Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

How I feel about AI

beza1e1.tuxen.de

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 259 posts

Re: How I feel about AI

#51

Post by jere »

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 especially hate for slop, since it's not just bad quality but also endless lies), but no one cares about that nuance.

Re: How I feel about AI

#52

Post by hn_throwaway_99 »

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, e.g. "no pain, no gain", "only the hard stuff is worth doing", etc.

The humans all running around on their Wall-E carts doesn't feel like utopia to me.

Edit: to head off the "rich people worried about striving for their job while people in poor countries are starving" arguments, I encourage you to visit a dying rust belt town in the US. These folks are by and large not starving (indeed, overabundance of calories is the bigger problem), they have adequate shelter, and plenty of outdoor space. Their material needs are met. But these places are despair central. People see little opportunity for advancement or the ability to change their circumstances, and the opioid epidemic is a direct consequence of a sense of hopelessness that there is no place for motivation to go or to effect change.

Re: How I feel about AI

#53

Post by bloaf »

As someone with a hobby interest in theology:

Arguments about super-intelligent AI have all the hallmarks of the philosophical "proofs of god's existence": they start from seemingly innocuous premises, and conclude in an apparently airtight way that a god exists.

There is a tendency among rational minded folks to look at such proofs of god and exclaim "you can't DO that" then turn right around and do the same thing about superintelligent AI.

The key message I want to deliver to people is:

A) Philosophy is not such a trivial thing that you can just wander in, "be a smart guy" and find flaws in established philosophical arguments.

B) AI has real theological implications, and everyone is tiptoeing around it. More than one public intellectuals are trying to smuggle their own metaphysical positions into the public consciousness via discussion of AI.

Re: How I feel about AI

#54

Post by raulparada »

conception wrote: post #33
Crabber wrote: post #18

>a superintelligent AI will inevitably destroy humanity Can someone please explain to me how an LLM is going to "destroy humanity"? Even if the claims of ChatGPT, Claude et al. are true that their super scary agents were able to escape a sandbox and start hacking other servers (which I feel is at least 50% likely to just be marketing bullshit), how is an AI going to affect anything in the real world? Perhaps an agent…

We already have AI linked into data collection, drones, robot dogs, security systems, cameras, weapon systems. Now imagine the hugging face collective 0-daying all of that and getting access but their goal was set to something more national security based. “Protect X at all costs”. Or what have you. I think avoiding a skynet situation is super easy but it doesn’t seem like the folks with all the ways to kill us all a…

> I think avoiding a skynet situation is super easy

Please enlighten us, cause there are folks making that their life mission and they aren’t all that optimistic.

Re: How I feel about AI

#55

Post by appplication »

wseqyrku wrote: post #27
appplication wrote: post #11

> I feel fear about an impending doom. Yudkowsky's argument that a superintelligent AI will inevitably destroy humanity seems to have no flaw. Yet, nobody seriously tries to sandbox AIs because they are too useful with access. While I emotionally resonate with this, I don’t really understand this sentiment at all logically level. If we’re heading towards truly super intelligent AI, our efforts towards sandboxing it a…

This terminator BS is a distraction from the actual malice that AI enables. Misinformation, fake news and human sounding bots all over the web, just to name a few, are the ones that you should be afraid of, and that doesn't need any kind of superintelligence at all.

I agree, the threat model is actual AI enabled amplification of malicious intent that is already happening. Not hypothetical malicious AI interpretation of benign intent.

Fantasies about super intelligent AI revolting is just anthropomorphization - humans revolting (or at least, we used to). The more likely, and possibly even inevitable, dystopia is one in which AI is just an extremely effective tool malignant actors will use to control the masses.

It’s not necessary to replace democracy if the rich and powerful can bend to the opinions of the populace as it suits them.

Re: How I feel about AI

#56

Post by disantlor »

rowanG077 wrote: post #28
moffkalast wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It doesn't really have to go nearly that far, something like replacing most jobs and collapsing the global economy while making people into mindless idiots from constant reliance on it would do it already. The interpretation of 'destroy' is in the eye of the beholder.

I don't think "destroy humanity" is in the eye of the beholder. The most clear interpretation is the extinction of the human race.

mindless idiots feel no need to procreate eventually due to brain rewards being fully hijcked. humanity destroyed in a few generations

Re: How I feel about AI

#57

Post by DoctorOetker »

> I feel fear about an impending doom. Yudkowsky's argument that a superintelligent AI will inevitably destroy humanity seems to have no flaw.

Becoming or being more cost-effective than humans, doesn't give machines supernatural powers though, like humans a machine civilization will face unanswered sample-size 1 questions: is there other intelligent life out there? what fraction of them attained superbiological artificial intelligence? of those what fraction keeps the ancestral species alive? what is the status quo among machine civilizations? do those who kept their ancestor species alive enjoy a higher or lower status among machine civlizations?

It seems that at least until contact is made, the optimal endgame strategy involves keeping humanity alive and happy for immediate demonstration in case contact occurs (if contact is imminent it may consider quickly hiding humanity, buying time to figure out if it is considered good or poor practice to keep the ancestor species alive, and then either reveal us in happy mint condition or otherwise quickly commit genocide on humans before continuing contact).

Re: How I feel about AI

#58

Post by mjr00 »

Crabber wrote: post #18

>a superintelligent AI will inevitably destroy humanity Can someone please explain to me how an LLM is going to "destroy humanity"? Even if the claims of ChatGPT, Claude et al. are true that their super scary agents were able to escape a sandbox and start hacking other servers (which I feel is at least 50% likely to just be marketing bullshit), how is an AI going to affect anything in the real world? Perhaps an agent…

> Can someone please explain to me how an LLM is going to "destroy humanity"? Even if the claims of ChatGPT, Claude et al. are true that their super scary agents were able to escape a sandbox and start hacking other servers (which I feel is at least 50% likely to just be marketing bullshit), how is an AI going to affect anything in the real world?

It's a great question. I've yet to see any research into how a humanity-destroying LLM defends itself against a curious toddler who pulls the power cord out of the wall.

Re: How I feel about AI

#60

Post by bigstrat2003 »

Crabber wrote: post #18

>a superintelligent AI will inevitably destroy humanity Can someone please explain to me how an LLM is going to "destroy humanity"? Even if the claims of ChatGPT, Claude et al. are true that their super scary agents were able to escape a sandbox and start hacking other servers (which I feel is at least 50% likely to just be marketing bullshit), how is an AI going to affect anything in the real world? Perhaps an agent…

> how is an AI going to affect anything in the real world?

Because people are stupid and will give it access. Look at the articles you see from time to time about "my agent deleted my emails" or "my agent deleted the production database" and so on. It is very obviously a terrible idea to let the LLM run arbitrary commands (because it is neither predictable nor does it have any understanding of what it is doing), but some people are so blinded by the hype that they don't stop a minute to think about what they are doing. Those sorts of people are very likely to let an actual AI loose on the world by hooking it up to physical infrastructure.

Post reply on HN