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The illusion of AI’s existential risk

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Re: The illusion of AI’s existential risk

#131

Post by ozr »

yanderekko wrote: post #84
ozr wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "Convinced that we are a few years from extinction," is an exaggeration of the pessimistic/alarmed end of the spectrum of opinion. It really isn't. There are people quitting their jobs, protesting AI companies, and inducing panic attacks in children over their irrational fears: https://www.wired.com/story/pause-ai-existential-risk/

No, even the more-panicked wing is not betting the proverbial house on AI killing us within the next few years , although the possibility is there. The "don't expect to live much longer" sentiment is based on a probability horizon that extends over decades.

I've spoken to people in the article. They expect doom in <1 year.

Re: The illusion of AI’s existential risk

#132

Post by hollerith »

ozr wrote: post #131
yanderekko wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, even the more-panicked wing is not betting the proverbial house on AI killing us within the next few years , although the possibility is there. The "don't expect to live much longer" sentiment is based on a probability horizon that extends over decades.

I've spoken to people in the article. They expect doom in <1 year.

Can you give a name so I don't have to read a long article?

It is easy to find people who believe that it is possible (with some low probability) that AI will end the human race in the next 12 mo. (I'm one of them.) I haven't seen anyone however put most of their probability mass in the next 12 or 24 mo, and I'd like to find out what their reasoning is.

Re: The illusion of AI’s existential risk

#133

Post by loup-vaillant »

anonyfox wrote: post #128
loup-vaillant wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, but capitalists have all the guns. Not directly, but the hired guns (police, military), work for the capitalists. In fact, if you watch The Rules for Rulers , there’s the possibility of turning the entire world into a 3rd world corrupted structure: a few people at the top enjoying the riches of full automation, a few more people with guns to protect them from the unwashed masses, and everyone else. If democracy…

The tipping point is when some „unwashed masses“ decide to go to a billionaire mansion and explain them (forcefully) that they aren’t billionaires any longer, and neither the security staff nor the called police will step in, since they are part of the masses (family ties, defunding, …). Why should they do cruel work for a salary if they can take their part of the wealth directly?

That’s possible as long as the police aren’t robot, and the mansion isn’t orbiting in space. Now Elysium doesn’t have to happen (and good luck with the giant space station) but a sufficiently walled garden guarded by sufficiently automated defences supplied by a sufficiently automated workforce could in fact repel anyone else trying to get in with nothing more than small arms.

Though I reckon an organised unwashed mass could most likely do something.

Re: The illusion of AI’s existential risk

#134

Post by jazzyjackson »

spacebanana7 wrote: post #124
jazzyjackson wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, I've been trying to figure out how to feel about china "lifting a billion people out of poverty" for a long while, because if I squint it kinda looks like land owners getting displaced by a government that would rather work then to death in cities than allow them a meek existence in the countryside. For young people, having a wage and the agency to spend it how they choose is worth a lot, but I still wonder how…

Outside of North America, it was relatively rare for farmers to own their land. Tenant farming and serfdom were more common in Europe/Japan. In China, as a general principle, the government itself owned all land during the Mao era. Farmer-landowners are much more financially resilient to technological change because (generally) the same technologies which reduced the value of their labour increased the value of their…

now that I think of it, if farmers had already owned their farms, Mao & co wouldn't have gone through the trouble of redistributing it via Land Reform.

I might suggest that drawing boundaries around a plot of land and calling it "owned" was the beginning of politics, as it represents collective agreements and mechanisms to arrive at them. Have you dug into Elinor Ostrom's work around the tragedy of the commons being an unrealistic model given that people don't just let other people's cows overgraze? We create rules and sanctions before the resource collapses (or rather, we try to; and that attempt to prevent collapse could be called government).

Re: The illusion of AI’s existential risk

#135

Post by jayGlow »

gpderetta wrote: post #98
jiggawatts wrote: post #34

I’m just re-reading Blindsight by Peter Watts, a novel that is amazingly prescient in — amongst other things — its predictions of this coming economic upheaval. Speaking of… one scene in the book has humans communicating with an alien that appears to have “learned” human speech by training a non-sentient LLM on human ship-to-ship transmissions, and then “fine tuned” it to achieve the desired communication goal withou…

> non-sentient LLM I don't think it is described as non-sentient in the book, but only as lacking consciousness. Consciousness not being required for sentience is one of the two major themes of the book (the other being that consciousness is an evolutionary dead end). Still your example is very relevant. I very much believe that ChatGPT, for example, is not conscious. The question is if it has some amount of sentienc…

I think sapience would be a better word than sentience. But with regards to the process talking to the crew I think the book explicitly said that it didn't have any sort of comprehension of what it was saying. I belive the Chinese room was an attack from rorschach similar to the perceived attack from humanity. basically it wanted to waste their time and energy on something pointless.

