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AI as Normal Technology

knightcolumbia.org

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Re: AI as Normal Technology

#41

Post by cootsnuck »

evrythingisfine wrote: post #8
randomwalker wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I appreciate the concern, but we have a whole section on policy where we are very concrete about our recommendations, and we explicitly disavow any broadly anti-regulatory argument or agenda. The "drastic" policy interventions that that sentence refers to are ideas like banning open-source or open-weight AI — those explicitly motivated by perceived superintelligence risks.

The assumption of status quo or equilibrium with technology that is already growing faster than we can keep up with seems irrational to me. Or, put another way: https://youtu.be/0oBx7Jg4m-o

Read the OP. They talk about that.

Re: AI as Normal Technology

#42

Post by cootsnuck »

Very good read. They've articulated points I keep trying to express to people.

I think their stances and predictions will start to be held by more and more people as the illusion / frenzy / FUD from the current..."fog" created by all the AI hype and mystique subsides. It may take another year or two, but public discourse eventually adapts/tires of repeated notions of "the sky is falling" once enough time has piled up without convincing evidence.

Re: AI as Normal Technology

#43

Post by Elextric »

owebmaster wrote: post #31
throwup238 wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

first telephone vs first iphone

Re: AI as Normal Technology

#44

Post by torginus »

dijksterhuis wrote: post #26
torginus wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know the difference between an OS and the kernel, still a lot of devices don't run on the Linux kernel. Windows isn't Linux, macOS/iOS is not Linux, PS5/Xbox/Nintendo don't run on Linux, Xiaomi and Huawei are transitioning away from Linux. I stand by my point that Linux isn't particularly dominant in the consumer space, even if we include Android, whose Linux-ness and open source pedigree is questionable.

i’ll try another way > the internal combustion engine is the “best” engine > lorries/hgvs are not the “best” vehicles then > lorries/hgvs are in the minority, so the internal combustion engine cannot be the best vehicle > … cars? nothing you’ve said refutes the statement ‘linux is the “best” kernel’. like, i geddit. you don’t like linux OSes. you’re entitled to have an opinion. i personally disagree. but that doesn’t…

I don't have any particular feelings for or against Linux, and even if I had, they would be irrelevant for the sake of this argument. I'm just saying for something to be the objectively being 'best' at something, means it makes little sense to use anything but that thing, excepting niche cases.

Which is why you could make a credible case for Linux being the 'best' server OS, but you couldn't make the case for it in other spaces (consumer, embedded etc.), because the alternatives are preferred by huge chunks of the market.

Re: AI as Normal Technology

#45

Post by mr_toad »

xpe wrote: post #36

> 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: conf…

Statistically prediction and description are two sides of the same coin. Even a simple average is both.

Re: AI as Normal Technology

#46

Post by iamgopal »

Small fast ( binary ? ) AI will be as simple as storing data in database and query it, in fact, very soon specialised software will come in to market to do so, guided by large LLM.

Re: AI as Normal Technology

#47

Post by noddingham »

kjkjadksj wrote: post #34
pdfernhout wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I think to the parent's point it is as you say: there is already untapped capacity that isn't being used due to (geo)political forces maintaining the scarcity side of the argument. Using your agriculture example, a simple Google search will yield plenty of examples going back more than a decade of food sitting/rotting in warehouses/ports due to red tape and bureaucracy. So, we already can/do produce enough food to feed _everyone_ (abundance) but cannot get out of our own way to do so due to a number of human factors like greed or politics (scarcity).

Re: AI as Normal Technology

#48

Post by callc »

> The normal technology frame is about the relationship between technology and society.

There is a huge differentiating factor for LLMs that makes it not normal: the blatant disregard for the ownership rights of everyone in the world. What other "normal" technology has so callously stolen everything it can without consequence?

The music industry? Artists getting inspired and too closely imitating other artists? I genuinely want to know. And if there is such a suitable example, how did society react? Is there relevant history we can learn from here?

Putting aside other the other problems (capital ownership class salivating at the prospect of using LLM bots instead of humans, reduced critical thinking and traditional learning, environmental impact, other societal changes), this is my main turn-off for LLMs.

Give me a model trained on a responsible dataset (not something our grandparents would scold us for doing) and that I can on consumer hardware then I can use LLMs guilt free.

Re: AI as Normal Technology

#49

Post by xpe »

mr_toad wrote: post #45
xpe wrote: post #36

> 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: conf…

Statistically prediction and description are two sides of the same coin. Even a simple average is both.

> Statistically prediction and description are two sides of the same coin. Even a simple average is both.

I'll restate your comment in my language in the hopes of making it clearer. First, the mean is a descriptive statistic. Second, it is possible to build a very simple predictive model using the mean (over observed data).

Ok, but I don't see how this applies to my comment above. Are you disagreeing with some part of my comment?

You're using a metaphor "two sides of the same coin"... what is the coin here? How does it connect with my points above?

Re: AI as Normal Technology

#50

Post by j45 »

I find in all the hype, that it's important to remember that AI is just software. A remarkable, and different kind of software. But software.
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