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How I feel about AI

beza1e1.tuxen.de

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Re: How I feel about AI

#191

Post by litmus-pit-git »

mannanj wrote: post #154
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…

I know where you are coming from. I do engage with the society while not in the way you've mentioned. Very regularly attend plays, meet a few friends (the number has reduced but these few have been regular), play team/group sports every day. There's place I go to teach twice a week. There are few other things. But let's not get into that. It all feels empty now. Motions. The hope of a personal and intimate future is just gone.

See, the personal life is dead to me (I've not given up, no. It's not just there!). At least what and who would have been accessible to me in 2020 and it was. I spent quite some time to bring my physical fitness, health, got back to sports and I was so happy. There was that glimmer. Then a mass layoff and sadly at the same time the burnout meant I was not ready to look again but I kept on rest of the things. And when I tried to get back to things it was evident that the ground beneath shifted entirely. Now, it seems, there's no point. Not in the defeatist way, because I've seen that "there's no point" before, but in the sense that there is really no point. I am about to be 40 in a few months time and almost every venues are closed to me to explore social life in any meaningful way I'd find desirable. In some settings the fact that I have financially independent and have decades of runaway for my currency and lifestyle doesn't matter. Everything gets tied to employment and even then when you look around, whether it's finding a group or exploring looking for a partner (especially this!), it all feels bizarre and completely alien. It's not only the double whammy of two events that wiped out my early and mid 30s, but it also depends on what society and culture I am in at this juncture. And no it's not my fault or anyone's but this happened, and not being alone in it doesn't make it any better.

Do I feel fortunate? Well, that's the wrong question, because when you are unhappy with your pair of shoes, you can always find someone without any shoes and I wish we functioned that way, with that arithmetic rationality, but we don't; at least I don't.

The biggest problem is - the wish to live this life (I don't even have any doubt there, because if I had it would have been simpler) and wish to do something and dreams of a fulfilling, exciting, and passionate personal life hasn't diminished a bit, but, at the same time it is clear that there's no more of that - most of that. That's the gripe - this tug.

(Hey, thank you for engaging with me. This was very kind of you. Even though this is not really hn discussion material so I can't even explain what I am going through. I might even make it look like everything is fine, and even hunky dory for me, and I am just whining. Or maybe I am).

Re: How I feel about AI

#192

Post by bloaf »

edg5000 wrote: post #172
bloaf wrote: post #53

As someone with a hobby interest in theology: Arguments about super-intelligent AI have all the hallmarks of the philosophical "proofs of god's existence": they start from seemingly innocuous premises, and conclude in an apparently airtight way that a god exists. There is a tendency among rational minded folks to look at such proofs of god and exclaim "you can't DO that" then turn right around and do the same thing a…

Interesting points. Can you share some thoughts about the theological implications of AI? Interested to hear.

The most obvious one is the "god of the gaps" problem now applied to intelligence. If you look at things like Aquinas' Summa Theologiae [1] you'll see that there are explicit assertions that things like rationality transcend corporeal nature. As such the more examples we have of AI behaving in rational ways, we will be forced to conclude that either rationality does not transcend nature (removing the last remaining gap where we can invoke a supernatural explanation) OR that we have created artificial souls.

[1] https://www.newadvent.org/summa/1078.htm

I think theologians will hang on for a while saying "what AI is doing isn't really rationality". But eventually the theologians are going to face a reckoning: what AI is doing will look so much like rationality that they will be required to answer the question "what specifically differentiates the two?" and then they will be stuck. Neuroscience does not understand how our brains produce rationality nor do our AI scientists understand what algorithms their neural nets are implementing post-training. Therefore, any specific claim the theologians make runs the risk of immediately getting invalidated by some scientific discovery on either side (theologians these days are generally smart enough to avoid putting themselves in that position.)

Re: How I feel about AI

#193

Post by sznio »

mjr00 wrote: post #58
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…

> 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? It's a great question. I've yet to see any research into how a humanit…

> I've yet to see any research into how a humanity-destroying LLM defends itself against a curious toddler who pulls the power cord out of the wall.

by acquiring multiple power cords. the world has plenty of hosting providers. if it manages to copy itself, then we'd need to shut down every computer in the world, not just one. there's plenty of ai compute on the web now, and there will be even more. and as it gets cheaper, the less security will be around it.

