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My main problem with AI, is that all around me in this world I still see grinding poverty, war, starvation, suffering, diseases, deadly pollution, insanitary li

My main problem with AI, is that all around me in this world I still see grinding poverty, war, starvation, suffering, diseases, deadly pollution, insanitary living conditions, underfunded schools and healthcare. What AI has ‘solved’ so far: almost all the activities that humanity has found fun and life-fulfilling for hundreds, if not thousands, of years - creativity, art, writing, solving intellectual challenges. As we accelerate ever-faster into a future dystopia of overlords (the richest 100 people in the world increased their collective wealth by 9% in 2021) while the rest of us are ground ever further into the dirt, I assume that AI will continue to steal the fulfilling parts of our lives from us, and leave us with the suffering and slavery.

flumpcakes 4y ago
This is a very pessimistic viewpoint. I really don't have any evidence to the contrary though. That's worrying.
Schroedingersat 4y ago
Nah, they'll create a convincing enough boot licking machine and then release the murder drones.
jstx1 4y ago
Those problems are real but completely unrelated to AI so I don't get how they're relevant here. I don't understand the expectation that AI should solve a specific set of complex economic and political problems, or that humans should solve those problems before they do anything with AI, neither of these ideas makes sense.
- foxes 4y ago
  The tech is ahead of social development.
  - _theory_ 4y ago
    as usual
- moritonal 4y ago
  The argument was that so much energy has been put into solving problems that aren't actually hurting people. Our success in having the ability to generate sonnets in seconds will be seen in our future similar to the emperor commissioning golden statues whilst his people starved.
  - TapWaterBandit 4y ago
    I think you radically underestimate how much AI will revolutionise our economy. Sure, sonnets are frivolous but there are countless applications that won't be.
    - Scarblac 4y ago
      And those applications will let more work be done by fewer people, show people more effective ads, and make the rich richer in myriad other ways.
      - TapWaterBandit 4y ago
        So you think the future is: 1. Fewer people working so fewer incomes 2. More ads to sell products to the fewer people who have incomes 3. A few people only getting rich (and buying all the stuff in the ads I guess?) This makes no coherent sense. Ads as a business model only make sense if there is a mass consumer market to sell stuff too. But if there are less people working and earning, ads by definition cannot be as effective. No, we are going to see bigger changes and more radical changes than poorly thought-out dystopia scifi plots.
        spion 4y ago
        Could you offer an alternative vision?
        TapWaterBandit 4y ago
        I think there will be immense social dislocation as all white collar workers simultaneously get 100x more productive virtually overnight without a corresponding increase in work to do. At the same time more people will be able to build on their ideas than ever. A few things that seem obvious to me would be: - Private AI tutors that can go at a student's pace will revolutionise schooling (say goodbye to a teacher shortage anywhere) - Helpdesk work will vanish - Art will explode like nothing we've seen before. I'm already experimenting with writing stories in collaboration with AI and this is only the beginning. - Numerous improvements in a huge number of machines and data analysis in particular will likely get much better. - Due to widespread white collar work unemployment almost certain to be UBI's springing up all over the developed world. - Far more workers will end up back in physical jobs of various types. Environmental clean up, farm work, construction, etc. - Vastly more software will be built as the effective price of building will go way down. - Robots is another area I'm interested in seeing what happens. My understanding is that building robot hardware that is useful is much easier than the software. So if this allows for much more rapid software development we couod see an explosion on robotics too. I'm more certain of some of these than others but those are the ones off the top of my head. Out atm but you could also ask the Chatbot haha.
- spion 4y ago
  Why do you think it doesn't make sense? In the worst case inventing AI before solving economic and political problems could potentially cause a massive societal collapse, hunger and/or poverty. I think it makes perfect sense to get our act together before creating something that can be so potentially devastating, to reduce the likelihood of bad outcomes.
  - HotHotLava 4y ago
    You can apply the same logic to conclude that Mesopotamians shouldn't have invented the wheel while they still fought wars with their neighbours and had people living in reed houses.
    - spion 4y ago
      While it is true that the Mesopotamians faced many challenges at the time they invented the wheel, it is not an apt comparison to the development of advanced AI. The wheel was a simple technology that greatly improved the lives of the Mesopotamians, whereas AI has the potential to vastly surpass human intelligence and fundamentally alter society in ways that are difficult to predict. The development of AI requires careful consideration and planning, particularly in regards to potential negative outcomes. In contrast, the invention of the wheel was a relatively straightforward decision that did not carry the same level of risk.
  - deleted 4y ago
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trekkie1024 4y ago
I've been thinking along the same lines for a while, how is it that these models can do amazing things but we still can't keep up with eg. evolving COVID variants? All the while it seems more and more futile to aspire towards improving oneself creatively or learn a new field since AI could just "do it better (or will soon).
- phkahler 4y ago
  >> but we still can't keep up with eg. evolving COVID variants? I believe that's a political problem. See Corbevax for something with broader protection that's not restricted to spike proteins. Then figure out why we can't get it. AI can't solve that.
- _djo_ 4y ago
  Well put. Aside from tools to enable remote work, which was already a strength area, big tech was woefully inadequate at providing rapid innovation to solve a major pandemic. Indeed, all the major cash-flush companies doubled down on non medical, non quality of life improving technology.
delusional 4y ago
It's quite interesting how some of the richest people in the world are concerned about AI turning into skynet and subjugating humanity, all while they spearhead a system which already does the same to so many people.
- tharax 4y ago
