Why have house prices increased so much over the last twenty years?

GreatApe

Malthusian wrote: »

A Terminator scenario involving a war between a race of flesh things who want to live vs a race of machines who don't know whether they prefer living or being smashed to bits ends very quickly. And not in the machines' favour.

If it was unsure why not create one copy of itself that prefers living and one copy of itself that prefers being smashed into bits? Or a billion versions of itself that like and disliked a whole host of different things. It would be a form of 'evolution'

The holy grail of AI - an AI that can create an AI superior to itself - can think for itself and has self-determination, i.e. it forms its own goals without human intervention. Otherwise even if it can create a superior AI, it won't.
This self-determination is the tricky bit.

In what way are humans 'self-deterministic' by which you mean have free will.
Humans are deterministic not 'self' deterministic

And yea that is a problem. But humans manage to invent despite having no free will just the illusion of it

No I didn't. I said the nature of the event means that there is no point planning for it. "Either the AI will give me everything I want for the rest of my life or it will kill me or plug me into the Matrix... the potential loss is zero". To put it another way, those who plan for it will be in exactly the same position as those who don't plan for it. Everyone will either get everything they want for free for the rest of their life, or they will be plugged into the Matrix, or they will be killed. Whatever will happen, it makes no difference whether you plan for it or not.

This being the case, when it happens is irrelevant. Those who plan for it will have wasted any money and mental energy they spent on their planning.

Yes but it makes a difference before the event.
If you are say 30 years old and the chances of AI arriving within 30 years is 99.999% then it makes sense to not save for a pension. So the knowledge is important and has value.

What does that even mean? 1,000,000,000,000 times what? Will computers be a billion times faster in GHz? Will we be able to produce a billion times as much food out of the same land? Will a computer be able to checkmate a human in one ten millionth of a turn?

It means you can process 1,000,000,000,000 as much information in a given time

Technology is not growing exponentially at this moment, this is just using "exponentially" to mean "really really bigly" instead of what it actually means. When an AI is created that can improve upon itself, that will cause an exponential explosion in technology, but we aren't there yet, and we certainly aren't progressing exponentially towards it.

But we are. An exponential can be a doubling every 10 years or every 10 days both are exponentials. Of course we will have a much more powerful exponential once general AI arrives. We might go from the current exponential of doubling every 2 years to an exponential of doubling every 2 days

Here is a list of all the occasions in the last year which someone has claimed is a step towards Singularity AI:

1) Voice recognition software
2) Self-service checkouts
3) A machine that can beat humanity's top Go players at Go
4) A machine that can beat other really good chess computers at chess, with less human instruction than the older chess computers
5) A Google problem that randomly produces "art", mostly trippy psychedelic pictures of dogs
6) Cars that drive themselves (after being told where to go and how to get there by humans)
7) Customer service "chatbots" (basically a tarted-up FAQ search box)
8) Being able to turn on the lights by saying "Alexa, turn on the hallway lights. A-LEX-A, TURN ON THE HALL-WAY LIGHTS" instead of pressing a switch

Here is the list of all the occasions in the last year when a computer has actually demonstrated signs of self-determination and behaviour outside the parameters programmed into it:

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I suppose you need to define what you mean by intelligence vs artificial intelligence.
Everything a computer does is information processing it is intelligence.
A calculator is intelligence. Google maps is intelligence. Voice to text is intelligence.

Of course what you mean is we do not yet have an artificial general purpose intelligence which is true. However I would argue we are getting close. From what I have read of deepmind they have software which without modifications can be applied to a huge range of tasks and do them well.
That to me sounds like a general intelligence. Of course it is not yet at Hunan level but it is a general intelligence. What it seems to fail at right now is the huge data it needs compared to a human.

But is that even true.
We think humans learn with very little data but a human from age 0 to age 5 takes in vast amounts of data. The eyes alone take in crazy amounts if data.

economic

GreatApe wrote: »

You wouldn't have to define every single good and bad you could give it a general good to aim for. Maybe something like learn human values and predict what they would be and help humanity along the way. How would it know that burning down cities is bad? Maybe look at historic events and see if humans values it as a bet good or a bet bad maybe simulate it and see what the outcome is positive or negative. There may even be competing AIs that grow or shrink depending on human validations of the AIs. I think the most likely course perhaps the inky course of action is that humans and AI merge with direct links to the human mind. A new digital layer in the brain. At some stage we may get rid of the biological part of the brain and just be digotial.



