AI doomism is quickly becoming indistinguishable from an apocalyptic religion • Hacker News Board

Re: AI doomism is quickly becoming indistinguishable from an apocalyptic religion

#61

Post by [deleted] » Sat, Apr 01, 2023, 6:06 PM UTC

lumenwrites wrote: post #20

PaulHoule wrote: post #6

There is "A.I. doomism" in general and there is also a specific cult-like group at the lesswrong website that really is an apocalyptic religion. It is astonishing how anything that deviates from its dogma in any way has to have "trigger warnings" and the senseless comments that users write on anything that suggests there could be intrinsic limits on intelligence. There ideology is such that a higher intelligence is g…

This is an inaccurate and ignorant comment that does not engage with the arguments people on LessWrong are making. If you have something smart to say about why these people are wrong in their beliefs, please do. Name calling a group of people a "cult" or "apocalyptic religion" is not an argument that contributes anything interesting to the conversation. If anyone is actually curious about what these people are saying…

[deleted]

Re: AI doomism is quickly becoming indistinguishable from an apocalyptic religion

#62

Post by nwerla » Sat, Apr 01, 2023, 6:07 PM UTC

The AI does not have to be omnipotent. People are worried about:

1) Job losses, which is a real concern, except for LeCun, who is safe or rich enough.

2) Some fools connecting a war game AI to real hardware, which is quite possible.

Other than that, I don't see "doomism" at all. I see outrage at the IP theft that exploits altruistic humans who posted their works on the Internet.

Re: AI doomism is quickly becoming indistinguishable from an apocalyptic religion

#63

Post by inconfident2021 » Sat, Apr 01, 2023, 6:08 PM UTC

I can’t comment or argue with prominent scientists such as LeCunn. But I surely can give perspective as SWE about to enter the industry.

1. We live in an uncertain time. Before most of the people, at least with a bit of research could have predicted the trajectory of technological innovation. Being born in era of tech, it was very easy to adopt to it. From PC to now, I have embraced every technological progress. Yet, nothing sent chills like this one.

2. I do not worry about my job. What I worry is most of the world is about getting shit done and this tech helps you get your shit done (for now). If we are at the upper tail of some sigmoid, there is nothing to fear. If we are at slope, oh boy, I cannot fathom the economic domino this tech is about to bring out. People are not rational. We are mostly governed by emotion. If you think, every single joe is rational and has capacity to judge, nobody would have voted from Trump to be president or riot the Capitol.

3. Currently it can do 60% of the work. If it evolves, it will do 80% of the work. If you factor human population and the amount of inefficiency in current economy, this will create a boom of productive workers with bust of average worker. And the world is not just for elites. Average people need their livelihood too. Now think about the magnitude of displacement.

4. I have no issue with innovation and breakthrough. AI won’t kill us, because we will kill each other before that. This tech is exposing entire middle class job (check out the job being exposed. There is a paper for that from openAI titled: gpts are gpts) And there are lot if people in that bracket. For once, think about us too.

So, these religious people do not exclusively worry about immediate effects of the tech. But within their doom, hides an issue that needs to be heard.

That’s my two cents.

Re: AI doomism is quickly becoming indistinguishable from an apocalyptic religion

#64

Post by GistNoesis » Sat, Apr 01, 2023, 6:08 PM UTC

While you were exploring the computational universe,

A wild Shoggoth suddenly appear,

Do you : - [Wisdom not high enough]

         - [Intelligence not high enough]

         - [Not enough gold]

         - Try to make it your friend and welcome it in your home

         - Try to make it your slave

         - Try to send it back to where he was

         - Continue this "choose your own adventure" with GPT 5
     
         - Roll 1d20 for extra Luck

Re: AI doomism is quickly becoming indistinguishable from an apocalyptic religion

#65

Post by 23B1 » Sat, Apr 01, 2023, 6:08 PM UTC

Something can go wrong (premise).

Therefore, something will go wrong (invalid conclusion).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Appeal_to_probability

Sure seems to me that the whole Lesswrong crowd has forgotten their founding principles around cognitive biases. Or maybe they're just having a bit of fun riding the hypecycle.

Re: AI doomism is quickly becoming indistinguishable from an apocalyptic religion

#66

Post by marginalia_nu » Sat, Apr 01, 2023, 6:09 PM UTC

elromulous wrote: post #25

The thing that makes the singularity so difficult (edit: to rein or reason about), compared with say development of the nuclear weapons, is that we know it will be a positive feedback system. So at some point, the point of no return will be passed, and we will have no idea that we passed it.

The AI singularity is also an entirely speculative scenario straight out of sci-fi. For some reason, many AI doomers are talking about it like it's not only something that is well understood, but also pretty much an inevitability.

The truth of the matter is we don't even know if it's possible. In general, unbounded exponential growth is extremely rare in nature. It's common in physics, but only as a result of looking at low order approximations.

