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How I feel about AI

beza1e1.tuxen.de

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Re: How I feel about AI

#221

Post by ben_w »

jere wrote: post #51

My experience online is if you don't show full throated rejection of all things related to AI, you're labeled an AI bro. None of the antis care how you feel. I had my decade old game completely cloned on steam (clearly done using AI as it was almost fully reimplemented in another engine). And I had several people gleefully tell me I deserve this because I've used AI. I have complex emotions here (overall dread and es…

> I have complex emotions here (overall dread and especially hate for slop, since it's not just bad quality but also endless lies), but no one cares about that nuance.

Many do, but I sympathise for your general point. I think the loudest voices… well, the boosters mostly own the platforms, and half of them already had terrible reputations; the normal people who hate it garner a lot of sympathy for entirely understandable reasons; and then there's people like me (abnormal nerd that I am) who are on lesswrong and therefore have had many discussions about doom and what to do to reduce it and if we can use the AI to help reduce it or if this is just asking for trouble.

Re: How I feel about AI

#222

Post by ethbr1 »

cosmic_cheese wrote: post #110
litmus-pit-git wrote: post #103

This is a bit of tangent and more of a rant. (and please don't suggest intervention of any kind) > superintelligent AI will inevitably destroy humanity seems to have no flaw For a section of population who were in a certain age-range when the pandemic hit and that derailed their certain kinds of plans/hopes/dreams in personal life and then this LLM/agentic world moved in, especially if they are in an industry directl…

I've been fortunate to not been impacted as severely as others, but yeah, the combo of the first half of my 30s (and everything that should've represented) going up in smoke, career continuity coming into question thanks to AI, and growing sense of overarching geopolitical, financial, and societal unease is really the worst kind of layer cake. I have to make a concerted effort to not get bogged down in it and that's…

> If anybody is hiding a button that'd take us all back to 2012 I wish they'd just hit it already.

Historically, resets have been a global war or economic meltdown, coupled with massive government-driven redistribution supported by popular opinion.

ZIRP post-COVID had a net effect of keeping the wealthy wealthy, without redistributing. For all the hay made about salary support, the Fed had more power in deciding who felt the pain.

Re: How I feel about AI

#223

Post by mvkel »

mjr00 wrote: post #98
mvkel wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Internet virtually indestructible against people smarter than a toddler. It's already impossible to turn off. We would need to prevent the models from getting smarter.

> The Internet virtually indestructible against people smarter than a toddler. It's already impossible to turn off. This isn't true at all. The internet has already been turned off in localized areas during major events, not to mention the (unintentional?) cutting of submarine cables. You could say "use satellite internet" but then you're just moving the point of failure to Starlink et al, who could also cut off the…

> The internet has already been turned off in localized areas

This is an oxymoron.

Re: How I feel about AI

#224

Post by Tanoc »

hn_mo wrote: post #210
AznHisoka wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The game is made up, but the effort, and process to be one of the most skilled sports players is still real. And sports players would probably feel something missing life if AI could replace them too

Computers surpassed humans at chess nearly 30 years ago. Yet human chess is more popular than ever, and people still dedicate their life to improving at chess. As a more silly comparison, forklifts didn't stop people from weightlifting.

Chess is inherently a leisure activity. The incentive for playing chess is just to be better at chess. But things like woodworking, typesetting, and welding, while all possible to do recreationally, are not leisure activities. They are effort used to produce something. The desire is always there to engage with the thing or idea, but if the resource cost is far too high or the knowledge required is more than one person can reasonably learn the effort will not be expended. A leisure activity will always persist so long as someone knows how to do it because it exists for itself. But many other activities exist in service to something else, and if that something else ceases to exist then the activity will as well. You lose entire domains of useful cross-disciplinary knowledge that way.

Re: How I feel about AI

#225

Post by mjr00 »

mvkel wrote: post #223
mjr00 wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The Internet virtually indestructible against people smarter than a toddler. It's already impossible to turn off. This isn't true at all. The internet has already been turned off in localized areas during major events, not to mention the (unintentional?) cutting of submarine cables. You could say "use satellite internet" but then you're just moving the point of failure to Starlink et al, who could also cut off the…

> The internet has already been turned off in localized areas This is an oxymoron.

