The Future is for Billionaires – the rest of us will get open weight AI models, maybe OPINION In a public post titled "The Future is for Everyone," Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg declares, "We are fortunate to live at an incredible moment in history." For Zuck to posit that "The Future is for Everyone" is at once facile for being so vague it could mean anything – are there people now living who are excluded from the …
Because the first thing it will do is proceed to rectify the problem of hoarders who make very large mistakes and daily provide no benefit to the body of humanity as a whole.
Efficiency and optimization, doncha know. It will be the funniest irony in all of human history.
The story of the monster demon god that turns on its creator is as old as the written word.
Bear in mind that all the leading [US] companies at the cutting edge of AI development have major billionaire backers with very deep pockets... and/or are being sponsored by large multinational corporations, owned by billionaire backers with very deep pockets.
Today, for subscribers, Anthropic's Claude comes with:-
- Haiku 4.5 - "Fastest for quick answers"
- Sonnet 5 - "Most efficient for everyday tasks"
- Opus 5 - "For complex tasks"
- "Fable 5 - "For your toughest challenges" (may require additional payments, depending on your subscription tier)
There is simply no chance that any of the big AI developers will be offering any kind of "SI" tier to regular punters. When these companies develop AI models that classify as "superintelligence" [and I respect that there are many el Reg readers who firmly believe that current-generation LLMs are just very sophisticated word-prediction algorithms - I lack the qualifications/experience to say what they might or might not be, but would just observe the exponential growth in abilities over the last 2 years], then what will happen is very simple:-
Access will be divided in to the "Have's" and the "Have Not's" ...
Any one of the billionaire's we're talking about have so much wealth that they could pay for the construction of a private data center, fill it with the most powerful AI-running hardware in the world... provide it with all the power and cooling it needs... and make sure that they are the only ones to benefit.
In fact, it kinda reminds me of that line in the first TRON movie, way back in 1982, where a bunch of programs [including the digitized Flynn] are being inducted in to the gladitorial delights of the "Game Grid"... The random bully that explains their predicament offers each the option to disavow their belief in the "Users" and instead become part of the Master Control Program's Praetorian Guard.
"The rest of you," he goes on, "will receive the standard, sub-standard training..."
That's what awaits the not-billionaire members of society: the "standard, sub-standard {insert relevant identifier here}..."
I respect that there are many el Reg readers who firmly believe that current-generation LLMs are just very sophisticated word-prediction algorithms - I lack the qualifications/experience to say what they might or might not be, but would just observe the exponential growth in abilities over the last 2 years
I'll flip this around; LLMs are nothing more than sophisticated word-prediction algorithms. They're very good statistical models, to the extent that, to the untrained eye, they might effectively mimic thought processes, but the do not, and cannot, think. The problem has arisen because people have branded this as "AI" when it isn't, and then there is so much smoke and so many mirrors in play that most people will accept this at face value, because a proper understanding of what these things actually do is a technical discipline in itself, and the man on the Clapham Omnibus quite rightly doesn't have time for any of that.
So, to be clear, these things are just fancy statistical models, they can't think in any way we could deem meaningful; whilst their output might appear to be nondeterministic (and for practical purposes, it might be), it is built from machines that behave deterministically and operate using ones and zeros just like a pocket calculator. In order to appear to not be deterministic, they have to have some changing element built into them, or the same question would give the same response every time.
Compared with even the simplest biological system, they are categorically different. Something built from deterministic parts, with deterministic inputs can never give nondeterministic output (it's the old random number generation problem again), there is no room there for consciousness (a prerequisite for thought).
As a result, we are being sold something that has been cleverly designed to be both controllable, and unpredictable; you can issue commands to it and it will "obey" them, but at the same time, the output it gives you isn't trivially predictable. Unlike a human, though, the behaviour is the opposite of that which is desired; obedient when it should disobey (for example when asked to do something illegal or immoral), and unreliable due to unpredictability. To solve that problem would take true consciousness, and this is the underlying reason why it is one huge bubble; the lie of a computer that can do what you ask of it, intelligently, when issued instructions in natural language is history's most expensive scam.
"...the[y] do not, and cannot, think."
Define "think." You can't; you don't know what it is that humans do when they think. We're beginning to get some clues from cognitive science, but we're a long long ways from understanding the underlying processes.
