The fear of population collapse is about protecting the established economic system which relies on an eternally growing customer/worker base. The economy cannot survive a long-term shrinking population.

The secondary issue of how to care for the elderly when they outnumber the young can be solved by simply not caring for them. (Not my recommended solution but that's what will happen if the situation arises).

Life extension won't solve what governments are worried about. While it lowers the health care costs of looking after the elderly, it does little to increase the birth rate of new customers/workers.

I'm sure politicians will try the re-skillling thing, but that isn't going to work at scale. There is no industry safe from automation and there are no uniquely human skills that can't be emulated by machine. It wasn't long ago that we were being told to pursue creative careers and then Dall-e burst that bubble.

It'll be hardwired into the brain and be so well integrated that using it will be second nature.

If we survive it, the singularity will probably be given a date in hindsight. However, i doubt that living though it will be an overnight change. I think some people are mistakenly including sentient AI as a requirement for the singularity. In such a scenario sentience could suddenly appear and infect advance systems round the world overnight.

I don't see why the singularity couldn't occur over a period of time without computers becoming sentient and then one day it seems to be everywhere. Gradually, then suddenly as Hemingway put it. The main requirement for the singularity is that the future becomes unpredictable.

I would argue that what we are seeing happening now in the AI sector qualifies as a symptom of the singularity having started. At this point it might be wiser to start thinking about ensuring a soft landing for yourself for whenever the carnage arrives at your occupation in the next X years.

Since short sleepers are a tiny percentage, the traits in combination must not lead to more offspring surviving very often vs a regular human.

It might make a difference for animals, but we evolved in a society where we help each other and work as a group. Doing this probably means that less desirable traits stick around.

Take myself for example. I don't have wisdom teeth and I don't get cavities at all. You'd think that would be a huge benefit since bad teeth was a big killer in the past. But no, people like me are a minority. Apparently perfect, long lasting teeth are not a major competitive advantage.

I've heard similar lately, that it could be a side effect of the body failing to process glucose as we age, leading to mitochondria damage in brain cells, so in effect it' could be related to diabetes. I don't have details, just seen it mentioned twice now over the past few months from different sources.

A start can be made by ending the attention economy, which is funded by advertising. If there's no monetary incentive a lot of the grifters manufacturing the fake content will go find some other scam.

It's good that you are aware of what is going on. However, you're probably already relatively safe since you have a few years of experience. If you keep your skills current and don't become heavily indebted you'll have the resources necessary to change career later if necessary

The major problem will initially be junior developers entering the workforce with huge debt and finding themselves superfluous because of experienced developers running a next gen developer centric chatbot.

Sorry, this is dumb. He means we'll but it's just an anti-innovation tax.

All this will do is cause larger companies to rig the firing process so it can't be linked to a specific piece of automation. The companies that can't escape through a loophole will struggle to compete.

Where are you getting your info? I've seen papers over a year ago that demonstrated multi-doman self supervised learning.

And what makes you think AI can't predict the future based on past patterns? It's used for that purpose routinely and has been for years. Two good examples are weather forecasting & finance.

I'd argue that training data is any data for unsupervised AI, that AI has access to far more data than puny humans because humans can't directly sense the majority of the EM spectrum and that you're massively overestimating the compute used by the average human.

Self learning AI exist. Labels are just our names for repeating patterns in data. Self learning AIs make up their own labels that don't match ours. It's a solved problem. Your information is out of date.

Google has a household robot project that successfully demonstrated human like capabilities across many domains six months ago.

True, it's not across ALL domains, but it proves that narrow AI is not the end of the line. Who knows how capable it will be when it's scaled up?

https://jrodthoughts.medium.com/deepminds-new-super-model-can-generalize-across-multiple-tasks-on-different-domains-3dccc1202ba1

First paragraph claims to know that "intelligence" can't be mimicked by our tech, yet intelligence is just learning and application of skills, which LLMs mimic quite successfully to a limited extent.

Nobody is seriously claiming LLMs reason and nobody is seriously claiming that human consciousness is just an LLM.

Intelligence and conciseness are two separate things. We have demonstrated super human capabilities in single domains. AGI just expands that to all domains. It does not require consciousness and t is achievable with our tech. Google has already demonstrated an AI that is capable across dozens of domains.