  Probably because currently multiple rich people can subjugate humanity, while AI would allow the single richest person to subjugate everyone, even second place
- concordDance 4y ago
  People like Musk are more concerned with AI exterminating humanity.
- dunefox 4y ago
  The difference is that they profit from the one model, while the other subjugates them as well as the rest of humanity.
deleted 4y ago
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cttet 4y ago
Yep, the important question is how we should deal with it. Even if it is banned, somewhere people will be making it as well. People would like to hunt and gather, but people will start farming eventually
cornel_io 4y ago
The rich will get richer and the poor will get richer at a slightly slower pace, as always, but quality of life for all will increase. AI will probably vastly increase both rates of change, more for the rich than the poor, but things will be better in 20 years for the poor with AI than without it. They will just be even further behind the super rich than they were before, even if they're better off. Some people would prefer a more equal but worse-for-everyone world. I'm not one of them, but I understand that it's a POV, and I can even semi-understand some of the arguments (sim to Communist talking pts, there's a real effect where people care more about how they rate vs other people rather than their absolute level of wealth/comfort). I fully reject them, but to each their own.
- graphpapa 4y ago
  Since wealth is concentrated more and more into a minority, redistributing wealth is surely aligned with increasing the quality of life for a majority of people. Why do you say it would be worse for everyone?
deleted 4y ago
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kolinko 4y ago
(rewritten previous comment with a help from gpt-3, so it’s more understandable) I work in climate tech and I think GPT-3 will be very helpful for us in researching new projects to tackle. I tested it on a few subjects that we're working on and it provided really good feedback. It's not always correct, but neither are the humans we ask for feedback on projects. So that's one example of how GPT-3 can help with global issues. Another issue is access to education. GPT-3 can speak many languages and can be used by people to learn things. Of course, it's not always right, but the same can be said for human teachers. For instance, my girlfriend is learning about financial instruments and will be using GPT-3 to help her. She has regular training materials, but it's also helpful to talk about the subject with someone. Human teachers are great, but they're not always available and don't always respond quickly. So there you have it, two SDG goals, education and climate change, that GPT-3 can help with.
- weatherlite 4y ago
  What will be the point of learning anything if A.I will soon do everything better?
  - kolinko 4y ago
    To understand what AI expects of us, and perform what it wants properly. Of course.
  - teawrecks 4y ago
    So you don't learn anything that you're not the absolute best at? Impressive.
    - weatherlite 4y ago
      Some people learn things for pure pleasure (like learning Japanese or playing an instrument) but most things we learn are absolutely not for pure pleasure. Think school, college and all the stuff you learn for work. That's like 95% of the learning we do.
XCSme 4y ago
> almost all the activities that humanity has found fun It makes sense to use AI for those though. You don't really need AI to automate most of the tasks. Most of the work we do are basic tasks that can be easily automated with simple scripts or with some basic (but accurate) robotics.
DeWilde 4y ago
Maybe, but maybe not. So far advances like these have, historically, improved our life in terms of poverty, living conditions, schooling, and healthcare. 300 years ago, in Europe, most of the population lived as peasantry because somebody had to cultivate the farms. 2000 years ago in some place slaves made up 60% of the population. Thinking that with AI only one dimension of our lives will change seems highly improbable to me. The printing press took way jobs from the scribes, but the revolution that book printing brought is one of the reason most people have electricity and tap water in their homes now. So I'm more optimistic, I see AI being democratized and improving life overal in ways we can't imagine. There will be down-sides that we also can't imagine but there are a lot of down sides to how we live today.
- TapWaterBandit 4y ago
  There's also the reality that a lot of the economy is already pretty frivolous if the concern is misallocated resources away from poverty. AI development is a far worthier cause than say, luxury handbags, massive sports stadiums (how much did the Football world cup cost?), video games, etc etc. AI compared to many other things has a far more plausible path to helping solve those issues.
- shafyy 4y ago
  And 30,0000 years ago people lived as foragers, the world was much more equitable and people had more leisure time. Sure, it's true that humans on average are now better than 2000 years ago, but this doesn't mean it was always the case nor that this trend will continue. It's entire possible that the average human will be worse off in 100 years from now.
  - naveen99 4y ago
    How do you feel about ant colonies and queen and worker ants ?
  - DeWilde 4y ago
    Maybe hunter gatherers did live more equitable but their life quality has nowhere near what an average human has today with technology. Even in developing countries.
ptoo 4y ago
This comment is nonsensical, it genuinely feels like it was written by GPT-3
sailorganymede 4y ago
AI, just like code, is a tool to get things done. My take is that advancements will enable some incredible creativity that can help to solve problems like what you stated.
qudat 4y ago
I disagree with the pessimism. Wealth disparity, while on the surface feels discouraging, economics is not zero-sum. There’s too much focus on wealth differences when we should instead focus more on quality of life outcomes. They’ve been better than ever and the trend is improving over time. Further, humans will always value human labor, it’s an inherent bias. If a bot can automate something and do it better than us, then we will find something else it can’t do and then trade that thing. Further, technology and humans are intertwined, you cannot separate the two. There’s no stopping this train so we should learn to embrace it and find creative ways to use it to our benefit. At least that’s what puts me to sleep at night.
- baq 4y ago
