Gradual Disempowerment: How Even Incremental AI Progress Poses Existential Risks
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Re: Gradual Disempowerment: How Even Incremental AI Progress Poses Existential Risks
#2or ... our minds and bodies will quite rapidly adapt!
Re: Gradual Disempowerment: How Even Incremental AI Progress Poses Existential Risks
#3or ... our minds and bodies will quite rapidly adapt!
Adapting to it normally involves a lot of death and misery.
Re: Gradual Disempowerment: How Even Incremental AI Progress Poses Existential Risks
#4or ... our minds and bodies will quite rapidly adapt!
we as humans evolve, yes.
BUT:
1. we evolve quickly in the grand scheme of the universe but slow when talking about human lives.
2. what would rapidly adapting to AI mean? if it’s become reliant on it for the most basic tasks in the way that people nowadays have become so reliant on calculators they barely even bother with doing math in their head, sure. If you mean adapting alongside AI where we in some way would also become way smarter as humans? Nonsense.
AI can be a great tool, nothing more though.
Re: Gradual Disempowerment: How Even Incremental AI Progress Poses Existential Risks
#5or ... our minds and bodies will quite rapidly adapt!
Which is being forced onto me by people who I truly believe want me dead or at least don’t care how many bodies they throw at building their cyberpunk dystopia.
Re: Gradual Disempowerment: How Even Incremental AI Progress Poses Existential Risks
#6Re: Gradual Disempowerment: How Even Incremental AI Progress Poses Existential Risks
#7I implore everyone to watch the movie ‘Money Monster’, not only because it’s a great movie but also because I think it has a minor plot point that basically predicts how AI will be used.
(small spoiler)
In Money Monster it turns out the hedge fund manager who is blaming their state of the art AI bot for malfunctioning and rapidly selling off certain stock, tanking it because of that, did so out of a machine code error. He can’t explain what the error was or how or why it happened cause ‘he didn’t program their trading bot, some guy in Asia did.’ But as it turns out he did do it in some way.
I feel like using AI as a way to abstract blame even more when something goes wrong will be a big thing, even when secretly it was not the AI (ML) or who trained the thing’s fault.
Re: Gradual Disempowerment: How Even Incremental AI Progress Poses Existential Risks
#8Maybe this is peak AI panic?
It seems wild that someone could unironically talk about tools “disempowering” their users. Like, I get it, C disempowers programmers by shielding them from assembly language, and Cuisinarts disempower chefs, and airplanes disempower travelers by not making them walk through each territory.
But… isn’t that a pretty tortured interpretation of tool use? Doesn’t it lead to “the Stone Age was a mistake”, and right back to Douglas Adams’ “Many were increasingly of the opinion that they'd all made a big mistake in coming down from the trees in the first place”
I get that AI can be scary, and hey, it might kill us all and that would be bad, but this particular framing is just embarrassing.
Re: Gradual Disempowerment: How Even Incremental AI Progress Poses Existential Risks
#9While this is a well written paper, I'm not sure it's really contextualizing realistic risks that may arise from AI.
It feels like a lot of "Existential AI Risk" types are divorced from the physical aspects of maintaining software - eg. your model needs hardware to compute, you need cell towers and fiber optic cables to transmit.
It feels like they always anthropomorphize AI as some sort of "God".
The "AI Powered States" aspect is definetly pure sci-fi. Technocratic states have been attempted, and econometrics literally the exact same mathematical models used in AI/ML (Shapely values are an Econometrics tool, Optimization Theory itself got it's start thanks to GosPlan and other attempts and modeling and forecasting economic activity, etc).
As we've seen with the Zizian cult, very smart people can fall into a fallacy trap of treating AI as some omnipotent being that needs to either be destroyed or catered to.
Re: Gradual Disempowerment: How Even Incremental AI Progress Poses Existential Risks
#10or ... our minds and bodies will quite rapidly adapt!
Which is being forced onto me by people who I truly believe want me dead or at least don’t care how many bodies they throw at building their cyberpunk dystopia.
This sounds like projection. Most people don’t think like that; the people who are (rightly or wrongly) advancing AI mostly don’t think of you at all, and almost universally believe they are helping humanity.
They could be wrong (I’m ambivalent), but assuming bad intent is almost always wrong.