Live data from Hacker News

On AI regulation and messaging

twitter.com

171–180 of 572 posts

Re: On AI regulation and messaging

#171
post #115
post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The effective altruist and longtermist crowd are into it as a religion. They would happily sacrifice anything human to satisfy their dreams of AI. They care way more about what the AI needs than their what their fellow humans need. We will end up with an AGI having better living and working conditions than humans and the whole AI industry will be clapping

It's an ideological thing. (We just had a conversation about ideology actually, remember?) Capitalism has always been a tension between capitalists, who want maximum return on capital and workers, who want pesky things like a living wage, sick leave or safe work conditions. For the longest time, the only power labor has had to get those things was the power of collective bargaining. No agreement with your workers mea…

> Capitalism has always been a tension between capitalists, who want maximum return on capital and workers, who want pesky things like a living wage, sick leave or safe work conditions.

The underlying purpose of AI is to allow wealth to access skill while removing from the skilled the ability to access wealth. (read on HN, not my words)

Re: On AI regulation and messaging

#172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Besides cancer isn't really "a disease" but rather "a family of diseases" that can vary a lot. Even breast cancer can be one of many different cancers. It's like saying "we'll cure infectious diseases"

We will cure virus.

We will cure carpet. We will cure desk. We will cure lamp.

Re: On AI regulation and messaging

#173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On the other hand, AI means actual experiments done in the physical world but coordinated by an entity that never sleeps and never gets depressed and can multiply itself manifold and always comes up with new ideas.

That fanatical tireless entity will need access to human tissue.

Please don't give them ideas

Re: On AI regulation and messaging

#175
post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Curing cancer sounds insane, but it's also a research problem, I just don't buy the AI labs approach to this stuff. Like, unless we can basically simulate the entirety of human biology, I don't really see how LLMs can make progress here. Maths is different as it doesn't require a real-world interface, and programming already (by definition) can be simulated on a computer. Without that, I can't see much (if any) pro…

I'm a noob on this topic, but I think drug discovery is more amenable to this structurally than other problems. Simulating biology is what we were doing with protein folding before Alphafold, and the search space was far too large to find stuff in reasonable timeframes. Alphafold showed that you could take a physical process and make a neural net clever enough to learn just enough structure that it starts finding thi…

> Drug discovery is similar AFAIK. The space of possibilities is even larger than protein folding, but it's structurally similar enough that I think AI will help to make progress on the discovery side.

I do agree that this kind of targeted approach makes sense.

However, discovery is not really the issue here. Running the clinical trials (1/2/3) is much much more difficult, and consumes basically all of the time in drug development, so even if LLMs perfectly automate this, the speedup will not be particularly large.

Re: On AI regulation and messaging

#176
> „… it will actually be possible to cure most human disease in ~5-10 years, as crazy as it may sound to ordinary people …“

Nothing beats the hubris of the Silicon Valley CEOs and self proclaimed “elite”. I’m missing people calling out “we are better than that”… NOT

Re: On AI regulation and messaging

#177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On the other hand, AI means actual experiments done in the physical world but coordinated by an entity that never sleeps and never gets depressed and can multiply itself manifold and always comes up with new ideas.

That fanatical tireless entity will need access to human tissue.

And hands.

Re: On AI regulation and messaging

#178
post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's more reasonable than it sounds on the surface. People's jobs, the bubble, etc are societal level problems and well beyond what Anthropic could even hope to influence on their own. Curing cancer sounds insane, but it's also a research problem, not a societal level coordination problem. And one AI has already proved to help with breakthroughs (alphafold). IMO it makes sense for them to shoot for something…

>People's jobs, the bubble, etc are societal level problems and well beyond what Anthropic could even hope to influence on their own. This is not true. There are two companies at the center of AI direction: Anthropic and OpenAI. If there were anyone on the plant who has the ability to influence our direction then it would be Dario Amodei. Acknowledging the grievances is a good step, but it's not enough. There needs t…

> If there were anyone on the plant who has the ability to influence our direction then it would be Dario Amodei.

Possibly, but not necessarily in a better direction. And that's the whole problem here. They should all go watch Phantasia.

Re: On AI regulation and messaging

#179
post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While there is a large element of paranoia here, we're already seeing serious problems in e.g. planning consultations that people can just spam them with AI. AI makes a lot of traditional social processes stop working properly. > puts in it's regulations that you're not allowed to use AI to communicate with them (we all know this is coming), .. do we? > You get a mail from the government about taxes. You want to chec…

>AI makes a lot of traditional social processes stop working properly. Which is mostly a good thing because most of those processes were cooked up to be exclusionary but with plausible deniability God forbid some upstart get a big contract they "shouldn't" have gotten because AI lets them create a submission that's on par with a big guys. God forbid Joe Schmo be able to prepare the paperwork and dot his I's and cross…

[dead]

Re: On AI regulation and messaging

#180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The thing that will work is actually curing cancer. This is honestly hilarious. Dario must think people are stupid. First, cancer research charities are some of the most well funded on this planet. They all obtain donations on the basis of "together, we will cure cancer" messaging. They all fund the best science they can. Second, the human body is a complicated thing. You can feed your fancy LLM as many textbooks a…

Besides cancer isn't really "a disease" but rather "a family of diseases" that can vary a lot. Even breast cancer can be one of many different cancers. It's like saying "we'll cure infectious diseases"

"Cancer isn't a single disease" is often shouted from the Dunning-Kruger peak of cancer research. I think it was popularized by an explainer video on Youtube, and now it's being memed. The people who think this way want to legitimize funding a particular research niche that they benefit from.

A more sophisticated view is that cancer (one idea) is an problem of rates (like most things in biology) and there is a tumor burden per unit time from whatever causes vs. the immune system's capacity to detect and destroy them per unit time. As humans age, the balance tips in one direction. If the balance is too far off for too long, tumors accumulate, doctors take notice, and assign whatever labels to the condition.

Looking into particular causes of tumors (and calling each cause its own cancer) can create a vast research program that employs a lot of people, since there are so many mutations that lead to tumors. But interrupting the development of a particular mutation is not going to have the same society-changing effect that solving the fundamental issue of rates would.

Post reply on HN