Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Yann LeCun: AI one-percenters seizing power forever is real doomsday scenario

businessinsider.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 873 posts

Re: Yann LeCun: AI one-percenters seizing power forever is real doomsday scenario

#71

Post by Joeri »

shreyshnaccount wrote: post #58
sgu999 wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Abundance for who? Our entire specie could live comfortably with goodies the last roman emperor wouldn't even have dreamed of, just with our current means of production. Yet we still have people not able to feed their children, dying of exhaustion at work or killing each other for land.

You've got the causality the other way round. We are in an apparent state of abundance partly because of exploitative practices

In general I think you’re right. Global GDP per capita is at $13K which is probably not enough to give everyone a western lifestyle if inequalities were stripped away.

But specifically for food the situation is different. There’s so much food that much of it gets thrown away, instead of getting to the hungry in time. It’s an allocation and efficiency problem.

Re: Yann LeCun: AI one-percenters seizing power forever is real doomsday scenario

#72

Post by thomasahle »

aeternum wrote: post #63
PeterStuer wrote: post #48

People focus on LLM's and diffusion models because they are so omnipresent now. But an AI for stock picking and prediction that would be realy next level and outcompete the current ones cosistently would siphon of so much wealth it would basically own society if the operators were clever enough not to get so gready short term that the system would litterally collapse overnight.

Arguably, this has already happened at least twice in the past. One with the discovery of the Black-Scholes model, and arguably again with the advent of HFT (and the ability to basically front-run trades). The interesting thing about markets is you generally can only make money when things are mispriced. This limits the total potential gain even for actors with perfect information. Suppose we did have an AI model tha…

> The interesting thing about markets is you generally can only make money when things are mispriced.

Why would you think things are not terribly mispriced right now? If only we were a lot smarter we'd know how.

Re: Yann LeCun: AI one-percenters seizing power forever is real doomsday scenario

#73

Post by samus »

PeterStuer wrote: post #61
logicchains wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The global average PPP GDP per capita is 18k USD/year. 18k USD/year is not remotely close to abundance.

If I watch my kids and you watch yours, our contribution to GDP is 0$. If I babysit your kids and you pay me 1.000.000$, and you watch my kids and I pay you 1.000.000$, we just created 2.000.000$ in GDP. Were we not in abundance the day before but now we are? What changed?

This device only works if these are two completely equal services served by two equally capable persons with the same investment of time and resources. And it assumes that we mutually trust each other to actually do the thing.

Also, bringing money into the game makes the responsibility stronger. Especially if those two persons are not living in a vacuum, but have other bills to pay [edit: i.e., to make other people do things for them]. Money is there to make people do things more reliably if there is no other relationship between the buyer and the seller.

Re: Yann LeCun: AI one-percenters seizing power forever is real doomsday scenario

#74

Post by Aithr »

JoshTriplett wrote: post #52
lazzlazzlazz wrote: post #35

The way incumbents are attempting to seize power via regulatory capture, using "X-Risk" and fantastical claims of sudden human extinction is maybe one of the most cynical ploys in the history of tech so far. Open source is one of our greatest gifts, and the push to close off AI with farcical licensing and reporting requirements (which will undoubtedly become more strict) is absurd. The laws we have already cover male…

> seize power via regulatory capture Not even a little bit. "Stop" is not regulatory capture. Some large AI companies are attempting to twist "stop" into "be careful, as only we can". The actual way to stop the existential risk is to stop. https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1719777049576128542 > the push to close off AI with farcical licensing and reporting requirements "Stop" is not "licensing and reporting requ…

"Stop new development." is regulatory capture.

Re: Yann LeCun: AI one-percenters seizing power forever is real doomsday scenario

#75

Post by logicchains »

sgu999 wrote: post #65
logicchains wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We are already in a post-scarcity world, we have been for decades. It's only a post-scarcity world if you define scarcity by absence of enough resources to satisfy the bare-minimum required for existence. People don't want to live at the subsistence level, and we're not evenly remotely close to having enough resources to satisfy everybody's wants.

