Earlier quoted context omitted.
Covid killed 1,193,165 people in the USA alone. Do you think the lockdowns failed to prevent that number from being significantly larger?
diagnostic error
What?
The first big AI disaster is yet to happen
91–100 of 154 posts
Re: The first big AI disaster is yet to happen
#92Earlier quoted context omitted.
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, asymptoti…
Use it for non coding busy work. At my job we rely fully on AI commit messages, and pr descriptions. We can also automatically generate GitHub issues based off the context of a helpdesk ticket. Less clerical busy work is a nice win
Those aren't clerical busywork, they're important technical writing.
Re: The first big AI disaster is yet to happen
#93I've just had a "fun" with DeepSeek R1 when I asked it about the Pope Leo XIV's views on AI, and it started spewing that he doesn't exist and Francis is still the pope. After sending it multiple URLs its conclusion was that I unearthed a major conspiracy of all news agencies reporting fake news, and that I "fractured the reality". Can't wait when AI goes off the rails similarly in more substantial contexts, gonna be fun...
Re: The first big AI disaster is yet to happen
#94Re: The first big AI disaster is yet to happen
#95Big AI disasters have most definitely already happened. We are just terrible at identifing them unless there's something exploding (literally) in our face. As an example, the recent "Make America Healthy Again" report released by the White House and the Health Secretary (RFK) was found to be AI generated, and was full of dubious science and made-up citations. How many people are going to directly die because of this?…
how many millions of people have died due to low-fat diet, food pyramid, margarine, dozens of other public nutrition policy debacles pushed by the FDA?
Re: The first big AI disaster is yet to happen
#96AI-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…
This is a rare combination of awful factors, but most of them are all too human.
Humans can sift through sigint (Cell phone calls, text messages, network access, etc.) to identify and locate targets. This is labour intensive and prone to error, but it can be done. In the past, such efforts were reserved only for high ranking members of Hamas and, if civilians were killed in the process, the IDF accepted that because of the potential rewards. Note that civilians dying is usually part of the plan in such operations. The "Where's daddy?" tool is designed specifically to identify when targets are in their homes with their families so that they can be bombed along with their families.
Lavender has allowed the IDF to perform the same kind of identification/location for anyone even peripherally involved with Hamas. The IDF has admitted to accepting casualty ratios of 20:1 (civilians to Hamas), and the real ratio is probably higher. If the AI fingers somebody, they're Hamas unless extraordinary evidence proves otherwise. Instead of scrutinizing what comes out of Lavendar, the IDF has shut journalists out of Gaza to reduce the odds of extraordinary evidence ever coming to public light.
The real problem here is not that Lavendar makes mistakes. Humans doing the same job would too. The problem is that the IDF has so completely dehumanized Palestinians that, without questioning their digital oracle, they are willing to drop bombs on large numbers of civilians if there's a chance, according to Lavender, one of them might be involved with Hamas in some way. That's not an AI disaster. That's a human disaster.
Re: The first big AI disaster is yet to happen
#97Big AI disasters have most definitely already happened. We are just terrible at identifing them unless there's something exploding (literally) in our face. As an example, the recent "Make America Healthy Again" report released by the White House and the Health Secretary (RFK) was found to be AI generated, and was full of dubious science and made-up citations. How many people are going to directly die because of this?…
When the AI is being used as a post hoc justification for a decision already made with ideology alone, we can hardly blame the chatbot for making it easier to cheat on government homework.
Re: The first big AI disaster is yet to happen
#98Earlier quoted context omitted.
> utility Also safety: Modern cooking usually occurs in a context of safety-measures developed over thousands of years of injuries, deaths, and burnt cities. Some are so pervasive and traditional that we barely notice, like "no fires unless you have a way to extinguish it in a hurry", or "if you wait too long to eat it is becomes dangerous again."
What about the 5 seconds rule?
Serious answer: A too-lenient myth, anything that makes physical contact transfers over bacteria/crud on a timescale which is practically instantaneous to humans.
Re: The first big AI disaster is yet to happen
#99I would expect an AI controlled bus makes an error somehow and drives off a cliff or stops on a train track.
Less gruesome, but some agent at a badly run hedge fund could create a Bear Stearns or worse.
Re: The first big AI disaster is yet to happen
#100If 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.
"if anybody can print things the peasants won't know what is and isn't legit" -clergy and nobles circa 1500
Let me tell you: you would not want to have been a German peasant in the 1500s.