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The Myth of AI – Jaron Lanier

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Re: The Myth of AI – Jaron Lanier

#131

Post by eanzenberg »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #99
eanzenberg wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The house price is set by what buyer's are willing to pay for them. This is taking into account that in median, 4 years of that person's work-output will be required to purchase a house.

In which country is that? Last time I checked, the common way for financing a house purchase in the entire Western world is through a mortgage loan, which makes the house price tied to the size of the loan a bank is willing to give to an average person.

That's not how prices are set. Just because I can borrow $X thousand dollars on my credit doesn't mean I go ahead and purchase all the big screen tvs and computers I want. Just because I can borrow $XX thousand to purchase a car doesn't mean I'm driving around in a new mercedes. Just because I can borrow $X million to purchase a house doesn't mean I will purchase real estate which will turn my net accrued savings to 0.

When people only think short-term (what's can I afford monthly) vs. long-term (what will I pay out over the life of the loan vs. what I'm getting now) they make mistakes. These mistakes are self-inflicted but these people tend to then blame any and all others for why they can't get ahead, why the system doesn't work, why the American dream is dead :).

Re: The Myth of AI – Jaron Lanier

#132

Post by ddingus »

mcguire wrote: post #129
TeMPOraL wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1. Because we have empathy and because we have no compelling economic reason to (economics always overruling silly things like empathy). 2. Empathy, which is a part of our emotions, is an incredibly complex thing we can't even begin to formalize yet - it's extremely unlikely that a random AI we'd build would happen to have the exact same emotional makeup as we do. 3. "Smart" has a particular meaning here when used in…

That's a good point. How is AI worse than a smart, amoral human?

It may have very long time frames to work in, may be faster or able to evade the nefarious detection intent of humans by working in ways very different from how we work.

Read a book recently that contained an interesting AI attack. Basically, it set a lot of small objects in motion, with complex orbits all computed to result in a large impact at some point in the future.

We would not notice something done this way, by analogy.

Re: The Myth of AI – Jaron Lanier

#133

Post by arethuza »

tome wrote: post #125
arethuza wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cobalt salted hydrogen bombs are one fairly plausible route - how many and how large they'd need to be is another question. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cobalt_bomb [Of course, they don't exist at the moment - but they wouldn't be that difficult to make as one advantage of a Doomsday bomb is that you don't need to deliver it so it can be made as large as you want through staging].

Interesting. So the idea is that a small group of people could unilaterally build and detonate one of these without anyone else being able to stop them?

In David Brin's novel Earth World War 3 is basically the world vs Switzerland - with the Swiss threatening to detonate large cobalt bombs buried under the Alps.

Re: The Myth of AI – Jaron Lanier

#134

Post by cobaltblue »

tome wrote: post #121
cobaltblue wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Adding to this, imagine you were part of an ancient alien species checking in on earth every so often. Around 4.5 billion years ago, Earth was formed. 500 million years later, the first self-replicators appeared. Another half billion years (now 3.5 billion years ago) for things to settle down and create the most recent ancestor from which all life descends from. Over the next 3 billion years nothing much happens, unt…

> This species at present could wipe out almost all life from the planet (if it wanted, which it doesn't) in multiple ways That's interesting. How could it? Please present a plausible scenario (more plausible than "The US president decides to cover the globe with nuclear explosions, and everyone with any degree of influence over the process just lets him do it").

My parenthetical is important. The "it doesn't [want to]" is precisely why many ideas won't work, because many adversaries within the species (the rest of us) will work against anyone trying, and getting enough people with the know-how and desire to try will be hard. In fact the hardest part of the fragment you pulled out is developing a strategy that will indeed end almost all life without first killing all humans. A lot of strategies are likely relatively long-term (and inplausible to actively work on because of adversaries, however some believe human activity is already an ongoing inadvertent mass-extinction event for other life and maybe ourselves eventually). However the thing in my mind when I wrote that was intentional asteroid impact. We've already demonstrated we can land on the things, NASA's been busy finalizing the details of a redirection mission, so redirecting a sufficient number of smaller ones or just one really big one (but why stop at one?) ought to do the trick for most plant and animal life.

