Co-founder of DeepMind on how AI threatens to reshape life as we know it

If your job just got eliminated because of an AI opening opportunity, then it very much is threatening your livelihood. Or any of the other various methods it might be threatening. How obtuse do you have to be, or how much kool-aid have you been drinking to not be able to see the ways of threatening?

AI risk is a spectacularization of a new source of wealth

When agriculture and then fossil fuels + supercharged agriculture with petro-fertilizer allowed humanity to become 100x more productive, the owners of the land & capital managed to capture the gains almost entirely, leaving the proletariat powerless except for their labor, and still struggling to survive despite the enormous windfall in energy

Now that AI is on the verge of becoming the major producer of wealth in the 21st century onward, the owners of the capital would like very much if we would talk about anything except the possibility of capturing the wealth of models trained on the public's behavior and distributing it directly as basic income, the way Alaska and Norway redistribute profits from oil to citizens. The data that has been drilled and refined into inference models belongs to humanity, to every book and letter ever penned, why are allowing the investors* of Facebook, Google, and Microsoft to capture the value and leaving the rest of humanity to toil?

The talk of extinction is a magicians trick to divert attention from the fact that we could likely move to 4-hour workweeks in the next decades, but only if wealth distribution is forced onto the capital owners, they will not share if they are not made to.

* yes, indeed, the public can be the investors! as is the case with mutual funds and so on, but the people who are being obsoleted are going to have no significant wealth tied up in these stocks in order to receive dividends. I would support, as an alternative to aggressive taxation, a forced dilution of the stocks of any company found to be replacing its workforce with a superintelligence. Distribute the newly minted stocks to all citizens so dividends can pay out to the rightful receivers of royalties.

These fluff pieces are so predictable and uninspiring. There are tons of qualified and interesting people working in AI and they holds diverse range of viewpoints. Why is it one specific sub-group’s beliefs that are continuously forced on us without even an attempt at critical examination of said beliefs?

what does any of this have to do with my question?

society as a whole is usually better off by such things, are mass-unemployed farriers in 1920?

edit: I do also feel the zeitgeist on HN will be extremely different from this "people will adapt, it's good overall" vibe once it's very-well-paid SWEs that are being affected en masse by this stuff

How the hell do better neural networks mean that printing material from CO2 emissions becomes financially viable, economic, or even just thermodynamically favored? A neural network is a tool for learning a particular statistical distribution. Processes and information we don't already know don't just fall out of the training distribution, you need to run experiments and prototype your way to get to the thing you want to do. You use neural networks when you want to do things at scale, and problems that have to be tackled at scale in R&D or research work are relatively scarce.

I do not doubt that machine learning and neural networks will accelerate research, but the limiting factor is still going to be humans in the loop for the forseeable future given the current state of the art (e.g. LLMs with tree-of-thought reasoning and LLM-powered agents that are easily subverted in the same way one hacks a badly written PHP application). You will have people using ML to crunch large datasets or accelerate simulation work, but that's it.

Asymmetric attacks are very feasible with today's LLMs and art generators, but that harm has already come to pass. It is also not a new harm. If you don't believe me, then I've got hard evidence of Donald Trump cheating in Barack Obama's Minecraft server[3].

Also...

> These include increasing the number of researchers working on safety (including “off switches” for software threatening to run out of control) from 300 or 400 currently to hundreds of thousands; fitting DNA synthesisers with a screening system that will report any pathogenic sequences; and thrashing out a system of international treaties to restrict and regulate dangerous tech.

Ok, so first off, all those AI safety researchers need to be fired if they thought 'off switches' were a good thing to mention here. It's already fairly well established AI safety canon that a "sufficiently smart AI" will reason about the off switch in a way that makes it useless[0].

Furthermore, notice how these are all obviously scary scenarios. The article fails to mention the mundane harms of AI: automation blind spots that render any human supervision useless[1]. I happen to share Suleyman's opposition to the PayPal brand of fauxbertarianism[2], but I would like to point out that they're on your side. Elon Musk talks about "AI harms" just like you do and thinks it needs to be regulated. The obvious choices of requiring a license to train AI is exactly the kind of regulatory capture that actual libertarians, right- or left-, would rail against. What we need are not bans or controls on training AI but bans or controls on businesses and governments using AI for safety-critical, business development, law enforcement, or executive functions. That is a harm that is here today, has been here for at least a decade, and could be regulated without stymieing research and creating "AI NIMBYs".

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3TYT1QfdfsM

[1] https://pluralistic.net/2023/08/23/automation-blindness/#hum...

[2] AKA, power is only bad if the fist has the word 'GOVERNMENT' written on it. Or 'let snek step on other snek'. This is distinct from just right-libertarianism.

[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aL1f6w-ziOM