6 ms·

Why Tech Inevitability is Self-Defeating

87 points by top256 1y ago

bonoboTP 1y ago
This is shallow. Game theory and coordination is the answer. Otherwise it's the same depth level as "if only the soldiers just stopped shooting at each other, the war would end".
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- top256 1y ago
  Thanks for engaging. I think you meant it's obvious rather than shallow? If so, yes I agree but a lot of my friends disagree so I wrote this as rigorously as possible to explain why this is obvious. That being said, regarding game theory and coordination: Wars DO end when people change the game's parameters. WWI's Christmas Truce happened despite every incentive against it. Catalonia chose not to pursue independence despite having voted for it. The Montreal Protocol solved ozone depletion despite classic tragedy of the commons dynamics. My point isn't that coordination is easy - it's that treating it as impossible becomes self-fulfilling. When tech leaders invoke inevitability via game theory, they're choosing to accept those constraints rather than working to change them.
  - lbrandy 1y ago
    > My point isn't that coordination is easy - it's that treating it as impossible becomes self-fulfilling. While I see what you are getting at, and I think its super important we come up with philosophical frameworks to push back on the central idea in question (ie, the moral hazard of "its gonna happen anyway so why not pour a little more into the river").... I think your writing/responses miss the central point. As I see it, the fundamental issue with this essay, and your responses, is you keep conflating impossible with probability zero. People are saying "this is inevitable" to mean this has probability 1 of occurring, with basic game theory reasoning (its a giant iterative prisoners dilemna), and your response "but it's possible". Yes, with measure zero. Telling us that such a path surely exists isn't useful. If you want to push back on "inevitability" you need to find a credible path with probability > 0 (which is not the same as impossible).
    - top256 1y ago
      Thanks for your thoughtful response. I think there's a misunderstanding (maybe my text wasn't clear. If so please point out where so I can fix it). We actually agree: even if the probability of successful coordination is only 10%, accepting inevitability makes it 0%. That difference matters enormously given the stakes. My argument isn't "coordination is definitely possible" but rather "believing it's impossible guarantees failure." When tech leaders say "AGI is inevitable," they're not describing reality; they're shaping it by discouraging attempts to coordinate. Human cloning hasn't happened because we maintain active resistance despite technical feasibility. You're asking for credible paths with P > 0. I'm saying: knowing P with certainty is impossible, so accepting P = 1 narratives makes alternative paths invisible. The path emerges through trial and error, not before it.
      - naasking 1y ago
        > When tech leaders say "AGI is inevitable," they're not describing reality; they're shaping it by discouraging attempts to coordinate. No, they're describing reality. As I posted in another comment, progress in technology drops capital requirements for innovation. Even if there's global coordination to stop AGI development right now, progress in tech means that in 30 years someone in their basement could do what OpenAI is doing right now but with commodity hardware. Preventing this would require an oppressive regime controlling basic information technology and knowledge to an extent that isn't palatable to anyone.
        top256 1y ago
        "They're describing reality" - No, they're making predictions about the future. If AGI requires 30 years of compute improvements as you say, then it's not reality, it's a forecast contingent on those 30 years of development continuing unimpeded. As for "oppressive regime", we already do this for nuclear and biotech, and most people find it quite palatable! Nuclear materials are tightly controlled globally. Cloning humans is illegal almost everywhere. We've had the knowledge for both for decades, yet basement nukes and basement human clones aren't happening. I'm not saying we should make it illegal, I'm just saying there are more gray areas than what's generally accounted for.
top256 1y ago
I wrote an essay critiquing Silicon Valley’s obsession with calling technologies “inevitable.” I argue that inevitability isn’t a fact but a rhetorical move that erases agency and responsibility. What if we treated predictions not as destiny, but as challenges?
- palmotea 1y ago
  > I wrote an essay critiquing Silicon Valley’s obsession with calling technologies “inevitable.” I argue that inevitability isn’t a fact but a rhetorical move that erases agency and responsibility. What if we treated predictions not as destiny, but as challenges? This essay? You are right. And I'd bet Silicon Valley is aping this bit of neoliberal rhetoric: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/There_is_no_alternative https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/There_is_no_alternative. > TINA (as characterized by explicit use of "there is no alternative" and declarations of necessity, inevitability, and irrefutability of certain policies) can be considered a political strategy in both democratic and autocratic regimes. Its rhetoric allows politicians to reduce the scope of available policy choices, limiting the expectations of their electorate and avoiding the blame for bad, but "unescapable" policies. > TINA allows decisions to appear not as a political choice, but as a matter of adherence to universal truth and common sense. Due to the switch from public deliberations to following the expert opinions, debates are shortened, and therefore input of an individual voter is diminished, so TINA is politically paternalistic. Tech salesmen want you to think you have no choice but buy what they are selling and that you cannot resist a world where they sell more.
