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There is no A.I.

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Re: There is no A.I.

#121

Post by vimax »

Animats wrote: post #68

The elephant in the room in these discussions of AI is the concept of the corporation. Most of the things people are worried about AI doing are things corporations already do. Deceptive marketing, exploiting customer information, conspiring to keep prices high, creating distractions from things companies are doing, setting up monopolies, lying to customers - the usual. With AI, this can be automated. Most of this is…

Thank you for this! I've been thinking about this since the digital artists got up in arms about AIs coming for their corporate jobs of shoving more ads down our throats.

People with lots of money have always been able to buy other people's time to get ahead.

Re: There is no A.I.

#122

Post by RcouF1uZ4gsC »

wefarrell wrote: post #117
Animats wrote: post #68

The elephant in the room in these discussions of AI is the concept of the corporation. Most of the things people are worried about AI doing are things corporations already do. Deceptive marketing, exploiting customer information, conspiring to keep prices high, creating distractions from things companies are doing, setting up monopolies, lying to customers - the usual. With AI, this can be automated. Most of this is…

We will always need a charismatic human being to be the figurehead of an organization, so I don’t think AI will ever replace CEOs. They will wind up making the important decisions though.

Neither Tim Cook or Jeff Bezos comes across as particularly charismatic. I would say they are in their positions because of their vision and execution, despite not being particularly charismatic.

So, if an AI CEO can execute better than human CEOs, it will dominate.

Re: There is no A.I.

#123

Post by crabmusket »

Animats wrote: post #68

The elephant in the room in these discussions of AI is the concept of the corporation. Most of the things people are worried about AI doing are things corporations already do. Deceptive marketing, exploiting customer information, conspiring to keep prices high, creating distractions from things companies are doing, setting up monopolies, lying to customers - the usual. With AI, this can be automated. Most of this is…

This is a great framing. I also appreciated this similar idea in Matthew Butterick's blog:

> Before too long, we will not dele­gate deci­sions to AI systems because they perform better. Rather, we will dele­gate deci­sions to AI systems because they can get away with every­thing that we can’t. You’ve heard of money laun­dering? This is human-behavior laun­dering. At last—plau­sible deni­a­bility for every­thing. [1]

While in a corporation there's still a person somewhere who could be held accountable, AI diffuses this even more.

[1]: https://matthewbutterick.com/chron/will-ai-obliterate-the-ru...

Re: There is no A.I.

#124

Post by marban »

LambdaComplex wrote: post #96
Animats wrote: post #68

The elephant in the room in these discussions of AI is the concept of the corporation. Most of the things people are worried about AI doing are things corporations already do. Deceptive marketing, exploiting customer information, conspiring to keep prices high, creating distractions from things companies are doing, setting up monopolies, lying to customers - the usual. With AI, this can be automated. Most of this is…

> Once AI systems can outperform CEOs, investors and boards will insist they be in charge. I doubt it. You know who sits on those boards? The executives of other companies.

The problem isn't A-players, but B-players who have no insight over the complexity of C-players' jobs so they think they can replace them with AI.

Re: There is no A.I.

#125

Post by scotty79 »

ummonk wrote: post #92

The author's whole approach to AI is focusing on the supervised learning aspects of AI but ignoring the likelihood that future advancements in AI will come from reinforcement learning - much as how AlphaGo was first bootstrapped on human play but then improved through self play. On another note, this was amusing: "Many of my friends and colleagues are deeply impressed by their experiences with the latest big models,…

> Is this supposed to be reassuring?

I have no idea why people think AIs will be better at general intelligence than they are at driving cars. At least why they think GI will improve any faster than driving.

Re: There is no A.I.

#126

Post by sclarisse »

counttheforks wrote: post #94
eternalban wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This then is the perfect historic opportunity to revist granting personhood to corporations. p.s. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporate_personhood Almost all such legal framings have been motivated by the legal difficulties of applying laws to organized groups of individuals. For example, entering into contracts is legally between two parties. Presumably, the sheer amount of legal reworking necessary to actually cr…

I never really understood this. Can a company go to prison or get the death penalty?

Corporations have rights because they are owned by humans and those humans have rights. Corporations are just a convenient way to do things together, like conduct a business and own property. Corporate personhood is just a legal abstraction to represent those peoples’ rights, a facade pattern that lets multi-person groups neatly fit in existing laws that might discuss individuals.

Corporations like Citizens United can solicit donations from citizens who are fans and produce a pathetic hack-job movie about Hillary Clinton and pay to air it on cable TV, without the FEC saying “no,” because that’s an exercise of the free speech rights of citizens who are working together.

Corporations cannot vote because there is no meaningful legal way for people to vote together.

Corporations seldom need to be jailed because their crimes are actually committed by humans and you can send the humans to jail.

Re: There is no A.I.

#127

Post by notjulianjaynes »

jancsika wrote: post #44

Ray Kurzweil's most important argument[1] from that one book he wrote two or three times: If AIs can convince us humans they are sentient, we'll believe them. Does that webgpu demo run on anything more than canary yet? In any case, someone is going to fall in love with one of their browser processes soon. I'll guess by mid-August. More rank speculation: by October, some poor soul will post on SO asking how to retriev…

>someone is going to fall in love with one of their browser processes soon. I'll guess by mid-August.

Already happened: https://gizmodo.com/replika-chatbot-ai-reddit-1850120099

Re: There is no A.I.

#128

Post by crabmusket »

puzzledobserver wrote: post #99
eternalban wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This then is the perfect historic opportunity to revist granting personhood to corporations. p.s. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporate_personhood Almost all such legal framings have been motivated by the legal difficulties of applying laws to organized groups of individuals. For example, entering into contracts is legally between two parties. Presumably, the sheer amount of legal reworking necessary to actually cr…

What about limited liability? It seems to me to be an enormous concession to corporations and their shareholders, and which never seems to be questioned in popular consciousness.

Do you see a connection between limited liability and AI, or are you going in the direction of "free gifts to corporations"? I'm trying to understand how limited liability interacts with AI and corporations.

Re: There is no A.I.

#130

Post by tuatoru »

gitfan86 wrote: post #73
eointierney wrote: post #36

Can we just backronym AI to Approximate Intelligence and carry on? There are so many dangers and possibilities of AI that are fascinating, and none of them are even remotely as interesting as those of actual animal and human intelligence. It's as if AI is held up as a mirror to our stupidity, and the Turing Test is how we measure ourselves against our models of computation. I'm really weirded out by the fear and expl…

Thank you, the philosophers and religious people are more than welcome to discuss what is "true" intelligence or humanity I'm more focused on the fact that GDP as it was measured in 2020 is going to 100x in the next 5 years.

GDP is measured both as production and as consumption. The figures have to be the same, within a "statistical discrepancy". The consumption is final consumption: goods and services used by households.

You are asserting that households will each have 100 times the income that they do now (and be spending the same proportion of income as they do now).

Edit: I believe that if most companies, or even a significant minority of them, can make effective use of LLMs, the most likely short term effect is a prolonged recession (i.e. steadily declining GDP, not increasing) with high unemployment.

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