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The Myth of AI – Jaron Lanier

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Re: The Myth of AI – Jaron Lanier

#61

Post by pron »

apsec112 wrote: post #21

This article seems very confused. Most importantly, it doesn't distinguish between what AI can do right now , and what the theoretical limit of AI is, in 50 or 100 or 500 years. Everyone agrees that AI today, and in the near future, doesn't even vaguely resemble a "person". That doesn't imply that much more powerful, "person-like" AI will forever be impossible. Airplanes weren't a practical means of travel in 1910, b…

> Airplanes weren't a practical means of travel in 1910, but by 1960 it was a different story, and some people in 1910 had already realized that plane travel was coming.

Indeed, arguing about the potential threats of air-travel in 1910 (let alone in 1810) would have been silly. The point isn't whether or not AI is possible (or could pose a serious threat), but whether or not discussing it as a threat given our current, near-zero, understanding of it is productive. Jaron Lanier argues that not only is it not productive, it distracts from more pressing challenges related to machine learning.

> I am an atheist, and think most religious beliefs are irrational. However, that doesn't mean that every belief that "looks like" religion (in some vague, poorly-defined way) is irrational.

You think now that religion is irrational, but when most religions were established there was little reason to believe they were. As to the "vague, poorly-defined way" all I can say is that religion has many definitions[1].

The famous anthropologist, Clifford Geertz defined it as a "system of symbols which acts to establish powerful, pervasive, and long-lasting moods and motivations in men by formulating conceptions of a general order of existence and clothing these conceptions with such an aura of factuality that the moods and motivations seem uniquely realistic."

Another famous anthropologist said (again, quoting from Wikipedia) that narrowing the definition to mean the belief in a supreme deity or judgment after death or idolatry and so on, would exclude many peoples from the category of religious, and thus "has the fault of identifying religion rather with particular developments than with the deeper motive which underlies them".

It is therefore common practice among social researchers to define religion based more on its motivation rather than specific content. If you believe in a super-human being and an afterlife and not for scientific reasons (and currently AI is not science, let alone dangerous AI), that may certainly be a good candidate for a religious or quasi-religious belief.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religion

Re: The Myth of AI – Jaron Lanier

#62

Post by gearhart »

IanDrake wrote: post #41
tsunamifury wrote: post #18

I think Jaron knows what many engineers who have worked on AI know: That the external promise of AI is far more inflated than the capability of the actual technology. It's simply that when the current technology gets just complicated enough for the above-average person to no longer understand, everyone starts assigning magical properties and expectations to it. This results in short term over-valuations, which inevit…

The real question for me is: What is motivating otherwise very intelligent people to promote the idea that AI will take all our jobs and/or enslave us? Possible answers: 1) To prop up their investments in AI to get higher valuation. 2) To reach a political goal, such as basic income, which is often justified as necessary in a world where computers and robots take over the work force. 3) ?

Whilst the "enslave us" thing is a bit alarmist, regarding it taking our jobs there's a certain analogy here with mechanisation.

You pointed out (below) that historically people have often been terrified that machines would take all of our jobs, and that terror has turned out to be unfounded. But they weren't wrong, they were just wrong in thinking it would be a bad thing.

Over the last 150 years, the proportion of Americans employed in agriculture has dropped from ~70% to ~2% [1]. They've literally been replaced by machines.

A large proportion of those people are now doing menial intellectual jobs that likely will be replaced by "AI". A complete shift in the nature of the work we do isn't unprecedented, and it shouldn't be considered impossible, but it shouldn't be considered disastrous either.

edit: [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agriculture_in_the_United_Stat...

Re: The Myth of AI – Jaron Lanier

#63

Post by Houshalter »

stepvhen wrote: post #57
Houshalter wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's far more of a threat than any of those things. Nuclear war isn't inevitable, and wouldn't destroy the entire world, just the countries at war. Even a ridiculous world wide nuclear war would leave tons of survivors. Volcanoes and meteorites are so unlikely they aren't even worth mentioning. Superbugs would have to be intentionally engineered by a malicious group with a lot of resources, and so are very un…

>And it's very likely to kill us all. This is absolutely absurd. Could you elaborate on that instead of just pointing to a book?

The tl;dr is that we will eventually have AIs which are smarter than humans. Much smarter than humans, to the point that we are to them what chimpanzees are to us. They would have godlike powers and abilities. And this could happen very rapidly, as the first smart AIs design even better AIs and better computers, which then design even better AIs, and so on.

The second point is that they would have no reason to keep us around. They would do whatever we programmed them to do, to the point of absurdity. An AI programmed to collect as many paperclips as possible, would convert the mass of the solar system into paperclips. An AI programmed to solve the Riemann hypothesis would build the biggest computer possible to do more calculations. An AI programmed to value self preservation would try to destroy anything that was even a tiny percent chance of being a threat to it. It would try to preserve as much energy and mass as possible to last through the heat death of the universe. Etc.

The only AIs which actually do things we want them to do would have to be explicitly programmed to want to do that. And we have no idea how to do that. We can't just hope that arbitrary AIs will happen to value humans instead of something else. We need to figure out how to control them, which requires solving something called "the control problem".

Re: The Myth of AI – Jaron Lanier

#64

Post by senekerim »

IanDrake wrote: post #54
tim333 wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

3) Because it's a real possibility. What makes you think the otherwise very intelligent people are wrong? Maybe we should look to the stupid and to philosophers who don't understand computers for answers?

