> The internal memo from Meta’s Reality Labs notes that the current situation in the U.S was good timing for the feature’s release.
> “We will launch during a dynamic political environment where many civil society groups that we would expect to attack us would have their resources focused on other concerns,” says the document.
It’s important you read quotes from the internal memo to understand what kind of company Meta is
> The coalition letter comes after internal Meta planning documents suggested that the company wanted to launch the glasses during a “dynamic political environment” because civil society groups would be too busy to protest.
> General relativity and quantum mechanics are incompatible at the Planck scale. This contention can be examined if a quantum computer is set to operate at a rate that exceeds the classical limit of one operation per Planck volume-time, or equivalently 2491 m−3 s−1. Here we quantify the relation between the logical qubit count and the extent to which classicality is challenged. We argue that 500 logical qubits are sufficient to reject theories confined to a laboratory. We account for the operational cost of computation and communication at all scales up to and including the observable universe, ultimately constrained by a 1600-logical-qubit computer. Remarkably, current plans for commercial quantum computers are projected to surpass this limit, thereby putting the quantum-gravity standoff to the test.
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The notion that we're expected to be able to probe these limits within our lifetimes is very interesting and exciting
This pattern continuing indefinitely without the need for analysis would be certainly nice but we do need to confront recent data. In the US, multiple metrics of quality-of-life peaked around 2015 and have declined since then, with some showing 11% decline while US total wealth has doubled! (with the majority of that decline pre-covid and pre-AI) [0][1][2].
What forces act on this trend? How can we make predictions? An interesting metric, which tracks the aggregate of many complex factors is the distribution of wealth, which could be seen as proxy for the distribution of power or agency of a person in their society. Median income as a fraction of total wealth decreased nearly 50% in real terms over this same period. [3]
Now inversely, during the period where life quality increased most the last century (1920 - 1980) inequality was _falling_.
How is super-human AI advanced through 2030, 2040, 2050 likely to affect things? Will it sharpen the inequality or relax it?
With AI the cost of raw resources to products goes down, but it's likely inequality increases. It's not obvious which force has a bigger impact on human quality of life as things shake out. However, I think the strongest argument – which also explains the steady improvements in QoL through previous changes you mentioned – has been to follow inequality, or median share of power in society.
You need to explain, from a systems point of view _why_ the gains must diffuse out as you suggest. We have analogs we can compare to: massive wealth injections through a natural resource such as oil. Now what happens to that wealth is not obvious; for some countries it's a curse with radical inequality and pernicious and robust power structures, in fewer it has been bestowed to the heritage of the people (think Norway)
Now, the nature of AI is to change the balance of the labour trade. We have a notion of the “economic value of the average person” which is presently very high in the western world.
What happens when the median figure drops through 0 thanks to AI?
Do the remaining wealth owners share their wealth? How often does this occur in existing systems we can compare against?
The cost of primary resources to products also goes toward 0, perhaps this offsets the decreasing economic power of the average person. But what forces protect them if their bargaining power is lost?
AI is the perfect low cost tool to enable that. Plantir knows this and has been making strategic moves to build this
Seems quite achievable and sustainable to me
Every human carries dense compute and sensors with them. If they don't they stand out while still surrounded by dense compute and sensors held by others at all times
Not nice to think about but it is the reality we are moving towards – vote accordingly
Sounds like they're automatically generating Go code from ts in some amount [0]. I wonder if they will open the transpilation effort, in this way you'd create a path for other TypeScript projects to generate fast native binaries
It was surprising to me to learn that we can be _a lot_ faster than evolution when it comes to 'improving' viruses. The process is called gain-of-function. It can create mutations that are rare or impossible in nature. Viruses don't select for devastation on their own, they select only for propagation
We will no doubt be able to use AI to develop vaccines that isn't the bottleneck, the bottleneck is in testing and distribution (and humans not wanting to get vaccinated). It's a fundamentally asymmetrical situation
I thought the discussion was getting to the important points once hyperbole was resolved but Carmack ducks out
Carmack:
> To answer the question directly: there is no way, even with an infinitely smart (but not supernatural) oracle, that a teenager can destroy all of humanity in six months.
Even the most devastating disasters people imagine will not kill every human being even over the space of years. This is a common failure of imaginative scope, not understanding all the diverse situations that people are already in, and how they will respond to disasters.
You could walk it back to “kill a million people” and get into the realm of an actual discussion, but it isn’t one I am very interested in having.
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I do think that's a discussion very worth having, asymmetrical advantage that AI gives is the concern here. A virus is a special arrangement of a few thousand atoms that we can now control and design on a computer. The defence is global vaccination programs costing billions of dollars and many lives in the process
We will no doubt be able to use AI to develop vaccines, that isn't the bottleneck, the bottleneck is in testing and distribution. It's a fundamentally asymmetrical situation
To be clear this is a risk without AI, but AI brings down the threshold of effort to make this more likely. I would love to be convinced otherwise
This field is moving fast! Something like this has just been released. Checkout DreamFusion, which does something similar: They start with a random 3D NeRF field and use the same diffusion techniques to try to make it match the output of 2D image diffusion when viewed from random angles! Turns out it works shockingly well, and implies fully 3D representations are encoded in traditional 2D image generators
For sure, energy has a cost which you want to optimize for - no question about it. The crux is when that cost is artificially low: you can dump your radioactive waste in the river for as much as it costs to transport it, but the cost is then payed by the people downstream. Now as you say if this is tightly causally linked, the people downstream will fight back against you and then it's not so cheap. But the problem comes when the causality gets foggy; it takes decades before there's enough data gathered to connect the high cancer rates with the waste dumping miles upstream. By that time the people who made that decision made bank and exited and are beyond accountability
Where this causal disconnect occurs is where regulation is most effective
I think we agree, you want to price in your externalities, but pricing externalities _is_ regulation, so we're saying the same thing. Perhaps we're crossing wires somewhere
A more complicated challenge is climate change, which is like the CFC example taken to the extremes. Since every company uses energy the responsibility is spread among everyone. However, every group, from countries to companies stands to lose competitively from using more expensive but less damaging sources of energy – the market pressures drive towards companies that take advantage of externalities like this
So a solution could be global regulation, where we all unilaterally agree to transition to better energy sources, however this has massive resistance and is the battle of our time
This sort of regulation is certainly more subtle than don't steal or shoot people but ultimately leads to a system that's better for all the players
> “We will launch during a dynamic political environment where many civil society groups that we would expect to attack us would have their resources focused on other concerns,” says the document.
https://www.biometricupdate.com/202602/meta-plans-launch-of-...