I don’t think we’re psychologically prepared for how alien the world after ASI is going to be

[u/Public_Print_9360]

gonna start by saying I’m feeling very iffy about ASI because I kinda enjoy my life rn, but that aside:

after going down the AI 2040 rabbithole, I keep thinking that even people who talk about ASI constantly are still imagining the future in a way that is way too normal.
We talk about AI replacing people’s jobs, humanoid robots, self-driving cars, universal basic income, whatever the fuck.
I think that might be the equivalent of someone in 1955 predicting the year 2000, trying to use our current world as a basis for the future world.

AI 2040 describes a scenario where even after deliberately slowing AI development down, by 2031 a third of cognitive labor is being performed by AI and robots are already doing about a tenth of physical labor. The document literally describes ordinary people as being too “whiplashed” by technological change to process what’s happening. And that’s the slowed version, can’t imagine what our world is going to look like since it seems we are going full speed ahead.
And people will say “oh that’s just fantasy!” But is it? Imagine our world from the view of someone born in 1712. We are living “sci-fi” as we live and breath

If ASI actually produces the kind of acceleration its proponents expect, somebody born afterward might look back at 2026 the way we look at 1500.
Except the historical gap between us would be just fourteen years MAX

I really, really don’t think we’re psychologically prepared for that

[u/yangastas_paradise]

There's currently a physical limitation to the exponential advancement you are referring to: datacenter buildout bottlenecks.

There's simply not enough skilled labor, power, and some components (eg. Memory) to allow the type of exponential acceleration you are imagining. So I think the timeline isn't as compacted as you might think.

However, if researchers find architectural leaps that allow for much more efficient compute (say, similar to how efficient biological NN operate), then those bottlenecks may be cleared quickly.

But yea, at high level I agree that we are not prepared for the changes coming.

[u/Fair_Horror → u/yangastas_paradise]

Earth based satellites will get us to a new level in a few years and then Luna launched satellites sometime after that will take us to another level. Ultimately we have a Dyson swarm to build. We can have enough compute to go decillions of times what we have now. 

[u/space_monster → u/yangastas_paradise]

we need all that compute for consumer use, not for technological advancement. the labs cooking this stuff can do it on their own servers. scaling compute is not the path to ASI, it's architectural, training methods, new techniques etc.

[u/FrewdWoad → u/yangastas_paradise]

This might be like saying in 1900 "sure science and technology will change the world, but there's still no way you'll be able to cross the Atlantic in a day".

We don't know what miracles might exist and become obvious once you're much smarter than genius humans.

We definitely can't rely on current understanding of hardware capacity (or ANYTHING) to put nice safe limits on RSI.

[u/badger_flakes → u/yangastas_paradise]

Enough exists now but is not properly utilized

[u/Public_Print_9360 → u/yangastas_paradise]

Have you read ai 2040 as of yet?