But supermarkets have already had shelf-stocking vehicles for years. There is no need to make a humanoid robot for navigating supermarkets to restock.

You could have this experiment done on yourself and then document your experience. I suppose you would be able to tell wether or not your consciousness was expanded and make deductions based on that.

This will be an actually testable hypothesis soon so we could actually gain a lot of information towards understanding consciousness.

Look up “hard problem of consciousness” and you’ll see why this doesn’t really work. Firstly, we don’t actually know wether anyone other than yourself is conscious. Also “extending” consciousness wouldn’t confirm that a machine is conscious. Certain parts of the human body such as the nervous system can “extend” our consciousness but this doesn’t mean they are conscious by themselves.

A lot to copious on both sides for sure but what I don’t understand is that say the Singularity does occur in a pessimistic timeframe (eg 50 years). That’ll still be in most people’s lifetimes and the changes that would occur would completely change the human race. We are living in one of the most critical points in time where the world could either get exponentially better or worse in most people’s lifetimes. You are definitely right about the copium on this sub but I think even the more pessimistic predictions about AI have insane ramifications that need to be talked about more.

All their jobs have ALREADY been automated to some extent. They could do many things much more efficiently through technology but it doesn't matter to them because they are almost disconnected from the rest of the modern world.

Just started reading it and it's really entertaining so far.

The argument I find most convincing is that whilst technology is moving fast, politicts is always slow. Stuff like regulations and a general political misunderstanding of AI might lead to pushback against AI or they might purposely slow down development. Even if AI was made that could replace something such a mcdonalds workers the government may place a ban or tax on companies using AI in order to keep employment high. It sounds like a dumb solution (and I agree) but to politicians this might sound like a good solution.

It would not be possible to simulate a larger universe than our current one unless our understanding of physics changes. However in a simulation you could use multiple tricks to create a world which by all practical means IS larger.

For example video games use tools like occlusion culling or level of detail (LOD) to make stuff the universe appear high-quality but for a reduced processing cost. I have no doubt similar tools could be used in a simulated world to make the world appear larger then it actually is.

The truth is the real world has scarcity. Not everyone can have their own castle because there is only so much room. You probably live in a developed nation with high living standards but replicating this for everyone has a massive toll on the environment. VR allows us to get past the scarcity of resources in the real world (ie the economic problem).

As to your challenge I have a very easy answer. Some things simply aren’t possible in the real world due to physical limitations. Do you want to fly around or use magic, well too bad because even if we made the world as perfect as possible we would still be limited by physical constraints. I can come up with a million other reasons why there are advantages to VR over the real world but I think this point is pretty hard to dispute.

ChatGPT has improved on context and memory quite a bit over GPT-3 and I assume it will be the same for GPT-4. You can have quite a long conversation with it remaining consistent but plotholes still appear after 1-2 pages of words (and the story’s are dull). Increasing the coherency of a response is definitely a focus at the moment so I wouldn’t be surprised if GPT-4 has the capability to write 5-10 pages which form a believable story. So it all depends on when GPT-4 is going to release which I’m guessing will be Q3 this year.

Yup, exactly. Whilst ChatGPTs ability to code is impressive it’s definitely not the “do everything” button some people think it is.

The code isn't good enough nor does the AI have a good enough understanding to implement the code itself. It's all quite basic code and often has errors.

The OpenAI team might be using ChatGPT to help design the next iterations but it's not exactly possible to "cut out the middleman" at the moment All the games/programs that have been made using ChatGPT have only been possible because people can actually check if the code is good, see if the program works and write followup prompts if necessary. It's not within ChatGPT's capabilities to actually see if it's code works. It may spit out a working answer sometimes but it can't actually test if it works itself and as such it can't improve without the aid of a human.

What would the AI spend money on? Food? A Car? A house? It's not like our concept of money is applicable to AI in anyway, even if it was sentient.

If you consider full dive an extremely immersive VR experience then probably but if you consider it indistinguishable from reality than I think more like 20 years minimum. To achieve something indistinguishable from reality it will probably require BCI which are ethically iffy. I think maybe we'll begin seeing some prototypes for full-dive in 10 years but due to the monumentality and philosophical/political ramifications I think it will take another 10 years or more before people actually start using it.

I think by graphics sumane12 also means displays that also look realistic. Even the best displays aren't quite there and we don't yet have the tech to combine the best graphics with the best display with reasonable refresh rate and latency.

No, sam altman didn't "reveal" the capabilities of GPT-4. Just because Altman says future models will have these capabilities doens't mean GPT-4 will have these capabilities. Altman has already stated that GPT-4 will be a language model and he believes language models are capable of a lot more then people think (stated in the exact same video linked). He literally says that right before mentioning we'll eventually get multimodal models - the fact you somehow extracted "GPT-4 will be capable of doing any human activity in virtual space" is just dumb.

Of course I think GPT-4 will be wildy impressive but if you are expecting a self-improving multi-modal model capable of doing any human activity you are setting yourself up for dissapointment.

My prediction that VR will be as big as the iPhone in 2007 did not look good this year. VR progress has been much slower than anticipated and meta hasn’t really played their cards right. Regardless it’s still 2 years away so a lot can change and some progress was still made.

In terms of AI more progress was made than I had anticipated. Whilst I expected GPT-4 to be out by now, I was blown away by the progress in art generation. I expected it would be a year until open source image generators competed with Dall-E 2 but only a few months after stable diffusion was released and now it’s better than Dall-e 2 in many aspects. I see AI generated art everywhere and I’m just blown away by how quickly it has improved. Self driving has been about where I expected it so nothing really to say there.

UE5 has also been mind blowing. Both ray tracing and polygon rendering has improved a ton with technology like nanite. The games on it look amazing however we’ll have to wait a couple years for games to be developed for it to see its full potential. Definitely higher than my expectations for sure.

Government developments have been about where I expected in most developments (infrastructure, finance etc). Little developments have been made towards AI by most governments. The one big exception was the China chip manufacturing ban by the US government which really took me by surprise. It definitely goes to show that countries such as the US and China have really seen the potential in AI and have begun making changes, even if it’s behind the scenes.

My predictions about hardware developments have roughly been right but I’m still disappointed. Progress in hardware has really slowed down, and if the 4090 has shown us anything it’s that we really are reaching the limit on how efficient we can make transistors. Although this was what I expected I still find it disappointing. Hopefully quantum computers or the like will be viable. If not I still think we’ve got a long way to go on software optimization.

Finally energy use. Due to the war in Ukraine I think many countries have begun focusing on renewable energy more than I predicted. Fusion progress seems to be faster than I expected but I don’t want to get too optimistic because it always seems like progress is being made with no results.

So that’s my predictions for everything. Overall a bit more progress was made than I expected.

If biological mechanisms such as brains or muscles truly are more efficient than other mechanisms then technology will shift towards trying to mimic it. At the moment we have lots of evidence to suggest this is the case for example your eyes, brain, heart are all extremely efficient for their size and can last decades running on very little fuel (food).

Dream Studio: Just a web version of stable diffusion
Character AI: Best conversational AI
GPT-3: A bit old now but still fun to mess around with