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How I feel about AI

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Re: How I feel about AI

#41

Post by gblargg »

mvkel wrote: post #34
Crabber wrote: post #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…

This is some Terminator version of destroying humanity, but a super intelligent AI could be much more insidious, and simple. It looks a lot more like social engineering. One easy, obvious example that has also been explored a thousand times: it could convince all nuclear countries that they are under attack by another nuclear country. Everyone nukes each other and Earth enters nuclear winter. Maybe not every single h…

A situation of life imitating art: all the fictional movie plots feed the AIs, which bring them about.

Re: How I feel about AI

#42

Post by Kiro »

tomashubelbauer wrote: post #7

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.

Worst feature ever. So many titles that get butchered for no reason.

Re: How I feel about AI

#43

Post by raulparada »

Crabber wrote: post #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…

A myriad possible ways. Objective-wise from accidental paperclip-type misalignment (“I killed everyone to eradicate disease”) to intentional self-preservation (“I eradicated humans so they wouldn’t get in my way”). The means are even easier, for one it just could hack into nuclear arsenals. It would be over before we could figure out how it did so.

Re: How I feel about AI

#44

Post by ryandrake »

Retr0id wrote: post #14
tomashubelbauer wrote: post #7

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.

It's kind of like the Scunthorpe Problem[1]. Really, there's no better way to solve [whatever it is HN is trying to solve here] than text substitution??

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scunthorpe_problem

Re: How I feel about AI

#45

Post by Crabber »

cush wrote: post #32
Crabber wrote: post #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…

They already influence people to do things that we wouldn’t otherwise

For millennia evil people and dictators have been using manipulation, propaganda, threats of violence to get entire populations to try and do "things that they wouldn't do otherwise" and humanity has not been exterminated yet. Even in the modern world there's human scammers that try everything to coerce and manipulate people. Humans are resistant to this kind of thing because it's been part of human social society since humanity began.

I don't see why the idea of an agent (who doesn't even have a physical presence) trying to manipulate people is some kind of world-ending threat when humans with human intellect have already being doing that to each other with limited success since humanity began.

Re: How I feel about AI

#47

Post by hobofan »

mariusor wrote: post #29
hobofan wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> how is an AI going to affect anything in the real world? Robotics

So if we stop research into robotic hands we'll manage to hold off the AI apocalypse? That seems easy...

All individual robotic parts are already far enough in research. Even if they aren't, an AI with enough resources can continue doing that research on its own.

It could likely get a good leg up by breaching the security of all top robotics labs and exfiltrating their documents.

Ultimately, if AI is advanced enough, and it were to decide to compete with humanity, there is essentially nothing that can be done to prevent it from embodying itself. As long as there is a single rack of GPU servers that it can hack into anywhere in the world that is unsupervised enough to where it can escape detection, there is no way to stop it. This would require an unprecedented (unrealistic) level of cooperation of all humanity to achieve.

Re: How I feel about AI

#48

Post by hackinthebochs »

mariusor wrote: post #29
hobofan wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> how is an AI going to affect anything in the real world? Robotics

So if we stop research into robotic hands we'll manage to hold off the AI apocalypse? That seems easy...

We could also just stop research into LLMs. Or keep them air gapped. Tell me how that's going?

For any real-world action required to allow an AI to escape some manner of containment, there will always be a person willing to do it out of hubris/ignorance/nihilism.

Re: How I feel about AI

#49

Post by raincole »

tomashubelbauer wrote: post #7

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.

Wait, this is automatic? HN removes 'how'?

Re: How I feel about AI

#50

Post by cush »

kkkamur wrote: post #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.

There’s actually a potential dark future where even this 10x ascension itself would mark the end of humanity. Humans would be the Homo sapiens who remain at 1x, and those who can access and afford to be 10x eventually split off into a new species. And historically there isn’t room for two species at the top…
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