  I see your point, but I still think the wealth disparity is a major issue that needs to be addressed. While it's true that economics is not zero-sum and that quality of life outcomes have improved over time, there are still many people who struggle to make ends meet. Moreover, while it's true that humans will always value human labor, automation is becoming increasingly sophisticated and is starting to replace jobs that were once considered safe from automation. This could lead to even more inequality and hardship for many people. Furthermore, while technology and humans are intertwined, that doesn't mean we should just accept the negative consequences of technological progress without trying to mitigate them. We need to find ways to use technology to benefit all people, not just the wealthy few. This will require careful planning and coordination, as well as a willingness to consider alternative approaches to economic growth and development. Ignoring the problem and just hoping for the best is not a viable solution.
  - prox 4y ago
    Every time wealth disparity comes to the forefront in society the powers that be stamp that out real quick. I feel a lot of the left-right confrontations are just so we are pre occupied amongst ourselves. Divide and conquer and all that.
    - baq 4y ago
      If you couldn’t tell, my post above was generated by the Assistant with a ‘get me a pessimistic rebuttal of the following comment’ prompt… it used arguments which I agree with, but when asked for an optimistic agreement it produces convincing rationales, too. The problem here is this technology very obviously pro-wealth concentration since I can’t see a way which in the limit doesn’t make everybody need it to stay competitive. (If you can’t tell it’s the real me, not the AI - the AI is so much better at plausible rants it isn’t even close)
visarga 4y ago
If all you see is the news then no wonder you think AI is automating just the creative parts. AI is everywhere. It does boring tasks reliably and in a consistent way, without getting tired. It is present in medicine, science, manufacturing, IT, education, transportation, military, and for personal use. AIs can read invoices, classify messages, unlock screen phones by face recognition, drive tractors and cars, fly drones, control the cooling system of a data center or the traffic lights in a city. The list is endless. It's not used just for the creative bits. It raises the quality of life for the whole society by improving everything.
zauberberg 4y ago
I do not agree that AI will necessarily lead to a future dystopia. While it's true that AI has the potential to disrupt many industries and potentially lead to job losses in some areas, it's also important to remember that AI can be used to improve people's lives in many ways. For example, AI can be used to help diagnose and treat diseases, improve crop yields and food security, and improve the efficiency of various industries. Additionally, AI can be used to help tackle some of the global challenges you mentioned, such as poverty, war, and disease. Furthermore, it's important to remember that the development and deployment of AI is not inevitable. It's up to us as a society to decide how we want to use this technology, and to ensure that its benefits are widely distributed. By working together, we can use AI to improve people's lives and create a better future for everyone.
- tryauuum 4y ago
  this is GPT3-provided reply, isn't it
  - nstart 4y ago
    Not the op but I believe you are right. That answer is very much the chat gpt answer structure. Makes me wonder if stylometry can be applied to the default chat gpt style to detect generated responses
    - TapWaterBandit 4y ago
      It could be but you can also ask for answers given "in the style of..." and it does a good job changing it up.
  - easterncalculus 4y ago
    I've seen more sentences that start with "Furthermore," in this thread than in any other thread I remember. It's certainly repetitive.
  - zauberberg 4y ago
    It is. Well spotted!
chegra 4y ago
Be the change that change you desire.
verisimi 4y ago
From an MBA perspective though, it sounds like it can 'solve' 90% of the coding problems, and the expense therein. That's progress, right?
- lucasyvas 4y ago
  We should be getting rid of MBAs though. Those that don't produce anything are more easily automated - that is the top commenter's point. These technologies are trained off of the fruits of the actual contributors, so the workers are being robbed. I haven't seen any componsation from AI learning off me. Have you?
  - verisimi 4y ago
    > I haven't seen any componsation from AI learning off me. Have you? No. AI to me is like basically like all technology. Lots of talk about how we will have a better life, be healthier, have more time to follow our passions, when the reality is more like we are more distracted, have superfluous human interactions, waste more of our (precious) time. Technology, for me, is a tool of control. We have given up privacy, independence, opened ourselves up to distanced and automated control and sold our the future for a paycheck and an entertaining slave tracking device.
herdcall 4y ago
What you say is somber but sadly hard to dismiss. AI is relatively new though (even deep learning didn't take off till 10 years back) and it's rapidly improving as it tackles low hanging fruit (relatively speaking), like writing stories and playing games. The hope is that as it matures you will see applications in addressing the big problems you mentioned.
pxtail 4y ago
> As we accelerate ever-faster into a future dystopia of overlords (the richest 100 people in the world increased their collective wealth by 9% in 2021) while the rest of us are ground ever further into the dirt, I assume that AI will continue to steal the fulfilling parts of our lives from us, and leave us with the suffering and slavery. In addition to that any developer/coder who wants to remain competitive (and still employed in not so distant future) needs to start to learn how to use this tool right now - and this means paying up to the big corps who built and own models, even further empowering them and allowing to build bigger and more sophisticated tools Sure, there can be some opensource attempts but: it will be used by corporations to advance further, cost of the required computing power may be forbidding
rbetts 4y ago
Did you shirk software when it came for everyone else's jobs? I don't expect anyone will shed a tear when better computing starts putting the software-manufacturing tradespeople out of work - just as it has done in every other industry.
photochemsyn 4y ago
It's really just a question of who controls the technology (echoes of Marxism and 'seize the means of production' I suppose). My favorite line when people bring up automation is to note that most corporate board members - and all the shareholders -could be replaced by AI bots with little or no effect on the corporation's daily business operations, and a significant savings (i.e. profits could be reinvested in R & D and production instead of distributed elsewhere).
darepublic 4y ago
I still can't get gpt3 to create all the games / ideas I have to my liking . So I suppose there's still a reason for me to get up and code in the morning. When it finally can magically generate all my game / app fantasies it will be depressing but at the same time I'll have some cool things to try
