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On being wrong about AI

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Re: On being wrong about AI

#41

Post by Jensson »

anonymousDan wrote: post #33
fidotron wrote: post #12

It has become clear that the defining route to riches this century is to persuade the already powerful of a huge threat to the status quo, then claim that you offer the way to control it, and ideally turn it into a mechanism for further entrenching established interests. It may have always been this way and I am just getting old.

Finding ways to make rich people richer will always make solid business sense unfortunately.

Making any group of people richer is good business sense as long as those riches doesn't come from you, since then you can take a share of that. That include unions taking a share of worker salaries in order to make those workers make a bigger salary.

Re: On being wrong about AI

#42

Post by rsynnott »

rwmj wrote: post #26
rsynnott wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Self driving cars? This one in particular, I find fascinating, because we've literally just _had_ a hype cycle over it (I remember people telling me they'd be here any day now a decade ago), and now we're onto another AI hype cycle, almost immediately. Which comes first, AGI, or the self-driving car? :) (I think your other examples are qualitatively different; moon bases, supersonic (passenger) jets and asteroid mi…

We have self-driving cars already, but they're not evenly distributed ... and they have an unsatisfying amount of human input behind the scenes.

Well, I mean, if you're willing to stretch the definition to beyond breaking, sure, but we don't have anything that the average person in the street would think of as a self-driving car. Anyone claiming a self-driving car today is a bit high on their own marketing, and there's no clear route to getting beyond that point.

Re: On being wrong about AI

#43

Post by _cjse »

I decided early on that wasting my one existence trying to solve a problem that seemed unsolvable wasn't what I wanted to do, especially given the stakes (it's very easy to reason yourself into working 14 hour days if you think it means saving the world is 0.001% more likely). However, I never found a satisfying argument against the default outcome being doom.

The closest I ever came to a "solution" is to target the economic forces which lead to people researching and innovating on AI. I eventually found fine-based bounties to be an unusually potent weapon, not only here, but against all kinds of possible grey- and black-urn technologies. I wrote up my thoughts very briefly about a year ago, and they still live at [url-redacted], but I suspect the argument is fundamentally flawed in a way I as a non-academic don't have time to suss out.

So I find myself in a strange place: Live my life mostly as normal, with a good chunk of my finances in low cost index funds, just in case the exponential starts shooting up - and just in case we don't all perish soon afterwards. C'est la vie.

Re: On being wrong about AI

#45

Post by roenxi »

The major mistake - some people have been getting this right - is looking at algorithms rather than processing power. The people who were just following the exponential curves [0] pointed out that we'd be hitting human-brain levels of processing power some time around now.

Turns out intelligence isn't complicated; it just needs a lot of brute force matrix math. This blog post can be interpreted as "I didn't realise what it was like living through an exponential process". Things happen very quickly.

[0] https://spectrum.ieee.org/estimate-human-brain-30-times-fast...

Re: On being wrong about AI

#46

Post by RandomLensman »

098799 wrote: post #39
pharmakom wrote: post #6

The latest LLMs are remarkable, but I think the AI Doomer claims are still a reach. My prediction is that the current AI boom will fizzle out into a handful of useful products and a lot of smoke from VC cash. Where are the moon bases? Supersonic jets? Asteroid mines? Self driving cars? We’ve gotten over excited so many times in the past.

Why would you need it? All you need is one machine capable enough that it will run it's own alphafold-3 to correctly predict the sequence of an appropriately deadly virus, pay some lab to synthesize it and release it to the atmosphere. Or create a dead man switch to do so, at which point you have to start treating it as north korea, sooner or later it will build the capabilities it needs and release it anyway.

Assumes the existence of such a virus (and that it cannot be treated/mitigated).

Re: On being wrong about AI

#48

Post by tomatotomato31 »

pharmakom wrote: post #6

The latest LLMs are remarkable, but I think the AI Doomer claims are still a reach. My prediction is that the current AI boom will fizzle out into a handful of useful products and a lot of smoke from VC cash. Where are the moon bases? Supersonic jets? Asteroid mines? Self driving cars? We’ve gotten over excited so many times in the past.

