31–40 of 133 posts
It's simple. It's because AI is the scariest technology ever made. Human intelligence has proven itself capable of doing a lot of scary things. And AI research is keen on building ever more capable and more scalable intelligence. By now, the list of advantages humans still have over machines is both finite and rapidly diminishing. If that doesn't make you uneasy, you're in denial.
Why does the uncanny valley[1] exist? (If it truly does.) What in our evolutionary history gave us a reflexive rejection of things that seem human but aren't? 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncanny_valley
This is roughly 1995 again and we're going to find out all over why mixing instructions and data was a spectacularly bad idea. Only now with human language as the input stream, which is far more expressive than HTML or SQL ever were. So now everybody is a hacker. At least in that sense it has leveled the playing field I guess.
It does feel like a bizarre moment, where the AI companies are deliberately trying to scare us about their own product in a bid to, I think, show the inevitability of it? Or to sell themselves as the one responsible power to constrain it? It's very odd. "It's going to take all your jobs" is not a great selling point to the everyday public.
It's simple. It's because AI is the scariest technology ever made. Human intelligence has proven itself capable of doing a lot of scary things. And AI research is keen on building ever more capable and more scalable intelligence. By now, the list of advantages humans still have over machines is both finite and rapidly diminishing. If that doesn't make you uneasy, you're in denial.
Many have built their careers from that kind of work in the past and yes they are threatened, but that kind of work is inherently not collaborative and more vocational.
It's simple. It's because AI is the scariest technology ever made. Human intelligence has proven itself capable of doing a lot of scary things. And AI research is keen on building ever more capable and more scalable intelligence. By now, the list of advantages humans still have over machines is both finite and rapidly diminishing. If that doesn't make you uneasy, you're in denial.
I see the flood of PR from AI firms as an attempt to make sure we don't build the appropriate safeguards this time around, because there's too much money to be made.
> Perhaps because this is the best advertising money can’t buy. People like Harari and others repeat these accounts like ghost stories around a campfire. The public, awed and afraid, marvels at the capabilities of AI.
And that's mostly it. PR. Publicity. Fear is good publicity if it emphasizes AI's capabilities. And people like Harari (or Gladwell) tell interesting and awe-inspiring stories that do not necessarily have much rigor or fact-checking in them. They simplify for storytelling purposes, which can result in misleading stories.
I am worried about AI, but not about superintelligent AI that will exterminate or enslave us. I'm worried about AI as a tool to concentrate wealth and power in the hands of the current amoral entrepreneurial elite. I'm not sure whether I trust ChatGPT, but I sure as hell do NOT trust Sam Altman et al.
Or, in other words, I subscribe to Ted Chiang's very apt remark about what we really fear:
> “There’s an article I love by [the sci-fi author] Ted Chiang,” Mitchell said, “where he asks: What entity adheres monomaniacally to one single goal that they will pursue at all costs even if doing so uses up all the resources of the world? A big corporation. Their single goal is to increase value for shareholders, and in pursuing that, they can destroy the world. That’s what people are modeling their AI fantasies on.” As Chiang put it in the article in The New Yorker, “Capitalism is the machine that will do whatever it takes to prevent us from turning it off.”
One thing that strikes me that I never really see anyone discuss is that we've been afraid of conscious computers for a _long_ time. Back in the 50s and before people were quite afraid that we'd build conscious computers. This was long before there was any sense that could actually accomplish the task. I think that similarly to seeing faces in the clouds, we imagine a consciousness where none exists. (eg: a rain god…
Are they? Not conscious? If you list out every prominent theory of consciousness, you'd find that about a quarter rules out LLMs, a quarter tentatively rules LLMs in, and what remains is "uncertain about LLMs". And, of course, we don't know which theory of consciousness is correct - or if any of them is. So, what is it that makes you so sure, oh so very certain, that LLMs just "feel" conscious but aren't?
Turing aimed too low.