<div dir="ltr">I'm a bit hesitant to go much further than saying it might happen within five years, because honestly, I have very low confidence in my ability to make accurate predictions about when \u2014 or even if \u2014 AI will surpass human intelligence. But hey, we\u2019re all speculating in good spirits, so here\u2019s my two cents:<br><br>With very low confidence in my own forecast, I predict that within five years, we\u2019ll have an AI that\u2019s smarter than the smartest human alive today \u2014 though not radically smarter. Think of it like comparing a top university professor to a hardworking high school student who has a personal tutor and still struggles to pass. It won\u2019t be like comparing a human to an amoeba \u2014 more like a few rungs up the same ladder, not a leap into another dimension. And also not in all aspects of human intelligence - true creativity will still elude them.<br><br>Here\u2019s what motivates my prediction:<br><br>1. The current AI architecture is still very basic.<br>Modern AI is mostly built on simple artificial neurons stacked in sequential layers \u2014 a kind of top-down, hierarchical design. The human brain, by contrast, is a bottom-up system with a staggering degree of interconnectedness. In our brains, any neuron could, in theory, connect to any other neuron. It\u2019s a complex, messy web \u2014 and that \u201cmessiness\u201d seems to be a feature, not a bug.<br><br>I won\u2019t attempt the math, but the possible combinations in a fully interconnected system are orders of magnitude beyond what our current layer-based architectures can achieve. So to get an AI that\u2019s to humans what humans are to apes, we\u2019ll need a radically different neural structure \u2014 not just a bigger one.<br><br>2. Still, with clever hacks, we\u2019ll get surprisingly far.<br>Even with today\u2019s limited architecture, I think we\u2019ll soon see AI systems capable of holding down very high-level roles \u2014 say, serving as second-in-command to a human CEO, taking care of day-to-day operations while the CEO focuses on vision and strategy (with a human board still making the big calls). You might also have a robotic butler that understands and fulfills your wishes better than any human could.<br><br>What I don\u2019t see coming soon is an AI you can form a deep, personal relationship with \u2014 not in any real, human sense. Maybe we\u2019ll get one that can run a country better than a certain T-guy... but that\u2019s such a low bar, it\u2019s not exactly a convincing benchmark.<br></div><br><div class="gmail_quote gmail_quote_container"><div dir="ltr" class="gmail_attr">On Fri, 20 Jun 2025 at 23:30, Marcus Daniels <<a href="mailto:marcus@snoutfarm.com">marcus@snoutfarm.com</a>> wrote:<br></div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0px 0px 0px 0.8ex;border-left:1px solid rgb(204,204,204);padding-left:1ex"><div class="msg5248031439462771883"><div lang="EN-US" style="overflow-wrap: break-word;"><div class="m_5248031439462771883WordSection1"><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:11pt">Perfect. I think I might like </span><span style="font-size:11pt">Ross Douthat even less. </span><span style="font-size:11pt;font-family:"Apple Color Emoji"">\U0001f60a</span><span style="font-size:11pt"><u></u><u></u></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:11pt"><u></u> <u></u></span></p><div style="border-right:none;border-bottom:none;border-left:none;border-top:1pt solid rgb(181,196,223);padding:3pt 0in 0in"><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom:12pt"><b><span style="font-size:12pt;color:black">From: </span></b><span style="font-size:12pt;color:black">Friam <<a href="mailto:friam-bounces@redfish.com" target="_blank">friam-bounces@redfish.com</a>> on behalf of Santafe <<a href="mailto:desmith@santafe.edu" target="_blank">desmith@santafe.edu</a>><br><b>Date: </b>Friday, June 20, 2025 at 2:23\u202fPM<br><b>To: </b>The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <<a href="mailto:friam@redfish.com" target="_blank">friam@redfish.com</a>><br><b>Subject: </b>Re: [FRIAM] AI<u></u><u></u></span></p></div><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:11pt">This is an interesting direction.<u></u><u></u></span></p><div><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:11pt"><br><br><u></u><u></u></span></p><blockquote style="margin-top:5pt;margin-bottom:5pt"><div><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:11pt">On Jun 21, 2025, at 5:46, Jochen Fromm <<a href="mailto:jofr@cas-group.net" target="_blank">jofr@cas-group.net</a>> wrote:<u></u><u></u></span></p></div><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:11pt"><u></u> <u></u></span></p><div><div><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:11pt">I believe it will be possible.<u></u><u></u></span></p><div><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:11pt"><u></u> <u></u></span></p></div><div><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:11pt">Will it be a good idea? I don't know. In science fiction movies AIs often start to kill their creators. "Ex machina" for example is the story of such an AI developed by the CEO of a large corporation <u></u><u></u></span></p></div><div><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:11pt"><a href="https://youtu.be/sNExF5WYMaA" target="_blank">https://youtu.be/sNExF5WYMaA</a><u></u><u></u></span></p></div><div><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:11pt"><u></u> <u></u></span></p></div><div><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:11pt">Then there is the possibility of massive unemployment because AI takes away the good, creative jobs. Claude's capabilities in programming are impressive. Stackoverflow is already in a crisis because developers ask ChatGPT, Gemini or Claude instead. More and more employees will lose their jobs. It doesn't look good.