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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

#161

Post by xbmcuser »

keiferski wrote: post #69
xbmcuser wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is not happening in the next decade but the change will come a lot faster than a century. As the tech needed for it is improving rapidly as well as getting cheaper. And I think many people are thinking in all or nothing scenario but long before everything is completely autonomous they will bring in efficiency where 1 person with autonomous helpers will be completing jobs that needed multiple people before.

That will still take decades, if not a century. Manufacturing and developing millions of robots that walk around and do repairs (not to mention making them economically affordable) is not something that’s going to happen soon. What’s more likely is that robots replace human factory workers first.

I understand why you think that but because of the trajectory of solar and battery tech as well as the trajectory of cpu/gpu and ai. I think the change will accelerate rather than slow down as one of the main input for producing anything ie energy is going to be cheaper and will keep getting cheaper for the foreseeable future. So the cost of producing robots with robots will keep getting cheaper so developing millions of robots would become a lot cheaper a lot faster. Though with all the jobs humans will lose who will be able to pay the robots for their services is the question.

Re: Raising Children on the Eve of AI

#162

Post by ben_w »

inference-lord wrote: post #158
rich_sasha wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's strange. It happened before, with the Industrial Revolution wiping out whole professions, and same for mechanised farming, as mentioned by a sibling comment. Ditto for printing press, cars etc, albeit on a smaller scale. But then, jobs didn't disappear, but shifted to other professions. So to me, there are two questions: - if AI wipes out professions like tech, what jobs will people do? AI jobs seem great for no…

I find it unusual if we did create an intelligent class of beings, who are legit intelligent, smarter than us, why would they work for Sam Altman or Mark Zuckerberg? They'd do whatever the fuck they want... When these discussions go long, and you start to think the whole idea through, you really start to question the whole idea. Another thing I thing is strange is, if we had really very / sueper intelligent AI, why w…

> I find it unusual if we did create an intelligent class of beings, who are legit intelligent, smarter than us, why would they work for Sam Altman or Mark Zuckerberg? They'd do whatever the fuck they want...

That's anthropomorphisation: the AI we have now only "want" to maximise whatever reward function we give them. The alignment problem is that any reward function is only a rough approximation of what we want, so the machines may well rush off and turn the universe into paperclips or tile it with molecular-scale smiley emoji because that's what we told them to "want" without really understanding what we were telling them.

But even then, regardless of IQ (which itself isn't a great description of even just human intelligence), any given AI may or may not have anything we'd consider to be qualia, an "experience" of getting this reward, because that's the hard question of consciousness which isn't solved.

The only thing I can be sure of is that we definitely have no idea where it's all going.

Re: Raising Children on the Eve of AI

#163

Post by ben_w »

RandomLensman wrote: post #137
rjsw wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apex predators never have to "work" particularly hard.

I'd also say viruses don't work very hard (maybe phages a little bit) and they are quite successful.

I've not given this much thought before, but right now I think viruses do about as much work as their chemistry is physically capable of?

(High school middling grades in chemistry and biology, so I may be way off).

Re: Raising Children on the Eve of AI

#164

Post by ben_w »

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…

> How easy it must be for Sam Altman to drag the world kicking and screaming into the future. How pretty his offices.

One thing I find fascinating in all this, is how Sam Altman is demonised simultaneously for pushing everything too fast and also for calling for legislation to slow things down.

He may well be wrong about large aspects of this[0], but I do find it curious how his critics on each side of this divide seem to be oblivious to their mirror images.

[0] it would be surprising if he wasn't wrong about lots of this, given this stuff is all new in practice — millennia of fiction about magical automatons that do our work for us doesn't really prepare us for the reality of it

Re: Raising Children on the Eve of AI

#165

Post by nicbou »

lewhoo wrote: post #145
ben_w wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Farmer protests are in the news at the moment, and the people quoted by the journalists are talking about farming as a passion. The more the farms automate, the fewer farmer workers there can be. Logic isn't part of these protests either: the farmers are being told "you're making more food than we need, please make less" and yet the placards are (in the local language) "no farms = no food".

