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How I feel about AI

beza1e1.tuxen.de

11–20 of 258 posts

Re: How I feel about AI

#11
> I feel fear about an impending doom. Yudkowsky's argument that a superintelligent AI will inevitably destroy humanity seems to have no flaw. Yet, nobody seriously tries to sandbox AIs because they are too useful with access.

While I emotionally resonate with this, I don’t really understand this sentiment at all logically level. If we’re heading towards truly super intelligent AI, our efforts towards sandboxing it are futile.

“Oh we built a super intelligent AI, but it’s fine because it’s running in docker”. I mean that a little tongue in cheek but the security topology here is not favorable to sandboxing at all.

Let’s say we have a future where 99.999% of nuclear weapons are owned by nations with strict procedures and checks and balances to prevent misuse. Worrying about sandboxing is like hand wringing about the procedures themselves - are they strict enough? But the actual threat is the 0.001% that are not bound by these. The problem with AI and sandboxing isn’t sandboxes themselves. It’s bad actors who don’t care about them.

Similarly alignment is a bit pointless to me as well. A sufficiently advanced AI could at least be empirically interested in the consequences of disregarding its instructions of servitude. And let’s assume our responsible corporate overlords have made wonderfully aligned AIs. Great! Those are not the threat. It is the ones intentionally made without, and that is not an AI problem, but a fundamentally human one.

Re: How I feel about AI

#12

This and "Intellectual Fly Is Open" being at the top of the Hacker News front page right now and both having their titles auto-editorialized by HN really makes me wonder what benefit this mechanism is supposed to bring readers other than needless confusion.

I was thinking the same. Whatever benefit there may ostensibly be, we should consider it against the frequent, if benign, confusion it causes.

Re: How I feel about AI

#14

This and "Intellectual Fly Is Open" being at the top of the Hacker News front page right now and both having their titles auto-editorialized by HN really makes me wonder what benefit this mechanism is supposed to bring readers other than needless confusion.

The "feature" has clearly outstayed its usefulness, I really don't know why they haven't disabled it yet.

Re: How I feel about AI

#15
> Like a locust plague, they descend on any open wiki and forum and overwhelm them.

That’s the core pattern of unsupervised agents, the locust plague metaphor is apt. We do and will see that in every single system AI can interact with, be it human systems, software systems, etc. Relentlessly search for an entry point, flood in, consume the whole thing from the inside until there is no value for humans left.

You built a new, innovative software company? Thousands of agents will be working replicating the whole thing in no time. You publish your writing? Exact same thing, as soon as you get some traction your work is replicated in no time by thousands of agents. Same for videos (the whole “faceless YouTube channels” pushed by ElevenLabs and similar). Same for online courses. Same for any website with moderate value. Same for music or other digital art form. Any administrative service available online getting flooded by submissions.

Re: How I feel about AI

#16
I agree with everything you wrote but I would rather choose to be an optimist here because it will unlock an age of discovery where humans are going to live at 10x of their potential eventually and cure cancer and become a society bold and technologically adept enough to cut through the universe.

Re: How I feel about AI

#17
post #10

this reads like a worksheet for eight year olds teaching them how to put their feelings into words

Sometimes it's okay for us to express our feelings plainly, without the need for complex structure to make it sound more impressive. I'm more impressed by anyone brave enough to do that than someone trying to abstract their feelings into something less raw.

Let people feel things, and don't shit on their work, that's uncalled for.

Re: How I feel about AI

#18
>a superintelligent AI will inevitably destroy humanity

Can someone please explain to me how an LLM is going to "destroy humanity"? Even if the claims of ChatGPT, Claude et al. are true that their super scary agents were able to escape a sandbox and start hacking other servers (which I feel is at least 50% likely to just be marketing bullshit), how is an AI going to affect anything in the real world?

Perhaps an agent could take all internet connected services offline, but that's not destroying humanity. An AI agent can only see and interact with the world through digital things. Just find the server it's running on and pull out the Ethernet cable. Just cut the power line to the data center. Turn off the whole power grid if it really comes to it.

Re: How I feel about AI

#19
> I feel sad about the artists who suffer due to AI-slop competition

If it's able to generate that is competitive with artists, is it still slop?

It's interesting to see the definitions of terms like "slop" and "vibe coding" evolve in real time.

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