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How I feel about AI

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Re: How I feel about AI

#151

Post by arctic-true »

FabHK wrote: post #136
arctic-true wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Otherwise-rational and moral people do bad things at the behest of powerful superintelligences with vast resources all the time. We call them “corporations,” and they can convince bright-eyed college graduates to do just about anything. Now, the corporations aren’t deliberately trying to destroy humanity, but they do lots of things that point in that direction. An artificial superintelligence would be able to do the…

Sure, the world was never safe for individuals, and even entire civilisations have gone extinct. For climate change and even nuclear weapons, most of humanity might perish, but there's the hope that some will survive. So, in the past humanity was not in a position to extinguish humanity as a whole.

I guess I don’t see why “everyone will die” should scare me more than “almost everyone, including me, will die but someone somewhere might survive in a barely-habitable world.”

And this is where I think some of the problem comes from. A lot of AI doomers swam in the same waters as transhumanists, life extension enthusiasts, etc. and got very good at pretending that they were never going to die, or that they would live for a massively superhuman lifespan such that they did not need to think about death. AI doom is much scarier - and thus much more worth posting about - if it represents the first time you’re grappling with your own mortality, as I suspect it is for a lot of younger people in this space.

Re: How I feel about AI

#152

Post by georgeecollins »

hobofan wrote: post #23
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…

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

Robots are gradually getting OK at navigating warehouse floors and paved streets. Flying drones are great but if they could really be counted on to pick out targets without human intervention you know the Russians and the Ukrainians would be doing that right now for reasons of range and jamming. To be fair, ai can certainly maintain the lock on a target when jamming kicks in.

We’re still a few years from the terminator imo.

Re: How I feel about AI

#153

Post by chasd00 »

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #108
litmus-pit-git wrote: post #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 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 br…

[flagged]

Re: How I feel about AI

#154

Post by mannanj »

litmus-pit-git wrote: post #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 directl…

Have you considered getting involved in local civics?

I only ask because like you, I felt similar. But I also grew up (I’m 35 now) with a big disconnect from civics life and always felt “someone else would save me”.

Now I see I was the problem all along: I never participated in what was a fragile and very delicate system of governance which requires my participation. Still figuring out what that looks like, but first confronting that my actions “didn’t change anything” (which I’m sure you can admit is a big propagandistic myth to disempower us) let me take my first tiny action locally which is reach out to my civics association for signage repair. I suspect from there I will level up and better understand my government to play a role in shaping it. I’m also building something to solve this problem of low participation which is exciting!

Re: How I feel about AI

#155

Post by hn_throwaway_99 »

agumonkey wrote: post #146
hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #52

The thing that makes me pretty terrified about AI is that I think the "utopia" scenario is not much better than the "doom" scenario. We will very quickly get to a point where very few people will be able to contribute economically because they will be worse than AI (including robotics) at most domains. A world where people just have their whims catered to is not a utopia. We have tons of sayings and idioms about this…

There's the mice utopia experiment too. I often hear that in space your bones dégradé, your biology needs weight as input. Also I believe our socialness was crafted out of the need for survival. If removed it's all gonna run wild since nobody needs anybody, and it might end up as doom scrolling but for human relationship. Short bursts from time to time and that's it

Really glad you brought up the mice utopia experiments. I encourage people to read about them and think how they apply to humans.

In many ways they don't apply to humans, and I think a lot of the modern critiques are valid, and the overpopulation concerns in particular don't map well to the modern world. Still, I believe it helps to think deeply about what happens to societies when innate drives and motivations have "nowhere to go".

Re: How I feel about AI

#156

Post by scotty79 »

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…

> which I feel is at least 50% likely to just be marketing bullshit

You'll have hard time figuring the reality if your mind staunchly rejects robust multi-party observations.

Re: How I feel about AI

#157

Post by mitthrowaway2 »

ThrowawayR2 wrote: post #73
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 lot of these "AI will destroy humanity" doomers watched Terminator as a child and can't distinguish a campy action movie from reality. They are also unfortunately unfamiliar with the word "logistics", as in " amateurs study [military] tactics, professionals study logistics ". An AI drone army doesn't maintain itself or manufacture itself and it's not going to anytime soon. The actual likely mechanism that AI would…

A lot of these "AI can't destroy humanity" skeptics seem to have watched the Terminator and convinced themselves that that's the AI-goes-wrong scenario that their opponents are imagining. Some kind of big war between humans and machines on opposite sides, fought by soldiers against robots.

The scenario in "If Anyone Builds It Everyone Dies" is not sexy at all and wouldn't make for interesting fiction. It's more like the AI engineers viruses while continuing to act friendly and helpful, and everyone gradually falls over dead as they stop being necessary to keep the AI running, and the whole time the humans are asking the AI for help curing the viruses.

Re: How I feel about AI

#158

Post by giardini »

mitthrowaway2 wrote: post #133
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…

The list of things that can be done digitally includes: Performing remote work, applying for grants and loans, earning money, pitching investors, managing a fund, directing investments, transferring money, founding a company, earning profits, hiring staff, hiring construction contractors, designing chemical plants, stamping construction blueprints, becoming the cornerstone of the local economy, lobbying the governmen…

So at worse they would be like another North Korea?

Re: How I feel about AI

#159

Post by mitthrowaway2 »

giardini wrote: post #158
mitthrowaway2 wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The list of things that can be done digitally includes: Performing remote work, applying for grants and loans, earning money, pitching investors, managing a fund, directing investments, transferring money, founding a company, earning profits, hiring staff, hiring construction contractors, designing chemical plants, stamping construction blueprints, becoming the cornerstone of the local economy, lobbying the governmen…

So at worse they would be like another North Korea?

Kind of, if North Korea were populated by a super intelligent uni-mind with lots of money, no trade restrictions preventing it from running projects in the United States or anywhere else, capable of winning widespread support by people around the world whose income depends on its projects succeeding, and completely unconcerned with keeping the planet inhabitable for Kim Jong-Un or any other human, even a single one of them.

Re: How I feel about AI

#160

Post by dwaltrip »

Crabber wrote: post #122
gleenn wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't even think AI has to have physical presence to do significant harm. How many worldwide systems depend on computers. Think of all the planning and deployment and management systems like food shipping; water, gas, and electricity management; safety systems for planes and boats and traffic lights. Imagine the chaos if all the banks got reset to zero a la Fight Club where they blow up all the credit union datacen…

AI could definitely disrupt and destroy the modern digital world as we know it. But that's a far cry from destroying humanity.

This would probably cause immense damage. Our society is extremely dependent on our digital infrastructure working. Grocery chain logicistics, the medical system, the police force, and so on...
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