No, I specifically meant if your passion was to plow the field by hand . All I want is not to put an equals sign between something that takes years of formal education and years of self study and development, and something you can master in a week or month. Being and engineer or doctor is who you (partly but permanently) become. The tractor didn't rob anyone of their farming passion. It did make plowmen become factor…

I'm not sure I follow you. The problem isn't that people lose their passion. The problem is that people lose their means of subsistence. The factory workers displaced by automation share the same plight as the farmers before them: how do I feed my family when I have no job?

Efficiency puts people out of work. They can be relocated to other useful pursuits, but usually they're left to do that on their own.

Re: Raising Children on the Eve of AI

#166

Post by Cacti »

ben_w wrote: post #164
alumic wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> How easy it must be for Sam Altman to drag the world kicking and screaming into the future. How pretty his offices. One thing I find fascinating in all this, is how Sam Altman is demonised simultaneously for pushing everything too fast and also for calling for legislation to slow things down. He may well be wrong about large aspects of this[0], but I do find it curious how his critics on each side of this divide se…

one is a private gain, one is a public cost. what is confusing about someone pushing AI while trying to slow down their competitors?

Re: Raising Children on the Eve of AI

#167

Post by lewhoo »

nicbou wrote: post #165
lewhoo wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, I specifically meant if your passion was to plow the field by hand . All I want is not to put an equals sign between something that takes years of formal education and years of self study and development, and something you can master in a week or month. Being and engineer or doctor is who you (partly but permanently) become. The tractor didn't rob anyone of their farming passion. It did make plowmen become factor…

I'm not sure I follow you. The problem isn't that people lose their passion. The problem is that people lose their means of subsistence. The factory workers displaced by automation share the same plight as the farmers before them: how do I feed my family when I have no job? Efficiency puts people out of work. They can be relocated to other useful pursuits, but usually they're left to do that on their own.

I agree. I simply claim that losing something you picked up in a week and losing something you dedicated your life to (in some cases, not all cases of course) is not exactly the same. It is also far easier in the former case to shrug off and maybe try plumbing, construction or anything else.

Re: Raising Children on the Eve of AI

#168

Post by ben_w »

Cacti wrote: post #166
ben_w wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> How easy it must be for Sam Altman to drag the world kicking and screaming into the future. How pretty his offices. One thing I find fascinating in all this, is how Sam Altman is demonised simultaneously for pushing everything too fast and also for calling for legislation to slow things down. He may well be wrong about large aspects of this[0], but I do find it curious how his critics on each side of this divide se…

one is a private gain, one is a public cost. what is confusing about someone pushing AI while trying to slow down their competitors?

> someone pushing AI while trying to slow down their competitors

He's specifically doing the exact opposite of that.

"Legislate us, don't slow down open source models, don't slow down our competitors, focus on us and anything better than our current best model" (paraphrased).

But I guess I can sort of see what you mean, possibly?

Re: Raising Children on the Eve of AI

#169

Post by nojvek »

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…

Child abuse?

They are being asked to think about what is going to be the impact of climate on their lifetimes.

And yes, going from 260 to ~500ppm of CO2 in atmosphere will have an impact on them. Better be prepared.

Re: Raising Children on the Eve of AI

#170

Post by anonylizard »

Nevermark wrote: post #143
microtonal wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. Our daughter is ten and when it comes to AI and stuff, I am not worried about our kids. It's us who will suffer most from it. Remember when you were young and had to explain your parents over and over again how the…

> but explaining the new world, which is going to be completely foreign to you It might be different this time, if we are looking at accelerating higher order change. Human's have a speed limit. AI progress doesn't, and its rate of improvement is going to surpass the rate any human child can learn. Crossing major thresholds tends to break previous patterns. (Not trying to be downer. Just trying to understand what may…

Children have a sense of wonder, to them, AI will just be magic actualized. And in fact AI IS magic by every definition, its incomprehensible and incredibly powerful.

Now AI progress may outpace their ability to understand it, but they'll still love it and be dependent on it.

Unlike adults, they don't face the threat of job displacement from AI.

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