Are We on the Brink of AGI?

Steve Newman at Am I Stronger Yet?:

No one seems to know whether world-bending AGI is just three years away. Or rather, everyone seems to know, but they all have conflicting opinions. How can there be such profound uncertainty on such a short time horizon?

Or so I thought to myself, last month, while organizing my thoughts for a post about AI timelines. The ensuing month has brought a flood of new information, and some people now appear to believe that transformational AGI is just two years away. With additional data, the range of expectations is actually diverging.

Here’s my attempt to shed some light.

Have we entered into what will in hindsight be not even the early stages, but actually the middle stage, of the mad tumbling rush into singularity? Or are we just witnessing the exciting early period of a new technology, full of discovery and opportunity, akin to the boom years of the personal computer and the web?

There was already a vibe that things were starting to speed up (after what some viewed as a slow period between GPT-4 and o1), and then OpenAI’s recent announcement of their “o3” model blew the doors off everyone’s expectations.

More here.  And see also this article called “The Important Thing About AGI is the Impact, Not the Name“.

Enjoying the content on 3QD? Help keep us going by donating now.

How Suicide Drones Transformed the Front Lines in Ukraine

C.J. Chivers in the New York Times:

In late 2023, President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine announced an ambition never before heard in the history of war. Ukraine, he said, would provide its forces with one million FPV drones in the next calendar year. The announcement, which followed battlefield disappointments and long delays of arms shipments from the United States, pushed this unusual new class of weapon to the front of Ukraine’s bid for survival and rapidly reordered contemporary combat along the way.

Drones became entwined with modern armed conflict years before President Vladimir V. Putin sent Russian mechanized divisions over Ukraine’s borders in 2022. But no previous conflict had involved drones used so extensively by two sides, in so many forms or in so many roles.

More here.

Enjoying the content on 3QD? Help keep us going by donating now.

What Is Wilderness?

John Last at Noema:

It’s no coincidence that in our age of techno-optimism, the technological solutions posed for ecological problems are growing ever more ambitious — and invasive. Fertility control for wildlife is hardly the only example; scientists are already releasing swarms of genetically modified insects to combat disease and seeding the sky with silver iodide to modify the weather. Among proponents of these technologies, it is rarely considered that we may simply be introducing a new kind of pollution — an intervention whose effects we do not understand well enough to be certain that we will not be trying to undo them in half a century’s time.

But if a heavier hand is not the solution, what is? Is there another way to approach nature — one that does not frame it solely as a scientific problem to be solved or a romantic ideal to be reconstructed? Not long after Muir articulated his philosophy of fortress conservation and Pinchot produced his utilitarian formula for sustainable development, Leopold, the author of the paradigm-shifting “A Sand County Almanac,” was trying to define a third way, one grounded in a different conception of humanity’s relationship to nature.

more here.

Enjoying the content on 3QD? Help keep us going by donating now.

London’s Lost Interiors

Thomas Blaikie at Literary Review:

A lot of London has been lost. German bombs didn’t do anything like as much damage as the energy produced by the huge, ever-expanding metropolis itself. In the late 19th century, London was the richest city in the world, boiling with plutocrats flinging up new mansions in the Kensington ‘suburbs’ or drastically refurbishing old ones in Mayfair and Belgravia. Clifford’s Inn, a remarkable medieval survival, was pulled down in Edwardian times. Nash’s Regent Street would have been one of the architectural wonders of the world had it survived in its original form, an astonishing urban scheme stretching all the way from Carlton House Terrace to Regent’s Park. But it was carelessly chucked on the rubbish heap: more retail space was required and undesirable persons were congregating in the arcades. Priceless aristocratic mansions, such as Devonshire House, designed by William Kent, were breezily bulldozed in the 1920s, when their owners could no longer afford the upkeep, and replaced by hideous blocks of flats.

Nothing is so thoroughly lost, as the author Steven Brindle points out, as a lost interior.

more here.

Enjoying the content on 3QD? Help keep us going by donating now.

Are men’s reading habits truly a national crisis?

Constance Grady in Vox:

The question has been hurtling through think piecesop-eds, and ominous headlines over the past few years: Have American men stopped reading? Specifically, have they stopped reading fiction? And is that why the world is so bad now? The most recent entry in this genre came in December, when David J. Morris, an assistant professor of English at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, theorized in a New York Times op-ed that the disappearance of literary men is a contributing factor to Donald Trump’s dominant performance with the manosphere. The conversation is so persistent that writer Jason Diamond declared in GQ back in August, with some resignation, “We’re Doing ‘Men Don’t Read Books’ Discourse Again.”

Reading fiction has assumed the same role as therapy in public discourse: something good for one’s mental and emotional health that we should all do in order to be better citizens, and something that men — particularly straight men — are simply choosing not to do, to the detriment of society. Essayists and critics have been hitting this note for several years, but it has acquired a new darkness since the 2024 election, when men seemed to break decisively for Trump. If men had been willing to read novels, the idea is, perhaps Kamala Harris would be preparing her inaugural address right now.

