I agree that fears are overblown. But we have definitely seen some attacks, especially in the crypto space. Three major ones just in the past month: Coldcard wallet, Liquid, and Trezor email compromised.
They're almost certainly a result of more competent models finding exploits.
I don't see how it's different from what we have now? Expensive cancer treatments already exist and are rationed by the companies who create them, then over time become more widely available.
If AI companies create better treatments they'll offer them to people who pay for them. So wealthier people will have better cancer treatments. If they can make them inexpensively, then a broader audience also gets treatment.
Eventually they lose IP rights and they become generics and the world gets better cancer treatments.
In all scenarios having them find better treatments benefits humans with cancer more than if they didn't.
I don't like trusting any organization, corporate or governmental, with control over people's lives, but it's obvious that we're not going to get cutting edge medical treatments without these organizations.
Thanks for sharing this sentiment and including data. So few people seem aware of the wonderful progress humanity keeps making. Makes me worry that the progress will stall or even reverse because people don't even know it's happening.
I think a lot of it is because the majority of improvements are not seen by those who already comparatively have so much. AIDs used to be a death sentence, and now it's a manageable disease, and there is a lot of work going on to vaccinate against it. These are massive things that I think a lot of people ignore. It's always easier to see when things are on fire rather than to celebrate the victories along the way.
That's one of the only real downsides of apparent intelligence that I've seen: people in positions which exist to be supportive tend to assume you don't actually need their help.
Which, comparatively, might be true. But just because someone else needs more help doesn't mean it wouldn't be welcome.
Parents, teachers, advisors, supervisors, they just let you figure it out because they know you can, and they need to focus on those who can't. I had a career coach once tell me I didn't need to worry about finding a job, smart people always find work.
If you've never needed to ask for help before, this can really cause problems when you finally do.
Sure, McDonald's probably doesn't want a hyper-intelligent fry cook. But in almost any intellectual line of work, there is a high-impact, high-ceiling place for truly intelligent people - as long as they also have sufficient work ethic and social skills to back it up. (social skills optional if the other two are high enough). And they will never struggle to find a job.
I think there's a gap between "hyper-intelligent" people like you describe here and people who are just intelligent enough that nobody thought they needed help.
I have a Pebble Time 2, which is an open source watch. I built a voice operated AI assistant for it.
It's hosted on a VPS, connected over Tailscale, and has a realtime TTS server (Piper).
The Pebble has built in transcription, so my app takes the transcript, hits the server endpoint with three possible paths:
1. Deterministic response
The server looks for certain triggers from the transcript like "Add task," "Complete task," "Set a timer," etc that will run a simple function on server and write / retrieve to a database, no LLM call needed. It then responds with the TTS output and the watch speaks. This path is nearly instant.
2. Fast response
If no trigger is found, then it hits a gpt5.6 Luna endpoint, which decides if it can answer the query itself, or if it needs to defer to the big brother model. If it can handle a query itself, it usually responds to simple questions in less than 8 seconds. It's also good about properly deferring, very close to 100% after a few weeks.
3. Deferred response
The VPS hosts a Hermes installation, and for more complicated tasks or for ongoing projects the Luna router sends it to the Hermes agent. This is typically quite slow, as you'd expect, but remarkably capable. I built the voice app to cache a few lines like "this will take some time" which will automatically trigger if the router indicates it's deferring, and then will respond with the full response from Hermes once it's finished (sometimes minutes later).
Pebble has a quiet mode, and my app will only display the text response if it's on, otherwise all responses are run through the TTS. Piper is so fast that this adds almost no time to the response.
In only a few weeks this has become the primary way I set up tasks, review and close them, set timers and reminders, log my weight, check in on the progress of projects I'm running on Hermes, and ask simple day to day AI questions.
Since Pebble is open source, AI tools are very good at building it, and it's trivially easy to set it up so that you can just ask the model to deploy it live. It's an awesome experience to tell it to change something, and two minutes later, that change is on your wrist.
I had no idea you could do something like this through the Pebble!
I pre-ordered mine last year but it looks like it's not going to come before September :(
As soon as it gets here I think this is the first project I'm going to attempt. It'll be helpful you've got any resources or source code for the Pebble STT and TTS parts. (I already have my own hermes that I want to hook it up to)
The Pebbble transcription is part of their SDK and very easy to use programmatically, also it's quite accurate (not perfect but good enough that I turned confirmation off).
