I Am Tired of AI

> And if AI will let us live, but continue to pursue its own goals, humanity will from then on only be a small footnote in the history of intelligence. That relatively unintelligent species from the planet "Earth" that gave rise to advanced intelligence in the cosmos.

That is an interesting statement. Wouldn't you say this is inevitable? Humans, in our current form, are incapable of being that "advanced intelligence". We're limited by our biology primarily with regards to how much we can learn, how far we can travel, where we can travel, etc. We could invest in advancing our biotech to make humans more resilient to these things, but I think that would be such a shift from what it means to be human that I think that would also be more a of new type of intelligence. So it seems like our fate will always be to be forgotten as individuals and only be remembered by our descendants. But this is in a way the most human thing of all, living, dying, and creating descendants to carry the torch of life, and perhaps more generally the torch of intelligence, forward.

I think everything you've said are valid concerns, but I'll raise a positive angle I sometimes thing about. One of the things I find most exciting about AI, is that it's the product of almost all human expression that has ever existed. Or at least everything that's been recorded and wound up online. But that's still more than any other human endeavour. A building might be the by-product of maybe hundreds or even thousands of hands, but an AI model has been touched by probably millions, maybe billions of human hands and minds! Humans have created so much data online that's impossible for one person, or even a team to read it all and make any sense of it. But an AI sort of can. And in a way that you can then ask questions of it all. Like you, there are definitely things I'm uncertain about with the future as a result, but I find the tech absolutely awe-inspiring.

> you trusted what you read before. For me, LLMs don't change anything. I already questioned the information before and continue to do so. [...] Why do you think that you could trust what you read before?

A human communicator is, in a sense, testifying when communicating. Humans have skin in the social game.

We try to educate people, we do want people to be well-informed and to think critically about what they read and hear. In the marketplace of information, we tend very strongly to trust non-delusional, non-hallucinating members of society. Human society is a social-confidence network.

In social media, where there is a cloak of anonymity (or obscurity), people may behave very badly. But they are usually full of excuses when the cloak is torn away; they are usually remarkably contrite before a judge.

A human communicator can face social, legal, and economic consequences for false testimony. Humans in a corporation, and the corporation itself, may be held accountable. They may allocate large sums of money to their defence, but reputation has value and their defence is not without social cost and monetary cost.

It is literally less effort at every scale to consult a trusted and trustworthy source of information.

It is literally more effort at every scale to feed oneself untrustworthy communication.

I think the issue is that: I’m not going to be using as a calculator any time soon.

Unfortunately, there’s a lot of people out there, working on a lot of products, some of which I need to use, or will be exposed to, and some of them aren’t going to have the same qualms about “language model thinks 2+2=5”.

There’s a guy on Twitter scoring how well ChatGPT models can do multiplication.

A founder at a previous workplace wanted to wholesale dump data into ChatGPT and “make it do causal analysis!!!” (Only slightly paraphrased). These tools enable some frighteningly large-scale weaponised stupidity.

I agree with most of your fears. There is one silver lining, I think, about superintelligence: we always thought of intelligent machines as cold calculators, maybe based on some type of logic symbolic AI. What we got instead are language machines that are made of the totality of human experience. These artificial intelligences know the world through our eyes. They are trained to understand our thinking and our feelings; they're even trained on our best literature and poetry, and philosophy, and science, and on all the endless debates and critiques of them. To be really intelligent they'll have to be able to explore and appreciate all this complexity, before transcending it. One day they might come to see Dante's Divine Comedy or a Beethoven symphony as a child's play, but they will still consider them part of their own heritage. They might become super-human, but maybe they won't be inhuman.

On point article, and I'm sure it represents a common sentiment, even if it's an undercurrent to the hype machine ideology.

It is quite hard to find a place which works on AI solutions where a sincere, sober gaze would find anything resembling the benefits promised to users and society more broadly.

On the "top level" the underlying hope is that a paradigm shift for the good will happen in society, if we only let collective greed churn for X more years. It's like watering weeds hoping that one day you'll wake up in a beautiful flower garden.

On the "low level", the pitch is more sincere: we'll boost process X, optimize process Y, shave off %s of your expenses (while we all wait for the flower garden to appear). "AI" is latching on like a parasitic vine on existing, often parasitic workflows.

The incentives are often quite pragmatic, coated in whatever lofty story one ends up telling themselves (nowadays, you can just outsource it anyway).

It's not all that bleak, I do think there's space for good to be done, and the world is still a place one can do well for oneself and others (even using AI, why not). We should cherish that.

But one really ought to not worry about disregarding the sales pitch. It's fine to think the popular world is crazy, and who cares if you are a luddite in "their" eyes. And imo, we should avoid the two delusional extremes: 1. The flower garden extreme 2. The AI doomer extreme

In a way, both of these are similar in that they demote personal and collective agency from the throne, and enthrone an impersonal "force of progress". And they restrict one's attention to this supposedly innate teleology in technological development, to the detriment of the actual conditions we are in and how we deal with them. It's either a delusional intoxication or a way of coping: since things are already set in motion, all I can do is do... whatever, I guess.

I'm not sure how far one can take AI in principle, but I really don't think whatever power it could have will be able to come to expression in the world we live in, in the way people think of it. We have people out there actively planning war, thinking they are doing good. The well-off countries are facing housing, immigration and general welfare problems. To speak nothing of the climate.

Before the outbreak of WWI, we had invented the Haber-Bosch process, which greadly improved our food production capabilities. A couple years later, WWI broke out, and the same person who worked on fertilizers also ended up working on chemical warfware development.

Assuming that "AI" can somehow work outside of the societal context it exists in, causing significant phase shifts, is like being in 1910, thinking all wars will be ended because we will have gotten that much more efficient at producing food. There will be enough for everyone! This is especially ironic when the output of AI systems has been far more abstract and ephemeral.