionless.

My opinion ( Which yes maybe more floored than anyones ), is to deal with Mazlows hierarchy, and then the prime directive for a living organism which after survival , which is reproduction. Only after this has been achieved can you then work towards your family community and nation.

This may seem trite, but I do believe that this is natural for someone with a relatively normal childhood.

My aim is not to disparage, its to give me honest opinion of why I disagree and possible reasons for it. If you disagree with anything I have said please correct me.

Thanks for sharing the article though it was a good read - and I did struggle myself with meaning sometimes.

I think generally the expectation is that there are around 100T synapses in the brain, and of course it's probably not a 1:1 correspondence with neural networks, but it doesn't seem infeasible at all to me that a dense-equivalent 100T parameter model would be able to rival the best humans if trained properly.

If basically a transformer, that means it needs at inference time ~200T flops per token. The paper assumes humans "think" at ~15 tokens/second which is about 10 words, similar to the reading speed of a college graduate. So that would be ~3 petaflops of compute per second.

Assuming that's fp8, an H100 could do ~4 petaflops, and the authors of AI 2027 guesstimate that purpose wafer scale inference chips circa late 2027 should be able to do ~400petaflops for inference, ~100 H100s worth, for ~$600k each for fabrication and installation into a datacenter.

Rounding that basically means ~$6k would buy you the compute to "think" at 10 words/second. Generally speaking that'd probably work out to maybe $3k/yr after depreciation and electricity costs, or ~30-50¢/hr of "human thought equivalent" 10 words/second. Running an AI at 50x human speed 24/7 would cost ~$23k/yr, so 1 OpenBrain researcher's salary could give them a team of ~10-20 such AIs running flat out all the time. Even if you think the AI would need an "extra" 10 or even 100x in terms of tokens/second to match humans, that still puts you at genius level AIs in principle runnable at human speed for 0.1 to 1x the median US income.

There's an open question whether training such a model is feasible in a few years, but the raw compute capability at the chip level to plausibly run a model that large at enormous speed at low cost is already existent (at the street price of B200's it'd cost ~$2-4/hr-human-equivalent).

If by “several” orders of magnitude, you mean 3-5, then we might be there by 2030 or earlier.

https://situational-awareness.ai/from-gpt-4-to-agi/

I think there is a good chance you are roughly right. I also think that the "secret sauce" of sapience is probably not something that can be replicated easily with the technology we have now, like LLMs. They're missing contextual awareness and processing which is absolutely necessary for real reasoning.

But even so, solving that problem feels much more attainable than it used to be.

Exponential growth means the first order of magnitude comes slowly and the last one runs past you unexpectedly.

Why can't the compute be remote from the robot? That is a major advantage of human technology over biology.

I was hoping someone would bring up Bullshit Jobs. There are definitely a lot of people spending the majority of their time doing "work" that doesn't have any significant impact to the world already. I don't know that some future AI takeover would really change much, except maybe remove some vale of perception around meaningless work.

At the same time, I wouldn't necessarily say that people are currently fine getting dopamine hits from social media. Coping would probably be a better description. There are a lot of social and societal problems that have been growing at a rapid rate since Facebook and Twitter began tapping into the reward centers of the brain.

From a purely anecdotal perspective, I find my mood significantly affected by how productive and impactful I am with how I spend my time. I'm much happier when I'm making progress on something, whether it's work or otherwise.

Targeted advertising is about determining and giving people exactly what they need. If successful, this increases consumption and grows the productivity of the economy. It's an extremely meaningful job as it allows for precise, effective distribution of resources.