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AI as Normal Technology

knightcolumbia.org

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Re: AI as Normal Technology

#31

Post by owebmaster »

throwup238 wrote: post #25
owebmaster wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> AI will transform everything, and after that life will continue as normal 100%. It just happened with the advent of the internet and then smartphones.

And thanks to both, future trends are getting established faster and faster. It took about a decade for the internet to go mainstream, maybe five years for smartphones, and now just a year or two for LLMs. It’s pretty fascinating watching that process get more and more compressed over a lifetime.

I think LLMs are actually taking quite some time to become economically and socially relevant. The smartphone/apps boom created a lot of opportunities for thousands of app developers while now besides some toy apps most people are not creating nothing too interesting. Which is funny because LLMs were supposed to make people code faster but everything is still bloated, broken, boring.

Re: AI as Normal Technology

#32

Post by schnable »

roxolotl wrote: post #12

This is a rare piece on AI which takes a coherent middle of the road viewpoint. Saying both that AI is “normal” and that it will be transformative is a radical statement in today’s discussions about AI. Looking back on other normal but transformative technologies: steam power, electricity, nuclear physics, the transistor, etc you do actually see similarly stratified opinions. Most of those are surrounded by an initia…

Add birth control to that list too.

After these technologies, certainly life is "normal" as in "life goes on" but the social impacts are most definitely new and transformative. Fast travel, instantaneous direct and mass communications, control over family formation all have had massive impact on how people live and interact and then transform again.

Re: AI as Normal Technology

#33

Post by owebmaster »

bluefirebrand wrote: post #28
owebmaster wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> AI will transform everything, and after that life will continue as normal 100%. It just happened with the advent of the internet and then smartphones.

I think the problem I have is that it still doesn't feel like society has really caught up to the impact that The Internet and Smartphones have had, and we keep getting disrupted faster and faster it seems I know that there have always been disruptive technologies, but I the the rate of "technologies that are disrupting everything " as opposed to "technologies that are disrupting just one thing" has been kind of craz…

> I think the problem I have is that it still doesn't feel like society has really caught up to the impact that The Internet and Smartphones have had, and we keep getting disrupted faster and faster it seems

Indeed. For the past 30 years, every 10 years people were raised in a completely different environment. TV -> Internet -> Smartphones and now the next 10 years of people growing up influenced by LLMs.

Re: AI as Normal Technology

#34

Post by kjkjadksj »

pdfernhout wrote: post #19
roxolotl wrote: post #12

This is a rare piece on AI which takes a coherent middle of the road viewpoint. Saying both that AI is “normal” and that it will be transformative is a radical statement in today’s discussions about AI. Looking back on other normal but transformative technologies: steam power, electricity, nuclear physics, the transistor, etc you do actually see similarly stratified opinions. Most of those are surrounded by an initia…

From the article: ==== History suggests normal AI may introduce many kinds of systemic risks While the risks discussed above have the potential to be catastrophic or existential, there is a long list of AI risks that are below this level but which are nonetheless large-scale and systemic, transcending the immediate effects of any particular AI system. These include the systemic entrenchment of bias and discrimination…

The idea of abundance vs scarecety makes sense on the outset. But I have to wonder where all this alleged abundance is hiding. Sometimes the assumptions feel a bit like “drill baby drill” to me without figures and projections behind it. One would think if there was much untapped capacity in resources today it would get used up. We can look at how agriculture yields improved over the 19th century and see how that lead to higher populations but also less land under the plow and fewer hands working that land, vs having an equal land under plow and I don’t know dumping the excess yield someplace where it isn’t participating in the market?

Re: AI as Normal Technology

#35

Post by Nevermark »

What a well reasoned stance!

They note that they don’t expect their view to address challenges without additional material, but one challenge struck me.

Slow diffusion, which gets bottlenecked by human beings learning to adapt to significant new technologies, drops considerably if a technology juices startups in other areas than the tech itself.

