Parents: you know how every day you look at your child and you’re struck with wonder at the amazing and quirky and unique person your little one is?
I swear that’s what lesswrong posters see every day in the mirror.
Playing in the Creek
21–30 of 122 posts
Re: Playing in the Creek
#22This is an excellent essay, and I feel similar to the author but couldn't express it as nicely. However if we are counting on AI researchers to take the advice and slow down then I wouldn't hold my breath waiting. The author indicated they stepped away from a high paying finance job for moral reasons, which is admirable. But wallstreet continues on and does not lack for people willing to play the "make as much money…
The paperclip maximizers are already here, but they are maximizing money.
One recent HN comment [0] comparing corporations and institutions to AI really stuck with me - those are already superhuman intelligences.
Re: Playing in the Creek
#23So many articles and comments claim Ai will destroy critical thinking in our youths. Is there any evidence that this conviction that many people share is even remotely true?
To me it just seems like the same old knee-jerk luddite response people have to any powerful new technology that challenges that status quo since the dawn of time. The calculator did not erase math wizards, the television did not replace books and so on. It just made us better, faster, more productive.
Sometimes there is an adjustment period (we still haven't figured out how to deal with short dopamine hits from certain types of entertainment and social media), but things will balance themselves out eventually.
Some people may go full-on Wall-E, but I for one will never stop tinkering, and many of my friends won't either.
The things I could have done if I had had an LLM as a kid... I think I've learned more in the past two years than ever before.
Re: Playing in the Creek
#24That was a well written essay with a non-sequitur AI Safety thing tacked to the end. His real world examples were concrete, and the reason to stop escalating easy to understand ("don't flood the neighbourhood by building a real dam"). The AI angle is not only even hypothetical: there is no attempt to describe or reason about a concrete "x leading to y", just "see, the same principle probably extrapolates". There is n…
> the high velocities of steam locomotives might kill you
This obviously seems silly in hindsight. Warnings about radium watches or asbestos sound less silly, or even wise. But neither had any solid scientific studies showing clear hazard and risk. Just people being good Bayesian agents, trying to ride the middle of the exploration vs. exploitation curve.
Maybe it makes sense to spend some percentage of AI development resources on trying to understand how they work, and how they can fail.
Re: Playing in the Creek
#25This is an excellent essay, and I feel similar to the author but couldn't express it as nicely. However if we are counting on AI researchers to take the advice and slow down then I wouldn't hold my breath waiting. The author indicated they stepped away from a high paying finance job for moral reasons, which is admirable. But wallstreet continues on and does not lack for people willing to play the "make as much money…
The paperclip maximizers are already here, but they are maximizing money. One recent HN comment [0] comparing corporations and institutions to AI really stuck with me - those are already superhuman intelligences. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43580681
I could imagine a Star Trek episode where someone says "I always assumed the paperclip optimizer was a parable for unchecked capitalism?"
Re: Playing in the Creek
#26Re: Playing in the Creek
#27So many articles and comments claim Ai will destroy critical thinking in our youths. Is there any evidence that this conviction that many people share is even remotely true? To me it just seems like the same old knee-jerk luddite response people have to any powerful new technology that challenges that status quo since the dawn of time. The calculator did not erase math wizards, the television did not replace books an…
I don't think you got the point of the article? It is saying that we as wise humans know (sometimes) when to stop optimizing for a goal, due to the negative side effects. AIs (and as some other people have pointed out corporations) do not naturally have this line in their head, and we must draw such lines carefully and with purpose for these superhuman beings.
Re: Playing in the Creek
#28It's a nice article. In a way though it kind of bypasses what I see as the main takeaways.
It's not about AI development, it's about something mentioned earlier in the article: "make as much money as I can". The problems that we see with AI have little to do with AI "development", they have to do with AI marketing and promulgation. If the author had gone ahead and dammed the creek with a shovel, or blown off his hand, that would have been bad, but not that bad. Those kinds of mistakes are self-limiting because if you're doing something for the enjoyment or challenge of it, you won't do it at a scale that creates more enjoyment than you personally can experience. In the parable of the CEO and the fisherman, the fisherman stops at what he can tangibly appreciate.
If everyone working on and using AI were approaching it like damming a creek for fun, we would have no problems. The AI models we had might be powerful, but they would be funky and disjointed because people would be more interested in tinkering with them than making money from them. We see tons of posts on HN every day about remarkable things people do for the gusto. We'd see a bunch of posts about new AI models and people would talk about how cool they are and go on not using them in any load-bearing way.
As soon as people start trying to use anything, AI or not, to make as much money as possible, we have a problem.
The second missed takeaway is at the end. He says Anthropic is noticing the coquinas as if that means they're going to somehow self-regulate. But in most of the examples he gives, he wasn't stopped by his own realization, but by an external authority (like parents) telling him to stop. Most people are not as self-reflective as this author and won't care about "winning zero sum games against people who don't necessarily deserve to lose", let alone about coquinas. They need a parent to step in and take the shovel away.
As long as we keep treating "making as much money as you can" as some kind of exception to the principle of "you can't keep doing stuff until you break something", we'll have these problems, AI or not.
Re: Playing in the Creek
#29So many articles and comments claim Ai will destroy critical thinking in our youths. Is there any evidence that this conviction that many people share is even remotely true? To me it just seems like the same old knee-jerk luddite response people have to any powerful new technology that challenges that status quo since the dawn of time. The calculator did not erase math wizards, the television did not replace books an…
> Ai will destroy critical thinking in our youths
I don't think that's the argument the article was making. It was, to my understanding, a more nuanced question about if we want to destroy or severely disturb systems at equilibrium by letting AI systems infiltrate our society.
> Sometimes there is an adjustment period (we still haven't figured out how to deal with short dopamine hits from certain types of entertainment and social media), but things will balance themselves out eventually.
One can zoom out a little bit. The issue didn't start with social media, nor AI. "Star Wars, A New Hope", is, to my understanding, an incredibly good film. It came out in 1977 and it's a great story made to be appreciated by the masses. And in trying to achieve that goal, it really wasn't intellectually challenging. We have continued in that downhill for a bit, and now we are in 16 second stingers in TikTok and Youtube. So, the way I see it, things are not balancing out. Worse, people in USA elected D.J. Trump because somehow they couldn't understand how this real-world Emperor Palpatine was the bad guy.
Re: Playing in the Creek
#30That was a well written essay with a non-sequitur AI Safety thing tacked to the end. His real world examples were concrete, and the reason to stop escalating easy to understand ("don't flood the neighbourhood by building a real dam"). The AI angle is not only even hypothetical: there is no attempt to describe or reason about a concrete "x leading to y", just "see, the same principle probably extrapolates". There is n…
The progress-care trade-off is a difficult one to navigate, and is clearly more important with AI. I've seen people draw analogies to companies, which have often caused harm in pursuit of greater profits, both purposefully and simply as byproducts: oil-spills, overmedication, pollution, ecological damage, bad labor conditions, hazardous materials, mass lead poisoning. Of course, the profit seeking company as an invention has been one of the best humans have ever made, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't take "corp safety" seriously. We pass various laws on how corps can operate and what they can and can not do to limit harms and _align_ them with the goals of society.
So it is with AI. Except, corps are made of people that work on people speeds, and have vague morals and are tied to society in ways AI might not be. AI might also be able to operate faster and with less error. So extra care is required.