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How I feel about AI

beza1e1.tuxen.de

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Re: How I feel about AI

#211

Post by tim333 »

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #97
traverseda wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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…

I agree with your points. My problem is that I don't see any way to "stop" AI development at a level just below human capability where you get most of the benefits but still have humans firmly in control. Regarding entertainment jobs like sports star, musician, artist, actor, etc., the problem is those are professions where, for the most part, only the very best can make a living. Nobody is that interested in seeing…

If we have money / goods from the AI making them then we can spend time getting the golf handicap down from 22 to 18 or singing mediocrely.

Re: How I feel about AI

#212

Post by ben_w »

DoctorOetker wrote: post #57

> I feel fear about an impending doom. Yudkowsky's argument that a superintelligent AI will inevitably destroy humanity seems to have no flaw. Becoming or being more cost-effective than humans, doesn't give machines supernatural powers though, like humans a machine civilization will face unanswered sample-size 1 questions: is there other intelligent life out there? what fraction of them attained superbiological artif…

Novel argument. I like it.

Re: How I feel about AI

#213

Post by ben_w »

kittikitti wrote: post #96

"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.

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

I know some people at AI labs, there's definitely people working in this field who take it seriously.

This does not stop them also working on e.g. better sandboxes.

Re: How I feel about AI

#214

Post by LtWorf »

arctic-true wrote: post #142
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…

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 think you are forgetting who owns these AI companies… their interests aren't your interests.

Re: How I feel about AI

#215

Post by ben_w »

georgeecollins wrote: post #164

Why would AI destroy humanity? People are cheap and useful.

> People are cheap and useful.

Which is cheaper today already depends on the task. Which is more useful today, likewise.

The entire history of industry has been humans inventing machines that are more efficient and useful than the unaided naked primate that is painfully and dangerously squeezed out of their mother, who takes about 20 years to get good enough to be worth paying for, then only works 25% of the hours in a week for 40 or so years before they retire, and only about 60% of them in the working age range have a job at any given time.

From the numbers I've seen, if anyone actually did do a full connectome-plus-synaptic-strengths map of a human brain, it would already be physically possible (expensive AF today but already possible) to implement this in purely analog (transistors as amplifiers, not digital arithmetic) circuits, where the energy required for any given task was lower for the circuits than it is for a living human brain.

But of course, that was "someone on the internet", this isn't my field of work, I don't want to suggest this is definitely so.

Re: How I feel about AI

#216

Post by conception »

raulparada wrote: post #54
conception wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We already have AI linked into data collection, drones, robot dogs, security systems, cameras, weapon systems. Now imagine the hugging face collective 0-daying all of that and getting access but their goal was set to something more national security based. “Protect X at all costs”. Or what have you. I think avoiding a skynet situation is super easy but it doesn’t seem like the folks with all the ways to kill us all a…

> I think avoiding a skynet situation is super easy Please enlighten us, cause there are folks making that their life mission and they aren’t all that optimistic.

Unfortunately those people aren’t in charge of the skynet. It’s like saying solving hunger or housing or medical care is hard. It’s not. But you have to make lots of folks with a great deal of resources and power slightly uncomfortable to do it.

Re: How I feel about AI

#217

Post by cubefox »

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.

> Well I think the point still stands that a superintelligent AI would still be constrained to the digital realm.

No it doesn't! As I said, it could control robots, just as animals (including humans) can control their bodies. It wouldn't be constrained to the "digital realm".

> Nobody has yet proven that a superintelligent AI is possible, or than an LLM is capable of creating one.

Nobody has "proven" that the climate in 10 or 50 years will be hotter than this year, nonetheless this is highly likely. Similarly, the enormous rate at which AI is progressing currently shows no sign of slowing down. Quite the opposite.

Re: How I feel about AI

#218

Post by ben_w »

apitman wrote: post #19

> I feel sad about the artists who suffer due to AI-slop competition If it's able to generate that is competitive with artists, is it still slop? It's interesting to see the definitions of terms like "slop" and "vibe coding" evolve in real time.

> If it's able to generate that is competitive with artists, is it still slop?

It can be. Trademark infringement, diluting the value of your style by doing a lot of "you but if you were just generally worse".

Right now it's still fair to describe as "slop": enough mediocrity in the free models, not enough interest in quality and saying "no, do it better" from the people using them.

That doesn't preclude actual artists who do say "no, do better" from getting much better results. For example here's something which fooled me even a year ago because the… I don't want to say "creator", but "director" might work… put in the effort to reject bad outputs: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EDIB9uwIhfA

Re: How I feel about AI

#219

Post by ben_w »

trebaud wrote: post #128

I am surpised that a lof of folks are surprised that neural networks work that well. I mean, did they really expect that we wouldnt approximate the brain cognitive capabilities at some point as we scale up compute?? This is rather obvious to me, but apparently not to everyone. My guess is that a lot of tech people have an immature model of the universe, have not read a lot of scientific, philosophical and cognitive l…

Neural nets are a toy approximation of biological neurons; and even if every synapse mapped to a weight (it's more complex than that but AFAICT even the brain scientists are not quite sure how much more complex), the biggest LLMs are around 0.2-1% of a human brain.
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