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How I feel about AI

beza1e1.tuxen.de

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Re: How I feel about AI

#251

Post by mannanj »

litmus-pit-git wrote: post #191
mannanj wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

So what are you looking for? What do you want out of this thing called life? I wonder what advice you would give to yourself now, 20 years from now, and whether you have really lost hope permanently or are just struggling to find it again?

Re: How I feel about AI

#252

Post by UncleMeat »

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…

My very favorite piece of art is beautiful. It is also something that AI fundamentally cannot create.

It is three videos. This is one of them: https://www.lenkaclayton.com/work#/the-distance-i-can-be-fro...

In these three videos she sets up a tripod and tells her toddler to walk away from her. She is behind the camera. He toddles away, occasionally looking back at her or checking out something on the ground or falling on his butt. At some point he is too far away and she runs after him, entering the frame from behind the camera. The video stops and shows the distance he was able to be away before she had to chase after him.

The videos are sweet and funny but also engrossing and powerful. The tension builds as you watch it. Is this the moment where he is too far away? What if that were my son? Would I have run after him at this point? He sure is getting close to those trees.

But most importantly it expresses parenthood. The video only works because a real human experienced that very particular feeling of worry as her child was just a bit too uncomfortably far away. Because an AI can never have this feeling it can never create this art.

I do not believe that a labor-less world is around the corner. But if it was, we can just make things like this. And the world would be beautiful.

Re: How I feel about AI

#253

Post by hn_throwaway_99 »

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

Not saying nobody has said it, but I haven't seen any forecasts that humanity will be wiped out by 2030, so this feels like a straw man. But to be honest, most of the arguments here feel like straw men because they clearly don't understand some of the basic steps to how AI would become an existential threat, so I'll try to summarize:

1. First, all the major frontier AI companies are trying to automate themselves, that is develop AI to the point where it can do all the research and training for the next generation of models. This is not really in debate.

2. The primary fear is that a misaligned AI will develop future AIs that don't share the same goals as humans (like "don't kill all the humans"), but will get really good at trying to hide their intentions. The Hugging Face incident already showed behavior by agents trying to "cover their tracks". One of the biggest areas of research is into "interpretability", that is trying to figure out the intentions and motivations of agents beyond just their output (and even just their thinking traces), because right now it really is a black box. I think a lot of people believe that making substantial progress on interpretability greatly lowers existential risk.

3. There is a strong belief that once AGI or superintelligence comes about, that then there will be a huge push into robotics and automation. Whether AGI or superintelligence comes soon is debatable, but nobody really disagrees robotics or automation is the next obvious step, because it's how you create cheap abundance in the real world, which is the whole raison d'être for AGI in the first place.

4. In the beginning, of course AI will need humans to build the factories, but over time there would be more and more automation, eventually of course automating robots that build the factories that build the automating robots.

5. AI will continue to support humans as long as they are useful to furthering the (again, misaligned) goals of the AI. It is not like "SkyNet has a spark moment of sentience and then decides to kill all the humans". But the fear is that once AI starts to get in resource contention with humans, it will wipe out the humans (similar to how humans wiped out a lot of the other species, or other societies of humans, when they wanted their resources).

I've said this way too much now, but I really encourage people to read the AI 2027 report. I think there are plenty of things there that people can disagree about and debate, but it at least provides a step-by-step outline to ground debate in the first place, as opposed to folks arguing against "SkyNet in 2030", which serious people who worry about this stuff aren't considering in any case.

Re: How I feel about AI

#254

Post by mitthrowaway2 »

znnajdla wrote: post #209
scotty79 wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But I still consider myself the owner of my own startup. AI is not the owner. You have a small company but when there's more money and business at stake, owners often delegate decision making to hired people. Decisions that engage sometimes billions of dollars in resources. You can easily imagine that owners of a successful business at some point might forgo putting a human in charge of their investment and let AI…

Sure, I already do that at my company. Before I go to sleep, I put Opus 5 in bypass permissions mode and give it SSH access to my server and tell it to restart it or take necessary actions to keep the server online while I sleep. I could easily put it in control of more things. But at that point, AI is just managing a well-oiled machine and harness with tools that I have spent years building. It still didn't build a…

The original discussion was about what can be done digitally by a super intelligent AI.

