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The first big AI disaster is yet to happen

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Re: The first big AI disaster is yet to happen

#61
Fantastic contemplation of the stakes and some grounded “what if” scenarios worth genuine consideration.

A former roommate mentioned to me “regulations are often written in blood” and with the current atmosphere, I wonder if and when that might happen. The US political system has its flaws. Firearms are a serious public health hazard and constructive mediation is consistently passed over. It’s a far more primitive technology comparatively speaking.

Very glad this type of discussion is able to be framed without hysterics or other easily dismissed rhetoric.

Re: The first big AI disaster is yet to happen

#62

AI-directed bombings of persons are already known to have occurred on a large scale, in Gaza. https://www.972mag.com/lavender-ai-israeli-army-gaza/ One source stated that human personnel often served only as a “rubber stamp” for the machine’s decisions, adding that, normally, they would personally devote only about “20 seconds” to each target before authorizing a bombing — just to make sure the Lavender-marked target…

But probably not LLM related, Israel intelligence have been building ML models for the military for a long time and probably they leverage some logic/symbolic AI in the mix.

Re: The first big AI disaster is yet to happen

#63

[flagged]

I honestly feel that LLMs have been a net negative for me rather than a positive, *especially* with software development. Most of the time I end up coaxing it through a series of prompts, only for there to be some bug in the code it generated for me that takes me longer to debug than if I had just read the relevant docs and examples myself.

I’m sure there’s utility now, and I’m sure it’ll (ever more slowly, asymptotically) improve, but at the moment it (and the Google that performs worse than that of 5 years ago) has been costing more time than the alternative web search, study, then write it myself. And don’t get me started on non coding technical subjects.

Re: The first big AI disaster is yet to happen

#64
post #52
post #48

If everyone no longer trusts any video or image they see (or has plausible deniability to dismiss it), that can lead to a terrible place without a "big disaster" ever taking place.

Wait what? You shouldn't trust anything you see online already. This has been true for 10+ years now.

I think I use appropriate skepticism, but only in the last 1-2 years do I need to seriously question whether an image or video I see is AI.

Re: The first big AI disaster is yet to happen

#65

AI-directed bombings of persons are already known to have occurred on a large scale, in Gaza. https://www.972mag.com/lavender-ai-israeli-army-gaza/ One source stated that human personnel often served only as a “rubber stamp” for the machine’s decisions, adding that, normally, they would personally devote only about “20 seconds” to each target before authorizing a bombing — just to make sure the Lavender-marked target…

[flagged]

Re: The first big AI disaster is yet to happen

#67
post #17

I feel like the first big disaster already happened. In the job market. Anyway, where there is public safety risk involved, I can't imagine a scenario where AI will directly cause a catastrophe. If anything, I feel overall safety will increase. However, I can't help but wonder what the over reliance would do to general population over the next few decades. Would people essentially become dumber and less skilled?

I don’t think AI is meaningfully taking any jobs. Just like return to office mandates, it is just more cover to do layoffs in less than prosperous economic conditions.

It's not the same as "AI replacing humans", but seems clear that the launch of ChatGPT led to dramatic cuts of NLP researchers. [1][2]

For instance, at HuggingFace:

> A few days after that, Thom Wolf, who was my manager at Hugging Face and also one of the co-founders, messages me, “Hey, can you get on a call with me ASAP?” He told me that they had fired people from the research team and that the rest would either be doing pre-training or post-training — which means that you are either building a foundation model or you’re taking a foundation model and making it an instruction-following model, similar to ChatGPT.

[1]: https://www.quantamagazine.org/when-chatgpt-broke-an-entire-... [2]: https://old.reddit.com/r/MachineLearning/comments/11rizyb/d_...

Re: The first big AI disaster is yet to happen

#68
post #17

I feel like the first big disaster already happened. In the job market. Anyway, where there is public safety risk involved, I can't imagine a scenario where AI will directly cause a catastrophe. If anything, I feel overall safety will increase. However, I can't help but wonder what the over reliance would do to general population over the next few decades. Would people essentially become dumber and less skilled?

I don’t think AI is meaningfully taking any jobs. Just like return to office mandates, it is just more cover to do layoffs in less than prosperous economic conditions.

There are other ways that AI can hurt the job market in major ways. One, already happening, is AI-generated resumes based on the listing itself, causing HR departments to waste a ton of time, potentially preventing real experienced candidates from even getting a callback.

Re: The first big AI disaster is yet to happen

#69
post #7

> Chatbot sites like character.ai and Chai AI have been linked to user suicides, for understandable reasons: if you allow users near-unlimited control over chatbots, over time you’ll eventually end up with some chatbots who get into an “encouraging the user to self-harm” state. If cooking hadn't been invented 2.5 million years ago and instead you tried to invent it today, I wonder how many thousands of articles would…

Considering that governments are trying to remove gas stoves from peoples homes for safety reasons yes, you would probably have a hard time introducing them from scratch today.

I've only heard suggestions (but nothing concrete) of regulating new stoves, don't believe anyone's proposed removing existing stoves. Where are you hearing this?

Re: The first big AI disaster is yet to happen

#70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t think AI is meaningfully taking any jobs. Just like return to office mandates, it is just more cover to do layoffs in less than prosperous economic conditions.

It's not the same as "AI replacing humans", but seems clear that the launch of ChatGPT led to dramatic cuts of NLP researchers. [1][2] For instance, at HuggingFace: > A few days after that, Thom Wolf, who was my manager at Hugging Face and also one of the co-founders, messages me, “Hey, can you get on a call with me ASAP?” He told me that they had fired people from the research team and that the rest would either be…

That giant shock to the NLP research community is more than two years old now. It would be interesting to hear from people affected by that today, I'd like to know what they ended up doing in response.
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