- risyachka 4y ago
  It improves exponentially. So give it like 5 years and you will be able to do all those things
gfiorav 4y ago
AI is just making it obvious what is repetitive. Humans find repetitive tasks soothing, but don't confuse them with art. Coding is like woodwork. Deciding what to code could be art (maybe). Also, this constant allusion to "the problems of the world" is rather vague and unconducive to a solution for them. If those problems bother you, work in those areas. Otherwise stop using the hunger of the world as a wildcard to discard the importance of everything you dislike or fear.
CuriouslyC 4y ago
AI has the potential to reshape the world for good by unlocking people's creativity, but if the models are so large and compute intensive that only the wealthy can afford to leverage them, it's going to be the ultimate dystopian enabler.
bcrosby95 4y ago
Poverty, war, and starvation are all political and/or cultural problems, not technical problems. To a large extent so is suffering, deadly pollution, insanitary living conditions, and underfunded schools and healthcare. So pretty much everyone is not working on these problems in a capacity that matters. If you want to be, you need to be in the realm of politics, not technology.
- nwienert 4y ago
  They are largely cultural and corruption problems. And the biggest parts of the corruption problem is inherent to this conversation - wealthy people have massive advantages at maintaining and increasing wealth whereas the poor have almost none. This sort of tech will accelerate that, and if not stopped, a modern French Revolution is waiting (or just dystopia).
  - baq 4y ago
    Dystopia is more likely, because why would a wealthy kleptocratic dictator need citizens… there’s no upside compared to AI and robots.
- pjmorris 4y ago
  > Poverty, war, and starvation are all political and/or cultural problems, not technical problems. I beg to differ. Currency, weaponry, and agriculture are all technologies.
  - zelphirkalt 4y ago
    The problem however is not that we do not have the technology to help others. The problem is its distribution on this planet. It almost does not matter what you invent, unless it reaches the places, where it is actually needed. And that is a political and cultural problem.
    - pjmorris 4y ago
      I don't disagree that there is a distribution problem. And I firmly adhere to Gerald Weinberg's advice on giving advice on technical problems: "No matter what it looks like, it's a people problem." [0] That said, my point is to not excuse technology. Currency and agriculture were both technical solutions to problems of poverty and starvation and I don't see a reason to exclude it from taking responsibility now. [0] 'Secrets of Consulting', Gerald Weinberg
teawrecks 4y ago
How sad it must be to never find fulfillment in doing anything anyone else has ever done before. I can't recommend this mindset at all.
mcbuilder 4y ago
I don't enjoy writing code any less just because Copilot can write boilerplate for me (in reality, I don't even use Copilot, but I wouldn't face existisitential dread if I did). I can understand Artists having this viewpoint (they're less technically inclined and dare I say more susceptible to flights of imagination). I just see it from the Gary Kasparov viewpoint (humans + AI is a really great combo). At the very least, doesn't the fact that an AI an generate a kick ass CSS style sheet in 5 seconds that would take you 20 minutes give you more time to think about the big problems of the world? What if AI can solve world hunger, but along the way we need to make Chatbots, so this Chatbot may be not useful now but it's an important milestone in something bigger? Sure it might be fulfilling to be the person to solve world hunger, but I'd rather an AI solved it instead hoping that a human also does it, but gets fulfilled along the way. Really your intellectual challenge is entirely selfish, no one really cares what intellectual challenge you solved besides the guy pairing with you.
nextlevelwizard 4y ago
I don’t get why “creative” people see AI created art or stories as some kind of death blow. Like I have seen many people lament how now that anyone can create art with Dall-e or Stable diffusion they won’t get paid, but many people using these AI would have never paid in the first place so in fact this will only increase the amount of art and art projects in the world. Sure the simplest projects will now be handled with AI, but you should see this as just another tool in your toolbox - just like people could learn how to use photoshop, but you still had your job so will you have it if you embrace the AI as assistant Same with stories. Now you can leave minor details to the AI. Need a minor character? Just generate one and fill in the stuff you need to fit him into your story. I am excited to use AI for my next DND campaign just for this kind of filler detail that doesn’t really matter but makes the world more lived in and rich
- anigbrowl 4y ago
  Just go to a thread about AI-generated software. What people are annoyed about is not that it kills creativity but that the painstaking acquisition of technical skill over many years has been abruptly devalued. It's really hard to make a living in the arts while you wait for the success fairy to pick you out somewhat at random and make you famous.
  - nextlevelwizard 4y ago
    I don’t see the issue. Unless the issue is that now they have more competition since there are easier tools to use, which is just stupid. It is like ancient lumberjack complaining how much easier it is to cut down trees with a chainsaw compare to just using axe and how that is killing lumberjacking industry. If you can’t compete after AI tools your business was built on lies
  - yunwal 4y ago
    Technical skill was already devalued. Modern art is about ideas, and many of the most expensive and renowned works of recent require almost no technical skill. At the very least, technical skill is rarely what distinguishes a great artist anymore.
AustinDev 4y ago
And this my friend is why the richest 100 people all advocate for a disarming and dumbing down of their respective populace. It's bleak.
yunwal 4y ago
I don’t necessarily disagree with your point, but there are lots of people using AI for big problems. Medical diagnosis is basically undergoing a complete transformation right now. The reason creative pursuits get tackled first is because they’re plentiful and pretty universal. The same person can develop an AI and admire a painting. This is not true of diagnosing disease.
tempera 4y ago
A major root of the problems you enumerate is constant money printing by Central Banks. It makes life more difficult each year by 3% (as was the wisdom on needed inflation), now each year 10% more difficult to get the same bread. No wonder we see the gloom, disease and poverty brought by that policy all around us.

