Isn’t taking risks just a standard part of technological innovation?
Current and former AI employees warn of the technology's dangers
11–20 of 56 posts
Re: Current and former AI employees warn of the technology's dangers
#12It’s pretty interesting how widely divergent views of the current state and promise this technology is. The dominant view here on HN seems to be that generative models are overhyped toys that burn massive amounts of energy and investment capital with little signs of promise. Meanwhile you have these AI researchers who are warning about “the loss of control of autonomous AI systems potentially resulting in human extin…
Researchers are people too and incentivized to come to conclusions which results in continuing their employment
Re: Current and former AI employees warn of the technology's dangers
#13When China & India form an alliance and send a peace keeping army to protect the former citizens of the fallen American Empire Megacorp, then the American public might have reason to have regrets about AI. But until then it’s just another distraction.
Lmao. As if chatbots are going to destroy the world. Give me a break. LLMs, while having some cool uses, are clearly just the next in line of a never ending tech hype scam cycle. Honestly I'm kind of dreading what's coming next because each iteration just gets more insufferable.
Re: Current and former AI employees warn of the technology's dangers
#14It’s pretty interesting how widely divergent views of the current state and promise this technology is. The dominant view here on HN seems to be that generative models are overhyped toys that burn massive amounts of energy and investment capital with little signs of promise. Meanwhile you have these AI researchers who are warning about “the loss of control of autonomous AI systems potentially resulting in human extin…
Remember, "the loss of control of autonomous AI systems potentially resulting in human extinction" is just the very end of the spectrum of risks they're flagging. There are still other very serious risks experts are calling out. I hate for the less controversial risks to get drowned out by arguments over the most controversial ones.
Re: Current and former AI employees warn of the technology's dangers
#15It’s pretty interesting how widely divergent views of the current state and promise this technology is. The dominant view here on HN seems to be that generative models are overhyped toys that burn massive amounts of energy and investment capital with little signs of promise. Meanwhile you have these AI researchers who are warning about “the loss of control of autonomous AI systems potentially resulting in human extin…
Some of the AI researchers are probably thinking about future systems only somewhat related to today's systems.
Re: Current and former AI employees warn of the technology's dangers
#16Periodic reminder: at the moment, governments worldwide are literally developing killer robots which can’t disobey their orders. Your fears are comically misplaced.
Re: Current and former AI employees warn of the technology's dangers
#17It’s pretty interesting how widely divergent views of the current state and promise this technology is. The dominant view here on HN seems to be that generative models are overhyped toys that burn massive amounts of energy and investment capital with little signs of promise. Meanwhile you have these AI researchers who are warning about “the loss of control of autonomous AI systems potentially resulting in human extin…
The technology is indeed powerful; it's pretty obvious you can make military grade or better propaganda pretty easily with this technology and disseminate it more easily. Let's just classify that as "misinformation" generally, which could also be applied to ideas of teenagers making deepfakes of classmates, etc. So misinformation is a big risk, and already affecting society. It is also clearly useful to whomever is creating the content for whatever their means or ends may be.
There are definitely use-cases being worked out for this technology, and the people who are developing these are using this technology on a daily basis (or creating it); their proximity to the technology and gain in understanding of it probably is helping them realize how this could be truly subversive and an existential threat.
Re: Current and former AI employees warn of the technology's dangers
#18It’s pretty interesting how widely divergent views of the current state and promise this technology is. The dominant view here on HN seems to be that generative models are overhyped toys that burn massive amounts of energy and investment capital with little signs of promise. Meanwhile you have these AI researchers who are warning about “the loss of control of autonomous AI systems potentially resulting in human extin…
Per usual, it's somewhere in the middle. I find LLMs to be very useful for coding and solving quick tasks, but I don't think it's going to turn into skynet or make humans worthless.
There's a lot of momentum (driven by incentivization) around sensationalizing and storyboarding emerging technology into the "to the moon" and "neo Luddite" camps, and there's far too many people that fall into that uncritically.
My guess based on historical precedent of most emerging tech is that ten years from now AI (my preferred name is machine learning) will settle in as a useful tool for certain tasks, and we will be shrugging about the implications of it.
Re: Current and former AI employees warn of the technology's dangers
#19Isn’t taking risks just a standard part of technological innovation?
So is mitigating them
Re: Current and former AI employees warn of the technology's dangers
#20It’s pretty interesting how widely divergent views of the current state and promise this technology is. The dominant view here on HN seems to be that generative models are overhyped toys that burn massive amounts of energy and investment capital with little signs of promise. Meanwhile you have these AI researchers who are warning about “the loss of control of autonomous AI systems potentially resulting in human extin…
Remember, "the loss of control of autonomous AI systems potentially resulting in human extinction" is just the very end of the spectrum of risks they're flagging. There are still other very serious risks experts are calling out. I hate for the less controversial risks to get drowned out by arguments over the most controversial ones.
Completely agree, but for that reason also think we need to be more specific when discussing AI safety. Both "AI" and "safety" are overbroad in the extreme.