- tolciho 1y ago
  Manifestations of the inevitable are older than what sillyvalley is cooking with (or coked up on), even older than the Manifest Destiny. Some pin it to the Renaissance, as opposed to the "dark ages" prior. Tagging the prior age dark (dark... that must be bad, right? We don't want to be on the bad team, right?) of course is a rhetorical move.
RaAsC 1y ago
good read!
- top256 1y ago
  thanks!
Joker_vD 1y ago
> You’ll say, “They got lucky, it had to happen, if not them someone else. Well. If you look at the previous examples of sudden technological breakthroughs, it's kind of amazing how many things were suddenly invented almost simultaneously yet independently. But then, of course, some things just straight up failed to be invented e.g. Chinese-style wheelbarrow in the West.
- philipkglass 1y ago
  But then, of course, some things just straight up failed to be invented e.g. Chinese-style wheelbarrow in the West. Thanks for this remark. This was really interesting: "How to Downsize a Transport Network: The Chinese Wheelbarrow" https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/2011/12/how-to-downsize-a-transport-network-the-chinese-wheelbarrow/ https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/2011/12/how-to-downsize-a-...
  - korse 1y ago
    Excellent link! Thank you.
- marcosdumay 1y ago
  Yes. The probability of people inventing something seems to vary widely from "everybody can sustain that problem for centuries until somebody has a good idea" to "the moment people know the requirements, everybody will invent this". And it's very unlikely that we can know where any invention falls on that distribution before it's made. We may not even be certain about some after they are made. Anybody talking about tech inevitability or some universal version of the Great Men theory (in support or rejection) is wrong.
avelis 1y ago
This reminds me of a similar article that might have been posted on here about tech now focusing on hype as the product. https://rys.io/en/180.html#hype-is-the-product https://rys.io/en/180.html#hype-is-the-product > In fact, increasingly, hype is the only thing that counts, as larger and larger chunk of investment money is chasing it – to the detriment of everything else that happens not to bolt the hyped tech onto its unrelated but otherwise solid product or service. > The bubble grows. The line goes up. > Because the hype is the product.
- palmotea 1y ago
  > This reminds me of a similar article that might have been posted on here about tech now focusing on hype as the product. It kind of reminds me of the money-manking strategy where someone buys a business with a good reputation, debases its products, then profits from the (temporary) price premium it can still charge due to is prior reputation. These people are well on the way to ruining tech's reputation, but they don't care because they hope to get rich(er) in the process.
Animats 1y ago
Technology is inevitable if a lot of people can independently do it without huge resources, and the result is useful. - Personal computing - inevitable. Once ICs became cheap, it started happening, with no one effort dominating. - Moon landing - not inevitable. Huge resource commitment required, and not repeated since. - Internal combustion engine - inevitable. Once fuels and steel were available, it was possible to contain the explosion of an IC engine, and many people started making them. - Nuclear weapons - not inevitable. Uranium separation is so hard that somebody had to spend billions to get it to work at all. It wasn't clear that fission could be made to work. - Radio - inevitable. Once something with gain and something that rectifies were invented, radio was something many people could work upon. - Steel - interesting case. Steel is thousands of years old, but mass production of steel only dates to 1880. It took considerable metallurgical research to get it right, with about 10,000 tries before the Bessemer converter worked reliably. No one had done that before, and one person did it. - "AI", via the machine learning route - inevitable. The concepts date from the 1960s, but it took half a century of IC development to make them feasible. Looking at the issue in this way moves it from rhetoric to reality. Note that none of the inevitable technologies have a "moat".
- ttoinou 1y ago
  - Nuclear weapons - not inevitable. Uranium separation is so hard that somebody had to spend billions to get it to work at all. It wasn't clear that fission could be made to work. The mainstream explanation is that the threat that someone else could be researching and investing is enough of push to try yourself Looking at the issue in this way moves it from rhetoric to reality. I would say moving from rhetoric to a simple 3 parameters model ("how many people can research this, how much resources it takes, how useful the promised result it")
- CGMthrowaway 1y ago
  >Note that none of the inevitable technologies have a "moat". Ironically, despite not having a moat, the inevitable technologies have been however far more lucrative. With a few more examples I can make the point stronger. Inevitable: printing press, vaccines, refrigeration, social media Not inevitable: reusable rockets, CRISPR, GPS, high speed rail
ath3nd 1y ago
There is also a great article about the same subject from Tom Renner: https://tomrenner.com/posts/llm-inevitabilism/ https://tomrenner.com/posts/llm-inevitabilism/ Sam, Elon, Zuck are conmen, husks of people, empty inside and not knowing what to do with themselves but hoard money. In their pointless quest to become the proverbial dragon on a mountain of gold, they are trying to control, bully and manipulate the world to their vision of how it should be. We know how this goes: - Facebook contributed to multiple atrocities and genocides, actively promoted warlords and dictators - Twitter after being acquired from Musk is just an echo chamber of fascism and white supremacy and misinformation - Sam...is just..a slimy dude. He made a coup in something that was supposed to be free and open, and made it ugly and about money and profits, riding on the work of idealists and forgetting all his pledges and manifestos just in the pursuit of money Those people rising to power and prominence is not inevitable. If only they had childhood validation, I think they might have turned out to be normal people and done less harm to the world. Sadly, they were probably neglected as children or dropped on their head repeatedly. I blame the parents.