Re: The Myth of AI – Jaron Lanier

#135

Post by amag »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #69
svanderbleek wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

3) Press/Media It's low hanging fruit, the public eats it up. Also people can be very intelligent but not have done the research in the field they are commenting on. Elon Musk and Stephan Hawking aren't AI PhDs.

I'll grant you Elon and Hawking, especially because the former is a "new guy", but otherwise intelligent people were talking about those issues for decades, and until very, very recently most people have either never heard of the issue, or thought those talking about it are loonies. Mass media is late to the party.

This all reminds me of the Y2K debacle. The world would end. Everything would stop. A common example given in the media (by "IT-professionals") was that all elevators would stop, I was always like: "WTF would an elevator check what date it is?"

Re: The Myth of AI – Jaron Lanier

#136

Post by TeMPOraL »

eanzenberg wrote: post #131
TeMPOraL wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In which country is that? Last time I checked, the common way for financing a house purchase in the entire Western world is through a mortgage loan, which makes the house price tied to the size of the loan a bank is willing to give to an average person.

That's not how prices are set. Just because I can borrow $X thousand dollars on my credit doesn't mean I go ahead and purchase all the big screen tvs and computers I want. Just because I can borrow $XX thousand to purchase a car doesn't mean I'm driving around in a new mercedes. Just because I can borrow $X million to purchase a house doesn't mean I will purchase real estate which will turn my net accrued savings to…

That's besides the point. Most young people today can't afford a house. So they take a mortgage loan to buy one, and surprisingly, houses tend to be priced just at the level of the loan an average person can get.

The situation is different from the TVs and computers and cars because those are not considered as important as your own house. Most people eventually have to move out, so they have to participate in the game. I believe we call it "inelastic demand".

Re: The Myth of AI – Jaron Lanier

#137

Post by TeMPOraL »

amag wrote: post #135
TeMPOraL wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'll grant you Elon and Hawking, especially because the former is a "new guy", but otherwise intelligent people were talking about those issues for decades, and until very, very recently most people have either never heard of the issue, or thought those talking about it are loonies. Mass media is late to the party.

This all reminds me of the Y2K debacle. The world would end. Everything would stop. A common example given in the media (by "IT-professionals") was that all elevators would stop, I was always like: "WTF would an elevator check what date it is?"

Yeah. I remember Y2K and since I was already taking baby steps in programming back then, I was also perplexed as for why it would matter.

16 years later now, I see that about the only thing that could do some real damage was software in factories and stock exchanges breaking, and requiring downtime to fix. It would be that downtime that could do actual harm. Because I've now seen some code that runs in factories and... man, how this is totally and utterly fucked up. I'm happy nothing bad happened back in 2000. I'm also surprised that some manufacturing plants are running at all.

Re: The Myth of AI – Jaron Lanier

#138

Post by robotcookies »

I don't think this is as much about AI as it may seem. I mean, yes, it's about AI. But what it's really about is a human tendency which is to create things and meaning when we don't necessarily have the evidence of them.

What this is really about is religion. More specifically, we have people who are the most non-religious group out there (like scientists) and they dismiss formal religion only to recreate another version of it:

"A core of technically proficient, digitally-minded people reject traditional religions and superstitions. They set out to come up with a better, more scientific framework. But then they re-create versions of those old religious superstitions!"

And I see this more often than just in computer science. It happens all the time in economics.

Re: The Myth of AI – Jaron Lanier

#139

Post by amag »

cygnus_a wrote: post #88

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 w…

1) Or we enter a post-scarcity era where there will be an abundance of food produced by autonomous machines. No one "needs" to work in order to feed themselves. 2) There are a lot of things that are weaponizable - today.

Re: The Myth of AI – Jaron Lanier

#140

Post by eli_gottlieb »

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…

I was with you until you plunged straight into global-warming denial.
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