> People don't want to live at the subsistence level, and we're not evenly remotely close to having enough resources to satisfy everybody's wants. What people want is defined by society. Somehow some people want to be alone in a 2 tons EV, a 200 sqm mansion for a family of 4 and retire at 40. Others are tremendously happy with a much, much less resources intensive lifestyles. You would also need to define what is par…

>What people want is defined by society. Somehow some people want to be alone in a 2 tons EV, a 200 sqm mansion for a family of 4 and retire at 40. Others are tremendously happy with a much, much less resources intensive lifestyles.

You just undermined your own assertion. If what people want was defined by society, then everybody would want the same things. But in fact as you stated they don't; some people want a lot, some people want little. There's no way you're going to stop people wanting nice things short of killing the 90% of the population that aren't ascetics, which you'll never be able to do (at least in the US) because that's also the part of the population that owns most of the guns.

Re: Yann LeCun: AI one-percenters seizing power forever is real doomsday scenario

#76

Post by hgomersall »

cosmojg wrote: post #12
penjelly wrote: post #2

some speculators say we'll enter an age of abundance and money wont matter nearly as much (or at all) but if thats the case, how do businesses transition from their current state of profit over everything into money is not important? I see it as much more likely that things become monopolized instead

Eh, the strong market for virtual goods and the existence of significant virtual economies[1] like those found in Roblox and Second Life lead me to believe that markets can and will always exist, regardless of how far we progress into and beyond post-scarcity (assuming humanity persists in its current form and consumption preferences remain stable). I'm less certain about the capitalist model in particular, but it to…

Those virtual economies are typically designed to mimick the real economy. They're often even hampered in ways the real economy isn't due to a misunderstanding of how the real system functions.

Re: Yann LeCun: AI one-percenters seizing power forever is real doomsday scenario

#77

Post by rolisz »

JoshTriplett wrote: post #52
lazzlazzlazz wrote: post #35

The way incumbents are attempting to seize power via regulatory capture, using "X-Risk" and fantastical claims of sudden human extinction is maybe one of the most cynical ploys in the history of tech so far. Open source is one of our greatest gifts, and the push to close off AI with farcical licensing and reporting requirements (which will undoubtedly become more strict) is absurd. The laws we have already cover male…

> seize power via regulatory capture Not even a little bit. "Stop" is not regulatory capture. Some large AI companies are attempting to twist "stop" into "be careful, as only we can". The actual way to stop the existential risk is to stop. https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1719777049576128542 > the push to close off AI with farcical licensing and reporting requirements "Stop" is not "licensing and reporting requ…

And... How do you do that? Seriously, people have been talking about stoping CO2 emissions for what, 50 years? We've barely made progress there.

Re: Yann LeCun: AI one-percenters seizing power forever is real doomsday scenario

#78

Post by esafak »

Aithr wrote: post #74
JoshTriplett wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> seize power via regulatory capture Not even a little bit. "Stop" is not regulatory capture. Some large AI companies are attempting to twist "stop" into "be careful, as only we can". The actual way to stop the existential risk is to stop. https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1719777049576128542 > the push to close off AI with farcical licensing and reporting requirements "Stop" is not "licensing and reporting requ…

"Stop new development." is regulatory capture.

Stop existing development too. Carve an exception for academic research.

Re: Yann LeCun: AI one-percenters seizing power forever is real doomsday scenario

#79

Post by Palmik »

chrismarlow9 wrote: post #29
nextaccountic wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Training is still very expensive.. and if it becomes cheaper, then a next-gen model with better performance will be expensive again. It may be very hard to train cutting edge models if you only have consumer hardware

Why do you need cutting edge models if you can solve your problems with less?

The gap between the value added by GPT 3.5 and GPT 4 to my every day tasks is immense. Most people, outside of these circles, don't realize that such a large gap exists.

Re: Yann LeCun: AI one-percenters seizing power forever is real doomsday scenario

#80

Post by Joeri »

homefree wrote: post #70

I think Yann is probably wrong. He refuses to engage earnestly with the “doomer” arguments. The same type of motivated reasoning could also be attributed to himself and Meta’s financial goals - it’s not a persuasive framing. The attempts I’ve seen from him to discuss the issue that aren’t just name calling are things like saying he knows smart people and they aren’t president - or even that his cat is pretty smart an…

The people best placed to understand how AGI will affect social power dynamics are probably political creatures, not AI researchers, except if one of those AI researchers is also a skilled politician, which I don’t think any of them are.
Post reply on HN