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The Myth of AI – Jaron Lanier

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Re: The Myth of AI – Jaron Lanier

#81

Post by moheeb »

gearhart wrote: post #62
IanDrake wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The real question for me is: What is motivating otherwise very intelligent people to promote the idea that AI will take all our jobs and/or enslave us? Possible answers: 1) To prop up their investments in AI to get higher valuation. 2) To reach a political goal, such as basic income, which is often justified as necessary in a world where computers and robots take over the work force. 3) ?

Whilst the "enslave us" thing is a bit alarmist, regarding it taking our jobs there's a certain analogy here with mechanisation. You pointed out (below) that historically people have often been terrified that machines would take all of our jobs, and that terror has turned out to be unfounded. But they weren't wrong, they were just wrong in thinking it would be a bad thing. Over the last 150 years, the proportion of A…

"Over the last 150 years, the proportion of Americans employed in agriculture has dropped from ~70% to ~2% [1]. They've literally been replaced by machines."

In most of the fields I've seen they've been replaced by Mexicans.

Re: The Myth of AI – Jaron Lanier

#82

Post by TeMPOraL »

eanzenberg wrote: post #76
TeMPOraL wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The difference is that this time we're running out of work we could give to those who will get displaced by machines. Yes, we can keep inventing bullshit jobs, but we've already reached the point when people are starting to ask, if working for the sake of working makes any sense.

Wat. I keep hearing the argument that there "won't be useful work to be done soon." Considering that a median house still costs 4x yearly median salary means that not only do we live in a resource-scarce world but we will continue to for a long time. Just because you don't "see" the work humans currently do doesn't allow you to be ignorant to it happening. Just because you personally don't want to work (as most peopl…

Why, there still will be plenty of work to do - maintenance, for instance. But probably not enough for everyone.

That "a median house still costs 4x yearly median salary" means exactly nothing. The size of median salary is market driven, and the price of housing reflects the games banks and housing developers are playing, and thus can be arbitrarily high.

Re: The Myth of AI – Jaron Lanier

#83

Post by pixl97 »

eanzenberg wrote: post #76
TeMPOraL wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The difference is that this time we're running out of work we could give to those who will get displaced by machines. Yes, we can keep inventing bullshit jobs, but we've already reached the point when people are starting to ask, if working for the sake of working makes any sense.

Wat. I keep hearing the argument that there "won't be useful work to be done soon." Considering that a median house still costs 4x yearly median salary means that not only do we live in a resource-scarce world but we will continue to for a long time. Just because you don't "see" the work humans currently do doesn't allow you to be ignorant to it happening. Just because you personally don't want to work (as most peopl…

>Considering that a median house still costs 4x yearly median salary means that not only do we live in a resource-scarce world but we will continue to for a long time.

Are housing prices, at least in the U.S. actually attached to the value of work, or they mostly affected by the banks willingness to hand out money?

Let's go another step and take work out of it completely. If houses were free, there would still be houses that are worth far more than others, simply because of proximity to other things of human interest.

Re: The Myth of AI – Jaron Lanier

#84

Post by Houshalter »

IanDrake wrote: post #54
tim333 wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

3) Because it's a real possibility. What makes you think the otherwise very intelligent people are wrong? Maybe we should look to the stupid and to philosophers who don't understand computers for answers?

>What makes you think the otherwise very intelligent people are wrong? Mostly history. Specifically the history of such predictions made by smart people of their own time that never came to pass. I assure you, this has all been predicted before. AI taking over the earth is always a decade away. There are people who wear tin-foil hats and there are those that sell tin-foil hats. The former think they're saving the wor…

So their predictions are wrong, but yours are correct? You can't argue against someone else by saying all predictions are unreliable, and then insert your own predictions instead.

And nice, you managed to cram global warming denial in there too.

Re: The Myth of AI – Jaron Lanier

#85

Post by maldusiecle »

Houshalter wrote: post #63
stepvhen wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>And it's very likely to kill us all. This is absolutely absurd. Could you elaborate on that instead of just pointing to a book?

The tl;dr is that we will eventually have AIs which are smarter than humans. Much smarter than humans, to the point that we are to them what chimpanzees are to us. They would have godlike powers and abilities. And this could happen very rapidly, as the first smart AIs design even better AIs and better computers, which then design even better AIs, and so on. The second point is that they would have no reason to keep u…

> The second point is that they would have no reason to keep us around. They would do whatever we programmed them to do, to the point of absurdity.

This is where this line of reasoning completely falls apart for me. Any complex system is going to do unexpected things that weren't deliberately designed for. My laptop computed doesn't do "whatever it was programmed to, to the point of absurdity." Why would you expect a program complex enough to simulate the human mind to act in such a predictable way, when none of the much simpler programs we already have act that way?

