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Why do we tell ourselves scary stories about AI?

quantamagazine.org

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Re: Why do we tell ourselves scary stories about AI?

#41

Post by MrDarcy »

ramon156 wrote: post #16

I feel like this article is more written towards non-techies. A decent amount of programmers have touched coding agents, and know it "kind of" does it's job. It's good enough for some tasks... I cannot be arsed to figure out how to edit a graph in Drupal, so I ask Claude. Claude fixes it, and it's not anymore broken than it already was. Win win. However, that's where I stop my agent usage. I let ~~Claude~~ GLM do the…

This usage pattern is a few months behind the curve. It’s effective at full on feature development now. Keep it fed with plans and it’ll keep implementing, leaving the codebase better than it found it each cycle.

Re: Why do we tell ourselves scary stories about AI?

#42

Post by xg15 »

afavour wrote: post #3

It does feel like a bizarre moment, where the AI companies are deliberately trying to scare us about their own product in a bid to, I think, show the inevitability of it? Or to sell themselves as the one responsible power to constrain it? It's very odd. "It's going to take all your jobs" is not a great selling point to the everyday public.

Yeah, the messaging felt weirdly pyromanic, like telling everyone about the unimaginable dangers of fire and then saying that's why I have I to burn everything, to protect us from the fire...

Re: Why do we tell ourselves scary stories about AI?

#43

Post by afavour »

ACCount37 wrote: post #22
everdrive wrote: post #17

One thing that strikes me that I never really see anyone discuss is that we've been afraid of conscious computers for a _long_ time. Back in the 50s and before people were quite afraid that we'd build conscious computers. This was long before there was any sense that could actually accomplish the task. I think that similarly to seeing faces in the clouds, we imagine a consciousness where none exists. (eg: a rain god…

Are they? Not conscious? If you list out every prominent theory of consciousness, you'd find that about a quarter rules out LLMs, a quarter tentatively rules LLMs in, and what remains is "uncertain about LLMs". And, of course, we don't know which theory of consciousness is correct - or if any of them is. So, what is it that makes you so sure, oh so very certain, that LLMs just "feel" conscious but aren't?

> So, what is it that makes you so sure, oh so very certain, that LLMs just "feel" conscious but aren't?

Because we know what they actually are on the inside. You're talking as if they're an equivalent to the human brain, the functioning of which we're still figuring out. They're not. They're large language models. We know how they work. The way they work does not result in a functioning consciousness.

Re: Why do we tell ourselves scary stories about AI?

#45

Post by saHqtr »

ACCount37 wrote: post #19

It's simple. It's because AI is the scariest technology ever made. Human intelligence has proven itself capable of doing a lot of scary things. And AI research is keen on building ever more capable and more scalable intelligence. By now, the list of advantages humans still have over machines is both finite and rapidly diminishing. If that doesn't make you uneasy, you're in denial.

Most humans can do more than plagiarizing text. But let's hype up the clankers before the IPOs.

Re: Why do we tell ourselves scary stories about AI?

#47

Post by bauerd »

sublinear wrote: post #37
ACCount37 wrote: post #19

It's simple. It's because AI is the scariest technology ever made. Human intelligence has proven itself capable of doing a lot of scary things. And AI research is keen on building ever more capable and more scalable intelligence. By now, the list of advantages humans still have over machines is both finite and rapidly diminishing. If that doesn't make you uneasy, you're in denial.

This is untrue. What is being diminished is the value of humans doing repetitive or uncreative tasks. Many have built their careers from that kind of work in the past and yes they are threatened, but that kind of work is inherently not collaborative and more vocational.

The vast majority of people on this planet work repetitive, uncreative jobs.

Re: Why do we tell ourselves scary stories about AI?

#48

Post by deepsquirrelnet »

afavour wrote: post #3

It does feel like a bizarre moment, where the AI companies are deliberately trying to scare us about their own product in a bid to, I think, show the inevitability of it? Or to sell themselves as the one responsible power to constrain it? It's very odd. "It's going to take all your jobs" is not a great selling point to the everyday public.

There are so many reason if you look at how it's being sold.

* We need to completely deregulate these US companies so China doesn't win and take us over

* We need to heavily regulate anybody who is not following the rules that make us the de-facto winner

* This is so powerful it will take all the jobs (and therefore if you lead a company that isn't using AI, you will soon be obsolete)

* If you don't use AI, you will not be able to function in a future job

* We need to lineup an excuse to call our friends in government and turn off the open source spigot when the time is right

They have chosen fear as a motivator, and it is clearly working very well. It's easier to use fear now, while it's new and then flip the narrative once people are more familiar with it than to go the other direction. Companies are not just telling a story to hype their product, but why they alone are the ones that should be entrusted to build it.

Re: Why do we tell ourselves scary stories about AI?

#49

Post by fontain »

ACCount37 wrote: post #19

It's simple. It's because AI is the scariest technology ever made. Human intelligence has proven itself capable of doing a lot of scary things. And AI research is keen on building ever more capable and more scalable intelligence. By now, the list of advantages humans still have over machines is both finite and rapidly diminishing. If that doesn't make you uneasy, you're in denial.

The world we live in is a construct, not a natural outcome. Even if we take your premise at face value, that our success as a species is only because of advantages over others, what's to say that "intelligence" is that advantage? What's to say that we don't use our advantages to reconstruct a world that works in a way that doesn't advantage intelligence over all else?

And on intelligence specifically: even amongst the human race, we all know smart people who are abject failures, and idiots who are wildly successful. Intelligence is vastly overrated.

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