Sashinii

Sashinii t1_j8b6cq0 wrote

Nope. I don't follow sports so I didn't even know the Super Bowl was today until just recently.

So I just watched what is a Squarespace advertisement: it mostly involves an actor saying "web sites" a lot, which I think is supposed to be funny, and that's about it.

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Sashinii t1_j7wg4nt wrote

>A huge reason why this sub is uber-optimisitic is because many people on this sub use the singularity (something which isn't even a guarantee to happen ever, or at least not in their lifetime) as cope for their lives, lives that they are not very happy with. Many people here do not lead content lives, so they turn to AI and other technologies as the thing that's going to save them (which I find quite sad, to be honest).

I think the optimism largely comes from AI progress accelerating, and with strong enough AI, that'll enable the advent of other technologies which will be able to solve every problem.

>But of course, the singularity doesn't mean jack if it's not coming anytime soon, so that's why you see so many people claim that it's only a few years away, a decade at most, and those comments tend to get a lot of upvotes. On the other hand, comments that are more conservative get downvoted a lot (I wonder why?).

Arguments become weaker the more conservative they are because of exponential growth.

>And this uber-optimism is the case despite the fact that most AI experts don't think we'll have a singularity-like event for at least a few decades, if not longer. And that's not even taking into account social, economic, and political factors that are almost a guarantee to delay the arrival of the singularity.

A lot of experts changed their tune when it comes to their AI predictions in 2022 when it became clear that AI progress occurs faster than they thought. But even if they didn't, so what? Many experts have been wrong, not just regarding controlled flight (which is the most common example), but also regarding atoms, molecular nanotechnology, AI as good as it already is, etc.

I don't take what experts say as gospel; I care about the actual details, and if the evidence goes against what "experts" say, I won't dogmatically ignore reality.

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Sashinii t1_j6905b3 wrote

I'm well aware of how scanning tunneling microscopy works.

Here's a quote from the article "Atom Manipulation with the Scanning Tunneling Microscope":

"Manipulation of single atoms with the scanning tunneling microscope is made possible through the controlled and tunable interaction between the atoms at the end of the STM probe tip and the single atom (adatom) on a surface that is being manipulated. In the STM tunneling junction used for atom manipulation, a host of interactions that depend on the electric potentials between the sample and probe tip, the tunneling current, and tip-adatom distance come into play in the atom manipulation process".

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