All of us computer geeks in the 90’s (and I do mean all) were evangelical about the internet ushering in a Renaissance in dissemination of truth. We were naive.
Hard disagree. The truth has come out, and the Internet has allowed more people than ever to see it… in all its glory and horror. Actually, we’re still in the process: only 5.5 billion people have Internet access right now, that’s 67% of the world population, we’re still missing 1/3rd of the whole picture.
Just wait until you see what 90% of the truth looks like.
As for AI… it’s safe (and who’s going to read it this deep in the thread anyway?) to tell you a little secret: neuromorphic hardware.
The goal has never been centralized AI like what is being sold right now, not even the dream of an AGI, or some super-AI. The goal is giving every person a self controlled personal assistant capable of sifting through the Internet, or in other words: a smartphone with an NPU running an AI of their choice customized to their personal preferences. The goal is direct democracy where the interests of everyone are taken into account 24/365 on millions of subjects all the time. The goal is giving everyone access to millions of lifetimes worth of skill sets with zero training time. Moderators? You can get hardware with a modest NPU right this moment, download any number of LLMs, and decide for yourself. Moderators will be people capable of affording the hardware, which are already in the hundreds of millions; those billionaires can fuck off, the genie is out of the bottle and it’s spreading fast (last I’ve seen, there’s an estimate of a “Moore’s law” where AI is growing at 100x efficiency per year, most people don’t even remotely realize what that means).
Switzerland is the only country with low tech direct democracy. I only see a dystopia coming and the only way I can think of to defend against it is to have better education in schools.
Half of US cannot read beyond 6th grade level.
About 40% don’t know it takes a year to orbit the sun (no they were not nitpicking about leap years).
A quarter don’t even know the Earth orbits the sun.
You don’t need neuromorphic hardware to get these facts right.
Don’t get me wrong, the US is totally going towards a dystopia. I was talking about the remaining 95% of the world and the long term goals. The US has done its part, some US companies can still do some stuff, but the US as a country, or its monopoly-USD “billionaires”, are no longer a relevant part of the equation.
Worldwide, NPUs and client-side AIs will lead the next changes. Some people in the US will have a chance to leverage those, learning will become a local query away, only limited by each person’s curiosity. Keep in mind a full copy of the Wikipedia is only 100GB, all of Project Gutenberg is only 70GB, I have both and more on the same smartphone I’m writing this from (and it’s not even a “flagship” model). There is a lot, and I mean A LOT of knowledge to be extracted from there, which just so happens to be part of the training data for chatbot AIs, meaning they’re particularly suited for retrieving it.
You’re right, you don’t “need” neuromorphic hardware to get those facts right… but at the same time, you don’t “need” those facts to use neuromorphic hardware to retrieve them as quickly as you can ask for, then get them with all explanations, related keywords, topics, plus links to sources for it all. With a simple text-to-voice, it will even help you read it!
I know, it may sound like the world upside down. Another way of seeing it, is as the pivot point of a balance, the joining of different ways of approaching knowledge. Interesting times lie ahead 😉
Hard disagree. The truth has come out, and the Internet has allowed more people than ever to see it… in all its glory and horror. Actually, we’re still in the process: only 5.5 billion people have Internet access right now, that’s 67% of the world population, we’re still missing 1/3rd of the whole picture.
Just wait until you see what 90% of the truth looks like.
As for AI… it’s safe (and who’s going to read it this deep in the thread anyway?) to tell you a little secret: neuromorphic hardware.
The goal has never been centralized AI like what is being sold right now, not even the dream of an AGI, or some super-AI. The goal is giving every person a self controlled personal assistant capable of sifting through the Internet, or in other words: a smartphone with an NPU running an AI of their choice customized to their personal preferences. The goal is direct democracy where the interests of everyone are taken into account 24/365 on millions of subjects all the time. The goal is giving everyone access to millions of lifetimes worth of skill sets with zero training time. Moderators? You can get hardware with a modest NPU right this moment, download any number of LLMs, and decide for yourself. Moderators will be people capable of affording the hardware, which are already in the hundreds of millions; those billionaires can fuck off, the genie is out of the bottle and it’s spreading fast (last I’ve seen, there’s an estimate of a “Moore’s law” where AI is growing at 100x efficiency per year, most people don’t even remotely realize what that means).
Switzerland is the only country with low tech direct democracy. I only see a dystopia coming and the only way I can think of to defend against it is to have better education in schools.
Half of US cannot read beyond 6th grade level.
About 40% don’t know it takes a year to orbit the sun (no they were not nitpicking about leap years).
A quarter don’t even know the Earth orbits the sun.
You don’t need neuromorphic hardware to get these facts right.
Don’t get me wrong, the US is totally going towards a dystopia. I was talking about the remaining 95% of the world and the long term goals. The US has done its part, some US companies can still do some stuff, but the US as a country, or its monopoly-USD “billionaires”, are no longer a relevant part of the equation.
Worldwide, NPUs and client-side AIs will lead the next changes. Some people in the US will have a chance to leverage those, learning will become a local query away, only limited by each person’s curiosity. Keep in mind a full copy of the Wikipedia is only 100GB, all of Project Gutenberg is only 70GB, I have both and more on the same smartphone I’m writing this from (and it’s not even a “flagship” model). There is a lot, and I mean A LOT of knowledge to be extracted from there, which just so happens to be part of the training data for chatbot AIs, meaning they’re particularly suited for retrieving it.
You’re right, you don’t “need” neuromorphic hardware to get those facts right… but at the same time, you don’t “need” those facts to use neuromorphic hardware to retrieve them as quickly as you can ask for, then get them with all explanations, related keywords, topics, plus links to sources for it all. With a simple text-to-voice, it will even help you read it!
I know, it may sound like the world upside down. Another way of seeing it, is as the pivot point of a balance, the joining of different ways of approaching knowledge. Interesting times lie ahead 😉
You sound as optimistic as we were in the 90’s about the internet. We were naive about how it would play out.
Most people are not curious. That curiosity needs to be cultivated in school but it isn’t. I gave you the statistics which indicate that.
First Earthers are on the rise. 2% of my GenX and 4% of Millennials.