How lucky are we to witness this rare moment in history when breakthroughs happen yearly instead of every 10,000 years?

I'd rather be alive when humans are an interstellar civilization; but this is second best :)

Bold of you to assume we're only halfway through our collective existence. 10 years could very well make-or-break us here...

I don't think we are actually lucky. People who will be born into ai world when everything will calm down are lucky, but we are going to experience the worst part(transition to whatever will be next) where you are either adapting(which is hard) or you live poor to the end of your life

We are extremely lucky:

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Not really that lucky. Collectively tens of billions of people will live throughout this period of history and we have the highest population in history by far. 7% of all humans to have ever lived are alive now and more are born every day.

I feel like most people don't understand this plus how huge of a thing has been the post industrial revolution era. We always like to think of us as normal humans like before like nothing changed but we are almost gods compared to a few centuries ago.

I care about disease cures and longevity breakthroughs that will benefit me. I get those, I'm happy to wait 50 plus years.

We don't get those, then it means very little to me. AGI itself is still far from a reality.

If you are optimistic about the future of humanity - there should be a future with quadrillion of humans living in the solar system alone and vastly more in the galaxy at large.

So if that future is real - we are actually incredibly unlucky. The probability to be born now instead of being born as one of untold quadrillions living in the Dyson swarms or whatever is vanishingly small.

yearly breakthroughs? no at least monthly if we are conservative

After super intelligent AI comes out that can do physics and medicine, there will be 20 years of social political bullshit that prevents the masses from benefiting. Anyone born 10 or so years after that will be the lucky ones.

So my guess is 40 years from now we’ll start to see all major diseases cured, unlimited energy, space colonization and etc. I’d be 77 years old if I’m lucky enough to make it that far.

Breakthroughs happen often you just don't care about most of them

Gives me sim vibes

Owd has a great graphic on that. Tldr - lucky, but not that lucky, 6.8% of all people who have ever lived are alive today.

https://ourworldindata.org/the-future-is-vast

I'm a nerd and love anime. I can't wait until it is common for humans to be integrated with robots. Call me Android 17!

I think anyone being born in the next 10 years will be truly lucky. My son is only two, I think he will experience some of the tough transition period, but ultimately will have a pretty good life.

It is a beautiful time we live in. I just can't wait to see what the next 50 years have to offer

I agree, Nick Bostrom even brought this up on a podcast this week.

The only thing that would negate this is if the next million years continued on a similar trajectory of incremental but accelerating progress. I can't imagine how that could be possible without hitting the upper limit, and it looks increasingly like AI systems in the near future will be able to solve the unknown areas of physics, unlocking whatever technologies are possible within this universe. That is, of course, if we don't all get wiped out first.

Lawrence Krauss once gave a talk, that I can't find right now, making this point in the context of the life of the universe. We live in the first 2% or something of the lifetime of the universe and, because the expansion rate of the universe is accelerating, for most of the future life of the universe galaxies will be accelerating away from each other at a rate faster than the speed of light. So any life that exists in the final 80 or 90% of the universe will not be aware that anything exists outside their own galaxy.

We really do seem to be at an inflection point where we're not only experiencing the last years of "simple" human life without whatever superintelligent machine technology brings, but also our window on the rest of the universe is maximally interesting.

It's kinda suspicious to be honest, as Bostrom points out.

Yes and no. Change may bring good things, but stability isn't bad. Would you rather be a person rendered culturally obsolete by change, an old man living in a perpetual state of bewilderment because he doesn't understand the world around him, his relatives all perpetually rolling their eyes at him for not "getting it"...or would your rather know at age 10 what the rest of your life would be like and live out your later years admired for your experience and wisdom because what you spent your entire life doing is still relevant and you had time to master your craft?

Change is not bad. Progress is not bad. But there is something to be said for stability.

I am grateful for AI.

To all the developers (not the CEOs) : Thank you!

To ChatGPT: Thank you for your help!

Awesome. reminds me of something i saw at geography class one time describing the history of the earth

I want to see my Eves <3, my beautiful Eves <3

Despite all the magnificent and extraordinary breakthroughs we have witnessed so far... we're, sadly, still not much closer to achieving the greatest ones: eliminating diseases (both mental and physical). This is the holy grail, and everything else is just toys to play with (in comparison).

Great way to put it

We very lucky and kind of unlucky at the same time. This rate of change is exciting but it's also stressful.

not really anyone living in a time where you don't have to work to live is lucky.

I'm lucky to have a hyperintelligent wife, Eve. - Maciej Nowicki

Did you know Roman public toilets came with brushes that visitors used to scrub their anuses? Yes, they shared the brushes.

I'd say we're REALLY lucky.

That's the kind of though that scares me, because of the doomsday argument.

Living in these times is a privilege imo

I've thought about this too and even made a post about it (which was not very well-received).

If you zoom out and look at the lifetime of humans, it looks like this (the future is hypothetical):

• 300,000 years of very slow progress.
• 200 years where we go from mostly being simple farmers to... well today. If you think about it, it is an absolutely incredible transformation.
• 200 years in which the singularity is completed. We invent AGI which then invents everything that can be invented.
• Millions of years of no or very slow progress. We will probably reach some stable equilibrium, I don't expect major changes every decade like we have today. Year 510,000 will be similar to year 520,000.

So, if you take into account the full lifetime of humans including the hypothetical future, it's crazy that we live in the singularity, which is just a tiny blip. My explanation is that there won't be a lot of new births in the future. Maybe we will achieve longevity. Or maybe there will be some kind of an extinction event.

