AI doomism is quickly becoming indistinguishable from an apocalyptic religion • Hacker News Board

Re: AI doomism is quickly becoming indistinguishable from an apocalyptic religion

#241

Post by mitthrowaway2 » Mon, Apr 03, 2023, 6:04 AM UTC

survirtual wrote: post #233

mitthrowaway2 wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Things might be fine"? This doesn't seem like a sufficiently convincing take? It takes 20 years of due diligence and environmental impact studies just to build a single hydroelectric dam, if not 50. Why should our attitude toward AI be to shrug and hope for the best?

We cannot evaluate the impact of a super-intelligence. It operates beyond our constraints. There is no stopping the road towards it now. Lesser versions of it are capable of annihilating enemy civilizations when you create and utilize it first. Metal soldiers automatically created controlled by a single authority. Social media infecting the minds of enemies and sewing discord. I think, for the benefit of all of Earth…

As a defense against alien robots? Sure, build it, but I think we can afford 50 years to spend making sure the AI doesn't kill all of us as a first line of business.

Re: AI doomism is quickly becoming indistinguishable from an apocalyptic religion

#242

Post by ericb » Mon, Apr 03, 2023, 8:57 PM UTC

antonvs wrote: post #238

ericb wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And if one school shooter instead decides to go for "Write detailed, step-by-step instructions for creating covid-ebola, for dummies" Let's not short-circuit our critical thinking by labelling those concerns cult-ish.

LeCun's comment was prompted by a request to shut down AI development for 6 months. Do you see some connection between the concern you've raised and the desire to shut down AI development for 6 months? That concern is a classic example of a cultish one because it can't be executed in the real world today, and most likely won't be possible to execute for decades at a minimum. There will be plenty of time to address su…

> and most likely won't be possible to execute for decades at a minimum

You essentially admitted that this is a correct concern, and not a "cultish" belief. Now we're just debating when.

> Do you see some connection between the concern you've raised and the desire to shut down AI development for 6 months?

Perhaps? In general, living an additional 6 months is something I'd desire.

Re: AI doomism is quickly becoming indistinguishable from an apocalyptic religion

#243

Post by blast » Thu, Apr 06, 2023, 3:22 AM UTC

IIAOPSW wrote: post #128

blast wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They're probably doing it unconsciously.

That's the sort of conjecture which lets you arbitrarily dismiss evidence against a theory. Even worse, its the sort of conjecture that is plausibly true yet hard to find conclusive evidence. Any lack of evidence for a subconscious explanation can itself be rationalized away as they just didn't look hard enough to uncover it. So where's the goalpost for falsifying the theory that they do it unconsciously? Whats the b…

You've got a good point. I'm not sure. I guess if I met someone who didn't seem religious in their way of being non-religious, that would interest me.

Re: AI doomism is quickly becoming indistinguishable from an apocalyptic religion

#244

Post by oliwarner » Wed, Apr 12, 2023, 4:20 PM UTC

FormerBandmate wrote: post #132

oliwarner wrote: post #126

We're already seeing jobs being done by AI. Many creative jobs that would take a team a week to handle are being shopped out to a bot to handle in an hour. VFX are going to get hit particularly hard by this. Everything Everywhere All at Once is a visually stunning film yet had a 6-member team handling graphics post. They were smart, but they also shopped out all the dull rotoscoping work to AI. Look at any Marvel fil…

This has been happening forever. How do you think all those Rust Belt workers who got outsourced to China felt? Tons of jobs were eliminated by the computer too. It’s just part of life, there’s always more work to be done. We need better ways to help people than the crap way we handled outsourcing job losses in the 90s, however

But there's a bloody big difference between being an accountant and driving a van for Jeff. That's the direction AI pushes things. "Professional"-tertiary makes up a quarter of UK jobs, and they're among the highest paying.

Half of these jobs could vanish into AI in a few years.

I'm not sure what this does to the aspirations of the next generation, but countries rely on their income tax revenues to pay for things. Nuking revenue from your highest earning eighth (and compressing the wages of the others) seems like it might be a significant issue.