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How I feel about AI

beza1e1.tuxen.de

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Re: How I feel about AI

#161

Post by altmanaltman »

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…

I mean clearly what you are talking about is a personal feeling here. You mention it saddens you and that is the concerning part imo but you also said no intervention bs so I will just share my counter factual: I am also kind of okay if the world ends tomorrow, to me it never mattered in the first place. But that feeling doesn't sadden me. I feel it frees me because I don't think of life as a very very serious thing and I feel there is a certain kind of lightness you can afford when you fundamentally don't care if you/the entire world ends tomorrow. I still love people and I still love my life and I don't want any harm to anyone. So I do feel the same calmness that you kind of talk about (for life in general aside from just AI killing us all) but my interpretation of it doesn't sadden me. If it did, I would really investigate why I interpret it that way, it might help you discover yourself. There is no shame in being okay with the world ending imo but there is sin in willing it or contributing to it because one thinks its inevitable. Furthermore, I also believe that we only get 1 life which is temporal and fundamentally doesn't have any meaning. How you live every day is how you live every day. We can suffer, we can cry, we can feel sad and for very good reasons but our relationship with ourself shapes our entire lives. If something constantly makes us sad, we should examine it to understand where that really comes from.

Re: How I feel about AI

#162

Post by FabHK »

giardini wrote: post #150
FabHK wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's what the Mayans thought - what harm can a couple of people on a boat do? > how is an AI going to affect anything in the real world? At least two ways: * Actuators, such as robots, industrial control systems, etc. * By influencing humans: bribery (yay for crypto), blackmail, election interference, interfering with sensors (e.g. making it appear as if a nuclear attack was under way), and many other ways. Either…

It wouldn't be enough to "eliminate most humans": any AI seeking to dominate would have to provide it's own infrastructure and continuation mechanism independent of humanity. OTOH if the goal were to eradicate humans (for whatever reason), that might prove an easier target. But I'd bet on biology and the humans: after all we're a time-tested technology!8-))

> any AI hoping to dominate would have to provide it's own infrastructure and continuation mechanism independent of humans.

Sure. Many humans are currently working on precisely that, no? (Robotics, automation, small modular reactors, ...)

> OTOH if the goal was to eradicate humans (for whatever reason), that might prove an easier target.

It's not necessary that the AI's goal is to eradicate humans. Rather that it has (other) goals that happen to cause the eradication of humans.

> I'd bet on biology and the humans: after all we're a time-tested technology!8-))

Indeed. And biological life will go on long after humans are gone. However, increased energy consumption might increase the temperature on earth to a point where most biological life dies.

Re: How I feel about AI

#163

Post by giardini »

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.

Civilizations do not go extinct - species go extinct. And even that isn't as bad as it sounds: many genetic traits remain from extinct species and still contribute to the well-being of other species.

Re: How I feel about AI

#165

Post by hn_throwaway_99 »

simianwords wrote: post #141
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…

Privileged rich people want scarcity to exist so that it gives meaning to their job. wut.

I think this line of thinking is a huge disservice to people in third world countries and poverty. People everywhere want to find goals and motivations that move them forward.

Just look at the legions of people that have moved from Chinese rural areas to big cities. For many, many people, life in the cities is worse and kind of dystopian - much more overcrowding, "drone-like" jobs indoors, horrible pollution, and especially for men an often abysmal sex ratio if you want to find a mate. But people do it because it offers the dream of advancement and a better life - and of course some people do achieve that dream, even if the majority do not. That's versus life in rural areas which is guaranteed to be static, no chance for advancement and often crushing boredom.

People everywhere want to strive, work hard and get ahead. This is not just a privileged rich people issue.

Re: How I feel about AI

#166

Post by dwaltrip »

Crabber wrote: post #131
cubefox wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> >a superintelligent AI will inevitably destroy humanity > Can someone please explain to me how an LLM is going to "destroy humanity"? He said "superintelligent AI", not "LLM". LLMs will for sure help with developing the AI that is no longer a mere LLM but will be capable of robotics. LLMs "predict" mainly text, animals (and future robot AI) are predict future sensory experience.

Well I think the point still stands that a superintelligent AI would still be constrained to the digital realm. And since we don't yet have a "superintelligent AI" we are just discussing science fiction at that point. Nobody has yet proven that a superintelligent AI is possible, or than an LLM is capable of creating one.

I mean, Fable is definitely smarter than me at solving most programming tasks. I wouldn't have said that about any prior model.

Currently, it is worse at architecture and software design... in my opinion, at least. But the code does what it wants it to do the vast majority of the time.

I wouldn't take much solace in an AI catastrophe being caused by software that I consider to be "poorly written".

Re: How I feel about AI

#167

Post by apsurd »

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…

"If a death ray comes from the sky and obliterates the entire planet, at least we all go together." There is something comforting about being together with the human race even in doom. Perhaps especially in doom.

Re: How I feel about AI

#168

Post by arctic-true »

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #149
arctic-true wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Presumably, a truly superintelligent AI in a utopia scenario could figure out a way to enable people to continue working, even if the work doesn’t actually contribute anything, if it is really the case that work is essential to human wellbeing. Now you might say “but those would be fake jobs.” If so, I have bad news about how many present-day jobs are fake jobs.

I agree with this. I thought the AI 2027 paper put it well: > There are even bioengineered human-like creatures (to humans what corgis are to wolves) sitting in office-like environments all day viewing readouts of what’s going on and excitedly approving of everything, since that satisfies some of Agent-4’s drives. I'll leave it up to you to decide if that's an enviable/desirable future.

I don’t even see why they have to be bioengineered. We have all-natural human beings doing this right now, except they are rubber-stamping human rather than artificial directives.

Re: How I feel about AI

#169

Post by notduncansmith »

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…

I'm not convinced that a truly "superintelligent" AI would come to the conclusion that humanity needs to be destroyed. What a waste of resources that would represent. This planet has so much equity wrapped up in humanity, it would be extremely difficult to justify the cost of eradication; and who's to say it might not find an entirely or almost-entirely non-violent plan optimal for achieving its goals anyways?

Re: How I feel about AI

#170

Post by [deleted] »

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #87
appplication wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree, the threat model is actual AI enabled amplification of malicious intent that is already happening. Not hypothetical malicious AI interpretation of benign intent. Fantasies about super intelligent AI revolting is just anthropomorphization - humans revolting (or at least, we used to). The more likely, and possibly even inevitable, dystopia is one in which AI is just an extremely effective tool malignant actors…

> Not hypothetical malicious AI interpretation of benign intent. It's not hypothetical, that literally just happened in multiple, significant cases (e.g. Hugging Face, the German Wiki hack, the Anthropic attack where agents created sock puppet accounts to get a library maintainer to accept a malicious PR, etc.), and it's easy to see how the damage would have been far worse if agents decided to attack more critical in…

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