The TTS is Piper installed on the same VPS as Hermes.
Happy to answer questions or share code. I might publish the device app eventually. I hope your Pebble arrives soon, it's a great device.
No. The world has absolutely gotten wealthier over the last few centuries.
Wealth is obviously not zero sum. Humanity is far wealthier today than before the industrial revolution, and the trend is still towards increasing wealth.
As Led Zeppelin once said, "you know sometimes words have two meanings". That definition of wealth is all well and good for books about how markets are magical fix-everything pixie dust. But it's not the definition of wealth that applies when used to describe a person. A wealthy person is not someone with a lot of things. That's a hoarder. A wealthy person is someone who can use their economic power to shape the world around them.
That definition of wealth is all well and good for books about how markets are magical fix-everything pixie dust
No, it actually means something. We have access to refrigeration, climate control, near-limitless computation, entertainment, transportation, knowledge, communication, and medicine. All of this stuff would BLOW THE MINDS of medieval kings. Even if you're living in a 1BR apartment, working at Walmart and struggling to pay rent, you enjoy many luxuries Charlemagne could scarcely dream of.
Go to the store, grab a pineapple off the shelf, take it home, and eat it. Then read about the great lengths [1] the wealthy people of the past went to in order to try to grow pineapples in Europe, and how obsessed the culture became with this fruit.
If you're in that one bedroom, struggling at Walmart, you probably don't have a dishwasher or a washing machine and dryer, and possibly not air conditioning or heating, or at least, your electricity bill is enough that you have to think twice before setting climate control to a comfortable level. Your social life probably isn't anywhere near what Charlemagne had. You have a smartphone and that has brought you news from afar. But that news is terrible! Local politics, things are fucked, climate change is out of control, geopolitics is a whole other shit show. Charlemagne didn't have to deal with Israel and Donald Trump. His world was very different. Sure, I have a fridge and a microwave and can use that to sate my hunger in mere minutes, a luxury inconceivable to Charlemagne, but all the trappings of modern society, with TikTok and Reels hasn't made us globally happier. Seeing the emotional damage from whichever online platform surfaces drone videos out of Ukraine today for me as a form of wealth is one perspective. We've lost the plot, or at least I have. We're solving the problems in front of our faces without asking if that's the right problem to be solved.
>A wealthy person is not someone with a lot of things.
No one made that claim.
By nearly any sane metric the world is wealthier. You can verify this on sites like Our World in Data.
We are healthier, have more leisure time, are less likely to die in natural disasters, etc.
It's willful ignorance to define wealth in a way that wouldn't show humanity as having gotten more wealthy. You're doing harm by overlooking massive gains we've made and understanding why we made them and instead redefining the common sense understanding of basic terms.
My father's generation had much more leisure time than my generation. When he was out of the office at 5pm work stopped. There were no laptops, slack pings, etc, etc. Vacations were longer, pensions were a thing. You could get a job supporting a family right out of high school. Things have absolutely gotten worse in the west no matter how much you want to twist the stats.
You are talking about access to resources and technologies, which is basically constantly rising, we couldn't stop that if we wanted to, so that's a given and more importantly orthogonal to the wealth that buys you goods and services.
The latter is absolutely zero sum, because of everybody has a billion, a billion isn't that much any more. E.g. human trafficking exists because some people are rich and others are poor, and the fact that even those poor people might have access to things an emperor 1000 years ago would have dreamed of doesn't change that, because the people who treat them like slaves have even more. It's all about the relative difference between people who are alive today, the absolute increase compared to people who lived N years ago is a red herring.
> ... human trafficking exists because some people are rich and others are poor ...
No, it doesn't. This is an absurd claim, and nobody intelligent should take it seriously. Human trafficking exists because some people choose to do evil things. There are plenty of relatively-rich people who are actively trying to stop the evil of human trafficking.
Furthermore, just being wealthy has not, historically, made you immune to being made a slave. For just one example, look at the story of Joseph in the Bible. He was his father's favorite son, the heir presumptive to fantastic wealth for his time (that "coat of many colors" his father gave him cost the equivalent of what a sports car would today), and yet his brothers who hated him sold him into slavery while his father wasn't around to protect him. Throughout history, cross-border slave raiding has been a thing, too: it didn't matter how much gold you had tucked under your bed if the Vikings (or whoever) caught you alone, or outnumbered and overpowered your hired guards: once they hauled you away and slapped chains on you, you no longer had access to your wealth, and your life depended on making your captors happy with your work.