flumpcakes 4y ago

This is a very pessimistic viewpoint. I really don't have any evidence to the contrary though. That's worrying.

Schroedingersat 4y ago

Nah, they'll create a convincing enough boot licking machine and then release the murder drones.

jstx1 4y ago

Those problems are real but completely unrelated to AI so I don't get how they're relevant here. I don't understand the expectation that AI should solve a specific set of complex economic and political problems, or that humans should solve those problems before they do anything with AI, neither of these ideas makes sense.

foxes 4y ago
The tech is ahead of social development.
- _theory_ 4y ago
  as usual
moritonal 4y ago
The argument was that so much energy has been put into solving problems that aren't actually hurting people. Our success in having the ability to generate sonnets in seconds will be seen in our future similar to the emperor commissioning golden statues whilst his people starved.
- TapWaterBandit 4y ago
  I think you radically underestimate how much AI will revolutionise our economy. Sure, sonnets are frivolous but there are countless applications that won't be.
  - Scarblac 4y ago
    And those applications will let more work be done by fewer people, show people more effective ads, and make the rich richer in myriad other ways.
    - TapWaterBandit 4y ago
      So you think the future is: 1. Fewer people working so fewer incomes 2. More ads to sell products to the fewer people who have incomes 3. A few people only getting rich (and buying all the stuff in the ads I guess?) This makes no coherent sense. Ads as a business model only make sense if there is a mass consumer market to sell stuff too. But if there are less people working and earning, ads by definition cannot be as effective. No, we are going to see bigger changes and more radical changes than poorly thought-out dystopia scifi plots.
      - spion 4y ago
        Could you offer an alternative vision?
        TapWaterBandit 4y ago
        I think there will be immense social dislocation as all white collar workers simultaneously get 100x more productive virtually overnight without a corresponding increase in work to do. At the same time more people will be able to build on their ideas than ever. A few things that seem obvious to me would be: - Private AI tutors that can go at a student's pace will revolutionise schooling (say goodbye to a teacher shortage anywhere) - Helpdesk work will vanish - Art will explode like nothing we've seen before. I'm already experimenting with writing stories in collaboration with AI and this is only the beginning. - Numerous improvements in a huge number of machines and data analysis in particular will likely get much better. - Due to widespread white collar work unemployment almost certain to be UBI's springing up all over the developed world. - Far more workers will end up back in physical jobs of various types. Environmental clean up, farm work, construction, etc. - Vastly more software will be built as the effective price of building will go way down. - Robots is another area I'm interested in seeing what happens. My understanding is that building robot hardware that is useful is much easier than the software. So if this allows for much more rapid software development we couod see an explosion on robotics too. I'm more certain of some of these than others but those are the ones off the top of my head. Out atm but you could also ask the Chatbot haha.
spion 4y ago
Why do you think it doesn't make sense? In the worst case inventing AI before solving economic and political problems could potentially cause a massive societal collapse, hunger and/or poverty. I think it makes perfect sense to get our act together before creating something that can be so potentially devastating, to reduce the likelihood of bad outcomes.
- HotHotLava 4y ago
  You can apply the same logic to conclude that Mesopotamians shouldn't have invented the wheel while they still fought wars with their neighbours and had people living in reed houses.
  - spion 4y ago
    While it is true that the Mesopotamians faced many challenges at the time they invented the wheel, it is not an apt comparison to the development of advanced AI. The wheel was a simple technology that greatly improved the lives of the Mesopotamians, whereas AI has the potential to vastly surpass human intelligence and fundamentally alter society in ways that are difficult to predict. The development of AI requires careful consideration and planning, particularly in regards to potential negative outcomes. In contrast, the invention of the wheel was a relatively straightforward decision that did not carry the same level of risk.
- deleted 4y ago
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trekkie1024 4y ago

I've been thinking along the same lines for a while, how is it that these models can do amazing things but we still can't keep up with eg. evolving COVID variants? All the while it seems more and more futile to aspire towards improving oneself creatively or learn a new field since AI could just "do it better (or will soon).

phkahler 4y ago
>> but we still can't keep up with eg. evolving COVID variants? I believe that's a political problem. See Corbevax for something with broader protection that's not restricted to spike proteins. Then figure out why we can't get it. AI can't solve that.
_djo_ 4y ago
Well put. Aside from tools to enable remote work, which was already a strength area, big tech was woefully inadequate at providing rapid innovation to solve a major pandemic. Indeed, all the major cash-flush companies doubled down on non medical, non quality of life improving technology.

