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Only You Can Stop an AI Apocalypse

betterwithout.ai

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Re: Only You Can Stop an AI Apocalypse

#71

Post by Zetobal »

hathawsh wrote: post #40
Zetobal wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is everyone bringing examples that are totally explained by how the tokenizer works. There is no intelligence it's Markov chains on crack.

Intelligence isn't really the interesting part. People are excited because we now have tools that interact well with ordinary human expression.

I get it but comments like yours make it seem intelligent for normal people, distorting the whole discussion, at least slow down with humanizing a llm, the human quips in the answers come from your prompts not from the model. Just imagine how many normal people will gaslight themselves.

Re: Only You Can Stop an AI Apocalypse

#72

Post by tempodox »

jhbadger wrote: post #21
vages wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did you miss this paragraph from the same page? > I am not a Luddite. I have been wildly enthusiastic about science, technology, and intellectual and material progress since I was a kid. I have a PhD in artificial intelligence, and I find the current breakthroughs fascinating.

I think the word "most" is relevant. You can find people with doctorates in technical fields who believe in a Flat Earth or that the Earth was created in 4004 BC. They just aren't most of them.

“No true Scotsman…”

Re: Only You Can Stop an AI Apocalypse

#73

Post by nhod »

Actually, no, "only you" can't stop it. No one can.

There was a book in the 80's called The Hundredth Monkey that posited that if only enough people opposed nuclear technology, there would be a magical critical mass of people after which it would become apparent to everyone in the whole world that nuclear technology was, you know, really bad and stuff, and it would all just go away.

We know how that went.

Like nuclear technology, AI technology development is in part an arms race. One huge difference is that AI's technological underpinnings are already far more widely available and understood than any nuclear technology ever was. Its myriad forms — neural nets, deepfakes, predictive spell check, Adobe Photoshop object selection filters, spam filters, deep learning, machine learning, large language models, etc — already permeate much of technology and life. Where does one draw the line?

Like nuclear technology, if any entity voluntarily decides to "voluntarily shut AI down," the other governments/rogue states/corporations/NGO's/financial firms/universities/etc in the world will merrily continue doing so, leaving the voluntary Luddite in the same dust as every other voluntary Luddite. Or even worse, such an entity (say, the US or Chinese governments) would in all likelihood not actually stop developing AI themselves, just ban others from having it, which would create another insane governmental "war" and enforcement regime, like the War on Drugs or War on Terrorism. Again, we know how both of those went.

One of the reasons OpenAI as founded was specifically because of this. To paraphrase @sama, AGI should belong to everyone, not to any one corporation or government. https://www.yahoo.com/now/openai-founder-sam-altman-says-221...

At the end of the day, the author may be right. Being right is also irrelevant. AI development will continue to hurtle forward. The real question is what do we do with it?

Re: Only You Can Stop an AI Apocalypse

#74

Post by twblalock »

jacquesm wrote: post #69
twblalock wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My point is that both the author's writings and the AI he argues against are the kind of believable nonsense that only gets published for wide viewership because the internet makes it possible. This whole comment thread is happening because a person who is wrong and not really smart is writing about how AI is wrong and not really smart, and none of this would happen if the internet didn't empower cranks in general, a…

So your point is 'the internet allows for the cheap dissemination of information'?

My point is to highlight the irony of the author being guilty of what he rails against.

Re: Only You Can Stop an AI Apocalypse

#75

Post by halvo »

jimmytucson wrote: post #34

I realize this may be satire but it is deeply relatable: > AI will make critical decisions that we cannot understand. Am I the only one that experiences this? For example, you know the way, the road signs are telling you that you are on the right route, but your map application tells you to go another way, and you do it because you assume it is smarter or has more information than you. You are analyzing a chess posit…

These just sound like opportunities to learn. If you’re on average outperforming betting odds then of course use your system. For the chess and driving examples you can analyze those recommendations to figure out the rationale and incorporate a new strategy or a new route in your knowledge (or learning the system is unreliable and avoid it).

Re: Only You Can Stop an AI Apocalypse

#76

Post by mistermann »

jimmytucson wrote: post #57
Dalewyn wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Personally, I just replace "AI" in all such fearmongering statements with "man". For example: "Man will make critical decisions that we cannot understand."

Even with "man", it's a dismal view. If Magnus Carlsen sat next to me at a chess tournament and suggested moves, I would follow his suggestion in every critical position, and probably most others if I wanted to maximize my chances. At that point, it would cease to be me playing the tournament. This website argues that a super intelligent program would be to human affairs what right-hand Magnus is to my chess tourname…

Chess is extremely simple compared to human affairs and causality. We only perceive a small slice of what's going on around us (and much of that is incorrect) so it may seem reasonable that AI can figure it out. And even if it can, I wouldn't expect us to take it's good advice.

Re: Only You Can Stop an AI Apocalypse

#77

Post by thatfrenchguy »

nhod wrote: post #73

Actually, no, "only you" can't stop it. No one can. There was a book in the 80's called The Hundredth Monkey that posited that if only enough people opposed nuclear technology, there would be a magical critical mass of people after which it would become apparent to everyone in the whole world that nuclear technology was, you know, really bad and stuff, and it would all just go away. We know how that went. Like nuclea…

> There was a book in the 80's called The Hundredth Monkey that posited that if only enough people opposed nuclear technology, there would be a magical critical mass of people after which it would become apparent to everyone in the whole world that nuclear technology was, you know, really bad and stuff, and it would all just go away.