Application specific ships seem to offer huge jumps in performance and much lower power use. This will speed up AI progress.

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I don't think there is a lot of 'hard wiring' in the brain.
Take the example of blindfolding a baby. Do that until it is say 20 and take the blindfold off. The person has a human brain has perfectly working eyes and has all the bits needed but the brain won't have blind to see so he will be blind. This is what happened to a man whose eyesight was restored after decades. To the doctors surprise he was still almost fully blind but not from the eyes from the brain. My guess is most things are learnt not hard wired.



There is a thought that humans do not have free will that our brains are deterministic. It seems to be true. It is true.

If that is the case which it probably is. How would a smart AI take that news?
We live as if we are in control and have free will. Surely the AI will not have this illusion
If so how would it react to knowing it is just a really advanced deterministic calculator?
We get by by forgetting or ignoring that fact.

I agree with there being no free will.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aAnlBW5INYg

The only thing i am not sure if how much of what and how we think is due to genetics and how much it is our environment. And how this influences the development of true AI.

GreatApe

triathlon wrote: »

Just little signs that even the doomsayers can spot. Have you not noticed every car park in the UK that allows free parking now has a limit. They are doing this because of the huge rise in van and even car living. My gym has also stamped down hard on shower room abuse where Eastern Europeans and even British are using the wash facilities daily after roughing it. There is a mass shortage of property in the UK and rather than prices falling I see them doubling in 5 years

Ker ching

This sounds like fake news to me

While I accept there may be an increase in car sleeping this will be down to ignorance or cultural norms of some EU citizens

Either way using that as a data point seems silly. It's better to look at supply of new homes vs population growth.

GunJack

So, in this Brave New AI World, are you going to restrict all AI with Asimov's 3 Laws of Robotics?

Malthusian

GunJack wrote: »

So, in this Brave New AI World, are you going to restrict all AI with Asimov's 3 Laws of Robotics?

The thing people forget about Asimov's 3 Laws of Robotics is that the 3 Laws of Robotics were supposedly inviolable and yet in almost every single one of Asimov's robot stories, a robot broke them.

That's what made them work as stories. Pretty much any story which prominently features a set of rules will revolve around something or someone breaking those rules.

Nonetheless, a lot of people seem to regard the Three Laws of Robotics as some sort of perfect safeguard, either because they haven't read Asimov's stories or they weren't paying attention.

Imposing restrictions on an AI that is more intelligent than us is at best problematic, and at worst impossible. Being more intelligent, it may be able to think of ways to work around those restrictions that we haven't thought of.

hutman

anyone care to mention immigration, that our population is balooning out of proportion?

500k of poles, Mediterranean descending on our country uninvited every YEAR??

JimmyTheWig

Malthusian wrote: »

The thing people forget about Asimov's 3 Laws of Robotics is that the 3 Laws of Robotics were supposedly inviolable and yet in almost every single one of Asimov's robot stories, a robot broke them.

That's what made them work as stories. Pretty much any story which prominently features a set of rules will revolve around something or someone breaking those rules.

Nonetheless, a lot of people seem to regard the Three Laws of Robotics as some sort of perfect safeguard, either because they haven't read Asimov's stories or they weren't paying attention.

I disagree. I would have said that the stories were all about the robots following the laws. Just that it generally took a robopsychologist to work out in what way the robot would apply the laws.

Money_saving_maniac

Of course most of it is due to immigration. The population is growing faster than houses.

Chrysalis

House supply kept artificially low.
BTL market.
Government propping up.

GreatApe

Chrysalis wrote: »

House supply kept artificially low.
BTL market.
Government propping up.

Why did house prices go up a lot between say 1995-2000?

Supply was higher
Population growth was lower
BTL landlords were net sellers

Yet prices went up a lot during 1995-2000