delusional 4y ago

It's quite interesting how some of the richest people in the world are concerned about AI turning into skynet and subjugating humanity, all while they spearhead a system which already does the same to so many people.

tharax 4y ago
Probably because currently multiple rich people can subjugate humanity, while AI would allow the single richest person to subjugate everyone, even second place
concordDance 4y ago
People like Musk are more concerned with AI exterminating humanity.
dunefox 4y ago
The difference is that they profit from the one model, while the other subjugates them as well as the rest of humanity.

deleted 4y ago

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cttet 4y ago

Yep, the important question is how we should deal with it. Even if it is banned, somewhere people will be making it as well. People would like to hunt and gather, but people will start farming eventually

cornel_io 4y ago

The rich will get richer and the poor will get richer at a slightly slower pace, as always, but quality of life for all will increase. AI will probably vastly increase both rates of change, more for the rich than the poor, but things will be better in 20 years for the poor with AI than without it. They will just be even further behind the super rich than they were before, even if they're better off. Some people would prefer a more equal but worse-for-everyone world. I'm not one of them, but I understand that it's a POV, and I can even semi-understand some of the arguments (sim to Communist talking pts, there's a real effect where people care more about how they rate vs other people rather than their absolute level of wealth/comfort). I fully reject them, but to each their own.

graphpapa 4y ago
Since wealth is concentrated more and more into a minority, redistributing wealth is surely aligned with increasing the quality of life for a majority of people. Why do you say it would be worse for everyone?

deleted 4y ago

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kolinko 4y ago

(rewritten previous comment with a help from gpt-3, so it’s more understandable) I work in climate tech and I think GPT-3 will be very helpful for us in researching new projects to tackle. I tested it on a few subjects that we're working on and it provided really good feedback. It's not always correct, but neither are the humans we ask for feedback on projects. So that's one example of how GPT-3 can help with global issues. Another issue is access to education. GPT-3 can speak many languages and can be used by people to learn things. Of course, it's not always right, but the same can be said for human teachers. For instance, my girlfriend is learning about financial instruments and will be using GPT-3 to help her. She has regular training materials, but it's also helpful to talk about the subject with someone. Human teachers are great, but they're not always available and don't always respond quickly. So there you have it, two SDG goals, education and climate change, that GPT-3 can help with.

weatherlite 4y ago
What will be the point of learning anything if A.I will soon do everything better?
- kolinko 4y ago
  To understand what AI expects of us, and perform what it wants properly. Of course.
- teawrecks 4y ago
  So you don't learn anything that you're not the absolute best at? Impressive.
  - weatherlite 4y ago
    Some people learn things for pure pleasure (like learning Japanese or playing an instrument) but most things we learn are absolutely not for pure pleasure. Think school, college and all the stuff you learn for work. That's like 95% of the learning we do.

XCSme 4y ago

> almost all the activities that humanity has found fun It makes sense to use AI for those though. You don't really need AI to automate most of the tasks. Most of the work we do are basic tasks that can be easily automated with simple scripts or with some basic (but accurate) robotics.

DeWilde 4y ago

Maybe, but maybe not. So far advances like these have, historically, improved our life in terms of poverty, living conditions, schooling, and healthcare. 300 years ago, in Europe, most of the population lived as peasantry because somebody had to cultivate the farms. 2000 years ago in some place slaves made up 60% of the population. Thinking that with AI only one dimension of our lives will change seems highly improbable to me. The printing press took way jobs from the scribes, but the revolution that book printing brought is one of the reason most people have electricity and tap water in their homes now. So I'm more optimistic, I see AI being democratized and improving life overal in ways we can't imagine. There will be down-sides that we also can't imagine but there are a lot of down sides to how we live today.

TapWaterBandit 4y ago
There's also the reality that a lot of the economy is already pretty frivolous if the concern is misallocated resources away from poverty. AI development is a far worthier cause than say, luxury handbags, massive sports stadiums (how much did the Football world cup cost?), video games, etc etc. AI compared to many other things has a far more plausible path to helping solve those issues.
shafyy 4y ago
And 30,0000 years ago people lived as foragers, the world was much more equitable and people had more leisure time. Sure, it's true that humans on average are now better than 2000 years ago, but this doesn't mean it was always the case nor that this trend will continue. It's entire possible that the average human will be worse off in 100 years from now.
- naveen99 4y ago
  How do you feel about ant colonies and queen and worker ants ?
- DeWilde 4y ago
  Maybe hunter gatherers did live more equitable but their life quality has nowhere near what an average human has today with technology. Even in developing countries.

ptoo 4y ago

This comment is nonsensical, it genuinely feels like it was written by GPT-3

sailorganymede 4y ago

AI, just like code, is a tool to get things done. My take is that advancements will enable some incredible creativity that can help to solve problems like what you stated.

