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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

#311

Post by voakbasda »

fwipsy wrote: post #293
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…

> internal competition and in-fighting of the natives. What about diseases which killed up to 95% of the population? I think you are basically correct, except for the historical analogy.

Wait, you think AI won’t eventually have full control over a bio lab, where it can manipulate an unsuspecting tech to produce and release a bioweapon to accomplish that explicit goal?

Because I think that seems virtually inevitable at this point.

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

#312

Post by EvanAnderson »

aleph_minus_one wrote: post #220
adamtaylor_13 wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah that's my thought too. People, especially Americans (I am one) have this weird belief that violence never has any place, ever, at any time. I'd argue that the unwillingness to commit violence in certain situations is actually a character flaw. If someone threatens my child with physical violence, an unwillingness to commit violence on my child's behalf isn't better morality; it's cowardice. All this to say, I ag…

> [E]specially Americans (I am one) have this weird belief that violence never has any place, ever, at any time. So why isn't there a huge opposition in the USA against the wars that the USA started (currently: Iran; before: Libya, Yemen, Syria, Somalia, Iraq, Afghanistan, ...). The only famous exception of cultural impact I am aware of where there was a huge opposition against war in the USA was the Vietnam war.

I think Americans (and probably humans in general) have a distaste for local violence. Violence afar doesn't tickle the brain in the same way.

My ignorant take:

Media brought the horror of US casualties in Vietnam home in a mass and immediate way that didn't exist in prior conflicts. The novelty of that media combined with the casualty rates drove unpopularity. It made the violence feel more real.

Even if casualty rates in post-Vietnam conflicts were higher I'm not sure we'd see negative sentiment because media coverage of violence is so normalized now. Exposure to violence in media is no longer novel.

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

#313

Post by rogerrogerr »

mrob wrote: post #285
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) becom…

I used to think this, but the AI labs sure seem neck-and-neck in the model race. Doesn't appear that anyone is developing an enormous lead. So I've become skeptical of the runaway king-of-the-world-maker model scenario.

The open models seeming to be ~6 months behind is very encouraging, too.

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

#314

Post by jacquesm »

Fricken wrote: post #299
vidarh wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And yet there are orders of magnitude more cars than olympic athletes, and most olympic athletes struggle to make much money on it. So, sure, there will be space for some human achievement for the sake of it, but, most fewer and fewer people will make a living off that.

Olympic Athletes are the fruits of our labour. They are what things like money and cars are for.

I'd say JS Bach was one of the fruits of our labor, so were Newton, Einstein and van Gogh.

Olympic Athletes are a combination of luck in the genetics department and a lot of effort, but ultimately do not seem to be sufficient to help the athletes themselves.

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

#315

Post by jacquesm »

michaelbuckbee wrote: post #174
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...

I feel like AI just raises the floor but doesn't push the ceiling on the quality of creative works. There's still space for creativity, novelty, invention and human intuition.

This is a fantastic point.

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

#316

Post by SpicyLemonZest »

thunky wrote: post #162
zozbot234 wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I have said repeatedly that when AI eliminates the need for human creativity and work Yeah, this is not happening anytime soon. Have you even looked at AI-generated code or text? AI is just a dumb parrot, it's no match for human effort and creativity even in these "easy" domains. The business case for AI generation is just being able to generate huge amounts of unusable slop for next to nothing. For skilled workers…

> 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.

You’re equating two things that aren’t the same. I’m not still manually writing code, but it’s not at all because Claude can produce better code than me. It’s worse at CRUD apps and a lot worse at domain specific bits. But it’s more parallelizable, so if I drive it well I can focus my skill on the small subset of problems that actually require it and achieve increased throughput.

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

#317

Post by dd8601fn »

softwaredoug wrote: post #199

Highly recommend people learn the history of the Industrial Revolution. I recently discovered the Industrial Revolutions Podcast[1] and have been enjoying it. What's happening today isn't unprecedented. The pace of change that's happening IS similar to periods of the industrial revolution. For example, the flying jenny, overnight, basically put an entire craft industry of weaving into question. Probably more dramatic…

At the start I think everyone thought the industrial revolution could be a useful historical reference.

But what AI is selling is the obliteration of human knowledge work.

It just isn’t informative for that.

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

#318

Post by HWR_14 »

MontyCarloHall wrote: post #269
dandanua wrote: post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Everyone would have equal access to the ultimate means of production. You are right that AI can be a fully democratized commodity. The problem is that the current wealth inequality is not the result of AI. Musk became a trillion seeking oligarch not because of AI. It is because the entire financial system is designed to extract wealth from everyone and concentrate at the top. Democratic AI is not in their interest.…

>It will be violence from the rich towards the poor, because democratic AI is not acceptable for them. Unless the rich somehow manage to completely stifle the progress of consumer-level computing advancement (all chip manufacturers would just collude to quit selling to consumers?) and exert an iron-fisted control over the dissemination of software (when has this ever worked?), I'm not sure how they could control the…

> all chip manufacturers would just collude to quit selling to consumers?

Well, someone with money could go buy 100% of RAM production for the next 3 years.

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

#319

Post by mrob »

rogerrogerr wrote: post #313
mrob wrote: post #285

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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) becom…

I used to think this, but the AI labs sure seem neck-and-neck in the model race. Doesn't appear that anyone is developing an enormous lead. So I've become skeptical of the runaway king-of-the-world-maker model scenario. The open models seeming to be ~6 months behind is very encouraging, too.

AI progress can potentially be extremely non-linear because of feedback effects. The first to build an AI smart enough to accelerate building even smarter AIs wins (or loses along with everybody else if it's more successful than they expected).

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

#320

Post by djeastm »

bregma wrote: post #60
block_dagger wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

War accelerated evolution, it’s why it exists.

So did compassion, probably in a greater amount. And yet the greater amount of resources goes into war at the expense of compassion. Humanity has taken control of its own evolution and no longer relyies on natural selection to be the driving force for change. Using evolution as an excuse to make bad and immoral choices is a poor argument and should be left back in the stone age.

>Humanity has taken control of its own evolution

Has it taken full control of it or just partial control?

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