Futurology

Dario Amodei, CEO of AI firm Anthropic, in October 2024 penned an optimistic vision of the future when AI and robots can do most work in a 14,000 word essay entitled - 'Machines of Loving Grace'.

Last month Mr Amodei was reported as saying the following - “I don’t know exactly when it’ll come,” CEO Dario Amodei told the Wall Street Journal. “I don’t know if it’ll be 2027…I don’t think it will be a whole bunch longer than that when AI systems are better than humans at almost everything. Better than almost all humans at almost everything. And then eventually better than all humans at everything.”

Although Mr Amodei wasn't present at the recent inauguration, the rest of Big Tech was. They seem united behind America's most prominent South African, in his bid to tear down the American administrative state and remake it (into who knows what?). Simultaneously they are leading us into a future where we will have to compete with robots & AI for jobs, where they are better than us, and cost pennies an hour to employ.

Mr. Amodei is rapidly making this world of non-human workers come true, but at least he has a vision for what comes after. What about the rest of Big Tech? How long can they just preach the virtues of destruction, but not tell us what will arise from the ashes afterwards?

Reference - 36 page PDF - SWE-Lancer: Can Frontier LLMs Earn $1 Million from Real-World Freelance Software Engineering?

Here's the robots in action.

I wonder how far away we are from humanoid robots that can perform most unskilled or semi-skilled work? Cleaning, factory work, stacking shelves etc etc

When you look at this it doesn't seem that far away.

I would also guess that if Chinese manufacturers can make and sell hatchback cars for 10,000 dollars they will be able to make robots like this for less.

When that day comes, we will very quickly have a new type of society and economy, though who knows what that will look like.

https://archive.is/yDSct

We're getting closer to making SeaQuest DSV a reality.

More and more it looks like the Western world's embrace of neoliberalism was a catastrophic mistake. Its guiding principle is that capital and the markets are always right, and governments/the people should have no say in what they do. After decades of this, manufacturing and industry have fled to where capital & the markets can get the cheapest labor, leaving most Western countries hollowed out and deindustrialized.

COVID exposed a fresh weakness in this model of organizing economies, but now there's yet another disadvantage coming to light. By making China the world's manufacturing HQ, it is handing it the crown of the planet's No 1 in technology.

By rapidly becoming the world's leading car maker, China is in gear to become the world's leading robotics nation. Add to that, it's also arguably already the world's leading AI nation.

Some people in Western countries see this in terms of wars and arms races, but maybe the solution is to look within at home and dump neoliberalism?

US Big Tech wants to eliminate the federal government administered by humans, and replace it with AI. Amid all the talk that has generated one aspect has gone relatively unreported. None of the AI they want to replace the humans with actually works.

AI is still plagued by widespread simple and basic errors in reasoning. Furthermore, there is no path to fixing this problem. Tinkering with training data has provided some improvements, but it has not fixed the fundamental problem. AI lacks the ability to independently reason.

'Move fast and break things' has always been a Silicon Valley mantra. It seems increasingly that is the way the basic functions of administering the US state will be run too.

What is more important on the path to AGI - scaling and more training data, or fundamental breakthroughs in AI software developed by humans?

Many people believe it is the former, though Deepseek itself arose from the latter.

If training data is to be significant then Tencent may have given itself a huge boost. WeChat is the biggest and most used app on the planet. The Google suite of products is the only thing comparable in western countries. However, Western countries are starting to split into AI walled gardens, so Google won't be able to take full advantage of all its users.

It may not matter. Some people believe scaling alone won't be enough to get to AGI. Some smart humans somewhere will need to figure out breakthroughs in AI software - and that could happen anywhere.