And now we also live in the dumbest version of this world: less civilian nuclear (that would help for climate change), same amount of nuclear weapons (that doesn't!)

Re: Only You Can Stop an AI Apocalypse

#78

Post by franciscop »

jimmytucson wrote: post #57
Dalewyn wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Personally, I just replace "AI" in all such fearmongering statements with "man". For example: "Man will make critical decisions that we cannot understand."

Even with "man", it's a dismal view. If Magnus Carlsen sat next to me at a chess tournament and suggested moves, I would follow his suggestion in every critical position, and probably most others if I wanted to maximize my chances. At that point, it would cease to be me playing the tournament. This website argues that a super intelligent program would be to human affairs what right-hand Magnus is to my chess tourname…

Well yes, we stopped long time ago from plowing the earth with our own arms to give pass to animals and then machines, and no one sees an issue there. If I want a picture of X, now I can ask MidJourney to generate it to me for virtually free, something that before I had to either pay an artist or be content without. I (and we) should be happy that robots are capable of doing more work for us so that we have more free time in life.

The only legit worry I see is that when factories took jobs 100-150 years ago, people fought to get much better work conditions, while now it seems most work improvements go to the company profit and little to your everyday person (though, still a lot ends up for your everyday person, as I said with the painting). I believe there might (or might not) have been some regression in the USA in the last 10-20 years in some areas, but in most of Europe quality of life is still climbing dramatically in most areas, and of course most of the world as a whole is way better off than 20 years ago.

Re: Only You Can Stop an AI Apocalypse

#79

Post by ShredKazoo »

lvxferre wrote: post #68

This sounds a lot like satire. This excerpt for example is blatantly self-contradictory: >We’ve found zero [scenarios] that lead to good outcomes. // Most AI researchers think good outcomes are more likely. This seems just blind faith, though. A majority surveyed also acknowledge that utter catastrophe is quite possible.1 So they found zero scenarios that lead to good outcomes, but most AI researchers think that good…

Previous surveys of this kind have suggested that most AI researchers aren't actually thinking about these questions very hard (e.g. rephrasing a question a bit can get you a very different answer). So it doesn't seem at all surprising to me that the majority view is out of sync with what a careful analysis shows.

>Anyway. The problem with AI-driven decisions is moral in nature, not technological. AI is a tool and should be seen as such, not as a moral agent that can be held responsible for its* own actions. Less "the AI did it", more "[Person] did it using an AI".

Essentially a "guns don't kill people, people kill people" argument.

I think this argument breaks down as weapons get more powerful, e.g. if I could walk down to my local car dealership and buy a cheap tank powerful enough to level a city, it seems good to focus more on "ease of tank purchase" than "culpability for tank drivers".

I think the argument also breaks down as AI gets more powerful.

Re: Only You Can Stop an AI Apocalypse

#80

Post by kmeisthax »

vages wrote: post #14
jhbadger wrote: post #11

"Most AI researchers think good outcomes are more likely. This seems just blind faith, though" Or, you know, they might actually know something about the subject? On a similar note, most physicists don't think particle colliders will cause mini black holes which will swallow the Earth, but the fear gets repeated by non-physicists.

Did you miss this paragraph from the same page? > I am not a Luddite. I have been wildly enthusiastic about science, technology, and intellectual and material progress since I was a kid. I have a PhD in artificial intelligence, and I find the current breakthroughs fascinating.

This is actually where I stopped reading and checked the comments, because it shows that the author skipped a few history lessons.

The Luddites were not intrinsically opposed to the advance of technology. In fact, the whole reason why they were smashing looms was as a protest tactic - not an end goal. England's upper class invented the myth of the technology-hating Luddite as a way to slander and libel what was basically a prototype of a modern labor union. Parliament would then crush them with laws that made machine breaking a hanging offense.

Transposing this to today would give you artists angry that their work was trained on by DALL-E, SD, or Midjourney[0]. In both cases the opposition is not to the technology itself, but to the reallocation of wealth away from labor and to whoever owns the machines. The latter today would be akin to, say, "businessman" hustlebros using ChatGPT and art generators to create labor-free fly-by-night operations[1]. Most art generators are also hosted platforms whose access is sold for profit, creating a second layer of ownership on top of the hustlebros.

Meanwhile the main argument here is more akin to the stereotypical technophobe: AI can't be trusted. Hell, there's a whole chapter (not yet written) arguing that we should just junk neural networks entirely. This isn't Luddism, this is the god damned Butlerian Jihad[2].

[0] If you want a bit of a stretch you probably could see some Luddite in, say, Richard Stallman

[1] I regularly get YouTube recommendations for people trying to tell me how much money I can make by just typing a few prompts into an art generator and posting the result on a print-on-demand site.

[2] In the sci-fi novel Dune, the Butlerian Jihad is an event in which all computers are outlawed and mercilessly destroyed.

Yes, this is why /r/Dune banned AI art.

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