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Raising Children on the Eve of AI

juliawise.net

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Re: Raising Children on the Eve of AI

#71

Post by ildjarn »

keiferski wrote: post #63
ildjarn wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don’t think AI generated content creators are a threat?

Only in situations where the creator is anonymous or has a weak brand now. For creators that are functionally celebrities (I.e., successful YouTubers) people follow them because they like the human behind the video. I don’t see AI replacing that, potentially ever.

For established creators, sure. But fast forward 10 years and imagine AI generated ones crowding out the human creators. Then how can humans get established in the first place?

Re: Raising Children on the Eve of AI

#72

Post by keiferski »

ildjarn wrote: post #71
keiferski wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Only in situations where the creator is anonymous or has a weak brand now. For creators that are functionally celebrities (I.e., successful YouTubers) people follow them because they like the human behind the video. I don’t see AI replacing that, potentially ever.

For established creators, sure. But fast forward 10 years and imagine AI generated ones crowding out the human creators. Then how can humans get established in the first place?

You already have companies like Google starting to crack down or limit ai generated stuff. It’s trivially easy for the companies controlling these channels to prefer human-made content.

Re: Raising Children on the Eve of AI

#73

Post by threedark »

safety1st wrote: post #58
inference-lord wrote: post #12

I became a parent about a year ago, completely unprepared for this future. My Son was born around the time ChatGPT-4 was released and I remember all the Geoffrey Hinton interviews which were really apocalyptic sounding, he is has a kind of kookie mad scientist vibe about him too. I remember thinking, like what the fuck just happened? Like I just woke up in a movie. I've learned to accept the situation, and realize th…

I'm not going to worry too much about my career being snuffed out by AI until AI actually exists. Right now we have LLMs and they're a very far cry from any form of AI that could replace a software engineer wholesale. In my little corner of the software engineering universe I have not seen any credible hiring manager say they were going to fire developers and replace them with LLMs (I have seen this threat from one o…

>I think LLMs might 10x our productivity

Think about this logically. Assuming demand for software engineers remain the same this reduces available jobs by 10x when the productivity of one engineer goes up by 10x.

> there is no sign that the demand for software is declining

There's been layoffs. Tons of layoffs.

I'm curious how many people actually still agree with your positive sentiment. At one point I would call it 50%, but now I think it's past that. I think the view point is largely shifting.

Re: Raising Children on the Eve of AI

#74

Post by archsurface »

I'm curious to know what people are going to be like when they've grown up in a world of things that are not comprehensible. Eg, I grew up easily understanding how films were made, but I wonder how a child's character will develop when growing up with "films" made by something called a neural net - will there be eg a sense of detachment from the world around them? Will there be an extended period of life during which time children don't understand things? What effect will that have?

Re: Raising Children on the Eve of AI

#75

Post by Vecr »

throwanem wrote: post #38
Vecr wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> VNM applied in the realm of ethics is definitionally utilitarian. I assume you are thinking deontological ethics, virtue ethics, etc vs utilitarianism, but non-benthamite utility functions exist. Actually, if they didn't I assume a lot of AI doomers would be less doomy, as quite a few of them are utilitarians.

No, I'm thinking utilitarianism. I appreciate that the standard definition includes a term about "for the greatest number". But you're still defining an ethical utility function which you then seek to maximize. That your utility function may be off model from the most doctrinaire possible interpretation of the theory does not seem to me the same as saying this is not an example of the theory. The same could be said o…

> Well, yeah, that's the fundamental failure of utilitarianism: it's so abstract as to say nothing meaningful, because it explicitly delegates the entire definition of what actually is ethical to the utility function, and nothing past that is distinct from any other ethical theory.

I think it's honest, as it really forces you to make a distinction between good (what should be) and real (what is). "Should" goes into the utility function, "is" goes into the world model. I'd honestly recommend giving it a shot if you have free time.

> I doubt that; this and your prior comment are the second and third time I've seen it in eleven years of active participation here.

It's the anti-flame war/spam thing kicking in. I'm manually responding to the "wrong post" but that's pretty much fine.

Re: Raising Children on the Eve of AI

#76

Post by Barrin92 »

It's always astonishing to me when people talk about what they want their children to be or do and the answer is a list of soft skills. The Protestant work ethic really has done a number on some people. I always thought the answer is simple (though not easy), I want my kids to be healthy, honest, loyal and kind, what they do from 8am to 4pm is for them to figure out, but it's not that important.

