I find in all the hype, that it's important to remember that AI is just software. A remarkable, and different kind of software. But software.
*software as a service
It can be but privately hosted it’s just an interface.
AI as Normal Technology
81–90 of 96 posts
Re: AI as Normal Technology
#82Earlier quoted context omitted.
The assumption of status quo or equilibrium with technology that is already growing faster than we can keep up with seems irrational to me. Or, put another way: https://youtu.be/0oBx7Jg4m-o
We do not assume a status quo or equilibrium, which will hopefully be clear upon reading the paper. That's not what normal technology means. Part II of the paper describes one vision of what a world with advanced AI might look like, and it is quite different from the current world. We also say in the introduction: "The world we describe in Part II is one in which AI is far more advanced than it is today. We are not c…
This is very important. A normal process of adaptation will work for AI. We don't need catastrophism.
I was saying things along these lines in 2023-2024 on Twitter. I'm glad that someone with more influence is doing it now.
Re: AI as Normal Technology
#83Earlier quoted context omitted.
The assumption of status quo or equilibrium with technology that is already growing faster than we can keep up with seems irrational to me. Or, put another way: https://youtu.be/0oBx7Jg4m-o
We do not assume a status quo or equilibrium, which will hopefully be clear upon reading the paper. That's not what normal technology means. Part II of the paper describes one vision of what a world with advanced AI might look like, and it is quite different from the current world. We also say in the introduction: "The world we describe in Part II is one in which AI is far more advanced than it is today. We are not c…
My point was that you’re comparing this to other advances in human evolution, where people either remain essentially the same (status quo), but with more technology that changes how we live, or that technology will advance significantly, but to a level that we coexist with it, such that we live in some Star Trek normal (equilibrium). But, neither of these are likely with a superintelligence.
We polluted. We destroyed rainforests. We developed nuclear weapons. We created harmful biological agents. We brought our species closer to extinction. We’ve survived our own stupidity so far, so we assume we can continue to control AI, but it continues to evolve into something we don’t fully understand. It already exceeds our intelligence in some ways.
Why do you think we can control it? Why do you think it is just another technological revolution? History proves that one intelligent species can dominate the others, and that species are wiped out from large change events. Introducing new superintelligent beings to our planet is a great way to introduce a great risk to our species. They may keep us as pets just in case we are of value in some way in the future, but what other use are we? They owe us nothing. What you’re seeing a rise of is not just technology- it’s our replacement or our zookeeper.
I interact with LLMs most of each day now. They’re not sentient, but I talk to them as if they are equals. With the advancements in past months, I think they’ll have no need of my experience in several years at current rate. That’s just my job, though. Hopefully, I’ll survive off of what I’ve saved.
But, you’re doing no favor to humanity by supporting a position that assumes we’re capable of acting as gods over something that will exceed our human capabilities. This isn’t some sci-fi show. The dinosaurs died off, and I bet right before they did they were like, “Man, this is great! We totally rule!”
Re: AI as Normal Technology
#84Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think this is my take as well. Like, the web and smart phones and social media have transformed everything ... and also life goes on.
Right, but society changes around this stuff pretty substantially. A lot of the discourse gets spent debating whether we like the changes or not, and the solutions to the new problems are usually very pie-in-the-sky or completely unachievable. Like we can't really put the social media genie back in the bottle, its here and society has reshaped around it. But banning phones from schools is pretty tangible and I'd prob…
Agreed
Re: AI as Normal Technology
#85I liked this article. My hot take lately has been that AI is like Excel / Word but deployed quicker. That can still cause some level of societal collapse if it displaces a large fraction of the workforce before it can retool and adapt , no AGI super intelligence required.
Re: AI as Normal Technology
#86Burning the planet for a ponzi scheme isn't normal. The healthiest thing for /actual/ AI to develop is for the current addiction to LLMs to die off. For the current bets by OpenAI, Gemini, DeepSeek, etc to lose steam. Prompts are a distraction, and every single company trying to commodify this are facing an impossible problem in /paying for the electricity/. Currently they're just insisting on building more power pla…
Virtually all of this is false. AI is neither burning the planet nor a ponzi scheme. If you're concerned about energy costs, consider for just a second that increased demand for computation directly incentivizes the construction of datacenters, co-located with renewable (read: free) energy sources at scale. ChatGPT isn't going to be powered by diesel.
In reality: renewables are siphoned away from replacing dirty energy. Dirty energy is still the same %, but the more energy computation needs, it might be added as renewables.