I honestly think when the dust settles, the smartphone will still have had more impact on society than LLMs. If people knew in 2009 what was coming, they'd be freaking out like many people are today.

Re: AI doomism is quickly becoming indistinguishable from an apocalyptic religion

#67

Post by a_shovel » Sat, Apr 01, 2023, 6:09 PM UTC

joshuahedlund wrote: post #50

lumenwrites wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is an inaccurate and ignorant comment that does not engage with the arguments people on LessWrong are making. If you have something smart to say about why these people are wrong in their beliefs, please do. Name calling a group of people a "cult" or "apocalyptic religion" is not an argument that contributes anything interesting to the conversation. If anyone is actually curious about what these people are saying…

> My lower-bound model of "how a sufficiently powerful intelligence would kill everyone, if it didn't want to not do that" is that it gets access to the Internet, emails some DNA sequences to any of the many many online firms that will take a DNA sequence in the email and ship you back proteins, and bribes/persuades some human who has no idea they're dealing with an AGI to mix proteins in a beaker, which then form a…

(You quoted the same paragraph I did, so I'll just delete my comment and move my response to this quotation here.)

Exactly. Why am I supposed to take this seriously?

Believers in Superintelligenceism seem to assume that any problem in any field - physics, chemistry, biology, math, sociology, geometry, whatever - that hasn't already been proved impossible to be within the capabilities of an AGI, justified with a handwave and "oh, it's so super smart that it'll have it all figured out in an afternoon". This has more in common with religious concepts of omnipotent and omniscient gods than with anything any AI developers are working on today.

Re: AI doomism is quickly becoming indistinguishable from an apocalyptic religion

#68

Post by skrebbel » Sat, Apr 01, 2023, 6:09 PM UTC

charcoalhobo wrote: post #59

skrebbel wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m not Paul, but this here has some serious Jonestown overtones: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/j9Q8bRmwCgXRYAgcJ/miri-annou... . It makes Yudkowski seem (to me) like the leader of a suicide cult more than anything else. The argument “yeah but what if he’s right?” is pretty much Pascal’s Wager by now, given how way out there the AI Doomers have gotten. I choose not to worry about the God from the Bible (ie I don’t…

FYI this article was published on April 1 and is labelled as "April Fool's".

hhhahaahha woa I missed that completely

I'm pretty sure i'm not the only one who took it seriously. Thanks! I wonder if mr LeCun made the same mistake, it's just... almost believable! Good April fools joke I gotta admit.

EDIT: it's now 5 minutes later and I'm still laughing. I believed for months that Yudkowski had started a death cult.

Re: AI doomism is quickly becoming indistinguishable from an apocalyptic religion

#69

Post by cubefox » Sat, Apr 01, 2023, 6:10 PM UTC

stevenhuang wrote: post #24

CharlesW wrote: post #3

I mean, Yann is paid by Meta to propagate an "only positive vibes" stance. "AI doomism" itself is a ridiculous phrase meant to demonize anyone with legit concerns, of which there are many. I say this as someone who is very excited about recent developments and sees the potential upside as well as anyone, I think.

Yann is also known for constantly denigrating the abilities of LLMs and being comically wrong all the time, saying they can't do X only to be proven wrong immediately after. He's pretty much a meme at this point. He spent all his years at FB building ivory towers of mathematics attempting the analytical route for building AI systems only to be out done by the bitter lesson. He's perpetually salty about the current st…

He also likes to talk about "human level AI". That's like expecting that the invention of the airplane passes through a stage of "human level flight". That didn't happen. And probably also not for AI.

These systems will vastly outperform humans at more and more tasks, while being still sub-human at others. When the time comes that they surpass humans at all tasks, they will be vastly superhuman overall. And consequently much more dangerous than LeCun's "human level AI".

Re: AI doomism is quickly becoming indistinguishable from an apocalyptic religion

#70

Post by version_five » Sat, Apr 01, 2023, 6:11 PM UTC

The_Colonel wrote: post #11

> Complete with prophecies of imminent fire and brimstone caused by an omnipotent entity that doesn't actually exist. That seems like an absurd comparison given people like LeCun are actively and intentionally working towards creating this super-human entity. (Some) scientists were rightfully worried when creating a nuclear bomb as well. The fact that we managed to survive 70 years with its existence does not automat…

We really need some perspective here. One one side is a force capable of unleashing unfathomable amounts of energy, with all kinds of additional negative side effects, that has both been extensively demonstrated and has been used for mass destruction.

On the other is a chatbot, that could what, "spew misinformation", take our jobs, someday through a mechanism not known and not related to how it works become sentient and hurt us? Seriously, the comparison is as absurd as the fear generally. There are way scarier things going on, it's sad we can't give them 1% of the attention we give things we made up completely.