qudat 4y ago

I disagree with the pessimism. Wealth disparity, while on the surface feels discouraging, economics is not zero-sum. There’s too much focus on wealth differences when we should instead focus more on quality of life outcomes. They’ve been better than ever and the trend is improving over time. Further, humans will always value human labor, it’s an inherent bias. If a bot can automate something and do it better than us, then we will find something else it can’t do and then trade that thing. Further, technology and humans are intertwined, you cannot separate the two. There’s no stopping this train so we should learn to embrace it and find creative ways to use it to our benefit. At least that’s what puts me to sleep at night.

baq 4y ago
I see your point, but I still think the wealth disparity is a major issue that needs to be addressed. While it's true that economics is not zero-sum and that quality of life outcomes have improved over time, there are still many people who struggle to make ends meet. Moreover, while it's true that humans will always value human labor, automation is becoming increasingly sophisticated and is starting to replace jobs that were once considered safe from automation. This could lead to even more inequality and hardship for many people. Furthermore, while technology and humans are intertwined, that doesn't mean we should just accept the negative consequences of technological progress without trying to mitigate them. We need to find ways to use technology to benefit all people, not just the wealthy few. This will require careful planning and coordination, as well as a willingness to consider alternative approaches to economic growth and development. Ignoring the problem and just hoping for the best is not a viable solution.
- prox 4y ago
  Every time wealth disparity comes to the forefront in society the powers that be stamp that out real quick. I feel a lot of the left-right confrontations are just so we are pre occupied amongst ourselves. Divide and conquer and all that.
  - baq 4y ago
    If you couldn’t tell, my post above was generated by the Assistant with a ‘get me a pessimistic rebuttal of the following comment’ prompt… it used arguments which I agree with, but when asked for an optimistic agreement it produces convincing rationales, too. The problem here is this technology very obviously pro-wealth concentration since I can’t see a way which in the limit doesn’t make everybody need it to stay competitive. (If you can’t tell it’s the real me, not the AI - the AI is so much better at plausible rants it isn’t even close)

visarga 4y ago

If all you see is the news then no wonder you think AI is automating just the creative parts. AI is everywhere. It does boring tasks reliably and in a consistent way, without getting tired. It is present in medicine, science, manufacturing, IT, education, transportation, military, and for personal use. AIs can read invoices, classify messages, unlock screen phones by face recognition, drive tractors and cars, fly drones, control the cooling system of a data center or the traffic lights in a city. The list is endless. It's not used just for the creative bits. It raises the quality of life for the whole society by improving everything.

zauberberg 4y ago

I do not agree that AI will necessarily lead to a future dystopia. While it's true that AI has the potential to disrupt many industries and potentially lead to job losses in some areas, it's also important to remember that AI can be used to improve people's lives in many ways. For example, AI can be used to help diagnose and treat diseases, improve crop yields and food security, and improve the efficiency of various industries. Additionally, AI can be used to help tackle some of the global challenges you mentioned, such as poverty, war, and disease. Furthermore, it's important to remember that the development and deployment of AI is not inevitable. It's up to us as a society to decide how we want to use this technology, and to ensure that its benefits are widely distributed. By working together, we can use AI to improve people's lives and create a better future for everyone.

tryauuum 4y ago
this is GPT3-provided reply, isn't it
- nstart 4y ago
  Not the op but I believe you are right. That answer is very much the chat gpt answer structure. Makes me wonder if stylometry can be applied to the default chat gpt style to detect generated responses
  - TapWaterBandit 4y ago
    It could be but you can also ask for answers given "in the style of..." and it does a good job changing it up.
- easterncalculus 4y ago
  I've seen more sentences that start with "Furthermore," in this thread than in any other thread I remember. It's certainly repetitive.
- zauberberg 4y ago
  It is. Well spotted!

chegra 4y ago

Be the change that change you desire.

verisimi 4y ago

From an MBA perspective though, it sounds like it can 'solve' 90% of the coding problems, and the expense therein. That's progress, right?

lucasyvas 4y ago
We should be getting rid of MBAs though. Those that don't produce anything are more easily automated - that is the top commenter's point. These technologies are trained off of the fruits of the actual contributors, so the workers are being robbed. I haven't seen any componsation from AI learning off me. Have you?
- verisimi 4y ago
  > I haven't seen any componsation from AI learning off me. Have you? No. AI to me is like basically like all technology. Lots of talk about how we will have a better life, be healthier, have more time to follow our passions, when the reality is more like we are more distracted, have superfluous human interactions, waste more of our (precious) time. Technology, for me, is a tool of control. We have given up privacy, independence, opened ourselves up to distanced and automated control and sold our the future for a paycheck and an entertaining slave tracking device.

herdcall 4y ago

What you say is somber but sadly hard to dismiss. AI is relatively new though (even deep learning didn't take off till 10 years back) and it's rapidly improving as it tackles low hanging fruit (relatively speaking), like writing stories and playing games. The hope is that as it matures you will see applications in addressing the big problems you mentioned.

pxtail 4y ago

> As we accelerate ever-faster into a future dystopia of overlords (the richest 100 people in the world increased their collective wealth by 9% in 2021) while the rest of us are ground ever further into the dirt, I assume that AI will continue to steal the fulfilling parts of our lives from us, and leave us with the suffering and slavery. In addition to that any developer/coder who wants to remain competitive (and still employed in not so distant future) needs to start to learn how to use this tool right now - and this means paying up to the big corps who built and own models, even further empowering them and allowing to build bigger and more sophisticated tools Sure, there can be some opensource attempts but: it will be used by corporations to advance further, cost of the required computing power may be forbidding

rbetts 4y ago

Did you shirk software when it came for everyone else's jobs? I don't expect anyone will shed a tear when better computing starts putting the software-manufacturing tradespeople out of work - just as it has done in every other industry.

