Welcome to the Era of Experience [pdf]
26 comments
·April 20, 2025artninja1988
Related: https://www.deepmind.com/publications/reward-is-enough. Not sure if I buy the reward is enough hypothesis though. Imo an AI with a fixed reward function doesn't seem like agi to me
jgbmlg
It's ironic that machine intelligence is advancing during an era when human intelligence is declining.
chneu
It's not. Everytime there's a new form of media or communication there's an uptick in "bad actors". Think yellow journalism or any of the moral panics around TV programming. Even back when the printing press was invented there was an uptick in troll behavior. One of the Green brothers posited that martin Luther was really just a pamphlet troll.
With social media and the Internet, stupid just got louder. I don't think people got stupid.
sdsd
Yes and no. In swaths of the world, we're actually observing a reverse Flynn effect and IQ has been dropping, in some places for decades.
Eg: https://www.popularmechanics.com/science/a43469569/american-...
_Algernon_
This started long before the internet.
jimbob45
IQ tests are administration-sensitive and have changed dramatically since the beginning of such a Flynn effect study. The population makeup of many countries has changed in recent years to include many immigrants for whom the study would make exceedingly little sense to include. IQ tests do not cover and do not claim to cover a comprehensive view of human intelligence, famously lacking verbal and social components entirely. It is possible past IQ tests were simply overtuned and we’re now seeing the natural correction.
croes
Not just louder, it got in power
codeflo
Amplifying stupid can be very deadly, though. In some sense, the printing press caused the 30-year war, and radio brought us World War II. Eventually, society will adapt. I just wish we could find a way to adapt faster than the bad actors do.
disqard
(continuing in that vein, and taking the liberty of making a giant oversimplification):
...and TV brought us Ronald Reagan, and the Internet gave us Trump as POTUS.
baxtr
Yes. Exactly right.
Also well documented. Anyone interested, read the book: Attention Merchants by Wu.
dullcrisp
Maybe machine intelligence only seems to be advancing from the perspective of human intelligence
teberl
I like that thought.
enaaem
Most people are not stupid. They react to their emotions.
CuriouslyC
The human brain optimizes for efficiency, if that extra intelligence doesn't confer survival benefits it'll be lost. I can't imagine that intelligence doesn't confer survival and reproductive benefits though, it's more likely that the gradient of survival and reproduction between the most intelligent and least has shrunk. In a sense civilization is coddling the weak, and humanity is getting weaker for it.
unsnap_biceps
I feel like declining human intelligence is a result of advancing machine intelligence. Computers are a force multiplier and societal pressure towards building intelligence is reduced.
whatnow37373
So the AGI/ASI problem might solve itself: we slowly become incapable of iterating on the problem while existing AI is not nearly advanced enough to pick up the slack.
It’s quite beautiful. Once a civilization tries to build machine intelligence it slowly degrades its own capacity during the process thus eventually losing all hope of ever achieving their goal - assuming they still understand their goal at that point. Maybe it’s an algorithm in the Universe to keep us from being naughty.
huijzer
Maybe on average, but I think it’s probably correlated to inequality. The kid of two Oxford professors will probably be smarter than a kid that grew up in poverty. The school system is aimed at mitigating these differences, but if on average everyone gets less intelligent maybe the school system is working poorly.
lazide
Eh, or there is a massive effort to push as many people as possible down Maslow’s hierarchy of needs - which also shows up as being less intelligent.
Happening right out in the open, and quite blatantly.
baxtr
Is there scientific evidence for this statement?
anal_reactor
> when human intelligence is declining
It's not. It's just that previously we were unaware how stupid people are, and now we're starting to understand this.
quantumHazer
Is it me or this is yet another PR stunt masked as a serious article with LaTeX and all the fancy things? The graph doesn’t even make sense.
I’m burning out from all this hypester type of thing, it’s really really tiring.
ChrisArchitect
Richard Sutton: "Ultimately (this) will become a chapter in the book 'Designing an Intelligence' edited by George Konidaris and published by MIT Press."
Wowzers, it’s happening imminently. Great to know that we can expect agents that learn from experience very very soon!
When they’re here I’ll make an upvote farming bot that learns from experience how not to get caught and unleash it on HM.
After that I’ll make an agent that runs a SaaS company that learns from experience how to make money and I’ll finally be able to chill out and play video games.
That last thing I’ll actually do myself, I won’t use an agent, although the experience revolution stared with games. Ironic!
But I’ll make an agent that learns from experience what kind of games I like and how to make them. This way I’ll have an endless supply.