<u></u><u></u></span></p></div><div><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:11pt"><a href="https://www.cnn.com/2025/06/17/business/amazon-ai-human-employees-jobs" target="_blank">https://www.cnn.com/2025/06/17/business/amazon-ai-human-employees-jobs</a><u></u><u></u></span></p></div></div></div></blockquote><div><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:11pt"><u></u> <u></u></span></p></div><div><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:11pt">Following the article Jochen forwarded, there is another in the same channel:<u></u><u></u></span></p></div><div><div><div><table border="0" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0" width="300" style="width:225pt;background:rgb(36,36,36);border-collapse:collapse"><tbody><tr><td style="padding:0in"><p class="MsoNormal" align="center" style="text-align:center"><span style="font-size:11pt;color:white"><img width="300" height="168" style="width: 3.125in; height: 1.75in;" id="m_5248031439462771883_x0000_i1025" src="cid:ii_197907852a469ffe5eb1"></span><span style="font-size:11pt"><u></u><u></u></span></p></td></tr><tr><td style="padding:0in"><table border="0" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0" width="300" style="width:225pt;background:rgb(36,36,36)"><tbody><tr><td style="padding:6pt 0in"><div style="margin-left:12pt;margin-right:12pt;max-width:100%;overflow:hidden"><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:9pt;color:white"><a href="https://edition.cnn.com/2025/06/18/business/ai-warnings-ceos?iid=cnn_buildContentRecirc_end_recirc" target="_blank"><span style="color:white;text-decoration:none">AI warnings are the hip new way for CEOs to keep their workers afraid of losing their jobs | CNN Business</span></a></span><span style="font-size:9pt"><u></u><u></u></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:8.5pt;color:white"><a href="https://edition.cnn.com/2025/06/18/business/ai-warnings-ceos?iid=cnn_buildContentRecirc_end_recirc" target="_blank"><span style="color:white;text-decoration:none">edition.cnn.com</span></a></span><span style="font-size:8.5pt"><u></u><u></u></span></p></div></td></tr></tbody></table></td></tr></tbody></table></div></div><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:11pt">It says what it says. I won\u2019t tie myself to or away from it.<u></u><u></u></span></p></div><div><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:11pt"><u></u> <u></u></span></p></div><div><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:11pt">I have been thinking for some weeks about the \u201cpro-natalist\u201d crowd, since they came up a few months ago. <u></u><u></u></span></p></div><div><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:11pt"><u></u> <u></u></span></p></div></div><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:11pt">As in all this, people can come up with a narrative for pretty-much any position, and we are left (if we want to say something meaningful about causation) to figure out which, if any, of these narratives has anything to do with why something becomes \u201ca movement\u201d, to which many of the narrative-spinners are just fabric and hangers-on. So there can be disingenuous (self-disingenuous?) saps and shills like Ross Doubthat of NYT who have all sorts of old-fashion-values arguments about natalism.<u></u><u></u></span></p><div><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:11pt"><u></u> <u></u></span></p></div><div><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:11pt">But to me the structure is: they are pushing somebody to have lots of babies at exactly the time they are engineering a world to eliminate anything like a human life for the babies already had. I don\u2019t think the timing-congruence of those two things is coincidence and unconnected to causation. <u></u><u></u></span></p></div><div><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:11pt"><u></u> <u></u></span></p></div><div><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:11pt">It\u2019s clear that falling birthrates seem like a godsend if one thinks population must decrease, but doesn\u2019t want that to happen by wars and disease epidemics, with lots of acute suffering. So for whom is it really not a godsend? Well, for people who can\u2019t live without \u201cbeing supported\u201d. There are real suffering-issues for aging populations who currently depend on getting crumbs from the big economies for their subsistence. But we probably produce enough, and have enough legacy-stuff, that if we really wanted their lives to have manageable suffering, we could achieve that through redistribution for however long it will take the various generations to die off. For whom, then, is redistribution off the table and they need the \u201ceconomy\u201d (whatever that is turning into) to be big? The ones who take almost-all of it, for whom there is no redistribution left to capture.<u></u><u></u></span></p></div><div><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:11pt"><u></u> <u></u></span></p></div><div><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:11pt">So the pro-natalist movement, in the current context of the feudalization of everything, seems to me like it drives paleo-feudalism into something that is no longer distinct from arguments for slavery, and maybe even stronger than that, to arguments for something more like livestock. <u></u><u></u></span></p></div><div><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:11pt"><u></u> <u></u></span></p></div><div><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:11pt">Dunno. Probably I just repeat statements of the obvious, or things that are already in the air all around us.<u></u><u></u></span></p></div><div><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:11pt"><u></u> <u></u></span></p></div><div><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:11pt">Eric<u></u><u></u></span></p></div><div><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:11pt"><u></u> <u></u></span></p></div><div><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:11pt"><u></u> <u></u></span></p></div><div><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:11pt"><u></u> <u></u></span></p></div><div><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:11pt"><u></u> <u></u></span></p></div><div><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:11pt"><u></u> <u></u></span></p></div></div></div>.- .-.. .-.. / ..-. --- --- - . .-. ... / .- .-. . / .-- .-. --- -. --. / ... --- -- . / .- .-. . / ..- ... . ..-. ..- .-..<br>
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