More here.

Enjoying the content on 3QD? Help keep us going by donating now.

Four Clinical Trials We’re Watching That Could Change Medicine in 2025

Shelly Fan in Singularity Hub:

Breakthroughs in medicine are exciting. They promise to alleviate human suffering, sometimes on global scales. But it takes years, even decades, for new drugs and therapies to go from research to your medicine cabinet. Along the way, most will stumble at some point. Clinical trials, which test therapies for safety and efficacy, are the final hurdle before approval. Last year was packed with clinical trials news. Blockbuster medications Ozempic and Wegovy still dominated headlines. Although known for their impact on weight loss, that’s not all they can do. In an analysis of over 1.6 million patients, the drugs seemed to block 10 obesity-associated cancers—including those of the liver, kidney, pancreas, and skin cancers. Another trial over one year found that a similar type of drug slowed cognitive decline in people with mild Alzheimer’s disease.

So, what’s poised to take the leap from breakthrough to clinical approval in 2025? Here’s what to expect in the year ahead.

More here.

Enjoying the content on 3QD? Help keep us going by donating now.

Sunday, January 5, 2025

Oil as Sin

Alexander Etkind in The Ideas Letter:

In September 2024, Saudi Arabia withdrew from its policy of stabilizing oil prices at the symbolic level of $100 per barrel. Having stopped price-gouging, the Saudis intended to displace Russia and Iran, two belligerent petrostates, from the oil market. The same month that saw two major wars in Eastern Europe and the Middle East, also saw Storm Boris in Central Europe and Hurricane Helene in North America. Terrible news about extreme weather events was competing for attention with horrible news about extreme political events. With more than one hundred nations having elections in 2024, including an unpredictable vote in the US, war and climate have come to the fore of global politics. But of course, all these issues have nothing to do with each other.

Nothing but oil.

It was 1973, and Joe Biden had just become the junior senator from Delaware. Having failed in a war with Israel, several Arab countries imposed an oil embargo. They nationalized oil that had been traded by transnational corporations. Negotiating behind closed doors, governmental officials increased the oil price threefold.  Decolonization turned global oil, a private business with gigantic profits and risks, into a network of state properties and sovereign funds. In the meantime, American drivers spent days in the lines at gas stations. Coincidentally or not, both the President and Vice President of the USA resigned shortly. The American politicians realized that their fate depended on oil prices.

Time passed and oil flew. It was 1991, and Vladimir Putin had just become a junior official in St. Petersburg. The price of oil was approaching its lowest point ever – the Soviets and the Saudis were at odds over the war in Afghanistan. Moscow stopped paying salaries, and the impoverished drivers could not buy petrol. Coincidentally or not, the Soviet president resigned, and his country collapsed. Fifteen new independent states, including Russia and Ukraine, emerged from the dust. The Russian politicians realized that their fate depended on oil prices.

More here.

Enjoying the content on 3QD? Help keep us going by donating now.

A data-driven case that AI has already changed the U.S. labor market

David Deming over at his Substack:

[T]he Aspen Economic Strategy Group released a paper I wrote with Chris Ong and Larry Summers called “Technological Disruption in the Labor Market.” You can find the paper here. Also, Larry and I will be talking about the paper and about my new survey of generative AI usage in the U.S. at an event at HKS this evening (Monday 10/7). Please come by if you are local – if not, check out the livestream!

This paper originated as a response to the incessant drumbeat that we are in an era of massive technological upheaval. Breathless declarations like these populate the opening paragraphs of many consulting white papers and think pieces, yet they are rarely grounded in hard evidence. Perhaps like other fellow economists, our instinct is that “things are changing faster than ever” is a lazy crutch argument made by people who either don’t know much history or want to sell you something.

We were interested in whether there was any empirical truth to “things are changing faster than ever”. So wwe developed this concept we call occupational “churn” way back in 2017. The idea was to measure the total magnitude of changes in the frequency of different types of jobs over time.

More here.

Enjoying the content on 3QD? Help keep us going by donating now.

Sunday Poem

Friendship

Making friends is a delicate business.
You say, he or she is my best friend,
choosing from a lifetime of acquaintances,
someone you hope you can trust.

Making friends, after all, is more pursuit
than necessity, although friends are good
for social well-being and grace.
Friends show many faces of loyalty and sincerity.

Most pay allegiance first to family ties and deem
a mere “friend” as an intruder, bent on breaking
strong bonds that are sometimes taken for granted,
leaving little room for curiosity and growth.

Growing up, you may have a strong attachment,
but it is not easy to latch onto a lasting pal.
That a man lay down his life for a friend
is still among the great virtues.