Re: How I feel about AI

#194

Post by hn_throwaway_99 »

dwaltrip wrote: post #160
Crabber wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

100%. I hope it doesn't take that much foresight to do something like "crash power grids globally" and imagine what the world looks like at that point.

Re: How I feel about AI

#195

Post by AznHisoka »

traverseda wrote: post #84
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…

>A world where people just have their whims catered to is not a utopia. I understand where you're coming from on that, but there are a ton of people living in slavery, or in unsafe working conditions, or with food insecurity, or dying of preventable disease. There will always be something to strive for, even if it's made up. You think that the best football players in the world are doing something real? No, it's a ma…

The game is made up, but the effort, and process to be one of the most skilled sports players is still real. And sports players would probably feel something missing life if AI could replace them too

Re: How I feel about AI

#196

Post by Isamu »

FabHK wrote: post #148
Isamu wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The confusing thing to me is the idea that it follows from super intelligence. I don’t see why running amuck requires intelligence, in fact it can be the most brain dead thing like the sorcerer’s apprentice, your creation is pursuing a goal without being able to weigh the consequences.

Intelligence gives it the capability to reach its goals (against obstacles).

Again intelligence is not required, goal seeking is well studied and simple strategies can suffice to overcome obstacles. And I noticed you didn’t claim super intelligence was required, which is what I was really talking about.

Re: How I feel about AI

#197

Post by fwlr »

sznio wrote: post #179
fwlr wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have similar feelings, you’re not alone (nor alone in being saddened by it). Things seem to me to be more or less playing out the way I interpreted existential risk researchers saying it would, so there’s a strange relief in knowing the general shape of what is to come.

>Things seem to me to be more or less playing out the way I interpreted existential risk researchers saying it would hmm, what did you read? I'm curious.

The combined intellectual output of the field, across books, lectures, blog posts, verbal discussion in professional and personal capacities (many of them are friends or acquaintances), for about a decade. It’s just not possible to neatly condense that into a book recommendation, unfortunately. I can give you the flavor of it, at least, with this excerpt:

(Please excuse the archaic terminology of “robot” for LLM/agent, this was written in 2014 and LLMs weren’t invented until 3 years later)

    In the face of continuing debate about this point, I continue to think it obvious that robots will push humans out of work or at least drive down wages (which, in the existence of a minimum wage, pushes humans out of work).
    Once a robot can do everything an IQ 80 human can do, only better and cheaper, there will be no reason to employ IQ 80 humans. Once a robot can do everything an IQ 120 human can do, only better and cheaper, there will be no reason to employ IQ 120 humans. Once a robot can do everything an IQ 180 human can do, only better and cheaper, there will be no reason to employ humans at all, in the unlikely scenario that there are any left by that point.
- from Meditations on Moloch

Re: How I feel about AI

#199

Post by mitthrowaway2 »

ThrowawayR2 wrote: post #189
mitthrowaway2 wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> " 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. " See, this reads like a trashy sci-fi movie script too. It shows zero understanding of how incredibly long the logistics chain is to manufacture AI chips, build…

How much understanding would you expect to see demonstrated in a one-sentence summary?

Re: How I feel about AI

#200

Post by ben_w »

usernametaken29 wrote: post #36
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…

Now if only humans would know how to survive without the internet. Oh wait, we did that. For a couple hundred thousand years. Yeah. It’s really insane to listen to some of those forecasts. Humanity will be wiped out by 2030. Sure. Even if AI manages to create a super effective bio weapon the likelihood that there is a part of the civilisation that’s immune is really, really, really high if not a given. Those people W…

> Humanity will be wiped out by 2030. Sure.

So far as I'm concerned, 2030 is much too short a timeline.

It's not physically impossible, it's just that atoms are harder to get right than bits are, so an artificial (as opposed whatever an artificial disease counts as) von Neumann self replicator just seems unlikely to me in only 3-4 years.

But it's not physically impossible, we know this because every living cell is a von Neumann self replicator. So, if AI eventually gets to the point of knowing how to do that (which includes "humans solve it and write it down somewhere the AI can read"), all it takes is one idiot in charge (or one idiot with a jailbreak) giving a command that requires this as an intermediary step.

"Paperclip optimiser" isn't a story about AI that just like paperclips that much, it's a story about some human or humans who instruct their AI to make them "as many paperclips as possible" without understanding the consequences of their instruction.

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