Tesla just showed their new bot and it's trained by ai.

We will continue integrating ai in all products for the next year's to come.

The money invested and what it opens up is still huge and it pointed a lot of people to this area for very good reasons.

But after the hype the work is there and now takes time.

Copilot rollout in my company (100k people) is only happening right now

Re: On being wrong about AI

#49

Post by piva00 »

mark_l_watson wrote: post #36
9991 wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your take is that you’re wrong a lot, so it’s OK others to be wrong? If the stakes are high, we should be learning how to not make mistakes rather than how to make excuses after the fact.

I think you misunderstood what I was saying, so I will try to be more clear: I was describing myself as an observer and participant in different waves of AI tech. I was not admitting to being wrong, rather, just someone who was lucky enough to be a small part of AI. What I don’t know right now: if AI will help solve difficult societal/energy/medical/scientific problems and propel humanity into a better future (I bet…

In my purely layman view of someone on the outskirts of AI development, meaning that I knew about the techniques from a basic concept view, saw the rise of ML and NN into the mainstream software development the past 15-20 years (and not from an academic background), and now seeing the latest generative AIs and LLMs.

My biggest anxiety with AI development rapidly increasing in pace and capabilities is that we don't work in a system which will distribute the efficiency gains brought by those developments to people, they will be captured as profit, we don't have anything in place on how to absorb large swaths of workers out of a job when an AI can help to automate 90% of most office jobs.

I really try to not be a Mennonite about it, technology invariably causes splash damage to jobs, from looms to robotic arms in factories, we increase our efficiency to produce but for some reason it feels like an AI boom will bring such a shift much quicker and broader than many past inventions. And I don't think we are prepared for the aftermath of that.

Let's say if in 10-20 years some 50% of white-collar jobs can be made redundant by AI, there would be large swaths of workers with non-marketable skills, how do you retrain so many people so quickly? We already struggle to retrain small pools of the labour force from jobs that are disappearing, like coal miners or factory workers, progress always come at a cost and so what's going to be the cost when that many people are out of jobs, out of prospect of jobs with their skills, and the value added by AI is captured by the few owners of capital?

That's my main anxiety. I have so far embraced AI as a way to make my job less tedious but I started to have this tingling feeling that I will see myself outskilled at my job by AI during my lifetime... And I have no idea what will be left to do. Given that predicting what will come next is nigh impossible, I don't think we will be prepared for the aftermath when it comes, just like we were not prepared for the aftermath of social media and just live with the malaise nowadays.

Re: On being wrong about AI

#50

Post by jltsiren »

rsynnott wrote: post #17
pharmakom wrote: post #6

The latest LLMs are remarkable, but I think the AI Doomer claims are still a reach. My prediction is that the current AI boom will fizzle out into a handful of useful products and a lot of smoke from VC cash. Where are the moon bases? Supersonic jets? Asteroid mines? Self driving cars? We’ve gotten over excited so many times in the past.

> Self driving cars? This one in particular, I find fascinating, because we've literally just _had_ a hype cycle over it (I remember people telling me they'd be here any day now a decade ago), and now we're onto another AI hype cycle, almost immediately. Which comes first, AGI, or the self-driving car? :) (I think your other examples are qualitatively different; moon bases, supersonic (passenger) jets and asteroid mi…

I think the main obstacle is that intelligence seems to be inherently unreliable.

There is no shortage of human intelligence in the world. The average person is remarkably intelligent. But they need a lot of learning and practice, and often plenty of organizational support, before they can use that intelligence to do something useful reliably.

We know how to make cars that are stupid and reliable. We know how to make cars that are intelligent and unreliable. But there is still a lot of work to be done before we can make cars that are both intelligent and reliable.

The only AI product I use in my daily work is Copilot. It can usually make useful and accurate suggestions, sometimes even remarkably so, but it also makes stupid mistakes all the time. Copilot is most useful for automating boring routine work, where I can quickly catch and correct its mistakes. It's far less useful for the difficult parts, or when I don't know what I'm doing, because the mistakes it makes are less obvious to me.

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