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AI Will Be Met with Violence, and Nothing Good Will Come of It

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Re: AI Will Be Met with Violence, and Nothing Good Will Come of It

#281

Post by Lerc »

UncleMeat wrote: post #232
Lerc wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How can you hope for anything better if you consider it an us versus them situation? When they say "We don't want to increase inequality" and the response is "We don't believe you". Where do you go from there? It seems like a lot of people want a revolution so that they can rotate who will be able to take advantage of the vulnerable. What are the suggestions for something better? I don't see a lot. I'd like to see mo…

We can look at their actions, in particular their efforts to influence public policy.

You can, but then what? Do you judge what they say as if their perspective is the same as yours, and then conclude from that context that what they suggest could only come from an evil person. That seems to be what a lot of people do. What if they actually think what they are suggesting is the best thing for the world? How can you tell what is in their minds?

Alternately you could criticise their arguments instead of the people, and suggest an alternative.

I'm also not entirely certain that influencing public policy is something that is inherently bad. I know if I were deaf, I would like to have some influence on public policy about deafness issues.

Re: AI Will Be Met with Violence, and Nothing Good Will Come of It

#282

Post by yoyohello13 »

Lerc wrote: post #196
tedivm wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you decouple it when the people who own it and are building it seem to be driven on increasing inequality?

How can you hope for anything better if you consider it an us versus them situation? When they say "We don't want to increase inequality" and the response is "We don't believe you". Where do you go from there? It seems like a lot of people want a revolution so that they can rotate who will be able to take advantage of the vulnerable. What are the suggestions for something better? I don't see a lot. I'd like to see mo…

The billionaires could start to earn trust by lobbying for laws and programs that help the poor and displaced. Put money in to retraining programs to help people who lose their jobs. So far they seem to be doing the opposite, CEOs are publicly declaring ‘fuck you, got mine’ and leaving it at that.

Re: AI Will Be Met with Violence, and Nothing Good Will Come of It

#283

Post by thunky »

prmph wrote: post #181
thunky wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> AI is just a dumb parrot You really need to look again. If you're still manually writing code you have your head in the sand. AI can produce better code than most devs produce. This is true for easy stuff like crud apps and even more true for harder problems that require knowledge of external domains.

Well "most" devs is doing a lot of work here. I'm not sure about other devs, or even their number, but AI can most definitely NOT produce better code than I can. I use it after I have done the hard architectural work: defining complex types and interfaces, figuring out code organization, solving thorny issues. When these are done, it's now time to hand over to the agent to apply stuff everywhere following my patterns…

What you're describing is using it to do something you already can do at an expert level, and you already know exactly what you want the result to look like amd won't accept anything that deviates from what's already in your head. So like a code autocomplete. You don't really want the "intelligence" part, you want a mule.

That's fine, and useful, but you're really putting a ceiling on it's potential. Try using it for something that you aren't already an expert in. That's where most devs live.

Even expert coder antirez says "writing the code yourself is no longer sensible".

https://antirez.com/news/158

Re: AI Will Be Met with Violence, and Nothing Good Will Come of It

#284

Post by jacquesm »

jdiff wrote: post #267
Der_Einzige wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

Swartz died in 2002, decades before LLMs. It is distasteful to put words in the mouths of the dead by invoking him here. Even local AI concentrates power in the hands of a few, the few who can afford the hardware to run it, and the few who have the luxury of enough time and energy to devote to engaging with the intricate, technical rabbit hole of local models.

You should read that comment again, they're not putting any words in Swartz's mouth, they are lauding his accomplishments.

Re: AI Will Be Met with Violence, and Nothing Good Will Come of It

#285

Post by mrob »

zkmon wrote: post #261

History has shown that an alien invasion can only happen because of the internal competition and in-fighting of the natives. Colonial empires proved it only a few centuries back. The invading alien powers are fuelled by the inviting natives. AI (and computing technology in general) is an alien as it defies all wordly norms. It can have exact identical copies, can replicate, can exist everywhere, communicate across hu…

>History has shown that an alien invasion can only happen because of the internal competition and in-fighting of the natives.

Not true. Overwhelming technological advantage also works. As Hilaire Belloc put it:

  Whatever happens, we have got
  The Maxim gun, and they have not.
The AI arms race is a race for that kind of advantage. Whoever wins (assuming they don't overshoot and trigger the "everybody dies" ending) becomes de-facto king of the world. Everybody else is livestock.

Re: AI Will Be Met with Violence, and Nothing Good Will Come of It

#286

Post by markus_zhang »

There is nothing new about it. I just hope when people scream “unions” they do expect to do things that early unions did, not just being some armchair unionists.

