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Do we need to worry about artificial stupidity?

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Re: Do we need to worry about artificial stupidity?

#61

Post by elliekelly »

DanielBMarkham wrote: post #57
celticmusic wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

what you're spouting is just religion all over again. There will always be a certain segment of the population that are into drugs, into religion, into politics, into the mindless entertainment provided by youtube, ad nauseum. But it will never be all of humanity, or even most of humanity. The trash still needs to be collected, the electricity still needs to be generated, the food still needs to be made and distribut…

No, I'm not. Religion is a formalized system of causality about things we do not understand: the sky god wants us to eat grapes, we do not eat grapes, there are floods, therefore we must eat more grapes. It's not wrong or right, it's non-rational. Religions know how things work, you just can't reason with them. I'm arguing from ignorance: we cannot know. My only additional point is that not only can we not know, we c…

Do you have a blog? If so you should consider writing a post that synthesizes your last few comments in this thread - AI, democracy, and religion. I say that, selfishly, because I would quite like to read it.

Re: Do we need to worry about artificial stupidity?

#62

Post by jerf »

MisterTea wrote: post #60

I can't blame Youtube, or any social media here at all. The enemy here is ignorance which is the root enabler for spreading this garbage. The only way to fix that is via education. Good luck. A well educated populace that thinks for itself is less profitable because you can't sell them a line of bullshit. And you wonder why education budgets are under attack. Another issue is how we humans emotionally relate educatio…

"Instead of trying to fight propaganda with education we should disguise education as easy to digest propaganda."

How is this different from what we are already doing?

I do not just mean that as mindless snark. There's a selection effect, where children can only handle even more radically simplified versions of reality than even our feeble adult minds can handle, so by necessity, it's already been processed down to that level because nothing else would stick even a little. A common example is "The civil war was caused by slavery", which gets mocked, but it's not like there's any explanation you can fit into a middle-school textbook that isn't just as simplified and loaded with the biases of the simplifier. (Which themselves are the result of the bias-loaded simplifications that they were themselves fed....)

Re: Do we need to worry about artificial stupidity?

#63

Post by kordlessagain »

theferalrobot wrote: post #51
pjc50 wrote: post #11

There's a lot to be said for this line of argument. The stupidity of the Youtube recommendation engine has wrecked Brazilian politics, for example: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/11/world/americas/youtube-br... (The deliberate construction of an AI that pays people to produce lies to damage other people's health and welfare sounds like a farfetched science fiction plot. Accidentally building one, and then trying to…

I think it is worth pointing out that a lot of this, 'artificial stupidity' is simply a problem of scale. People may think of Google as a leading Ai company and in many respects that is true, but is so many others it is not. When Google utilizes a model it has to work across billions of users where the margins are tiny on each user, the models have to be damn simple. The industry has far better than what Google offer…

I would add to this line of reasoning that companies don't particularly care about a given model one way or the other, as long as it makes them money and is easy to manage. Not all these models will be good for users, however, nor will they be obvious in the damage the model causes later in other systems.

Re: Do we need to worry about artificial stupidity?

#65

Post by kaolti »

xamuel wrote: post #56

A lot of what we call AI these days (especially neural network stuff) should really be called "artificial knee-jerk reactions". A neural network trained to detect traffic lights is 'intelligent' only insofar as your leg is 'intelligent' when it involuntarily kicks in response to a tap on the knee. Of course, automating a knee-jerk reaction in response to traffic lights can still be extremely useful (say, for self-dri…

Agree. I would argue context makes all the difference in real intelligence and we can never define context because it's multi level, slightly different for everyone and constantly changing.

On top of all that forcing a certain context across the board can have countless unintended consequences.

Re: Do we need to worry about artificial stupidity?

