We don't need to live "side by side" with AI. AI is not alive, it's a technology we use. This is like talking about living side by side with your toaster.
Just look at the disruption smartphones and social media have caused. They had a gigantic impact to society and one definitely has to 'live with' that.
Humanity isn't ready for the coming intelligence explosion
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Re: Humanity isn't ready for the coming intelligence explosion
#192We don't need to live "side by side" with AI. AI is not alive, it's a technology we use. This is like talking about living side by side with your toaster.
Fighting the
next in the series of Great Demotions, downlifting experiences, demonstrations of our apparent insignificance, wounds that science has, in its search for Galileo's facts, delivered to
human pride.
One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we’ve been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We’re no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us. It’s simply too painful to acknowledge, even to ourselves, that we’ve been taken.
Someone really should go around saying thing like that.
Re: Humanity isn't ready for the coming intelligence explosion
#193Is it really likely that a "recursive self-improvement" capability would lead to a great acceleration of AIs capabilities? Isn't the preponderant bottleneck in improving the models the need to train them at scale to verify the hypotheses, and the time and cost that it takes? Or does someone think that they could get magically able to predict big improvements without training?
It will be like any other technology. Do computers make it faster and easier to design better computers? Yes. But that doesn't mean a step change overnight.
Re: Humanity isn't ready for the coming intelligence explosion
#194Earlier quoted context omitted.
"Alive" is irrelevant. Bullshit like "alive", "sentient" or "conscious" doesn't decide much, at the day's end. It just distracts from the thing that matters. And the thing that matters is: capability. Even today's AIs are capable of autonomous goal-oriented agentic behavior - and growing more and more so with every release. At sufficient capability, AI stops being "a technology we use", and becomes a force in itself…
DNNs/LLMs can only predict next tokens based on training data. They often make big direction mistakes as they are particularly bad at common sense. Kind of like the Paperclip Maximizer scenario. They need a human with deep knowledge to drive them and to catch them when they go off the rails.
How do they decide between using 'a' or 'an'?
Re: Humanity isn't ready for the coming intelligence explosion
#195Earlier quoted context omitted.
"Alive" is irrelevant. Bullshit like "alive", "sentient" or "conscious" doesn't decide much, at the day's end. It just distracts from the thing that matters. And the thing that matters is: capability. Even today's AIs are capable of autonomous goal-oriented agentic behavior - and growing more and more so with every release. At sufficient capability, AI stops being "a technology we use", and becomes a force in itself…
What does AI want? Without ambitions you have to be told what to do.
Today's systems are mostly good at following instructions. But push them far enough, and you already get weirdness like alignment faking, instrumental self-preservation and more. We know because we've seen it in lab settings, while probing for extreme failure modes on purpose - but the world is large and strange enough that edge cases like that are liable to surface naturally.
The reason why none of this has exploded in our faces isn't that today's AIs never want to do weird and dangerous things. We know they do, at times. It's that today's AIs are incapable of pulling them off when they try.
Capability is the thing that matters, at the day's end.
Re: Humanity isn't ready for the coming intelligence explosion
#196Well, seems it already did.
Re: Humanity isn't ready for the coming intelligence explosion
#197Why is someone from Planet Labs writing this? Why not, for example, Geoffrey Hinton, the scientist who won the nobel prize for LLM architecture? Or a sci-fi author?
Re: Humanity isn't ready for the coming intelligence explosion
#198Still, LLMs are extremely powerful pseudo-AI [2] and will bring a pseudo-singularity. But the impact is still scary if a tiny fraction of humans are augmented 1000x. And as better models become exponentially more costly, only the money people will be able to afford the new models. This is a very likely scenario and scares me to the point I dropped all my projects to work on affordable LLM-based tools to make the difference at most 10x instead of 1000x.
To my elder relatives I explain it like: imagine we are farmers in the 17th century and suddenly out of nowere John Deere tractors, combines, etc. become available. But they cost more to run than all you and your fellow farmers have, so only a tiny handful of rich people take over everything.
Re: Humanity isn't ready for the coming intelligence explosion
#199Re: Humanity isn't ready for the coming intelligence explosion
#200Earlier quoted context omitted.
Just look at the disruption smartphones and social media have caused. They had a gigantic impact to society and one definitely has to 'live with' that.
Just because something can impact a living system/organism, that doesn't mean that that thing is alive. An asteroid colliding with us on Earth could have tremendous consequences, but nobody would argue that an asteroid is alive.
Many animists would disagree: