Comment on What If There’s No AGI?
Perspectivist@feddit.uk 2 days agoThe chart is just for illustration purposes to make a point. I don’t see why you need to be such a dick about it. Feel free to reference any other chat that you like better which displays the progress of technological advancements thorough human history - they all look the same; for most of history nothing happened and then everything happened. If you don’t think that this progress has been increasing at explosive speed over the past few hundreds of years then I don’t know what to tell you. People 10k years ago had basically the same technology as people 30k years ago. Now compare that with what has happened even during your lifetime.
Womble@piefed.world 2 days ago
Its not a chart, to be that it would have to show some sort of relation between things. What it is is a list of things that were invented but on an exponential curve to try and back up loony singularity naratives.
Trying to claim there was vastly less innovation in the entire 19th century than there was in the past decade is just nonsense.
Perspectivist@feddit.uk 2 days ago
And where have I made such claim?
Womble@piefed.world 2 days ago
The "chart" that you posted, it showed barely any increase in the 1800s and massive increases in the last decades.
Perspectivist@feddit.uk 2 days ago
The chart is just for illustration to highlight my point. As I already said - pick a different chart if you prefer, it doesn’t change the argument I’m making.
It took us hundreds of thousands of years to go from stone tools to controlling fire. Ten thousand years to go from rope to fish hook. And then just 60 years to go from flight to space flight.
I’ll happily grant you rapid technological progress even over the past thousand years. My point still stands - that’s yesterday on the timeline I’m talking about.
If you lived 50,000 years ago, you’d see no technological advancement over your entire lifetime. Now, you can’t even predict what technology will look like ten years from now. Never before in human history have we taken such leaps as we have in the past thousand years. Put that on a graph and you’d see a steady line barely sloping upward from the first humans until about a thousand years ago - then a massive spike shooting almost vertically, with no signs of slowing down. And we’re standing right on top of that spike.
Throughout all of human history, the period we’re living in right now is highly unusual - which is why I claim that on this timeline, AGI might as well be here tomorrow.