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The Myth of AI – Jaron Lanier

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Re: The Myth of AI – Jaron Lanier

#111

Post by cobaltblue »

stepvhen wrote: post #57
Houshalter wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's far more of a threat than any of those things. Nuclear war isn't inevitable, and wouldn't destroy the entire world, just the countries at war. Even a ridiculous world wide nuclear war would leave tons of survivors. Volcanoes and meteorites are so unlikely they aren't even worth mentioning. Superbugs would have to be intentionally engineered by a malicious group with a lot of resources, and so are very un…

>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?

I think a shorter tl;dr is simply that the ways a human-level or beyond AI can be programmed incorrectly (it eventually kills us all or worse), even trying our best to do it right, outnumber the ways it can be programmed correctly. If you don't believe this, I'm not sure how to convince you, other than to poke holes in your ideas about how a benevolent AI could be programmed correctly so you see that such an idea is actually a terrible one or at least insufficient. There are many level of detail attacks I could use, other attacks around the lack of a proof that the AI's goals and preferences will remain exactly the same let alone within a window of benevolence over time.

Re: The Myth of AI – Jaron Lanier

#112

Post by maaku »

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…

Most of the industrial revolution has been about replacing mindless physical labor with machines. The unemployed humans (or their children, typically) were given new jobs as "knowledge workers." In other words, jobs which required thought as the principal skill. Now thinking is being done by machines. So where will the new jobs come from?

Re: The Myth of AI – Jaron Lanier

#113

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

Re: The Myth of AI – Jaron Lanier

#114

Post by marcosdumay »

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…

People always overestimate technological progress at the short time, and underestimate it at the long time. (Somebody else said that, don't remember who.)

On what time-frame are you make those claims?

Re: The Myth of AI – Jaron Lanier

#115

Post by nickpsecurity »

Houshalter wrote: post #102
nickpsecurity wrote: post #53

Great article covering a lot of good topics. Especially the overpromise->winter effect and the fact that lots of whats in AI's are nonsense. My favorite part was this though: "The truth is that the part that causes the problem is the actuator. It's the interface to physicality. " BOOM! That was my exact argument in counterpoints to Superintelligence risks. I thought it was ridiculous to worry about what it thought wh…

Once AI is invented, what's to keep anyone in the world from building one? And not keeping it in a box? And that's assuming the box even works, and the AI can't hack out of it, or trick you into letting it out.

My AI that works in concert with surveillance state to hunt their AI's. Plus, anything or anyone too smart will have to be registered and monitored. Basically, the reaction to mutant powers on X-men.

Re: The Myth of AI – Jaron Lanier

#116

Post by mcguire »

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…

"Certainly it isn't human level now, and it might take a decade or two to get there."

Any chance you could define "human level" in a way to make this a meaningful sentence? Twenty-five years after I was introduced to this problem and I still have never heard a better definition of "intelligence" than the Turing test, and it's a purely operational, "I'll know it when I see it" thing.

Re: The Myth of AI – Jaron Lanier

#117

Post by nickpsecurity »

Another thing I'll add is many people forget that the only known super-intelligence, savant humans, still takes years of training data and introspection to get the intelligence to function in society. Takes even more to function better esp accounting for human nature.

So, I call bullshit on the idea there's a startup anywhere that's just going to turn on an AI we can't handle. We'll likely see it coming a mile away or the isolation it operated in will do it in when it faces human strategists.

Re: The Myth of AI – Jaron Lanier

#118

Post by jtolmar »

muaddirac wrote: post #87
Houshalter wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 c…

Taking a best-fit line like Moore's law as a fundamental law of the universe is a classic mistake.

Of course, there's no such thing as an inevitable progression of progress in AI research. Until we have AI software capable of contributing to AI research, of course.

Re: The Myth of AI – Jaron Lanier

#119

Post by tome »

pron wrote: post #16
kfk wrote: post #12

Well, at a logical level, it's one of the biggest existential threats, if 1. it can be done; 2. humans are intelligent enough to pull it off. There is a non 0 chance of AI (and related existential threat), as there is a non 0 chance of a meteorite coming down and wiping all of us off the Earth. But my guess is that most of us would say "YES" to a meteorite deviation project, while "Meh" to any attempt to better under…

Well, we can predict more-or-less what will happen when a large meteorite hits earth, but we have no clue (other than sci-fi scenarios) for the nature of the threat AI poses, if only because we are so far away from understanding what AI is. We don't know if intelligence can be separated from agency and agenda, we don't know if intelligence can be separated from emotions, and we don't even know if intelligence can eve…

> the argument for "human intelligence at a higher speed" fails on several grounds

I'd be interested if you said more about that.

Re: The Myth of AI – Jaron Lanier

#120

Post by tome »

kfk wrote: post #12

Well, at a logical level, it's one of the biggest existential threats, if 1. it can be done; 2. humans are intelligent enough to pull it off. There is a non 0 chance of AI (and related existential threat), as there is a non 0 chance of a meteorite coming down and wiping all of us off the Earth. But my guess is that most of us would say "YES" to a meteorite deviation project, while "Meh" to any attempt to better under…

Doesn't any attempt to better understand the AI problem just bring the (potential) AI problem closer?
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