Re: The illusion of AI’s existential risk

#136

Post by ozr »

hollerith wrote: post #132
ozr wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've spoken to people in the article. They expect doom in <1 year.

Can you give a name so I don't have to read a long article? It is easy to find people who believe that it is possible (with some low probability) that AI will end the human race in the next 12 mo. (I'm one of them.) I haven't seen anyone however put most of their probability mass in the next 12 or 24 mo, and I'd like to find out what their reasoning is.

Sure, first name in the article I posted, Joep Meindertsma. They have an open discord you can join, but fair warning that it's entirely panicky people lamenting their inevitable doom.

Re: The illusion of AI’s existential risk

#137

Post by RC_ITR »

john2x wrote: post #45
RC_ITR wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> a car can never navigate a single-lane one-way tunnel safely without a driver (ie, The Boring Company). I think the criticisms of the Boring Company are more "small diameter tunnels are a bad way to build high-throughput underground infrastructure, and autonomous cars will not solve that"

"small diameter tunnels" + "autonomous cars" kind of sounds like a subway train.

Sure, but have you ever been on the London Tube and noticed it's notoriously small and uncomfortable in parts? Have you also noticed how windy some stations get because the small trains fill most of the tube and act like an air piston?

Those tunnels are 12 feet diameter. Boring Co's tunnels are 12 feet diameter.

A modern subway system needs considerably larger tunnels.

Re: The illusion of AI’s existential risk

#138

Post by Aerroon »

QuantumG wrote: post #78
Aerroon wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don’t understand why economic disruption and human obsolescence isn’t considered an existential risk. Because that's the goal of our economic system! If everything could be made with no human labor requirement, then the price of these goods is going to trend towards zero. The disruption is going to cause pain, but ultimately that's what we've always been after.

Everything already costs basically nothing. There's a Moore's Law for every industry, and if you go into mature industries you'll see how easily they ignore it. There's open collaboration to keep prices "stable" in most of them.

I think that's mostly due to consumers rather than the industry. The industry keeps inventing new stuff that they can charge more money for because that's what the people want.

You can go buy decent t-shirts with no logos for €2.50 right now. And yet most people walk around with t-shirts that cost €10-50 with some logo on them.

This becomes apparent when you look at common food like potatoes, milk, cheese, bread etc. All the competition more or less provides the same product for about the same price. If they could go cheaper while still being profitable they would.

Re: The illusion of AI’s existential risk

#139

Post by XorNot »

QuantumG wrote: post #79
XorNot wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is just repeating the fallacy that the person being replaced is going to be the blue-collar worker. But it isn't...it's the office knowledge worker. Anyone cruising in the middle bucket where you don't do creative research, but you do sit in front of a computer. AI is coming for those groups. The blue collar worker? They'll be fine for decades. Anyone who gets out there and manipulates the physical environment,…

You mean, other than anyone we're replacing with robots next year.

Who do you think that's going to be? Certainly no plumber or bricklayer is worried.

Re: The illusion of AI’s existential risk

#140

Post by spacebanana7 »

jazzyjackson wrote: post #134
spacebanana7 wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Outside of North America, it was relatively rare for farmers to own their land. Tenant farming and serfdom were more common in Europe/Japan. In China, as a general principle, the government itself owned all land during the Mao era. Farmer-landowners are much more financially resilient to technological change because (generally) the same technologies which reduced the value of their labour increased the value of their…

now that I think of it, if farmers had already owned their farms, Mao & co wouldn't have gone through the trouble of redistributing it via Land Reform. I might suggest that drawing boundaries around a plot of land and calling it "owned" was the beginning of politics, as it represents collective agreements and mechanisms to arrive at them. Have you dug into Elinor Ostrom's work around the tragedy of the commons being…

I’ve not but I’ll take a look into it. Sounds interesting.
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