But who among us can rise to such a sacrifice?

by George De Gregorio
from
Zerilda’s Chair
White Chicken Press, 2009


Enjoying the content on 3QD? Help keep us going by donating now.

Why a ‘Third Life’ Is the Answer to America’s Loneliness Epidemic

Adam Chandler in Time Magazine:

In 1989, the sociologist Ray Oldenburg cemented his status as required reading for hungover college freshmen when he coined the concept of “third places” in his book The Great Good Place. Third places, which are informal spots to gather outside of home and work for socializing, have been features of societies going back to antiquity, from Greek agora and Viennese cafés to barber shops and Burger King dining rooms. But their role in making cultures vibrant and communities cohesive, Oldenburg warned, had begun to “constitute a diminishing aspect of the American social landscape.”

He was right to worry. These days, the role of coffee shops and bars, libraries and community centers, civic clubs and houses of worship, have faded as the creep of work and domestic obligation in American life have become all but inescapable. According to the 2021 Census Bureau’s Time Use Survey, Americans were already spending significantly less time with friends before the pandemic rearranged life entirely. Our collective isolation has only metastasized since then. In 2024, a staggering 17% of Americans claimed to have zero friends, up from 1% in 1990, around when Oldenburg was first urging caution.

More here.

Enjoying the content on 3QD? Help keep us going by donating now.

There’s a Reason ‘Squid Game’ Hit a Global Nerve

Rebecca Sun in The New York Times:

It would have been easy to take the successful high-concept premise of “Squid Game” — hard-luck contestants compete to the death in a sadistically kiddie-themed battle royale — and simply replicate it for Season 2. After all, the show’s first season, which appeared on Netflix to little initial fanfare in 2021, was embraced as a shrewd fable of late-stage capitalism and drew a reported 330 million viewers worldwide, becoming the streaming service’s most-watched title of all time.

But the second season of the show, which premiered on the day after Christmas, introduces an intriguing plot element that cannily taps into the current political moment. Critical reviews for the new season have been mixed, but the new installment of “Squid Game” might be the best pop-cultural examination yet of the social dynamics that have led to a series of rightward shifts around the globe — from the election of Yoon Suk Yeol, South Korea’s hard-line conservative president, in 2022 to a second victory for Donald Trump here at home. If the first season was about how capitalism forces people into impossible choices (such as braving a murderous game show in hopes of improving a desperate lot), then the second season is all about the toll of tribalism: how the push to pit ourselves against one another in a winner-take-all political battle leads to destruction and despair for all.

More here.

Enjoying the content on 3QD? Help keep us going by donating now.

Friday, January 3, 2025

Your life is not a story: why narrative thinking holds you back

Karen Simecek in Psyche:

We rely on narratives because they help us understand the world. They make life more meaningful. According to Sartre, to turn the most banal series of events into an adventure, you simply ‘begin to recount it’. However, telling a story is not just a powerful creative act. Some philosophers think that narratives are fundamental to our experiences. Alasdair MacIntyre believes we can understand our actions and those of others only as part of a narrative life. And Peter Goldie argues that our very lives ‘have narrative structure’ – it is only by grappling with this structure that we can understand our emotions and those of others. This suggests that narratives play central, possibly fundamental, roles in our lives. But as Sartre warns in Nausea: ‘everything changes when you tell about life.’

In some cases, narratives can hold us back by limiting our thinking. In other cases, they may diminish our ability to live freely. They also give us the illusion that the world is ordered, logical, and difficult to change, reducing the real complexity of life. They can even become dangerous when they persuade us of a false and harmful world view. Perhaps we shouldn’t be too eager to live our lives as if we were ‘telling a story’. The question is: what other options do we have?

More here.

Enjoying the content on 3QD? Help keep us going by donating now.

How Much Do Animals Think About Death?

Dan Falk in Undark:

Our relationship with death is a complex one. At an intellectual level, we understand our mortality, yet we go to great lengths to banish the notion from our minds. In most circumstances it’s a taboo subject for conversation. At the same time, we have elaborate rituals around death, and it inspires all manner of art, literature, music, and more. (Think Prince Hamlet’s “To be or not to be” speech, Mozart’s “Requiem,” and the Great Pyramid of Giza.)

And what of our animal cousins? When Charles, a western lowland gorilla, died in the Toronto Zoo last year, did his fellow primates mourn his passing? What does a gazelle think when a member of its herd becomes a lion’s dinner? Questions like these have been very much on the mind of the Spanish philosopher Susana Monsó, whose new book, “Playing Possum: How Animals Understand Death,” invites the reader to think about death from the point of view of the creatures we share the planet with.

While Monsó is a philosopher, her investigation draws on empirical studies from various scientific disciplines. Being a philosopher may even give her an edge, as it allows her to incorporate knowledge from many different fields.

More here.

Enjoying the content on 3QD? Help keep us going by donating now.