- top256 1y ago
  Thanks for the link to Tom Renner's article. I've read it and agree with it. I wrote this essay to convince "unbelievers" that's why I tried to be as rigorous as I could
- unfitted2545 1y ago
  Musk has said a lot about getting badly bullied at school, those bullies were probably bullied at home as well :/
arscan 1y ago
I’m not an expert on American history, but this attitude feels a bit like a modern day adaptation of ‘manifest destiny’.
GMoromisato 1y ago
The premise of the article hinges on the fact that it's hard to make predictions, especially about the future: > ... it’s impossible for us to know if a prediction is inevitable or not. But I think that ignores that some predictions are more likely to happen than others. For example, here are two predictions: 1. ASI will be achieved in the next ten years. 2. LLMs will have a large impact on the economy in the next ten years. I'm sure it's debatable, but I think prediction #2 is very likely to be true--I would say it's almost inevitable. But I don't think #1 is inevitable.
- top256 1y ago
  You're absolutely right that predictions exist on a probability spectrum. I focused on the binary for rhetorical clarity, but you're correct that some predictions are more likely than others. That being said, it doesn't change my point about agency. Your prediction #2 (LLMs impacting the economy) seems "almost inevitable" precisely because thousands of people are actively working to make it true. If everyone stopped tomorrow - if OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, etc., all pivoted to other projects - would it still be inevitable? The appearance of inevitability comes from observing massive coordinated human effort toward a goal, then mistaking that effort for natural law. It's like watching a thousand people pushing a boulder uphill and concluding "that boulder inevitably goes up."
  - GMoromisato 1y ago
    I get that--and it's a good point. But large groups of people do tend to be predictable under certain situations. Is anyone surprised that people hoard staples (toilet paper, etc.) during a crisis? It reminds me of the time a Scientific American columnist ran a contest. The idea was to submit a number on a postcard. The person who submitted the highest number would win $1 million divided by the winning number. The publishers almost nixed the contest. They didn't actually have $1 million to give away and they were worried. But the columnist assured them that there was no chance the prize would be even one dollar. As you might expect, the winning number was so ridiculously large that no money had to be sent. As for LLMs affecting the economy, I think my only uncertainty is in how long it will take for them to be integrated. I think we all agree that even in their current state, they are valuable for certain tasks (e.g., language translation). I'm pretty sure they are economically viable for 90% of support calls. Are they going to displace software developers? Lawyers? Doctors? Even if they don't, the effects will still be large. If we agree that they are economically viable, then I don't see how they don't have an impact. If a technology saves businesses money, it is going to get deployed. The only wildcard would be regulatory blocks or legislative bans. But you know China is not going to give up on the technology, so any bans will be reversed or circumvented (we'll import products/services from China). Now, if you don't think LLMs in their current state are economically viable/valuable, then none of that will happen. But (a) that's a different argument, and (b) then people will inevitably choose NOT to deploy LLMs. I get the desire for agency. I certainly wish I had more control over the course of the future. But people's behavior (in large groups) is almost always downstream of external events. Fukushima has an accident and Germany chooses to give up nuclear power. Inflation in the US goes up and people vote for Donald fraking Trump. Maybe there will be some event--a Fukushima for AI--that causes a mass change. But absent that, I think LLMs are here to stay.
datadrivenangel 1y ago
"Supersonic flight once looked inevitable until people stopped it." Things only happen if we make them happen. Game theory can make it hard to keep everyone from taking some action, but we can change the rules of the game to punish defectors more.
- top256 1y ago
  yes that's exactly what I was trying to convey. Technology is a human byproduct so we are collectively in charge.
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
vin92997 1y ago
TL;DR: Think for yourself.
BinaryIgor 1y ago
Interesting, beautifully written; I especially like the ending: "Inevitability is rhetoric, not truth. Predictions aren’t laws of nature, they are acts of persuasion. And because no one can ever know how much is determined and how much is open, the only rational stance is to live as agents. Supersonic flight once looked inevitable until people stopped it. You, too, have already reshaped the world once; you can do it again. Don’t give away your power."
- top256 1y ago
  thanks a lot! I appreciate it
cadamsdotcom 1y ago
> “X is inevitable” → Stop trying to change it This is the logic flaw that got my attention. If you’re told something’s inevitable, ask who’s claiming that and why. Are they trying to beat you to the punch? Do they want you to give in and buy their thing?
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
snvzz 1y ago
Some tech really is inevitable. e.g. RISC-V is inevitable.
partomniscient 1y ago
Do you hear that Mr. Anderson?