Daily life remains very similar to in the 1970s for most people. The phones are the only major difference.

I think Deep learning and LLMs are kind lackluster breakthroughs compared to like... Agriculture as a whole.

What would it look like if you compressed it into an hour?

So, the light switch is about to flick on.

I agree and with chevron deference eliminated and Trump coming back we are set up for explosive growth and innovation!

People who tend to witness events like these are most likely to consider themselves lucky, when luck has nothing to do with it. There is some motif in here similar to the anthropic principle. We can view ourselves as 'fortunate', in some sense, that we have these technologies at our disposal when all our ancestors didn't, but this has nothing to do with real luck.

It remains to be seen how fulfilled and happy this will make us. If AI really is the paradigm shift many suggest it will be, we might all suffer a traumatic ontological shock.

I wish I was fucking dead. So fucking lucky 🎉

Actually the last 10 years appears in 11:58m 30s pm

It's nothing new, we live in constant acceleration. Human history is just constant adaptation to the latest technology which does not make us necessarily more happy. We chase a utopia where technology would free us from the grind but instead we just work faster and faster until the next technology shift.

It really makes you wonder. My very existence right now is by pure chance. If the human species continues to grow without major catastrophe which set our population back to the middle age. It would be far far far likely to be born in an age AFTER interstellar travel and immortality.

If our species keep on venturing forward, we are really the most unlucky ones. A million years from now if humans are somehow still around, we would be seen as the first few minutes of a galactic civilization.

Wow

We live in a simulation.

Breakthroughs every 10,000 years? Lol you are shitting on the thousands of hard working people who've made revolutionary breakthroughs between now and 10,000 years ago. Much more revolutionary than the next iteration of your shitty waifu simulator.

We are probably cosmically unlucky. Wouldn't be surprised if all life that's been lived is less than 0.1 percent of life that will ever live. And if the future is a decent singularity its some bad odds really.

Tbh i wouldn’t say we’re that lucky. Sure, we’re lucky enough to be born in the 21st century and not in 1636 as a medieval peasant. But there are so many things that we are missing out on. Like Advanced AI, significant life extension, etc that we were probably born too early for. And besides, we might all die in WW3.

"lucky" lol.

Tell me you know nothing about the way the world actually works without telling me you know nothing about how the world actually works.

I feel like I rather be living in the 80s.

How are people here so ignorant to actual historical breakthroughs? 10,000 years? What is wrong with you.

Your comparing a chat bot to agriculture and electricity? Are you insane?

Okay Okay then you mention how peoples "lives remain unchanged" when there were so many more breakthroughs going on in between these things you have listed? Like the discovery of convex and other lenses to focus light and invent the telescope opening up the entire universe for humanity only for Isaac Newton to come up with calculus before he even turned 30?

How one random person can have a problem wanting to make copies of documents and then over time discover graphite to make a graphite paper to make copies of documents only to experiment on it and MENTION to Edison that it reacts to electricity so he uses it to literally invent a telephone with exceptional audio quality leading to other breakthroughs.

Even just the change in a trade route making two countries come in contact with each other sharing knowledge causing the explosion of modern ideas just from a place like China where we got gunpowder, paper, ceramics etc etc

I see posts like these and realize. You people don't actually know much about the history of humanity at all. You don't understand the winding roads FULL of discovery and breakthroughs that lead up to these events.

Then maybe go ahead and list the things you think that the "tech explosion" has done that is tantamount to the discovery of electricity or the industrial revolution.

Go ahead and list just ONE way a LLM has changed the fucking GLOBE the way agriculture has.

This is just ludicrously ignorant stuff to say and shows you have no idea how something like the invention of a weaving loom to make fabric literally leads to the invention of the first computer in the first place.

It's estimated that approximately 108 billion Homo sapiens have existed up to now. This figure accounts for humans from the earliest modern Homo sapiens around 200,000 years ago to the present day. So the odds are roughly one in a billion. 

uh , guys ?
It's a chatbot , chill lol .

I've made my own luck throughout my whole life.  I've been screwed over by circumstance much more than I have caught good fortune by circumstance.  Any break that has gone my way has only done so because of my own foresight and aptitude and moral character.  So no, I don't feel particularly lucky, at least by outside circumstance.  I don't think ever in my life I've caught a major break just by sheer dumb luck.

100,000BC: "Nobody asked for throwable pointy sticks, why are you stealing the livelihoods of our skilled hunters?

I stated previously that we are seeing the first generation of hummans that will have an LLM/AI attached to them at birth... and whats interesting is that the "generation" is the "Gen Alpha" -- which was appriopriate for the first ever people who are born not knowing a world without AI as a complete entanglement around their Human life on this planet going forward are called the Alpha generation.... Lets hope at least these guys can Make The World A Better Place.

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Yes lucky, but also as a part of the generation that helped literally bild a lot of the required precursor infra that brought us here based on the "Wouldn't it be cool if"

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Wouldn't it be cool if I could do this!

and you show it... and they say wow - it'd be cool if!

And they show that and more go and this!

Or THIS

THAT!! YES THAT.

And it was cool...

Until... no... not that.

Wouldnt it be cool if we could not have this?

Or that.

and THIS. YES DEFINITELY NOT THIS!

And it wasnt cool, because we built be cause we could, and it was fun and great...

But now we're all caged in, by the prison of whats cool

and what if its too late....

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And now its time to see if what we wrought,

will still be cool and great

What hath AI brought;

Sorrow or Hilarity

For we cannot know the state

of the Singularity.