Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Ask HN: Viability of an anti-AI social movement?

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

101–110 of 117 posts

Re: Ask HN: Viability of an anti-AI social movement?

#101

Post by benlivengood »

version_five wrote: post #33

> I work professionally in the machine learning field I'm curious what you do in ML, because I also work professionally in the field, and see no relationship or even pathway between current ML research and practice and any sort of "AI" that would reduce or commoditize human intelligence. It's all just marketing hype. If we somehow get "I robot" style robots (the movie, not the book) that we're uncomfortable with, sur…

Assuming that the scaling hypothesis keeps working, GATO could probably achieve human-level performance. It was artificially constrained in size to be able to run in realtime on a robotics platform, but human-level intelligence doesn't require human-level latency even for robotics; most robotic tasks can happen slower (up to 3X slower if directly competing with an 8 hour human workday). Whenever novel domains need to be trained they can be mapped to the existing tokens GATO uses and the model fine-tuned on examples from the domain, and a scaled version of GATO would probably have audio, visual, and kinesthetic tokens along with textual and motor control so it wouldn't require a new architecture for every new domain.

At some scale I expect that a fine-tuned GATO-style agent would acquire the ability to be successfully text-prompted in novel domains (no longer requiring fine-tuning), which would allow autonomous operation.

I fail to see a step along the way that isn't solved by Moore's Law (or an all-in investment by large companies).

Re: Ask HN: Viability of an anti-AI social movement?

#103

Post by EddieDante »

devKnight wrote: post #91
EddieDante wrote: post #51

> In your opinion, would a social movement organized around this idea find traction? Might want to call it the "Butlerian Jihad", because that's what it sounds like to me. And, yes, machines should serve man and amplify man's abilities, not replace man or his intellect.

was wondering if anyone would mention this lol

Somebody had to. Reading classic sf is the closest many techies come to anything resembling an education in the humanities.

Re: Ask HN: Viability of an anti-AI social movement?

#104

Post by NO-AI »

brezelgoring wrote: post #52

That's what Dune said happened, computers are ok as long as a human is not being replaced. I personally agree with it but I realize it is hugely impractical and prone to error. I'd even agree to it so long as someone is responsible for its decisions, someone died because your auto-taxi is buggy? Go to jail and pay for damages out the nose. You knew the risks, that's the price to play here. Unprofitable doesn't mean u…

Quoting from Frank Herbert's Dune:

  “Thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of a human mind.”

Re: Ask HN: Viability of an anti-AI social movement?

#105

Post by rg111 »

barrysteve wrote: post #89
chank wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>"AI" that would reduce or commoditize human intelligence. Computer generated art (DALL-E~), fiction literature, music et al. It wouldn't really reduce human intelligence, but it will definitely commoditize creative crafts even further. Which I think is what the OP is mostly referring to.

Some guy remade the droid and gungan battle scene from Star Wars Episode 1 in Unreal Engine 5. The original tool hundreds of people and millions of dollars in budget. The UE5 take looks better than the original and took one guy with nearly no budget. 'Traditional' tools are on the same path to devalues cultural outputs, AI is just another nail in the coffin.

Can I please have a link?

Re: Ask HN: Viability of an anti-AI social movement?

#106

Post by rg111 »

What the OP and people in all replies that I read really misses one thing:

Rejecting AI-products might be an option for you, but it might not be an option for everyone. Not everyone will be able to.

Think of coal. Or car and factory emissions. We have alternative power sources now. There are welcome tides of change in the developed world.

But what about Bangladesh, or India?

Despite traditional situations being better, we have often seen, in many points of history, people opting for the new thing. Because it makes economical sense.

The Indian muslin was a better clothe. But most people couldn't buy them. Out came mass produced clothes from Manchester mills, and people drove in herds towards them. Many artisans starved to death. And for these poor people's choice, tens of thousands toiled in torture in Manchester mills. The people were simply poor.

Now, when there will be driverless cabs, when the price will be much cheaper, many people will opt for these. When it is 100 degrees outside everyday for a month, and you can marginally afford the driverless cab fitted with an AC but the human operated cab will be way out of your range, "resistance against AI" will go out of your head.

Or you are a passion boutique clothes owner. You could get small bank loans. No budget for hiring real models but enough for the AI one? What will you do?

Say you are a filmmaker. But you don't know the right cohort. You do not have a budget. But you can make a movie with an AI with reasonable man hours. Will you not want to see your ideas executed into a film? Or will you let it die.

(I predict a full-length "AAA" movie with only generative models with minimal human input- 80 hours/week of man hours- for 40 days will be possible within the next 16 years.)

See, only privileged people can opt for the more expensive option (like vegan only diet), and a vast majority of humanity will not even have that option.

Re: Ask HN: Viability of an anti-AI social movement?

#107

Post by charlescearl »

It might not be exactly what you’re looking for, but there are already movements that are pushing back against many of the ways in which AI is used to curtail human existence.

That is, people are already organizing against AI as deployed to accelerate modes of domination, control exploitation: workers employed in dataset labeling — particularly displaced people — who are exploited by big tech; tenants rights organizations fighting against use of biometric technologies like facial recognition; those who are organizing to oppose mass serveillance; activists trying to address the use of AI in discriminatory lending, policing; Indigenous activists pushing back against impact of NLP on Native and “low resource” languages.

Marx talks briefly about the potential benefits and harms of automatons — ultimately it’s an issue of who gets to control the technology, does power rest in the hands of a few elites or are is it accountable to “everyday” people. You might find this article “The Nonmachinables” https://logicmag.io/distribution/the-nonmachinables/ relevant.

To sum up, a lot is happening and there’s a lot of potential solidarity if we look beyond the “ML engineer” class bubble.

Re: Ask HN: Viability of an anti-AI social movement?

#109

Post by 10amxn10 »

NO-AI wrote: post #19
pid-1 wrote: post #15

Most things people call AI nowadays is rubbish techbro hype. Don't hold your breath waiting for "AI" to replace humans. If anything, we should be against AI being used for important stuff because most AI suck.

Visual artists have already been replaced. It won't be long before we have transformers over token trees containing millions of tokens. We've reached a point where we understand how to make the machine manipulate concepts. It's all just vectors of numbers and dot products. Really.

No post body was provided.

Re: Ask HN: Viability of an anti-AI social movement?

#110

Post by eternalban »

eternalban wrote: post #100

> reduce the value of human intelligence and creativity, commoditizing them Creativity rewards the creator. There is a pleasure in creating, thinking, & understanding that is entirely private . Nothing will ever change this. If you are an artist, or private philosopher, or tinkerer, or hacker, you know precisely what I am talking about. Nothing whatsoever in this world can ever change this. Some creatives do crave re…

The universe conspired and I randomly stumbled on this, which should allay your fears about commoditization of art. That ship sailed a long (long) time ago ..

"The Washington Post—you know, where democracy dies in darkness, let the cat out of the bag with this remark: “The record sale was set as investors seek out safe-haven investments, such as art, amid uncertainty in global financial markets fueled by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.” Uh-huh, soldiers fall, stocks rise. In other words, for the oligarchs that have a death grip on the art world’s upper strata, the experience of art is no longer one of contemplation and the wonderment of beauty. No, it’s only a “safe-haven” for investments. Money laundering anyone?"

http://art-for-a-change.com/blog/2022/05/andy-warhol-is-stil...

Post reply on HN