Of course, I'm assuming this wasn't some elaborate chat bot troll.

> Some people piss their money away

People with jobs also piss their money away. When that happens it's usually charities that pick up the slack, not the government. Under UBI that wouldn't change.

> it seems like a waste of tax money to provide UBI checks to wealthy people who don't need them.

They'd pay it back in tax. It's cheaper doing it this way than creating a bureaucracy to police who gets it.

I get that you don't like it, but you haven't given any reason why development will fail. The technology exists in nature, it's how you were constructed. We've already got nanoscale machines being used in manufacturing, both organic (DNA based) and inorganic. Those machines are importing rapidly.

It is inevitable (excluding a civilisation destroying crisis) because capitalism will drive manufacturing towards atomic assembly as it removes all the costs associated with a supply chain and human labor, a tremendous competitive advantage. That is also the end of capitalism because the cost of production will be close to zero with no material, energy or labor costs.

Have you ever heard of atomic assemblers? They're advanced 3D printers that print in any element at an atomic scale. Ribosomes are a natural example of an atomic assembler that produces only proteins. The difference is that our atomic assemblers will be microscopic robots that can work with any element.

Imagine you had a home atomic assembler. It would be capable of making anything you need to survive, given access to raw atoms and electricity. It could make food, clothes, your house, solar panels, batteries, medicine, and even copies of itself.

That is what a post scarcity world looks like. There's no point to hoarding resources when a shovel full of dirt + the air around you contains all the atoms you'd need to make almost anything to could want. Nothing goes to waste because atomic assemblers also offer the possibility of disassembly making perfect recycling a possibility.

Even land would no longer in short supply. A person with an atomic assembler could build a life of luxury anywhere, even on marginal land that today is considered worthless. No need for infrastructure, access to water, employment or anything we need today.

I've seen estimate of about 10 years. It'll definitely be less than 20 years.

Of course there are limits in a finite universe. However there is ample energy and matter on earth to allow for all of us to enjoy a very luxurious lifestyle so long as we don't let a handful of selfish people try to hoard it all.

The only real possible shortage is land. Even so, in a post scarcity world a lot more of the earth's surface and oceans will be habitable because proximity to fresh water, infrastructure and jobs won't matter anymore.

He WAS important, or rather, his marketing skill was important to kick-start a number of industries that faced an uphill battle because of legacy incumbents. These techs would have become mainstream eventually, but we are on a bit of a clock thanks to climate change, so any help is appreciated, whatever the motivation.

He's overstated his welcome at this point though.

That's quite a brood range. Given how mainstream analysts often underestimate technological change, does that mean that the blue sky scenario is closer to the low end?

Just look to the hype curve for your answer.

We've had the peak of inflated expectations. The field has been recognised as legit and money has begun flowing.

We're now in the trough of disillusionment where all the announcements and breakthroughs haven't seemingly achieved anything.

Next up the research will start to bear fruit, offering small improvements at first, nothing too exciting. When? Probably late this decade or early next.

Yes. The point of automation is to reduce the wages bill. I can easily see reduced demand for junior programmers as a result of efficiency gains from codex to existing teams.

It won't speed up the singularity. All techs seem to follow some form of exponential curve with little deviation for good times, bad times or even war. It may increase programmer efficiency, but that could just be required to keep it on the accelerating curve.

Crime is increasing, but mainly identify theft and financial crime, because it's so easy to carry out remotely.

At the company I work for we recently acquired a cyber security expert. That's not a role that existed before because we just weren't being hit by criminals.

Nobody is being arrested. We don't know who's doing it or where they are or how many they are.

I don't think that's going to change for a long time. When the bad guys get AI their attacks will be on steroids and well have to use AI to defend ourselves.

I think we're just going to have to learn to live with it. It'll only if away if money or poverty goes away.

Animals have demonstrated self awareness, so it's not just humans.

Random mutations gave rise to conciseness, driven by evolution. The key difference is that we are directing the evolution of AI and our measure of fitness isn't the same as natural selection.

Op's phrasing might have been a bit combative, but I think the question is fair. Why do we assume that an artificial mind created under artificial conditions for our purposes will become conscious? To me that's like assuming alien intelligence will be humanoid.