See also Chris Lattner’s commentary, which raises some more ideas. This is an AI conversation I actually can sink my teeth into and enjoy. I haven’t felt that way since the Dennett/Hofstadter era of philosophizing in The Mind’s I, which I read in 1996
Conversation
In a way, just as there was an AI winter technologically between ~1990-2002, there was a philosophical dry spell. Moravec’s paradox had been identified in the 80s but we didn’t have the tech to attack it till the like 2009-10, and new phenomenology to think about till like 2015.
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I do think the Singularity crowd helped keep the conversation going during the extended winter, and it’s important to acknowledge their institution-building contributions esp via founding influence on OpenAI, DeepMind etc. But both the tech and the conversation are MUCH bigger.
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Reminds me of something similar in early computing history: for some California-obsessed people, the influence of the hippie counterculture on early computing in 1960-1985 via SRI, PARC, Stanford is the whole story, but objectively it’s like 1/5th of the story.
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In brief, if you want to look it up, there are like 5-6 strands to the story:
1. Semiconductors/Bell labs/Noyce...
2. IAS machine/von Neumann track
3. California track
4. DoD track
5. MIT track
6. Control and cybernetics
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This is by now we’ll know to historians of computing. Somebody with a deeper understanding of AI history should do a similar “thick” version of the AI story. Both dismissing the Singularity crowd as amateur entryists or the whole story is bad historiography.
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They mattered less than they believe, but more than critics are willing to give them credit for. Anyhow... back to the topic at hand. AI futures.
What does the AI future look like?
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I think:
1. General purpose post-GPU hardware
2. Application-specific hardware optimization
3. An end to going faster than Moore’s law ceiling
4. A software 2.0 stack that will evolve faster than people realize
5. Rapidly falling costs of AI compute
6. Smaller form factors
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Ugh broke threading further up but this sub thread of 3 tweets fits better here anyway
Quote Tweet
This whole track of AI btw, came from a whole different place... people trying to use GPUs for parallel computing, Moore’s law raising the ceiling, etc. It did not come from pursuit of abstract science-fiction concerns. So those frames are likely to misguide.
Show this thread
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Tech trends: Cambrian explosion of long-tail beyond language models or image sets for driverless cars. As costs plummet people will do 5000 Software 2.0 things instead of 5.
Philosophy: divergent conversation that looks like biology/ecology/complex systems, not eschatology.
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Will there be a new winter? Yes and no. The divergent nature of the future that has been opened up means “winter” vs “spring” will be application-specific local weather pattern. Each divergent path of intelligence will sink or swim based on how good our mental models are.