Re: Raising Children on the Eve of AI

#77

Post by threedark »

seabird wrote: post #65
inference-lord wrote: post #12

I became a parent about a year ago, completely unprepared for this future. My Son was born around the time ChatGPT-4 was released and I remember all the Geoffrey Hinton interviews which were really apocalyptic sounding, he is has a kind of kookie mad scientist vibe about him too. I remember thinking, like what the fuck just happened? Like I just woke up in a movie. I've learned to accept the situation, and realize th…

Not to minimize your concerns, but as it stands, AI is replacing dick-all in the near term. Wondering what employment will exist in 3 years is a tad silly. This shit is confidently wrong without a tinge of doubt and the mitigation for that is babysitting to the point where nothing but the most trivial jobs can be entrusted to it. I wouldn't sweat it robbing you of your career when it can't even recite airline ticket…

>I wouldn't sweat it robbing you of your career when it can't even recite airline ticket policy properly.

It's way past this. Not a tad bit silly at all. Come on. It's not ready to replace are jobs as of now, but it's remarkably close.

To be honest your view point of utter total confidence when LLMs blew past the turing test causing everybody to reset the goal posts is imho much more silly and I mean to say this with no offense at all... which is Fair given you used the term as well.

Re: Raising Children on the Eve of AI

#78

Post by Biologist123 »

moshun wrote: post #53
Biologist123 wrote: post #43

The writer says: “[My children] are more viscerally worried about climate change”. I’m not surprised. I recently heard from a friend that her 7 year-old child had, as a class assignment, to create a timeline setting out the impact of climate change over their lifetime. I was gobsmacked, and feel this amounts to a form of psychological child abuse. It’s a serious problem, don’t get me wrong, but having a small child l…

I’m not sure being honest with children about something that impacts them so heavily is the wrong move here. Traumatized or not, I suspect teaching children about the problem in clear terms will lead to a better informed generation of scientists, lawmakers, and voters. Hopefully they make and stick to better decisions then those that came before.

I hear what you’re saying, that children should be educated about the reality they find themselves in. If that is the case, and I would say their are exceptions until children are older, then strong guidelines are needed, partly because acting out of trauma is rarely a good idea. Secondly, because a full reality must be imparted including that projections are based on modeled outputs, and modeling complex systems is inherently problematic, there are many problems facing humanity, and resources must be rationally allocated between all.

Re: Raising Children on the Eve of AI

#79

Post by larodi »

moshun wrote: post #53
Biologist123 wrote: post #43

The writer says: “[My children] are more viscerally worried about climate change”. I’m not surprised. I recently heard from a friend that her 7 year-old child had, as a class assignment, to create a timeline setting out the impact of climate change over their lifetime. I was gobsmacked, and feel this amounts to a form of psychological child abuse. It’s a serious problem, don’t get me wrong, but having a small child l…

I’m not sure being honest with children about something that impacts them so heavily is the wrong move here. Traumatized or not, I suspect teaching children about the problem in clear terms will lead to a better informed generation of scientists, lawmakers, and voters. Hopefully they make and stick to better decisions then those that came before.

Sorry but children pre-12 actually can’t grasp ‘clear terms’ so easy when the terms are about something clearly abstract or existential.

They may grasp the idea of death but seldom is it not terrifying to them as genetically it takes a while to overcome the dna-imprinted anxiety of body failure.

So perhaps there’s a certain age before which u are advised to be very careful with what actually is being said to a child.

Re: Raising Children on the Eve of AI

#80

Post by moltar »

alumic wrote: post #28
inference-lord wrote: post #12

I became a parent about a year ago, completely unprepared for this future. My Son was born around the time ChatGPT-4 was released and I remember all the Geoffrey Hinton interviews which were really apocalyptic sounding, he is has a kind of kookie mad scientist vibe about him too. I remember thinking, like what the fuck just happened? Like I just woke up in a movie. I've learned to accept the situation, and realize th…

I drove around today listening to the most recent Lex Fridman podcast, in which the founder of Boston Dynamics was describing replacing human labor with machines that were capable of learning by seeing. I have family in the trades. I pursued tech and fell in love with the field. Listening to the interviewee, I began to feel sick to my stomach at the glib description of what amounts to ripping away peoples' livelihood…

Could have said the same about the use of tractors. People used to farm by hand. All those people were replaced. Yet here we are doing just fine.
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