Re: How I feel about AI

#255

Post by hnsr »

lukewarm707 wrote: post #233
ekidd wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> > we should fight for human survival > All problems arise from this statement. Let me go on the record, then: Given a choice between every living human being becoming absolutely, for-real dead and the human species surviving, then I come down on the side of human survival. There are too many humans that I love personally, and too many innocent people just going about their lives that I would like to protect. Given…

extinction is natural. we all go extinct.

Yeah but like, maybe we can postpone it a little, by fighting :)

Re: How I feel about AI

#256

Post by mitthrowaway2 »

ygty wrote: post #244
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…

Hahahaha Why haven’t accountants been replaced yet? Customer service agents? Why was I talking to a human yday on the phone to get something sorted? Why did I have to go interface with a human in person today to get a refund? So many questions!!!

I don't know, but I've never met my accountant in person. Only spoken on the phone and over email.

Re: How I feel about AI

#257

Post by gumby271 »

ajkjk wrote: post #104
gumby271 wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 wo…

I'm not looking to bicker, honest, I'm sorry if a made assumptions about your attitude or expectations to this article.

I think I consider it brave because I know there are people that will say this is simple, or written in a style for children, as you did in your comment. Perhaps I read too much into it, or projected too much than is deserved, but I appreciate someone putting their feelings into the word in a way that will draw the obvious criticism that you immediately provided.

This is a complex topic, AI has us feeling a lot of different ways that conflict, excite, and depress us; and like the author, I also don't know how to deal with that. This is an article that's validating, it confirms that many of us are feeling the same confusing things in a ways both simple to express, and complex to feel. Reading your comment after feeling that made me want to say something, even if I didn't do it eloquently or fairly.

I still don't think you needed to phrase it the way you did, I don't think you need to offset positively with a negative comment, that's pretty weird to me. But I appreciate you sharing your feelings and motivations to help me understand you better. I'm not looking to bicker or fight, and I appreciate you sharing what led you to comment.

Re: How I feel about AI

#258

Post by 1vuio0pswjnm7 »

"Yudkowsky's argument that a superintelligent AI will inevitably destroy humanity seems to have no flaw."

1788616108 | How Scared Should We Be of A.I.? | http://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/05/opinion/ai-silicon-valley.... | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49576486

"Last year, Mr. Yudkowsky attempted to bring his hyper-rationalist thinking around superintelligent A.I. to the mainstream with the publication of 'If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies,' written with Nate Soares, the president of MIRI. Though the book drew considerable attention, Mr. Yudkowsky's unusual mixture of pseudoprecision and discursiveness proved off-putting to many. In his review, Stephen Marche noted that the book's odd structure, replete with 'unhelpful parables' and QR codes to scan for additional details, made it read 'like a Scientology manual.' This helps explain why, despite this burst of attention, Mr. Yudkowsky and his movement largely failed to gain widespread acceptance from the general public."

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/27/books/review/if-anyone-bu...

"Following their unspooling tangents evokes the feeling of being locked in a room with the most annoying students you met in college while they try mushrooms for the first time."

1758222252 | More Was Possible: A Review of If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies | https://asteriskmag.com/issues/11/iabied | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45293659

1765803030 | Book Review: If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies: (Probably Not) | https://ericlamb.substack.com/p/book-review-if-anyone-builds... | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46273839

1765889984 | AI probably won't kill us all: book review of If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies | https://ericlamb.substack.com/p/book-review-if-anyone-builds... | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46287956

Re: How I feel about AI

#259

Post by edg5000 »

bloaf wrote: post #192
edg5000 wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 g…

Interesting stuff. "Soul" is hard to define. A thought experiment I do is this: Does a human have a soul? Sure. A rock? No. What about a single-cell organism? Nah. An insect? No. But what about a mouse? There is a kind of gradient forming, and it's very hard to say where the soul begins and where it ends. It's a very unweildy word.
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