I wish I could find it, but one report on housing from UH Manoa included research on who vacated a certain number of homes sold who moved in etc. in the report summary they traced a single new home to five sales as each vacancy got filled and eventually a renter moved into ownership of an apartment.
That's a lot of people improving their living conditions from a single new home being built. Not saying all of them have such a long chain, but I would love to see more data on this side of the story.
A question in the form of an analogy (this is almost certainly not phrased in its strongest form, hopefully it is clear enough and assistance with phrasing and responses to the question are both appreciated):
Lay a sledgehammer on a perfectly stable (assume it will not rot/rust/etc. for the purpose of this thought experiment) table. At rest on the table, some amount of force downward is being applied by the sledge. Call this unit of energy applied daily X.
Alternatively, there exists some velocity and mass combination at which a single swing of the sledgehammer will break the table. Call the minimum unit of energy required to accomplish this feat Y.
There exists many multiples of X that exceed the value of Y. But simultaneously there exists no multiple of X that equals the results of Y. That is, you can leave the sledge on the table for a month, a year, a century, a millennium, even a Graham's number of years and the table doesn't break. But one application of >\= Y energy in a single unit, does break the table. A million times X is clearly more energy than Y, but it doesn't break the table, and Y does.
Therefore there exists some threshold below which X is an irrelevant number with respect to Y. It is a relevant number in many other ways, but not in respect to achieving the outcome of a broken table, which requires values equal to or greater than Y.
Does such a moral threshold exist?
Because I think some people assuming yes and others assuming no, but both being unable to conceive of the alternative position is happening here. And this appears to me to be true regardless of which school of ethics they otherwise subscribe to.
Eschew obfuscation. -- Mark Twain
It really is weird that so many people find ways to not be impressed.
I think that I can give some clarity here: it is a use case / user story issue combined with frog in the increasingly hot water.
I have seen AI do amazing things for other people. In my own use case, it is below not useful and into actively harmful: using AI makes my output worse in every situation. If I did not have access to other people's use cases, I too would be unimpressed. And when people in my fields (mostly government) try to use AI and it fails, they are updating their priors about every attempted tech rollout in the past 20 years making things worse not better. So they see videos and articles about AI working and they are reinforcing "media is over hyping something that will get used in other fields but not ours again, just like the 'paperless' revolution that gave us twice as much work and yet we still use typewriters and faxes".
By contrast, you are exposed to the areas where it is working. You understand the context of what those changes mean and how important they are, and how they are accelerating.
The exact same news is updating you in the direction of "this is amazing and fast" and them on "this is the same b.s. we've seen a dozen times and never amounts to anything real".
At some point, it will hit their field in a way they feel is a big improvement (not a miniscule increase in temperature style improvement), and they will be completely shocked and not understand how they got where they are.
I have tried to explain to the ones I work with and I can watch them mentally moving me away from "trusted expert on technology" over to "cultlike evangelist of vaporware" as I speak.
I had started to type a reply then cancel it, but apparently it didn't actually cancel and the quote showed up.
There are so many old earworms that I was expressing surprise at the quote. But I decided to cancel because the number of possibilities combined with anecdotal evidence of other people's being struck by them doesn't generalize to a wide probability of them.
Also, the one that gets me the most is from the 1934 Babes in Toyland (Laurel and Hardy version), even though the operetta is from 1903, so that probably doesn't apply. I right now, again, have Stan Laurel singing "slowly, slowly he sank into the sea. With no life preserver he sank in to the sea." And I will be listening to him for a while. 😔
Edit: for those wondering about some example pre-1920s earworms, many Christmas Carols are from the 1800s (Jingle Bells, Joy to the World, Away in a Manger, Hark the Herald Angels Sing). I know several people who enjoyed the Troll Hunters cartoon and got In the Halls of the Mountain King from Peer Gynt stuck in their heads a few years back. And I sometimes snap the William Tell Overture when I am frustrated thinking through things, only to have people listening report they are humming it the rest of the day. Parents are subjected to baa baa black sheep, row your boat, coming round the mountain, the flying trapeze, the alphabet song, chopsticks, and old MacDonald
It was more than that, but that was involved. They also ran social media searches, reverse image searches etc. Their demo showed full names, addresses, schools they attended, and list of relatives in real time.