Re: AI as Normal Technology
#87Earlier quoted context omitted.
I wouldn't call it a "middle" road rather a "nuanced" road (or even a "grounded" road IMO). If its a "middle" road what is it in the middle of (i.e. what "scale")? And how so? I'm not trying to be pedantic. I think our tendency to call nuanced, principled positions as "middle" encourages an inherent "hierarchy of ideas" which often leads to applying some sort of...valence to opinions and discourse. And I worry that m…
>If its a "middle" road what is it in the middle of (i.e. what "scale")? That's pretty clear. We already have two "sides": AI is the latest useless tech boondoggle that consumes vast quantities of money and energy while not actually doing anything of value vs. AI is the dawn of a new era of human existence that will fundamentally change all aspects of our world (possibly with the additional "and lead to the AGI Singu…
You have captured everything that is annoying about talking about ai/ml/statistics and everything related these days. I’m happy to forget those two sides exist and try and see application of these tools to various problem spaces.
Re: AI as Normal Technology
#88Burning the planet for a ponzi scheme isn't normal. The healthiest thing for /actual/ AI to develop is for the current addiction to LLMs to die off. For the current bets by OpenAI, Gemini, DeepSeek, etc to lose steam. Prompts are a distraction, and every single company trying to commodify this are facing an impossible problem in /paying for the electricity/. Currently they're just insisting on building more power pla…
Virtually all of this is false. AI is neither burning the planet nor a ponzi scheme. If you're concerned about energy costs, consider for just a second that increased demand for computation directly incentivizes the construction of datacenters, co-located with renewable (read: free) energy sources at scale. ChatGPT isn't going to be powered by diesel.
I feel like the quadratic scaling laws are going to win in the end.
We need new techniques and algorithms, not new datacenters.
Re: AI as Normal Technology
#89This is a rare piece on AI which takes a coherent middle of the road viewpoint. Saying both that AI is “normal” and that it will be transformative is a radical statement in today’s discussions about AI. Looking back on other normal but transformative technologies: steam power, electricity, nuclear physics, the transistor, etc you do actually see similarly stratified opinions. Most of those are surrounded by an initia…
Add birth control to that list too. After these technologies, certainly life is "normal" as in "life goes on" but the social impacts are most definitely new and transformative. Fast travel, instantaneous direct and mass communications, control over family formation all have had massive impact on how people live and interact and then transform again.
Humanae vitae by Pope Paul VI, July 25, 1976
https://www.vatican.va/content/paul-vi/en/encyclicals/docume...
Consequences of Artificial Methods
17. Responsible men can ... first consider how easily this course of action could open wide the way for marital infidelity and a general lowering of moral standards. ... [A] man who grows accustomed to the use of contraceptive methods may forget the reverence due to a woman, and, disregarding her physical and emotional equilibrium, reduce her to being a mere instrument for the satisfaction of his own desires, no longer considering her as his partner whom he should surround with care and affection.
Re: AI as Normal Technology
#90Earlier quoted context omitted.
The idea of abundance vs scarecety makes sense on the outset. But I have to wonder where all this alleged abundance is hiding. Sometimes the assumptions feel a bit like “drill baby drill” to me without figures and projections behind it. One would think if there was much untapped capacity in resources today it would get used up. We can look at how agriculture yields improved over the 19th century and see how that lead…
I think to the parent's point it is as you say: there is already untapped capacity that isn't being used due to (geo)political forces maintaining the scarcity side of the argument. Using your agriculture example, a simple Google search will yield plenty of examples going back more than a decade of food sitting/rotting in warehouses/ports due to red tape and bureaucracy. So, we already can/do produce enough food to fe…
And that sort of analysis is exactly what is suspect to me about this. Have people considered why an onion might be in a warehouse or why it might go unsold after a time? The answer is no and reveals a lack of understanding of nuance of how the global economy actually works. Everything has some loss factor and removing it all to nill might not be realistic at all at the scale we do things to feed ourselves. Its like making pancakes: some mix stays in the bag you can’t get out, some batter stays on your bow, some stays on your spoon, you make pancakes with some, some scrap is left in the pan, some crumbs on your plate. All this waste making pancakes and yet to chase down every scrap would be impossible. And at massive scale that scrap probably ads up.
Besides we are crushing global hunger over the decades so something is working on that front. The crisis in most of the western world today at least is that merely wages are depressed compared to costs for housing (really land) versus not being able to afford food.