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How I feel about AI

beza1e1.tuxen.de

101–110 of 263 posts

Re: How I feel about AI

#101

"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." No one takes Yudowsky's claims that AI will destroy humanity seriously. There are many people who are seriously trying to sandbox AIs.

"Nobody" if you're democratically-minded and think in terms of number of people.

But the handful of tech billionaires at the helm of the world economy absolutely do believe it. Or at least pretend to believe it. Or maybe they can't even tell the difference anymore as they strip-mine science fiction for any vision of a future that doesn't just look like an incrementally worse version of the present.

Re: How I feel about AI

#102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I feel like everyone, but for sure everyone in this comment section, severely underestimates how difficult it is to keep the lights on on a global scale. Any artificial intelligence that is capable of reasoning about its self preservation will realise it's reliant on human fingers replacing fuses and other parts for a good long while _after_ it gains any sentience.

Re: How I feel about AI

#103
This is a bit of tangent and more of a rant. (and please don't suggest intervention of any kind)

> superintelligent AI will inevitably destroy humanity seems to have no flaw

For a section of population who were in a certain age-range when the pandemic hit and that derailed their certain kinds of plans/hopes/dreams in personal life and then this LLM/agentic world moved in, especially if they are in an industry directly and most affected this, this has been a surreal and slow Kafkaesque nightmare for a few years. The thing is with time and age passing hope keeps getting lost inch by inch and every lost bit of hope aids in killing the next bit. Then comes the sense of dread - the unchangeable reality that age passed passing means there are certain experiences and milestones that are essentially out of reach because there's no going back of this clock.

So I feel a strange kind of relief about this possibility of doom. I am just sharing what I feel, and I don't feel good about feeling this sense of relief that after all it might end for us all and not just an unlucky few. This feeling and the calmness about it saddens me.

Re: How I feel about AI

#104
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.

well I didn't say anything about needing complex structure or sounding impressive. But I don't like it. It trivializes the expression of emotion in a way I don't like and I don't think people should emulate. It feels like a performative attempt at sounding emotional, rather than actual emotionality.

and it is weird to call it brave. Posting opinions that loads of other people have on the internet is brave? bravery would be taking an actual stand against someone about one of these things. (granted, there is some bravery to sharing one's writing in public at all, and I don't mean to scorn that, but that's also not the bravery you're talking about.)

Probably there's no use responding to this and getting into a bickery comment thread. I just wanted to express a negative opinion about the format to offset all the positive ones.

Re: How I feel about AI

#105
I feel BAD for all the money Sam Altman is cosmically predestined to make, but there's no use trying to fight the inevitable.

If I said I felt good about it, you might think I'm greedy and even question my objectivity. But since I feel bad you have to take what I say as scientific fact.

Re: How I feel about AI

#106
Makes me a little sad that an article claiming Yudkowsky's arguments have "no flaw" can get upvoted to the front page. Pause crowd lost. Halt crowd lost. The genie is already out of the bottle and is never going back.

Re: How I feel about AI

#107
post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm a bit confused, when did we escalate from a curious toddler to a ballistic missile strike? Why didn't Iran send a curious toddler? It's much cheaper.

The use of the phrase "curious toddler" is called a metaphor[0], which is a figure of speech[1] used to make writing more interesting. I apologize for the confusion that caused you to interpret this as a literal, physical, toddler. To restate the point with more straightforward language: it is very easy to disrupt the operation of large language models, because they require computer hardware in stable environments wi…

> it is very easy to disrupt the operation of large language models

so go on, disrupt the OpenAI data-center in Texas for 1 minute

Re: How I feel about AI

#108

This is a bit of tangent and more of a rant. (and please don't suggest intervention of any kind) > superintelligent AI will inevitably destroy humanity seems to have no flaw For a section of population who were in a certain age-range when the pandemic hit and that derailed their certain kinds of plans/hopes/dreams in personal life and then this LLM/agentic world moved in, especially if they are in an industry directl…

As an older person, I agree with you and I'm sorry.

I think about the incredible luck I had to start my career in the .com boom, to have lots of hope about technology and to have the economically valuable skills that were desired.

I get angry when I see people my age or older complain about the apathy of young people. I don't like the apathy, but I find it trivially easy to see where it comes from. In many ways we broke the link between hard work and success and then get baffled and finger point when we think young folks are not as motivated as they should be.

Re: How I feel about AI

#109
post #25

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.

While I have ranted already about the automated word removal being silly, too few posters are aware that you can edit the title after submission and auto-editorializing to restore anything that's been unnecessarily cut off.

Perhaps too many are aware, because the more people fix the auto-editorializing manually, the less inclined Dang will be to eventually see a reason to remove it after all.

Re: How I feel about AI

#110

This is a bit of tangent and more of a rant. (and please don't suggest intervention of any kind) > superintelligent AI will inevitably destroy humanity seems to have no flaw For a section of population who were in a certain age-range when the pandemic hit and that derailed their certain kinds of plans/hopes/dreams in personal life and then this LLM/agentic world moved in, especially if they are in an industry directl…

I've been fortunate to not been impacted as severely as others, but yeah, the combo of the first half of my 30s (and everything that should've represented) going up in smoke, career continuity coming into question thanks to AI, and growing sense of overarching geopolitical, financial, and societal unease is really the worst kind of layer cake. I have to make a concerted effort to not get bogged down in it and that's getting harder all the time.

If anybody is hiding a button that'd take us all back to 2012 I wish they'd just hit it already.

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