>What makes you think the otherwise very intelligent people are wrong? Mostly history. Specifically the history of such predictions made by smart people of their own time that never came to pass. I assure you, this has all been predicted before. AI taking over the earth is always a decade away. There are people who wear tin-foil hats and there are those that sell tin-foil hats. The former think they're saving the wor…

This is one of those cases where you can't really extrapolate from history. At least linearly extrapolate.

Re: The Myth of AI – Jaron Lanier

#65

Post by TeMPOraL »

gearhart wrote: post #62
IanDrake wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The real question for me is: What is motivating otherwise very intelligent people to promote the idea that AI will take all our jobs and/or enslave us? Possible answers: 1) To prop up their investments in AI to get higher valuation. 2) To reach a political goal, such as basic income, which is often justified as necessary in a world where computers and robots take over the work force. 3) ?

Whilst the "enslave us" thing is a bit alarmist, regarding it taking our jobs there's a certain analogy here with mechanisation. You pointed out (below) that historically people have often been terrified that machines would take all of our jobs, and that terror has turned out to be unfounded. But they weren't wrong, they were just wrong in thinking it would be a bad thing. Over the last 150 years, the proportion of A…

The difference is that this time we're running out of work we could give to those who will get displaced by machines. Yes, we can keep inventing bullshit jobs, but we've already reached the point when people are starting to ask, if working for the sake of working makes any sense.

Re: The Myth of AI – Jaron Lanier

#66

Post by TeMPOraL »

IanDrake wrote: post #54
tim333 wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

3) Because it's a real possibility. What makes you think the otherwise very intelligent people are wrong? Maybe we should look to the stupid and to philosophers who don't understand computers for answers?

>What makes you think the otherwise very intelligent people are wrong? Mostly history. Specifically the history of such predictions made by smart people of their own time that never came to pass. I assure you, this has all been predicted before. AI taking over the earth is always a decade away. There are people who wear tin-foil hats and there are those that sell tin-foil hats. The former think they're saving the wor…

There are predictions and there are predictions. There will always be those predicting that strong AI is a decade away, right until the point when the last group is actually right about it.

But there's a different kind of "prediction", which I think is the type those smart people subscribe to - that we are on the path to an AI, that there's nothing that would make it impossible to achieve as the technology progresses (a reminder: we have a working example that intelligence can be built - our brains). Of course there are a lot of obstacles on the way. Personally, the most probable is that our civilization ends before we reach the necessary level - because of war, or all the economic and political shenanigans we see every day.

Re: The Myth of AI – Jaron Lanier

#67

Post by IanDrake »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #65
gearhart wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Whilst the "enslave us" thing is a bit alarmist, regarding it taking our jobs there's a certain analogy here with mechanisation. You pointed out (below) that historically people have often been terrified that machines would take all of our jobs, and that terror has turned out to be unfounded. But they weren't wrong, they were just wrong in thinking it would be a bad thing. Over the last 150 years, the proportion of A…

The difference is that this time we're running out of work we could give to those who will get displaced by machines. Yes, we can keep inventing bullshit jobs, but we've already reached the point when people are starting to ask, if working for the sake of working makes any sense.

>Yes, we can keep inventing bullshit jobs

What is an example of a non-government bullshit job?

Re: The Myth of AI – Jaron Lanier

#68

Post by nkrisc »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #65
gearhart wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Whilst the "enslave us" thing is a bit alarmist, regarding it taking our jobs there's a certain analogy here with mechanisation. You pointed out (below) that historically people have often been terrified that machines would take all of our jobs, and that terror has turned out to be unfounded. But they weren't wrong, they were just wrong in thinking it would be a bad thing. Over the last 150 years, the proportion of A…

The difference is that this time we're running out of work we could give to those who will get displaced by machines. Yes, we can keep inventing bullshit jobs, but we've already reached the point when people are starting to ask, if working for the sake of working makes any sense.

At that point perhaps our society will have to recognize that we've reached the point where we simply don't need the entire population working. There's nothing inherently wrong with a fraction of the population working to support the rest of it, assuming everyone's on board. It might not be a easy change, but I imagine something like that will happen eventually.

Re: The Myth of AI – Jaron Lanier

#69

Post by TeMPOraL »

svanderbleek wrote: post #51
IanDrake wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The real question for me is: What is motivating otherwise very intelligent people to promote the idea that AI will take all our jobs and/or enslave us? Possible answers: 1) To prop up their investments in AI to get higher valuation. 2) To reach a political goal, such as basic income, which is often justified as necessary in a world where computers and robots take over the work force. 3) ?

3) Press/Media It's low hanging fruit, the public eats it up. Also people can be very intelligent but not have done the research in the field they are commenting on. Elon Musk and Stephan Hawking aren't AI PhDs.

I'll grant you Elon and Hawking, especially because the former is a "new guy", but otherwise intelligent people were talking about those issues for decades, and until very, very recently most people have either never heard of the issue, or thought those talking about it are loonies. Mass media is late to the party.

Re: The Myth of AI – Jaron Lanier

#70

Post by Avshalom »

apsec112 wrote: post #21

This article seems very confused. Most importantly, it doesn't distinguish between what AI can do right now , and what the theoretical limit of AI is, in 50 or 100 or 500 years. Everyone agrees that AI today, and in the near future, doesn't even vaguely resemble a "person". That doesn't imply that much more powerful, "person-like" AI will forever be impossible. Airplanes weren't a practical means of travel in 1910, b…

On the other hand look where airplanes are now. It turns out that even though it's theoretically possible to have supersonic human/cargo transport we gave up on it because it turned out not be economical.

Hell we were supposed to have suborbital launches, anywhere in the world 20 minutes.

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