A legealease to English translator for end user licensing agreements. I have uploaded a few to various ais and asked for summaries of the salient legal points, but they can't extract "this gives ownership of your IP to the publisher if you agree" as an example. But this seems like a really easy task for some of them. Also, this seems like you could sell it. I am really surprised no one has this yet.
A "dating app that hasn't been enshittified" publishing ap. Not the dating app, an app publishing app. Just using dating apps as the topic to start. Basically, all dating apps are owned by two companies, and any new ones get bought up. These two firms modify all the apps to work in a way that prevents dating success, and upsells premium products that actually reduce effectiveness (for example, paying for super messages and premium status causes women to respond less often to messages according to their own statistics). Therefore, an app that takes the original version of E-harmony or match or whatever, makes small changes, creates new branding and publishes it. Then periodically does it again, and again. As fast as the monopolies buy them this app makes and releases new ones. So there are always, un-enshittified dating apps available. Honestly, I see this as much as an experiment to see how the match group would respond to such a threat to its business model. But also an app publishing app is a step towards a fully automated economy, and i think this particular step is achievable. Which is why i am surprised we don't have an app publishing app. That i know of.
More training tools. Any really. For every "ai teaches you how to do this yourself", I see at least two orders of magnitude more "AI does this for you" apps. We need more teach to fish, not give fish apps. And in line with the prior, a "teach people to interact IRL" app would be a great start. There are a ton of ai girlfriend apps, Xiaoice is junk and it has over 600 million users. Make one that generates dozens of ai personas has you interact with them and does NOT have them always be positive, instead they behave realistically based on your behavior. Write targeted lessons to guide you through your own worst social faux pas, and give you simulated practice in many different situations. Again, seems like the sort of thing there should be a lot more of.
"Turn navigation instructions to sonification" app. Instead of the gps voice saying "turn right" or "continue for 1 mile" have an app that takes the data for that and generates times. Turn your head the wrong way the tone indicates this. This is very critical for blind navigation, and for people who don't speak the language the gps is in, etc,. It also can be far less confusing in many situations. There's a few apps that do this for specific circumstances, but one that simply takes gps input and outputs directional tones and adapts real time to your movement should be within existing capabilities. I saw a proof of concept for this using Meta AI glasses, but it doesn't seem to exist for real, might have only been vaporware. Very surprising.
App that lets you upload pictures, news articles, videos, and tell stories about a dead relative then makes an avatar of them. Yes you can do this manually right now, (Peter Diamandis made a pretty amazing avatar of himself) but that takes a lot of skill. An app that automates it should be within current capabilities. I'm honestly surprised that a company like ancestry.com doesn't already have this as a paid service.
Google translate has a camera mode that applies translation in real time to anything you look at. What about an AI math app that looks at store prices and converts everything to a standard price per unit display in real time? Again, why doesn't this already exist? Should be simple, seems high demand.
When the Meta AI glasses first came out, students quickly pieces together an app that real-time doxxed everyone you looked at. That's obviously not legal, and they never released it, for that reason. However, a corporate app that identifies everyone in the company address book and links to Salesforce (or equivalent) to identify all your customers. Or one that goes into your contacts and reminds you of the name of the person who just walked up to you at a party. This has to be do able, because two students did that stronger version in one or two days.
I have a lot more, but they're much more niche.
One of the differences between bardic inspiration, and Avril Lavigne's "Girlfriend" is the level of control it exerts on your attention (exogenous control). In other words, I can't remember the last time I had a pre-1920s ear worm.
Whenever I see discussions about the actual mechanisms by which ASI might actually act against humanity, it seems like a proxy argument for/against the actual position "ASI will/won't be that much smarter than humans."
Can it be complex without being messy?