87 points by top256 1y ago

This is shallow. Game theory and coordination is the answer. Otherwise it's the same depth level as "if only the soldiers just stopped shooting at each other, the war would end".

deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
top256 1y ago
Thanks for engaging. I think you meant it's obvious rather than shallow? If so, yes I agree but a lot of my friends disagree so I wrote this as rigorously as possible to explain why this is obvious. That being said, regarding game theory and coordination: Wars DO end when people change the game's parameters. WWI's Christmas Truce happened despite every incentive against it. Catalonia chose not to pursue independence despite having voted for it. The Montreal Protocol solved ozone depletion despite classic tragedy of the commons dynamics. My point isn't that coordination is easy - it's that treating it as impossible becomes self-fulfilling. When tech leaders invoke inevitability via game theory, they're choosing to accept those constraints rather than working to change them.
- lbrandy 1y ago
  > My point isn't that coordination is easy - it's that treating it as impossible becomes self-fulfilling. While I see what you are getting at, and I think its super important we come up with philosophical frameworks to push back on the central idea in question (ie, the moral hazard of "its gonna happen anyway so why not pour a little more into the river").... I think your writing/responses miss the central point. As I see it, the fundamental issue with this essay, and your responses, is you keep conflating impossible with probability zero. People are saying "this is inevitable" to mean this has probability 1 of occurring, with basic game theory reasoning (its a giant iterative prisoners dilemna), and your response "but it's possible". Yes, with measure zero. Telling us that such a path surely exists isn't useful. If you want to push back on "inevitability" you need to find a credible path with probability > 0 (which is not the same as impossible).
  - top256 1y ago
    Thanks for your thoughtful response. I think there's a misunderstanding (maybe my text wasn't clear. If so please point out where so I can fix it). We actually agree: even if the probability of successful coordination is only 10%, accepting inevitability makes it 0%. That difference matters enormously given the stakes. My argument isn't "coordination is definitely possible" but rather "believing it's impossible guarantees failure." When tech leaders say "AGI is inevitable," they're not describing reality; they're shaping it by discouraging attempts to coordinate. Human cloning hasn't happened because we maintain active resistance despite technical feasibility. You're asking for credible paths with P > 0. I'm saying: knowing P with certainty is impossible, so accepting P = 1 narratives makes alternative paths invisible. The path emerges through trial and error, not before it.
    - naasking 1y ago
      > When tech leaders say "AGI is inevitable," they're not describing reality; they're shaping it by discouraging attempts to coordinate. No, they're describing reality. As I posted in another comment, progress in technology drops capital requirements for innovation. Even if there's global coordination to stop AGI development right now, progress in tech means that in 30 years someone in their basement could do what OpenAI is doing right now but with commodity hardware. Preventing this would require an oppressive regime controlling basic information technology and knowledge to an extent that isn't palatable to anyone.
      - top256 1y ago
        "They're describing reality" - No, they're making predictions about the future. If AGI requires 30 years of compute improvements as you say, then it's not reality, it's a forecast contingent on those 30 years of development continuing unimpeded. As for "oppressive regime", we already do this for nuclear and biotech, and most people find it quite palatable! Nuclear materials are tightly controlled globally. Cloning humans is illegal almost everywhere. We've had the knowledge for both for decades, yet basement nukes and basement human clones aren't happening. I'm not saying we should make it illegal, I'm just saying there are more gray areas than what's generally accounted for.