> This is an oxymoron.

Huh? Not really, internet shutdowns are a documented and real thing. Suggested reading (all of which refer to the internet as being shut down or blacked out): [0] [1] [2]

The fact that you need to connect to the internet through a service provider plus mostly-centralized control of infrastructure like DNS or BGP means shutting down the internet is a real thing that has been done several times. It doesn't happen in the developed world because their service economies are so highly dependent on internet connectivity, but if e.g. the US government had to contain a theoretical rogue escaped AI, they could absolutely get ISPs to metaphorically unplug the network cable and take down the internet as we know it.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2026_Internet_blackout_in_Iran

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_in_Egypt#2011_Interne...

[2] https://www.reuters.com/world/india/india-asks-telecom-compa...

Re: How I feel about AI

#227

Post by tim333 »

>Yudkowsky's argument that a superintelligent AI will inevitably destroy humanity seems to have no flaw.

From trying to see what his argument is, it doesn't seem to have much rigor either, basically that AI smarter than us may figure it doesn't want us. Which doesn't prove it'll happen. Even humans who generally are not that nice tend to try to preserve species and I expect we'll try to give AI better values than us warlike primates.

Re: How I feel about AI

#228

Post by rdsubhas »

agumonkey wrote: post #146
hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #52

The thing that makes me pretty terrified about AI is that I think the "utopia" scenario is not much better than the "doom" scenario. We will very quickly get to a point where very few people will be able to contribute economically because they will be worse than AI (including robotics) at most domains. A world where people just have their whims catered to is not a utopia. We have tons of sayings and idioms about this…

There's the mice utopia experiment too. I often hear that in space your bones dégradé, your biology needs weight as input. Also I believe our socialness was crafted out of the need for survival. If removed it's all gonna run wild since nobody needs anybody, and it might end up as doom scrolling but for human relationship. Short bursts from time to time and that's it

It's the inverse. We created a world for introverts only in the last ~50 years, where people can spend all their time in an office desk not actually talking to anyone. This was never the case in any of human evolution before.

It's only going back. Raw urban human connections will be the only thing left to exercise.

Re: How I feel about AI

#229

Post by ben_w »

juiceland wrote: post #226
ben_w wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, but feelings drive actions in humans.

And it appears the feelings drove this human to write a blog post. Not exactly world changing.

So?

Feelings drive almost, perhaps literally, all actions we take.

Feelings drove the Crusaders, feelings drove the Renaissance, feelings drove Einstein, feelings drove the invention of communism and of Glasnost, the Irish independence campaign, the start and end of Prohibition, the creation of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and of all the evil deeds that made the UDHR necessary.

Re: How I feel about AI

#230

Post by ekidd »

apsurd wrote: post #171
ekidd wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> * For a section of population who were in a certain age-range when the pandemic hit and that derailed their certain kinds of plans/hopes/dreams in personal life* ... > So I feel a strange kind of relief about this possibility of doom. So let me make sure I understand what you're saying. The pandemic disrupted your life plans for a few years and threw you off the track you planned? (Which does suck.) And now the pos…

There's nuance though. Poetry even. > we should fight for human survival All problems arise from this statement. It's baked in us and it's why we do in fact survive. But it isn't so neatly righteous. When we struggle to agree on what defines a human, who ought to have rights, and basic equality, it's easy to see how much harm "we should fight for survival" does.

> > we should fight for human survival

> All problems arise from this statement.

Let me go on the record, then: Given a choice between every living human being becoming absolutely, for-real dead and the human species surviving, then I come down on the side of human survival. There are too many humans that I love personally, and too many innocent people just going about their lives that I would like to protect. Given a choice between the mass death of billions, and their survival, I choose survival.

Human rights are essential. But human rights are difficult to achieve if everyone is dead.

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