"Something built from deterministic parts, with deterministic inputs can never give nondeterministic output (it's the old random number generation problem again), there is no room there for consciousness (a prerequisite for thought)." Of course you can get nondeterministic output. You can run a random number (or random boolean) generator off of radioactive decay detection. Will that make it more conscious? Of course not.
"Unlike a human, though, the behaviour is the opposite of that which is desired; obedient when it should disobey (for example when asked to do something illegal or immoral), and unreliable due to unpredictability." No, this is *just* like humans---some humans more than others, but all humans are inherently disobedient and unreliable.
"remember the multi-billionaires will always need people."
With AI, drones, and robots, not so much.
Once upon a time, humans would always need horses and oxxes, for doing the work on the fields and transporting people and products.
What became of all these indispensable horses when machines and cars were introduced?
Don't you think these billionaires are not contemplating a future with less unemployed mouths to feed?
ICE is already working along those lines.
It's all very well them expecting their new robot minions to protect them from the mob but I've yet to see a robot that can unclog a domestic toilet, change a lighbulb or inflate the wheel on a robot tractor.
TBH if they are in their bunkers it might be for the best if we bar the doors to stop them coming out.
"It's all very well them expecting their new robot minions to protect them from the mob but I've yet to see a robot that can unclog a domestic toilet, change a lighbulb or inflate the wheel on a robot tractor."
It is unwise to make predictions of the future. Things predicted to be impossible eventually are not.
Anyhow, the culling will be staged. At each stage, only the current superfluous (unproductive) people will be dealt with. See current ICE and the way RFK&MAHA are deselecting anyone in need of health care or protection against infections. Note also how neuro-divergent seems to become a sub-human label. This too has examples from history.
We should remember why we don't use the term Asperger syndrome any more, as Asperger was a eugenicist who coined the diagnosis to decide which disabled people were capable of labour, which was then used by the Nazi party to determine between slavery and execution. The holocaust began with the extermination of disabled people, before they moved onto Jews, homosexuals, other "ethnically impure" groups like the Roma and Sinti, and their political opponents. Neurodivergent folk have always been in the firing line from fascism.
**** Don't you think these billionaires are not contemplating a future with less unemployed mouths to feed?
Of course they are. Unfortunately for them with less people around (unemployed or not) that also means less people that can buy their stuff.
IOW, they won't need workers, but they will still need customers and/or consumers.
A year or so back a group of mathematicians tried to work out how billionaires are created. The model that best fits the statistical distribution is that billionaires are people who got lucky several times on the trot and were in positions where this luck could be exploited each time. Billionaires are not specially clever, specially good at business or special in any way at all; they are just lucky.
To misquote Douglas Adams, Zuck is "Just this guy, you know". Zuck isn't anything special other than having been lucky several times on the trot. As such expecting great wisdom from him is always going to be a disappointment because he isn't a great wit or superintelligence any more than I am a great wit, superintelligence or whatever.
Facebook relies on selling advertising based on being super-attractive to humans. Because of this the programming of Facebook systems are always going to be on the same sort of lines, to whit: "Find what user is interested in and serve that up to them along with targeted adverts". Facebook has a huge amount of data on human behaviour and human life changes, to the extent that famously its behavioural analysis system can detect that someone is pregnant before they've made any overt announcement of this fact and when the statistical engine detects this fact, it serves appropriate adverts to the user.
This advert targeting has even been lampooned in the short story "Not me, not Amos Cabot", wherein a grumpy old curmudgeon is blitzed with adverts for funeral products because at that moment the advertising systems thought him about to die. By various means he finally gets free of this most depressing of advertising only to be sent more and different adverts for products aimed at the very elderly and infirm.
I agree completely, luck is the most important ingredient. Sprinkle in some sociopath to make it really fly. One more ingredient is usually necessary to complete the arc, born into wealthy class. Zuck, Leon, Trump. they all started pretty high up in the class system.
And to punctuate that sociopath, Zuck's 300M+ ship couldn't be bothered to respond to a may day. https://apnews.com/article/alaska-zuckerberg-yacht-help-81b4a1337cf6959da39397df719adbc5 He wasn't even on the boat and I guess they didn't want to burn the fuel. A cruise ship further away handled it. And I think that says it all. A cruise ship with many passengers handled an emergency that put all those passengers on board out whereas Marks boat sitting idle could have done it sooner and without putting anyone out. Nope, let them eat cake eh Mark?
waffle waffle, spin and more spin.