top256 1y ago

I wrote an essay critiquing Silicon Valley’s obsession with calling technologies “inevitable.” I argue that inevitability isn’t a fact but a rhetorical move that erases agency and responsibility. What if we treated predictions not as destiny, but as challenges?

palmotea 1y ago
> I wrote an essay critiquing Silicon Valley’s obsession with calling technologies “inevitable.” I argue that inevitability isn’t a fact but a rhetorical move that erases agency and responsibility. What if we treated predictions not as destiny, but as challenges? This essay? You are right. And I'd bet Silicon Valley is aping this bit of neoliberal rhetoric: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/There_is_no_alternative https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/There_is_no_alternative. > TINA (as characterized by explicit use of "there is no alternative" and declarations of necessity, inevitability, and irrefutability of certain policies) can be considered a political strategy in both democratic and autocratic regimes. Its rhetoric allows politicians to reduce the scope of available policy choices, limiting the expectations of their electorate and avoiding the blame for bad, but "unescapable" policies. > TINA allows decisions to appear not as a political choice, but as a matter of adherence to universal truth and common sense. Due to the switch from public deliberations to following the expert opinions, debates are shortened, and therefore input of an individual voter is diminished, so TINA is politically paternalistic. Tech salesmen want you to think you have no choice but buy what they are selling and that you cannot resist a world where they sell more.
tolciho 1y ago
Manifestations of the inevitable are older than what sillyvalley is cooking with (or coked up on), even older than the Manifest Destiny. Some pin it to the Renaissance, as opposed to the "dark ages" prior. Tagging the prior age dark (dark... that must be bad, right? We don't want to be on the bad team, right?) of course is a rhetorical move.

RaAsC 1y ago

good read!

top256 1y ago
thanks!

Joker_vD 1y ago

> You’ll say, “They got lucky, it had to happen, if not them someone else. Well. If you look at the previous examples of sudden technological breakthroughs, it's kind of amazing how many things were suddenly invented almost simultaneously yet independently. But then, of course, some things just straight up failed to be invented e.g. Chinese-style wheelbarrow in the West.

philipkglass 1y ago
But then, of course, some things just straight up failed to be invented e.g. Chinese-style wheelbarrow in the West. Thanks for this remark. This was really interesting: "How to Downsize a Transport Network: The Chinese Wheelbarrow" https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/2011/12/how-to-downsize-a-transport-network-the-chinese-wheelbarrow/ https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/2011/12/how-to-downsize-a-...
- korse 1y ago
  Excellent link! Thank you.
marcosdumay 1y ago
Yes. The probability of people inventing something seems to vary widely from "everybody can sustain that problem for centuries until somebody has a good idea" to "the moment people know the requirements, everybody will invent this". And it's very unlikely that we can know where any invention falls on that distribution before it's made. We may not even be certain about some after they are made. Anybody talking about tech inevitability or some universal version of the Great Men theory (in support or rejection) is wrong.

avelis 1y ago

This reminds me of a similar article that might have been posted on here about tech now focusing on hype as the product. https://rys.io/en/180.html#hype-is-the-product https://rys.io/en/180.html#hype-is-the-product > In fact, increasingly, hype is the only thing that counts, as larger and larger chunk of investment money is chasing it – to the detriment of everything else that happens not to bolt the hyped tech onto its unrelated but otherwise solid product or service. > The bubble grows. The line goes up. > Because the hype is the product.

palmotea 1y ago
> This reminds me of a similar article that might have been posted on here about tech now focusing on hype as the product. It kind of reminds me of the money-manking strategy where someone buys a business with a good reputation, debases its products, then profits from the (temporary) price premium it can still charge due to is prior reputation. These people are well on the way to ruining tech's reputation, but they don't care because they hope to get rich(er) in the process.

Animats 1y ago

Technology is inevitable if a lot of people can independently do it without huge resources, and the result is useful. - Personal computing - inevitable. Once ICs became cheap, it started happening, with no one effort dominating. - Moon landing - not inevitable. Huge resource commitment required, and not repeated since. - Internal combustion engine - inevitable. Once fuels and steel were available, it was possible to contain the explosion of an IC engine, and many people started making them. - Nuclear weapons - not inevitable. Uranium separation is so hard that somebody had to spend billions to get it to work at all. It wasn't clear that fission could be made to work. - Radio - inevitable. Once something with gain and something that rectifies were invented, radio was something many people could work upon. - Steel - interesting case. Steel is thousands of years old, but mass production of steel only dates to 1880. It took considerable metallurgical research to get it right, with about 10,000 tries before the Bessemer converter worked reliably. No one had done that before, and one person did it. - "AI", via the machine learning route - inevitable. The concepts date from the 1960s, but it took half a century of IC development to make them feasible. Looking at the issue in this way moves it from rhetoric to reality. Note that none of the inevitable technologies have a "moat".

ttoinou 1y ago
- Nuclear weapons - not inevitable. Uranium separation is so hard that somebody had to spend billions to get it to work at all. It wasn't clear that fission could be made to work. The mainstream explanation is that the threat that someone else could be researching and investing is enough of push to try yourself Looking at the issue in this way moves it from rhetoric to reality. I would say moving from rhetoric to a simple 3 parameters model ("how many people can research this, how much resources it takes, how useful the promised result it")
CGMthrowaway 1y ago
>Note that none of the inevitable technologies have a "moat". Ironically, despite not having a moat, the inevitable technologies have been however far more lucrative. With a few more examples I can make the point stronger. Inevitable: printing press, vaccines, refrigeration, social media Not inevitable: reusable rockets, CRISPR, GPS, high speed rail

ath3nd 1y ago

There is also a great article about the same subject from Tom Renner: https://tomrenner.com/posts/llm-inevitabilism/ https://tomrenner.com/posts/llm-inevitabilism/ Sam, Elon, Zuck are conmen, husks of people, empty inside and not knowing what to do with themselves but hoard money. In their pointless quest to become the proverbial dragon on a mountain of gold, they are trying to control, bully and manipulate the world to their vision of how it should be. We know how this goes: - Facebook contributed to multiple atrocities and genocides, actively promoted warlords and dictators - Twitter after being acquired from Musk is just an echo chamber of fascism and white supremacy and misinformation - Sam...is just..a slimy dude. He made a coup in something that was supposed to be free and open, and made it ugly and about money and profits, riding on the work of idealists and forgetting all his pledges and manifestos just in the pursuit of money Those people rising to power and prominence is not inevitable. If only they had childhood validation, I think they might have turned out to be normal people and done less harm to the world. Sadly, they were probably neglected as children or dropped on their head repeatedly. I blame the parents.

top256 1y ago
Thanks for the link to Tom Renner's article. I've read it and agree with it. I wrote this essay to convince "unbelievers" that's why I tried to be as rigorous as I could
unfitted2545 1y ago
Musk has said a lot about getting badly bullied at school, those bullies were probably bullied at home as well :/

arscan 1y ago

I’m not an expert on American history, but this attitude feels a bit like a modern day adaptation of ‘manifest destiny’.