I.e. existing organizations may not be the bottleneck for change, if widely available AI makes disruptive (cheaper initially, higher quality eventually) startups much easier in general to start and to scale.

Re: AI as Normal Technology

#36

Post by xpe »

> The statement “AI is normal technology” is three things: a description of current AI, a prediction about the foreseeable future of AI, and a prescription about how we should treat it.

A question for the author(s), at least one of whom is participating in the discussion (thanks!): Why try to lump together description, prediction, and prescription under the "normal" adjective?

Discussing AI is fraught. My claim: conflating those three under the "normal" label seems likely to backfire and lead to unnecessary confusion. Why not instead keep these separate?

My main objection is this: it locks in a narrative that tries to neatly fuse description, prediction, and prescription. I recoil at this; it feels like an unnecessary coupling. Better to remain fluid and not lock in a narrative. The field is changing so fast, making description by itself very challenging. Predictions should update on new information, including how we frame the problem and our evolving values.

A little bit about my POV in case it gives useful context: I've found the authors (Narayanan and Kapoor) to be quite level-headed and sane w.r.t. AI discussions, unlike many others. I'll mention Gary Marcus as one counterexample; I find it hard to pin Marcus down on the actual form of his arguments or concrete predictions. His pieces often feel like rants without a clear underlying logical backbone (at least in the year or so I've read his work).

Re: AI as Normal Technology

#37

Post by cainxinth »

It already is for me. I've been using LLMs daily for years now. I don't get the people claiming AGI every two minutes any more than the people claiming these tools are useless.

LLM reasoning abilities are very fragile and often overfitted to training data. But if still you haven't figured out how to do anything useful with an LLM, warts and all, that says more about you than LLMs.

Re: AI as Normal Technology

#38

Post by datadrivenangel »

bluefirebrand wrote: post #28
owebmaster wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> AI will transform everything, and after that life will continue as normal 100%. It just happened with the advent of the internet and then smartphones.

I think the problem I have is that it still doesn't feel like society has really caught up to the impact that The Internet and Smartphones have had, and we keep getting disrupted faster and faster it seems I know that there have always been disruptive technologies, but I the the rate of "technologies that are disrupting everything " as opposed to "technologies that are disrupting just one thing" has been kind of craz…

We've made the world run on machines, and gotten better about machine intelligence and distributing software, so the speed at which the world's machines can operate smarter has increased significantly.

An innovation by one person can be distributed to the majority of people on the planet within minutes. It's amazing and all of our social and political norms aren't built to handle this.

Re: AI as Normal Technology

#39

Post by _ea1k »

OhioMan2943 wrote: post #22
datadrivenangel wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AI will transform everything, and after that life will continue as normal, so except for the details, it's not a big deal. Going to be a simultaneously wild and boring ride.

Everything changes, but everything stays the same.

All of these things have happened before and all of these things will happen again :)

Re: AI as Normal Technology

#40

Post by cootsnuck »

roxolotl wrote: post #12

This is a rare piece on AI which takes a coherent middle of the road viewpoint. Saying both that AI is “normal” and that it will be transformative is a radical statement in today’s discussions about AI. Looking back on other normal but transformative technologies: steam power, electricity, nuclear physics, the transistor, etc you do actually see similarly stratified opinions. Most of those are surrounded by an initia…

I wouldn't call it a "middle" road rather a "nuanced" road (or even a "grounded" road IMO).

If its a "middle" road what is it in the middle of (i.e. what "scale")? And how so?

I'm not trying to be pedantic. I think our tendency to call nuanced, principled positions as "middle" encourages an inherent "hierarchy of ideas" which often leads to applying some sort of...valence to opinions and discourse. And I worry that makes it easier for people to "take sides" on topics which leads to more superficial, myopic, and repetitive takes that are much more about those "sides" than they are about the pertinent evidence, facts, reality, whatever.

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