kubb 10 hours ago

Wowzers, it’s happening imminently. Great to know that we can expect agents that learn from experience very very soon!

When they’re here I’ll make an upvote farming bot that learns from experience how not to get caught and unleash it on HM.

After that I’ll make an agent that runs a SaaS company that learns from experience how to make money and I’ll finally be able to chill out and play video games.

That last thing I’ll actually do myself, I won’t use an agent, although the experience revolution stared with games. Ironic!

But I’ll make an agent that learns from experience what kind of games I like and how to make them. This way I’ll have an endless supply.

  • shiandow an hour ago

    We don't need an agent to do all that.

    We just need it to get better at building agents.

  • tempodox 5 hours ago

    > very very soon!

    If they're not careful, they'll be sued for copyright violation of the Real Soon Now™ brand.

  • trollbridge 2 hours ago

    There are days when I feel like I’m a not-so-advanced LLM, just spewing forth text in documents nobody is going to read.

jgbmlg 13 hours ago

It's ironic that machine intelligence is advancing during an era when human intelligence is declining.

  • dullcrisp 12 hours ago

    Maybe machine intelligence only seems to be advancing from the perspective of human intelligence

    • teberl 12 hours ago

      I like that thought.

  • chneu 10 hours ago

    It's not. Everytime there's a new form of media or communication there's an uptick in "bad actors". Think yellow journalism or any of the moral panics around TV programming. Even back when the printing press was invented there was an uptick in troll behavior. One of the Green brothers posited that martin Luther was really just a pamphlet troll.

    With social media and the Internet, stupid just got louder. I don't think people got stupid.

    • codeflo 8 hours ago

      Amplifying stupid can be very deadly, though. In some sense, the printing press caused the 30-year war, and radio brought us World War II. Eventually, society will adapt. I just wish we could find a way to adapt faster than the bad actors do.

      • daseiner1 5 hours ago

        i think it’s consensus that yellow journalism directly led to the spanish-american war via hearst

      • disqard 8 hours ago

        (continuing in that vein, and taking the liberty of making a giant oversimplification):

        ...and TV brought us Ronald Reagan, and the Internet gave us Trump as POTUS.

    • sdsd 9 hours ago

      Yes and no. In swaths of the world, we're actually observing a reverse Flynn effect and IQ has been dropping, in some places for decades.

      Eg: https://www.popularmechanics.com/science/a43469569/american-...

      • _Algernon_ 9 hours ago

        This started long before the internet.

        • trollbridge 2 hours ago

          Started in 2006 in Denmark and seemed to start a few years ago in the U.S… coinciding with smartphones (which I think will make us even dumber).

      • jimbob45 8 hours ago

        IQ tests are administration-sensitive and have changed dramatically since the beginning of such a Flynn effect study. The population makeup of many countries has changed in recent years to include many immigrants for whom the study would make exceedingly little sense to include. IQ tests do not cover and do not claim to cover a comprehensive view of human intelligence, famously lacking verbal and social components entirely. It is possible past IQ tests were simply overtuned and we’re now seeing the natural correction.

    • croes 10 hours ago

      Not just louder, it got in power

    • baxtr 10 hours ago

      Yes. Exactly right.

      Also well documented. Anyone interested, read the book: Attention Merchants by Wu.

  • CuriouslyC 11 hours ago

    The human brain optimizes for efficiency, if that extra intelligence doesn't confer survival benefits it'll be lost. I can't imagine that intelligence doesn't confer survival and reproductive benefits though, it's more likely that the gradient of survival and reproduction between the most intelligent and least has shrunk. In a sense civilization is coddling the weak, and humanity is getting weaker for it.

  • unsnap_biceps 13 hours ago

    I feel like declining human intelligence is a result of advancing machine intelligence. Computers are a force multiplier and societal pressure towards building intelligence is reduced.

    • whatnow37373 11 hours ago

      So the AGI/ASI problem might solve itself: we slowly become incapable of iterating on the problem while existing AI is not nearly advanced enough to pick up the slack.

      It’s quite beautiful. Once a civilization tries to build machine intelligence it slowly degrades its own capacity during the process thus eventually losing all hope of ever achieving their goal - assuming they still understand their goal at that point. Maybe it’s an algorithm in the Universe to keep us from being naughty.

  • baxtr 11 hours ago

    Is there scientific evidence for this statement?

  • huijzer 10 hours ago

    Maybe on average, but I think it’s probably correlated to inequality. The kid of two Oxford professors will probably be smarter than a kid that grew up in poverty. The school system is aimed at mitigating these differences, but if on average everyone gets less intelligent maybe the school system is working poorly.

    • lazide 10 hours ago

      Eh, or there is a massive effort to push as many people as possible down Maslow’s hierarchy of needs - which also shows up as being less intelligent.

      Happening right out in the open, and quite blatantly.

  • anal_reactor 12 hours ago

    > when human intelligence is declining

    It's not. It's just that previously we were unaware how stupid people are, and now we're starting to understand this.

  • enaaem 6 hours ago

    Most people are not stupid. They react to their emotions.

  • apwell23 8 hours ago

    > era when human intelligence is declining

    is it ? i am listening to most beautiful music that was ever created. it was created in 2024.

    • daseiner1 4 hours ago

      would citing lebron james explain away the obesity epidemic?

      • bethekidyouwant 3 hours ago

        Yes, the strongest man who ever lived is alive today. The best player of every sport is alive today . It absolutely supports the theory support the theory that the smartest person ever is alive today, etc. etc..

quantumHazer 10 hours ago

Is it me or this is yet another PR stunt masked as a serious article with LaTeX and all the fancy things? The graph doesn’t even make sense.

I’m burning out from all this hypester type of thing, it’s really really tiring.

  • tempodox 4 hours ago

    > I’m burning out

    The constant barrage of excrement makes critical thinking ever harder, which is by design (it has been proven that pumping out BS en masse is way easier than debunking it). Stop using your brain already and just buy what they tell you. Thinking is done by machines now. As is pumping out BS about how good machines are at thinking.

  • TheFragenTaken 5 hours ago

    There should be a term for this. I semi-unironically trust content written in Computer Modern, even if I know it's insane.

  • Jensson 2 hours ago

    Maybe it was generated by an LLM?

  • gwern 2 hours ago

    What fancy things? There's not a single equation in the whole thing. (I don't think this is even using Computer Modern, is it? It looks like a considerably thicker serif, and some of the characters like the lower-case 'g' look different.) Or are you referring to 'having 4 short, simple footnotes' as 'fancy' now? And also the graph makes perfect sense and tracks my own impression of RL history, what are you talking about?

tempodox 4 hours ago

I suspect this text was generated by an LLM.

ChrisArchitect 10 hours ago

Richard Sutton: "Ultimately (this) will become a chapter in the book 'Designing an Intelligence' edited by George Konidaris and published by MIT Press."

numpad0 5 hours ago

...yeah? It'll be great if machines could learn and adapt on-the-fly instead of just compressing the scrapes for 1 epoch over the course of few months into a 1TB download. Making machines learn and adapt on-line is what AI was always about.

Siah 16 hours ago

[flagged]

baq 2 hours ago

Any such article or book must be read with https://ai-2027.com/ in the back of the mind. Exponential processes are… exponentially… dependent on starting conditions, but if takeoff really happens this decade, we’ll be at the destination before Winds of Winter.