GMoromisato 1y ago

The premise of the article hinges on the fact that it's hard to make predictions, especially about the future: > ... it’s impossible for us to know if a prediction is inevitable or not. But I think that ignores that some predictions are more likely to happen than others. For example, here are two predictions: 1. ASI will be achieved in the next ten years. 2. LLMs will have a large impact on the economy in the next ten years. I'm sure it's debatable, but I think prediction #2 is very likely to be true--I would say it's almost inevitable. But I don't think #1 is inevitable.

top256 1y ago
You're absolutely right that predictions exist on a probability spectrum. I focused on the binary for rhetorical clarity, but you're correct that some predictions are more likely than others. That being said, it doesn't change my point about agency. Your prediction #2 (LLMs impacting the economy) seems "almost inevitable" precisely because thousands of people are actively working to make it true. If everyone stopped tomorrow - if OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, etc., all pivoted to other projects - would it still be inevitable? The appearance of inevitability comes from observing massive coordinated human effort toward a goal, then mistaking that effort for natural law. It's like watching a thousand people pushing a boulder uphill and concluding "that boulder inevitably goes up."
- GMoromisato 1y ago
  I get that--and it's a good point. But large groups of people do tend to be predictable under certain situations. Is anyone surprised that people hoard staples (toilet paper, etc.) during a crisis? It reminds me of the time a Scientific American columnist ran a contest. The idea was to submit a number on a postcard. The person who submitted the highest number would win $1 million divided by the winning number. The publishers almost nixed the contest. They didn't actually have $1 million to give away and they were worried. But the columnist assured them that there was no chance the prize would be even one dollar. As you might expect, the winning number was so ridiculously large that no money had to be sent. As for LLMs affecting the economy, I think my only uncertainty is in how long it will take for them to be integrated. I think we all agree that even in their current state, they are valuable for certain tasks (e.g., language translation). I'm pretty sure they are economically viable for 90% of support calls. Are they going to displace software developers? Lawyers? Doctors? Even if they don't, the effects will still be large. If we agree that they are economically viable, then I don't see how they don't have an impact. If a technology saves businesses money, it is going to get deployed. The only wildcard would be regulatory blocks or legislative bans. But you know China is not going to give up on the technology, so any bans will be reversed or circumvented (we'll import products/services from China). Now, if you don't think LLMs in their current state are economically viable/valuable, then none of that will happen. But (a) that's a different argument, and (b) then people will inevitably choose NOT to deploy LLMs. I get the desire for agency. I certainly wish I had more control over the course of the future. But people's behavior (in large groups) is almost always downstream of external events. Fukushima has an accident and Germany chooses to give up nuclear power. Inflation in the US goes up and people vote for Donald fraking Trump. Maybe there will be some event--a Fukushima for AI--that causes a mass change. But absent that, I think LLMs are here to stay.

datadrivenangel 1y ago

"Supersonic flight once looked inevitable until people stopped it." Things only happen if we make them happen. Game theory can make it hard to keep everyone from taking some action, but we can change the rules of the game to punish defectors more.

top256 1y ago
yes that's exactly what I was trying to convey. Technology is a human byproduct so we are collectively in charge.

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]

vin92997 1y ago

TL;DR: Think for yourself.

BinaryIgor 1y ago

Interesting, beautifully written; I especially like the ending: "Inevitability is rhetoric, not truth. Predictions aren’t laws of nature, they are acts of persuasion. And because no one can ever know how much is determined and how much is open, the only rational stance is to live as agents. Supersonic flight once looked inevitable until people stopped it. You, too, have already reshaped the world once; you can do it again. Don’t give away your power."

top256 1y ago
thanks a lot! I appreciate it

cadamsdotcom 1y ago

> “X is inevitable” → Stop trying to change it This is the logic flaw that got my attention. If you’re told something’s inevitable, ask who’s claiming that and why. Are they trying to beat you to the punch? Do they want you to give in and buy their thing?

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]

snvzz 1y ago

Some tech really is inevitable. e.g. RISC-V is inevitable.

partomniscient 1y ago

Do you hear that Mr. Anderson?