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Everyone Is Wrong About AI Except Me

jasonpargin.substack.com

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Re: Everyone Is Wrong About AI Except Me

#21

Post by josefritzishere »

vends wrote: post #15
josefritzishere wrote: post #10

AI is truly the dumbest technology to emerge in my lifetime.

Hyperbole or just rage bait?

Maybe a smidge dramatic? What I'm seeing is the most money-losing technology being shoe-horned into virtually every system with little to no benefit, but definitely producing a more dystopian future in terms of unemployment and the environment. But even AI fans expect a market correction because they can't hemorrhage cash forever. So in that context, watching employers hire AI-evangelists to force workers to use AI seems even more absurd.

Re: Everyone Is Wrong About AI Except Me

#22

Post by stvltvs »

vintermann wrote: post #16

Interesting first point. I'm reminded of Blade Runner, which definitively fits in the "robots are people too, you monster!" genre ... But the source material was the exact opposite. Philip K. Dick went out of the way to rub in that even if the robots could move you to tears with their art (Luba Luft), be a reassuring authority figure for years (Garland), or even appear vulnerable and afraid (Pris Stratton), they are…

Sounds like the book and the film are different works, so people who only watched the film can't misunderstand the book because they didn't read it.

Re: Everyone Is Wrong About AI Except Me

#23

Post by stvltvs »

palmotea wrote: post #12
Closi wrote: post #7

> Not only is the populace primed to treat artificial intelligence tools as living peers, they’ve been trained to hate or dismiss anyone who doesn’t This doesn’t meet my personal experience, but curious to hear if others see something different! The prevailing opinion in the UK at least seems to be that it’s some non-living magical tool assistant. As this assumption seems to be the basis of the article, I’m not sure…

I think the article makes a bit of a leap. The "priming" in the passage you're quoting is the depiction of robots in mass-media, cherry-picking the highly anthropomorphized hero-robots (e.g. WALL-E, Lt. Cmdr. Data, the good-guy Terminator in all the sequels). I think it's an open question if that pre-LLM "priming" will survive actual contact with LLMs or if modern media depictions of robots will change in response.

The priming didn't prepare us to sympathize with robots that were built to plagiarize our art and literature and take our jobs.

Robocop is an interesting example where we sympathize with a cyborg but not the greedy corporate executives. Blade Runner has the same outlook. The Matrix and Ex Machina don't present AI as entirely sympathetic. Etc.

The priming has been a lot more nuanced than simply AI = sympathetic lifeform.

Re: Everyone Is Wrong About AI Except Me

#24

Post by xgulfie »

xgulfie wrote: post #18

I have a feeling we are going to see more media where the opposite arc happens — where the robot is revealed to be actually /not/ as human as someone thinks, and is revealed to be a jerk, actually (like Ash in Alien)

Also adding: the author seems to miss that the stories he references are subversions of the existing trope

Re: Everyone Is Wrong About AI Except Me

#25

Post by drivingmenuts »

I've finally started realizing that, while I don't trust AI (or what we're calling AI), what I really don't like or trust are the people behind it. In fact, the whole problem with modern tech is that the people funding it and hyping it are just untrustworthy.

I have less of a problem with Chinese AI than American AI because no one in China is screaming at me to use their AI. No one in China is trying to justify me making sacrifices so their AI can grow. It's like: they don't care if I use their AI or not - it's there, you do you.

Meanwhile, Altman, Bezos, Musk and Zuckerberg (problematic individuals at best) are all over the news proclaiming AI as the Second Coming of Jesus if only I give up water so they can cool their plants, all while yelling "it will all work out if you just trust us!"

Not helping, guys. Not at all.

Also, it's not Intelligent and for the love of God, please stop pretending it is and please stop trying to convince everyone that it is.

Re: Everyone Is Wrong About AI Except Me

#27

Post by palmotea »

soulofmischief wrote: post #20
vintermann wrote: post #16

Interesting first point. I'm reminded of Blade Runner, which definitively fits in the "robots are people too, you monster!" genre ... But the source material was the exact opposite. Philip K. Dick went out of the way to rub in that even if the robots could move you to tears with their art (Luba Luft), be a reassuring authority figure for years (Garland), or even appear vulnerable and afraid (Pris Stratton), they are…

When phrased this way, you're describing real people as well. We all have our various masks, secrets and lies.

> When phrased this way, you're describing real people as well. We all have our various masks, secrets and lies.

You're misunderstanding "Dick went out of the way to rub in that ... robots ... are actually not people, but rather artifacts designed to fool you about what they are." A person fooling others doesn't make that person an artifact.

Re: Everyone Is Wrong About AI Except Me

#28

Post by soulofmischief »

palmotea wrote: post #27
soulofmischief wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When phrased this way, you're describing real people as well. We all have our various masks, secrets and lies.

> When phrased this way, you're describing real people as well. We all have our various masks, secrets and lies. You're misunderstanding "Dick went out of the way to rub in that ... robots ... are actually not people, but rather artifacts designed to fool you about what they are." A person fooling others doesn't make that person an artifact.

I understand the idea, but my take is that while PKD was by all accounts a visionary who could see things few others could, I wonder how his opinion on this would have evolved over the last four decades.

Like what makes something an "artifact"? That it is a superficial image produced intentionally by another? Mass propaganda and social pipelining have produced the same phenomenon in humans.

Is it that the robot doesn't "feel" like a human does? Well, now we're in extraordinarily subjective territory, dealing with qualia, and the distinction will become more difficult as neural models continue to evolve and experience the world in the same way we do.

I like PKD's take but I think it's an open question.

Re: Everyone Is Wrong About AI Except Me

#29

Post by Closi »

palmotea wrote: post #12
Closi wrote: post #7

> Not only is the populace primed to treat artificial intelligence tools as living peers, they’ve been trained to hate or dismiss anyone who doesn’t This doesn’t meet my personal experience, but curious to hear if others see something different! The prevailing opinion in the UK at least seems to be that it’s some non-living magical tool assistant. As this assumption seems to be the basis of the article, I’m not sure…

I think the article makes a bit of a leap. The "priming" in the passage you're quoting is the depiction of robots in mass-media, cherry-picking the highly anthropomorphized hero-robots (e.g. WALL-E, Lt. Cmdr. Data, the good-guy Terminator in all the sequels). I think it's an open question if that pre-LLM "priming" will survive actual contact with LLMs or if modern media depictions of robots will change in response.

I mean the first point in the article was also:

> “Robots are actually more alive than we are” is a core belief in our society

I absolutely do not think this is a core belief - If anything, the core belief is that 'being a human is special' and that robot's aren't really alive in the same way, because they don't feel human emotion.

Re: Everyone Is Wrong About AI Except Me

#30

Post by customguy »

boombapoom wrote: post #17
englens wrote: post #9

This post makes a critical error. It is talking about sci-fi AI. Artificial Consciousness. What we have is, while useful for many things (with proper constraints), just prediction engines that behave like intelligence. Generating a sentence when specifically asked to do so is a far cry from independently pondering over your existence then picking up the God of Thunder's hammer. If anything, the public has been primed…

and when AI agents start tasking llms to build better llms on their own that then turn into better agents that then task automated robots to design better hardware then manufacture it and configure it and run agents that start tasking llms to build better llms on their own that etc at what point does it cease to become a simple mathematical function and start to become an "organism"?

When they start tasking, and don't just "start tasking", you already have a made a leap to something completely different from what we have no. So your question is basically "but what if a frog turns into a prince, at what point is it a prince"?
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