To think that slavery, ancient or modern, is caused by relative wealth differentials reveals an abysmal ignorance of both history and human nature.
I'm deliberately giving an illustration that shows that relative power throughout most of history had to do with physical strength and weapons, rather than money.
And if you didn't mean that slavery is caused by relative wealth differentials, then saying "... the people who treat them like slaves have even more. It's all about the relative difference between people who are alive today ..." was a very poor way of making your point. So what was your point that I missed, then?
That in this context, it's about the wealth that leads to "having economic power over the people around you". That is zero sum, and the general rise in absolute living standards is as relevant to that as a comment about apples is in a discussion about Apple.
Ah. When that one commenter said "Wealth is having economic power over the people around you", I ignored him, because that's a ridiculous definition, not to be taken seriously. Any argument that arises out of that definition is inherently flawed, since one of its premises is false; it would be like saying "Since the moon is made of green cheese, therefore X". The definition of wealth that nearly everyone agrees with is, well, I'll just cite the opening line of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wealth because it's a pretty good summary: "Wealth is the abundance of valuable financial assets or physical possessions which can be converted into a form that can be used for transactions." Or, to put it in simpler terms, wealth is the stuff you have that you can use to satisfy your desires. Anyone trying to make it about economic power over people is trying to redefine the standard definition for his own purposes... and that's usually a big red flag warning you of a bad argument.
>You are talking about access to resources and technologies, which is basically constantly rising, we couldn't stop that if we wanted to
We could very obviously stop our progress in resources and technology. It has happened throughout history many times and we see plenty of modern examples.
You seem to be treating the accumulated products of civilization as though they are geological facts rather than fragile outputs of maintained institutions.
Maybe you should ask yourself why you believe that 1) access to resources and technology are "basically constantly rising" and 2) why the relative difference in wealth today is more important than the (magical?) existence of a system were everyone has continually gotten more access to resources and technology.
> Maybe you should ask yourself why you believe that 1) access to resources and technology are "basically constantly rising"
Because people have and share ideas, and I was using that as a shorthand. Even if they aren't, if you completely strike that part -- my point remains completely untouched.
> why the relative difference in wealth today is more important than the (magical?) existence of a system were everyone has continually gotten more access to resources and technology
Because in the context of "Wealth is having economic power over the people around you.", that is the definition of wealth that is used. To quote a randomly picked one, emphasis mine:
"Large possessions; a comparative abundance of things"
> You are aware that the default state of humanity hasn't been one of continually increasing access to resources and technology?
There was no default "state", at least by the time you're talking about humans, we probably already learned from each other by observation. Sure, politics and wars and religion and feudal dynasties and whatever make bumps in the line, but generally it goes up. Once things get out, they're out, roughly speaking (that's the keyword here), and even in the animal kingdom.
And as I said, even if that's completely false, doesn't matter for the wider point about wealth, and that it can only buy you power over others if they have less of it.
>There was no default "state", at least by the time you're talking about humans, we probably already learned from each other by observation. Sure, politics and wars and religion and feudal dynasties and whatever make bumps in the line, but generally it goes up.
No, that's not the shape of the line. You can view it here:
The hockey stick upturn in recent centuries needs explanation.
I'm pushing back so hard on this comparative definition of wealth (which I notice is the secondary definition you found behind large possessions) because I think it's silly to do that when we have an unbelievably dramatic increase in wealth in recent centuries which needs understanding first.
Hand-waving away human progress and forcing zero sum definitions of wealth feels unserious. You have terms for things like inequality, why not use those instead of distorting what wealth means?
> The hockey stick upturn in recent centuries needs explanation.
Why? It goes up. As I said.
> I think it's silly to do that when we have an unbelievably dramatic increase in wealth in recent centuries which needs understanding first.
That's not pushing back, that's wanting to talk about something else first. That's just not something I'm interested in.
> distorting what wealth means?
It simply means both things, from context it was obvious how it was used in this instance, you ignoring that and going on tells me explaining it yet another time won't help.
They're almost certainly a result of more competent models finding exploits.
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