Re: The Myth of AI – Jaron Lanier

#86

Post by pixl97 »

stepvhen wrote: post #55
apsec112 wrote: post #21

This article seems very confused. Most importantly, it doesn't distinguish between what AI can do right now , and what the theoretical limit of AI is, in 50 or 100 or 500 years. Everyone agrees that AI today, and in the near future, doesn't even vaguely resemble a "person". That doesn't imply that much more powerful, "person-like" AI will forever be impossible. Airplanes weren't a practical means of travel in 1910, b…

Religion itself does a lot of hand waving, and people tend to talk about the "existential threat" of AI with a lot of hand waving. Its an easy comparison to make. Also, a claim, by itself, can't be a religion. It would need people to attach to it with a certain fervor. >it doesn't distinguish between what AI can do right now, and what the theoretical limit of AI is, in 50 or 100 or 500 years. AI, by itself, cannot in…

>AI, by itself, cannot interact with the physical world, past bit-flipping registers on a cpu (a negligible action). For AI to be a threat, in my opinion, it would need to be coupled with some form of physical manifestation that could, in some fashion, not be under the control of a human.

Now that's just silly.

An AI does not need a body for any reason. What it needs is a voice, software is pretty good at simulating that, and we can simulate images and video pretty well too. If an AI can become a master in the art of persuasion (say coupled with a great hacking ability) it could easily convince people to act in its name (much like old books do now) and pay off others do to its bidding.

Re: The Myth of AI – Jaron Lanier

#87

Post by muaddirac »

Houshalter wrote: post #50
tsunamifury wrote: post #18

I think Jaron knows what many engineers who have worked on AI know: That the external promise of AI is far more inflated than the capability of the actual technology. It's simply that when the current technology gets just complicated enough for the above-average person to no longer understand, everyone starts assigning magical properties and expectations to it. This results in short term over-valuations, which inevit…

I understand how the technology works, and I still believe it's amazing and rapidly progressing. Certainly it isn't human level now, and it might take a decade or two to get there. But it's still an incredible advancement. AI has gotten way better than anyone expected in the last 5 years or so. Progress in many of these areas like image recognition was super slow and challenging. And all of a sudden computers are app…

One of the many good points that Lanier made was that there is not currently an inevitable, moore's-law-like progression that will take modern AI methods towards the "superintelligence" that is meant when AI is discussed as an existential threat.

Coupling that with the fact that any AI will be limited by its human-defined interface leaves me pretty unconcerned about AI, even if we ever figure out what truly makes a conscious, intelligent being and determine how to replicate it fully in some other medium.

That said, I appreciate Bostrom's work as a philosophical rather than practical matter.

Re: The Myth of AI – Jaron Lanier

#88

Post by cygnus_a »

I think there are two valid existential concerns regarding AI:

1) Widespread use of advanced AI in robotics/production has the ability to bankrupt the working populace, at which point something closer to pure socialism may take over; not so much an annihilation scenario.

2) AI is weaponizable -- at a certain point, given other technological advances in addition to AI, a relatively small amount of like-minded people will be able to produce unique weapons of mass destruction.

Re: The Myth of AI – Jaron Lanier

#89

Post by TeMPOraL »

moheeb wrote: post #81
gearhart wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Whilst the "enslave us" thing is a bit alarmist, regarding it taking our jobs there's a certain analogy here with mechanisation. You pointed out (below) that historically people have often been terrified that machines would take all of our jobs, and that terror has turned out to be unfounded. But they weren't wrong, they were just wrong in thinking it would be a bad thing. Over the last 150 years, the proportion of A…

" Over the last 150 years, the proportion of Americans employed in agriculture has dropped from ~70% to ~2% [1]. They've literally been replaced by machines. " In most of the fields I've seen they've been replaced by Mexicans.

Then fine, it's probably 5% if you count them in. It doesn't change the fact that all the machines we now have, combined with the fertilizer revolution of the early XX century that started with the Haber process[0], has increased the food production output per worker by orders of magnitude.

[0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haber_process

Re: The Myth of AI – Jaron Lanier

#90

Post by stepvhen »

Houshalter wrote: post #63
stepvhen wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>And it's very likely to kill us all. This is absolutely absurd. Could you elaborate on that instead of just pointing to a book?

The tl;dr is that we will eventually have AIs which are smarter than humans. Much smarter than humans, to the point that we are to them what chimpanzees are to us. They would have godlike powers and abilities. And this could happen very rapidly, as the first smart AIs design even better AIs and better computers, which then design even better AIs, and so on. The second point is that they would have no reason to keep u…

>The tl;dr is that we will eventually have AIs which are smarter than humans. Much smarter than humans, to the point that we are to them what chimpanzees are to us. >The second point is that they would have no reason to keep us around.

Questions:

(1) What reason do we have to keep chimpanzee's around? Why don't we just kill them all? They can't even do calculus.

(2) Whatever the answer for question 1, wouldn't an AI consider that same scenario regarding humans? Assuming an AI is truly smarter than a human?

(3) If AI gets to the point where they are much smarter than humans, wouldn't it follow that there would be AI philosophers? Or activists? Or pacifists? Would there be such a thing as an AI civilization? Or is your scenario just a few AI overlords that some how slipped through the cracks of regulation by humans?

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