But individuals can’t fight with the trend. Might as well reduce costs/debts and prepare to go into the mountains for a few weeks once SHTF.

Re: AI Will Be Met with Violence, and Nothing Good Will Come of It

#287

Post by tedivm »

UncleMeat wrote: post #232
Lerc wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How can you hope for anything better if you consider it an us versus them situation? When they say "We don't want to increase inequality" and the response is "We don't believe you". Where do you go from there? It seems like a lot of people want a revolution so that they can rotate who will be able to take advantage of the vulnerable. What are the suggestions for something better? I don't see a lot. I'd like to see mo…

We can look at their actions, in particular their efforts to influence public policy.

Seriously. They can say they want to share their gains all they want, but I don't see them spending any lobbying money on things like universal income (and if Altman can afford to lobby for age verification laws he can certainly afford to lobby for things that actually benefit society). The reality is they don't lobby for anything that would take wealth away from them, and any redistribution of wealth (such as a s 75% tax rate) would by definition take wealth away from them.

Re: AI Will Be Met with Violence, and Nothing Good Will Come of It

#288

Post by GuB-42 »

conartist6 wrote: post #114

I have said repeatedly that when AI eliminates the need for human creativity and work, the only thing left as the natural domain of humans will be bloodshed. The fact that we're using AI killer robots to wipe each other out in droves doesn't bode well for that future does it...

At least for now, AI sucks at creativity. There is an initial "wow" effect when you can generate an image of an astronaut riding a unicorn on the moon with a simple prompt, but as you try to play a bit more with it, you notice that unless you inject some of your own creativity, you won't get very far, no matter the medium.

Passed some point, if you are good at what you are doing, the AI will stop helping and become a burden, because you will want precise control, and AI in its current form (deep learning) is not good at it.

There is a reason we talk about "AI slop", you simply cannot let an AI make creative decisions and expect a good result.

By creative I don't just mean artistic. For code, AI works for the least creative tasks, like ports, generic-looking CRUD apps, etc...

As for work, we have already eliminated most of the need for human work. By "need", I mean survival: food, shelter, these kinds of thing. Most of human production goes to comfort, entertainment, luxury, etc... We will find stuff to do that isn't bloodshed. In fact, as times went on, we spend more on saving people than killing them, judging by a global increase in life expectancy. Why would AI reverse the trend?

Re: AI Will Be Met with Violence, and Nothing Good Will Come of It

#289

Post by wongarsu »

ekidd wrote: post #158
surgical_fire wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If AI eliminates the need for creativity and work, it means that our creativity and work are not meaningful enough to warrant survival. I don't think we're anywhere near that point.

Personally, I would surprised if we are less than 3 years or more than 20 years from humans being obsolete. That is, humans would be economic dead weight, any job could be done better by AI/robots, and "comparative advantage" wouldn't apply because it's cheap enough to just make more robots. At this point, the average human would be completely useless to the billionaires (or to the AIs, if the billionaires fail to co…

I broadly agree with a 3-20 year timeline for a majority of office work. But some important qualifying statements I would add:

- some jobs will stay with humans even when AI would be better at it. We already see a lot of this with even with pre-AI automatisation. Neither markets nor companies are perfectly efficient

- at the point where AI is better than the average human, half of all humans are still better than AI. For companies or departments built around employing lots of average people the cutover point will be a lot earlier than for shops that aim to employ the best of the best. Social change is inevitable long before the best are out of work

- the actual benchmark for " replacement" is not human vs machine, but human plus machine vs machine alone. But the difference doesn't matter much because efficiency increases still displace workers

- I don't think robots will advance enough to meet this timeline. This is not just a software issue. Humans have an amazing suite of sensors and actuators. Just replicating a human hand is insanely complex. Walking, jumping robots are crude automatons in comparison. We can cover a lot with specialized robots, but we won't replace humans in physical jobs in 20 years

Re: AI Will Be Met with Violence, and Nothing Good Will Come of It

#290

Post by NeutralCrane »

moogly wrote: post #194
MontyCarloHall wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you underestimate just how much we value human achievement. Why do we watch Olympic runners, when cars on your average city street easily exceed Usain Bolt's top speed on their morning drive to Starbucks? Why do we watch the Tour de France, when we can watch Uber Eats drivers on their 150cc scooters easily outpace top cyclists? I'm sure within a couple years a Boston Dynamics robot will be able to out-gymnast…

Sucks for us that don't care one iota about sports, but care about the arts.

The point is that the same thing is likely to occur with the arts
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