I have never worried about the singularity because I had a single conversation in 2007 with a guy who worked in a chip fab, and learned just the tiniest bit about the physical, mechanical process that goes into actually manufacturing a microprocessor, and how much of it requires direct intervention of human hands despite everyone involved in the process having wanted to automate it all since 1980
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@glyph I came to a similar conclusion when I realized that the customer service application I worked on at the time required constant monitoring and human intervention to keep functioning properly. It was essentially just a CRUD application with a pretty UI.
@glyph I have never worried about the #Singularity because in the late nineties, on two separate occasions, I spoke at length with two (then and still today) fairly well-known Ayatollahs of the movement.
They both made certain to mention that they thought I was smart—perhaps even approaching as smart as they thought they were!—and so they were candid and enthusiastic with me. Neither had studied biology (ahem ahem obviously), and both genuinely were eager to share ideas with a PhD student in molecular biology.
When I pointed out that exponential growth always, but always, leads to system collapse in nature; when I pointed out that in a universe finite in space and time, this is the rigidly necessary requirement of arithmetic, they both responded nonverbally: with a dismissive wave of the hand.
In short, the entire movement is based on the belief that Technology is Magic.
At the time I had not reached the level of cynicism to see where it would go in thirty years.
@jameshowell @glyph I had the same journey, more or less. What the DAIR institute folks anatomize as TESCREAL is basically warmed-over Christianity minus the god/jesus bit, but including the rapture of the nerds and AI calvinist satan (Roko's basilisk).
Thirty years for naive belief in perpetual scientific progress to fester and rot down into a new religion.
@glyph So I appreciate this notion that the paperclip optimizer cannot exist without coopting human fingers into bending paperclips, but OTOH there are a lot of people in this world who will be "reverse centaurs" and bend those fucking paperclips because they need to eat.
I also am not worried about a "singularity", but about something much more stupid.
@glyph
I find this specifically hilarious cos i remember the LessWrong Sequences post where Yudkowsky posited computers designing better computers etc, and a guy who worked at fucking Intel told him he was off in la la land, and the acolytes duly downvoted the heretic
@glyph Haha yep! I hit this same experience with so many hype things - knowing even just a smidge more-but-firm-details about some domain makes so much air get blown out of hype
Humanoid robots? Good luck with the heat/power/load trifecta (and this is why all the fucking things cap out at sickly ~30kg load max)
“Asteroid mining” and “space production”? Yeah we’re 2.5 centuries into mass-collaborative industrial refining and extreme sunk costs, but sure, that magically in space in 6y! 😂😂😂
@glyph I worked for a couple of years as a production assistant at a semiconductor-grade quartzware facility where we made all the glass parts you need to produce semiconductors in the fab process. Basically my boss ran the plant and I put all the orders in production with the right BOM router and controlled drawings, and made sure we had the material in inventory and on orde, and confirmed the delivery times with the customers who were chip manufacturers like Intel and Samsung. You need humans to run all the 50 different kinds of machines and lasers in there, especially the plasma torches and fire lathes. You have to spin giant quartz tubes in these rings of plasma torches to attach flanges and things like that. Also the torch guys are all artisans and the vision technology to see the stress in glass is impossible for the computer vision guys to replicate let alone the haptics to wield a plasma torch lol it’ll be a couple decades at least especially if we let them replace engineers with genAI lol this dude from AMD we hired as VP of R&D was trying to figure how to automate everything and do all work in Korea but afaik people still make all these parts, 15 years later.