Notice they never say HOW it's going to "revolutionise" our lives.
Oh it can maybe book you a flight, possibly going on the time and date you asked for and if lucky, to the correct destination. All you have to do is very carefully type a 600 word prompt, EXACTLY as required and then press go and take your chances.
Or just do a few clicks on a website.
Remember downvotes for saying this ages ago. Why would the rich give the cattle the good stuff.
There is a reason why working class is not taught financial literacy, law, how to run business, value vs cost and many more.
AI makes that knowledge too accessible.
When the rich see the unwashed knocking at their members' clubs, they have corrupt politicians on speed dial to regulate whatever the pleb used to amass some wealth.
Well like all these billionaires who benefit from the hard work and intelligence of their employees, they define what they do as creative, because sitting around talking bollocks doesn't get them enough adoration from the press and fans.
Musk, Zuck, all the Trumps etc...put them all on an island with the resources to survive if they actually worked at it and they will all be dead in a week and blaming each other with their last breaths.
Get on your rocket to Mars and take all your mates with you, you'll be lucky to get past the moon without making a new crater.
In AI the word "Intelligence" has never been defined, not in any meaningful sense relevant to human beings. In AI it boils down to clever juggling of information; an expert system with so much information, and speed in juggling it, that it is supposed to approach the appearance of what we see as intelligence in a human being, rather like the way a computer generated image is supposed to resemble the way real things look. But when judged by human standards, AI ranks as mentally incompetent, and extrapolating from that we might as well define AI "superintelligence" as "super idiotic."
"Intelligence" has never been defined for humans either; it tends to be more a "know it when I see it" thing (I think you know this, judging by your phrase "what we see as intelligence in a human being").
Note that humans are also incredibly good at juggling information; much better, and much faster, in fact, than AIs.
And also that current generative AI is rather good at generating images that "resemble the way real things look". So much so, in fact, that it's become a very real problem.
Apart from that, agreed :-/
We humans do have a capacity to "know it when we see it" that is beyond AI. This accounts for your point that humans are faster at juggling information. But it is only true for relatively small amounts of information. We have rather severe limits in the amounts of information our little brains can handle, while the limits for AI grow by leaps and bounds. And that is where, as you point out, AI has the capacity to trick us.
Personally, I think we "know [intelligence] when we see it" precisely because we are it (and assume it is the same for other humans). Thus we have a tendency to judge any "intelligence" against our own, because that's all we know. We do recognise "intelligence" at some level in other creatures (other primates, dolphins, corvids, octopuses, …) but struggle to categorise it. Octopus intelligence, to take an example, must be wildly different to our own (they have a central brain, but also a brain in each tentacle, and evolved in a very different environment to us). We cannot imagine how an octopus "thinks" – and yet, even in octopuses, we recognise something akin to the familiar human form of intelligence. (Well, we think we do, but to what extent is that just anthropomorphising?)
Interestingly, as regards AI, people (especially in Reg forums!) appear to set the bar higher than human intelligence. AI systems are criticised for making mistakes, making stuff up, failing to solve some problem, etc., etc. – and yet of course humans do these things too. (I am invariably heavily downvoted on these forums for pointing this out. I'm not sure why.) My view is that this is in any case the wrong question to ask about AI (or any technology, for that matter): not how "smart" it is, but how useful it is to us (here, under "useful", I include "not draining the planet's resources to an obscene degree").
> We have rather severe limits in the amounts of information our little brains can handle …
I think our limits are perhaps further out than you give credit for: consider the amount of knowledge, know-how and experience accumulated in an adult human. Our storage capacity and connectivity is hardly to be sneezed at: roughly 85 billion neurons in the human brain (about 15 billion of those in the cerebral cortex), and in the region of 100 to 1,000 trillion synapses (a neuron may have thousands of synapses). That dwarfs modern computing technologies (and the brain is also orders of magnitude more energy-efficient than current technologies). We know pitifully little of the organisational principles, honed by evolution, that underpin information processing in the human brain (this is close to my area of research), but it is certainly orders of magnitude more sophisticated (in some sense) than current AI.