#66

Post by celticmusic »

DanielBMarkham wrote: post #57
celticmusic wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

what you're spouting is just religion all over again. There will always be a certain segment of the population that are into drugs, into religion, into politics, into the mindless entertainment provided by youtube, ad nauseum. But it will never be all of humanity, or even most of humanity. The trash still needs to be collected, the electricity still needs to be generated, the food still needs to be made and distribut…

No, I'm not. Religion is a formalized system of causality about things we do not understand: the sky god wants us to eat grapes, we do not eat grapes, there are floods, therefore we must eat more grapes. It's not wrong or right, it's non-rational. Religions know how things work, you just can't reason with them. I'm arguing from ignorance: we cannot know. My only additional point is that not only can we not know, we c…

2 things.

1. you're tilting at windmills here, I gave no opinion on what I think the result of AI will be.

2. You didn't understand the comparison to religion.

You could literally take your arguments and reskin them as religious points.

One could even imagine this exact discussion happening when humanity first discovered drugs. Because they feel good all of humanity will eventually be hooked on them, yada yada yada. Only that presupposes that there's no value in procuring the drugs themselves, because the second you have to have a certain segment of the population procuring those drugs you have people who: 1) have a lot of power, and 2) have a reason for existing outside of simply taking drugs. In other words, the argument is a contradiction itself.

Now, if an external force had been able to get all of humanity hooked on drugs in a very short amount of time (and takes care of the procurement), then the predictions would be possible because procuring the drugs is no longer valuable for humanity.

The dangers of AI are not that we're slowly going to lose ourselves as we all become mindless zombies watching entertainment. The danger is that, like the drug example, those who procure AI are going to have a lot of power, and if AI itself ever becomes independent of humanity then we could lose all control over our own destiny.

And to loop this back to the religion comparison, there are always people in this world wanting to impress their worldview on others. Which is why your arguments can be reskinned so easily as religious arguments. They use the same techniques you're using here.

Re: Do we need to worry about artificial stupidity?

#67

Post by SilasX »

pjc50 wrote: post #11

There's a lot to be said for this line of argument. The stupidity of the Youtube recommendation engine has wrecked Brazilian politics, for example: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/11/world/americas/youtube-br... (The deliberate construction of an AI that pays people to produce lies to damage other people's health and welfare sounds like a farfetched science fiction plot. Accidentally building one, and then trying to…

Oh wow, that's almost a real-life "Sort By Controversial", Scott Alexander's short story about what happens when an algorithm optimizes for controversial content that's so warping people think the other side misunderstood it.

https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/10/30/sort-by-controversial/

Re: Do we need to worry about artificial stupidity?

#68

Post by ben_w »

pvaldes wrote: post #33
nradov wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Democracy was never intended to work. It's just better than the alternatives over the long run.

Don't blame democracy for the sins of pseudodemocracy.

How to you tell one from the other, especially when you’re inside one?

Re: Do we need to worry about artificial stupidity?

#69

Post by skilled »

delinka wrote: post #42
skilled wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"no doubt" and "may" are two words that contradict one another. Clearly whoever wrote that has no idea what they are talking about.

I disagree. They've constructed a sentence that will always be true by using the weasel word "may" and the emphatic "no doubt." I have no doubt that one day someone may win big at poker in a casino. Someone may; or they may not - of this I have no doubt.

No they have not.

Re: Do we need to worry about artificial stupidity?

#70

Post by ben_w »

matz1 wrote: post #53
mrhappyunhappy wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

YouTube recommendations feel like a direct impediment to democracy. When your recommendations consist of the same crap all the time, it may seem as though that stuff carries more weight than it really does. I wonder to what degree YouTube is responsible for the current political climate. The same with Twitter really. When you only follow and see posts from people you choose, how are you supposed to give important iss…

Democracy work just fine. It might not what you want but what if the current youtube recommendation system is what I want ? In democracy people like me should still get equal power to decide. There are no right or wrong outcome in democracy.

No system of decision-making can survive a high level of misinformation. In the case of democracy that means you might be happy and placated, but you won’t have any control no matter how often you vote.
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