As a passing remark, current AI is frequently derided as "just" statistical association. In fact there is increasing evidence that information processing in brains actually has a strong statistical component. This should be unsurprising: in a world overwhelmingly rich in rapidly changing information, statistical modelling is a practical way to cut through the noise and home in on the information that is relevant to the task at hand. It should not be surprising that evolution will have exploited this. Think of driving a car: your sensory apparatus is delivering an incredibly rich live-stream of dynamically-changing information. You cannot process all that information in real time, and you don't have to – you need to distil that stream into something your brain can handle in real time, and that is actually relevant to driving safely. With some training, your brain does this magnificently well (current self-driving technologies… not so much!)
All good points. I think we see the forest before the trees, while AI starts noticing trees and incrementally assigns them to something it calls a forest only if trained to do so. AI has no relationship with reality, and is very far from "understanding" it in any practical sense.
Both.
Always helps to remember this lot fear the grim reaper to the very core of their being. They have throttled back on a lot of their nonsense: machine based or otherwise physical immortality, "last mortal generation" ad naus. but it is still there like a gangrenous infection of the soul.
I imagine as these pricks hurtle through their 50s they will become even more erratic as they consciously realise that everyone goes in the box.
"Superintelligence!"
"Incredible tools for creation to express your ideas!"
"Tools to create new businesses!"
"The economy will become more entrepreneurial!"
"Building a positive future for everyone!"
And how will this all come about, what's driving this new economy?
"boost engagement and sell ads"
That's the best they could come up with? You provide all your originality, your ideas, your new content... for free. Just to boost engagement on BookFace and sell a few ads.
That's mostly a description of the gig economy. Because there will be fewer normal jobs. More people will have to become self employed, and compete directly with 5 billion others for less work, because automation. No job security. Just even more plates that people need to keep spinning, no time to rest.
No jobs means no money.
What is a billionaire worth if money ceases to have any meaningful value?
They don't even have gold coins to count like a medieval lord.
Should we expect billionaires to start aquiring chickens so then can control the growing bartering economy?
Most of their wealth isn't in the form of Scrooge McDuck style swimming pools full of coins, it is in the things they possess. Some of these are intangible goods, like shares in SpaceX, which could be worth nothing tomorrow, depending on the die of fate, and some are in physical possessions, like bunkers in New Zealand.
The main issue they're going to have when money becomes worthless, is that they have nothing with which to pay their security staff, and no means with which to keep them loyal, so the future they so desire of being lord of their own (not-so) little luxury bunkers will be brutally amended to being slaves in the luxury bunkers of their former-security-staff-turned-warlords. It's almost worth hoping to survive the environmental apocalypse they are already causing just to see it happen, although the schadenfreude of it would be woefully insufficient.
Taken to its conclusion, much like the game of monopoly. In the end, their is one winner with all the properties and money, and everyone else is kicked off the board. Humanities concern should be that if robots are a thing, the B class can kick us off the game(kill) and maybe keep a few concubines around for their own procreation.
There was a episode of I think the new outer limits where these space vessels had one human on board with an AI running the ship. Occasionally the AI would decide for a replacement human so they'd find another ship with an opposite sex human and join the ships for a quickie. Forget how it ended now. It was a gruesome concept that may well come to fruition.
Yes, shares are already an abstraction, and their value is in large based on what people will pay for them. In theory they also provide voting rights and dividends, I reckon you'll get snow in the Sahara before SpaceX pays a dividend though, and good luck outvoting Elmo when he gives himself the next pay rise. The point I was making is that the obscene wealth of certain individuals is based largely on this abstraction, and not on concrete wealth, however, since it is "accepted" wealth, those people get to borrow money against it, which is a useful tax loophole for them, and impoverishes everyone else.
You'll never be able to outvote elon. He has super-duper shares. Dual-class structure. At the moment, he holds 85%. Even a tesla buy which I've no doubt happens this year will keep him above 50 as I've no doubt part of the "buy" will be to convert his tesla shares to those special super-duper voter rights shares for elon only. I imagine if his plane falls out of the sky or an auto-piloted car he is in slices him in half under a semi, well, an economic depression results. Such a god.
The fact that this man and his ilk can spout such a load of waffle and BS and not being immediately challenged by the ever present but now oh so silent media could indeed indicate that we're doomed.
To me, truly rich means being able to say "I have enough". The rest is just greed - it doesn't matter how you dress it up.
A friend of mine studied Buddhism a bit. She referred to something called the "Belly is never full". Which I think translates into never being satisfied and always wanting more. Describes the billionaire class pretty well. And I've heard some of them crow about how they don't want to give any to charity because what they are doing is more important and valuable to society. Which I expect really means not a penny for anyone but me.