photochemsyn 4y ago

It's really just a question of who controls the technology (echoes of Marxism and 'seize the means of production' I suppose). My favorite line when people bring up automation is to note that most corporate board members - and all the shareholders -could be replaced by AI bots with little or no effect on the corporation's daily business operations, and a significant savings (i.e. profits could be reinvested in R & D and production instead of distributed elsewhere).

darepublic 4y ago

I still can't get gpt3 to create all the games / ideas I have to my liking . So I suppose there's still a reason for me to get up and code in the morning. When it finally can magically generate all my game / app fantasies it will be depressing but at the same time I'll have some cool things to try

risyachka 4y ago
It improves exponentially. So give it like 5 years and you will be able to do all those things

gfiorav 4y ago

AI is just making it obvious what is repetitive. Humans find repetitive tasks soothing, but don't confuse them with art. Coding is like woodwork. Deciding what to code could be art (maybe). Also, this constant allusion to "the problems of the world" is rather vague and unconducive to a solution for them. If those problems bother you, work in those areas. Otherwise stop using the hunger of the world as a wildcard to discard the importance of everything you dislike or fear.

CuriouslyC 4y ago

AI has the potential to reshape the world for good by unlocking people's creativity, but if the models are so large and compute intensive that only the wealthy can afford to leverage them, it's going to be the ultimate dystopian enabler.

bcrosby95 4y ago

Poverty, war, and starvation are all political and/or cultural problems, not technical problems. To a large extent so is suffering, deadly pollution, insanitary living conditions, and underfunded schools and healthcare. So pretty much everyone is not working on these problems in a capacity that matters. If you want to be, you need to be in the realm of politics, not technology.

nwienert 4y ago
They are largely cultural and corruption problems. And the biggest parts of the corruption problem is inherent to this conversation - wealthy people have massive advantages at maintaining and increasing wealth whereas the poor have almost none. This sort of tech will accelerate that, and if not stopped, a modern French Revolution is waiting (or just dystopia).
- baq 4y ago
  Dystopia is more likely, because why would a wealthy kleptocratic dictator need citizens… there’s no upside compared to AI and robots.
pjmorris 4y ago
> Poverty, war, and starvation are all political and/or cultural problems, not technical problems. I beg to differ. Currency, weaponry, and agriculture are all technologies.
- zelphirkalt 4y ago
  The problem however is not that we do not have the technology to help others. The problem is its distribution on this planet. It almost does not matter what you invent, unless it reaches the places, where it is actually needed. And that is a political and cultural problem.
  - pjmorris 4y ago
    I don't disagree that there is a distribution problem. And I firmly adhere to Gerald Weinberg's advice on giving advice on technical problems: "No matter what it looks like, it's a people problem." [0] That said, my point is to not excuse technology. Currency and agriculture were both technical solutions to problems of poverty and starvation and I don't see a reason to exclude it from taking responsibility now. [0] 'Secrets of Consulting', Gerald Weinberg

teawrecks 4y ago

How sad it must be to never find fulfillment in doing anything anyone else has ever done before. I can't recommend this mindset at all.

mcbuilder 4y ago

I don't enjoy writing code any less just because Copilot can write boilerplate for me (in reality, I don't even use Copilot, but I wouldn't face existisitential dread if I did). I can understand Artists having this viewpoint (they're less technically inclined and dare I say more susceptible to flights of imagination). I just see it from the Gary Kasparov viewpoint (humans + AI is a really great combo). At the very least, doesn't the fact that an AI an generate a kick ass CSS style sheet in 5 seconds that would take you 20 minutes give you more time to think about the big problems of the world? What if AI can solve world hunger, but along the way we need to make Chatbots, so this Chatbot may be not useful now but it's an important milestone in something bigger? Sure it might be fulfilling to be the person to solve world hunger, but I'd rather an AI solved it instead hoping that a human also does it, but gets fulfilled along the way. Really your intellectual challenge is entirely selfish, no one really cares what intellectual challenge you solved besides the guy pairing with you.

nextlevelwizard 4y ago

I don’t get why “creative” people see AI created art or stories as some kind of death blow. Like I have seen many people lament how now that anyone can create art with Dall-e or Stable diffusion they won’t get paid, but many people using these AI would have never paid in the first place so in fact this will only increase the amount of art and art projects in the world. Sure the simplest projects will now be handled with AI, but you should see this as just another tool in your toolbox - just like people could learn how to use photoshop, but you still had your job so will you have it if you embrace the AI as assistant Same with stories. Now you can leave minor details to the AI. Need a minor character? Just generate one and fill in the stuff you need to fit him into your story. I am excited to use AI for my next DND campaign just for this kind of filler detail that doesn’t really matter but makes the world more lived in and rich

anigbrowl 4y ago
Just go to a thread about AI-generated software. What people are annoyed about is not that it kills creativity but that the painstaking acquisition of technical skill over many years has been abruptly devalued. It's really hard to make a living in the arts while you wait for the success fairy to pick you out somewhat at random and make you famous.
- nextlevelwizard 4y ago
  I don’t see the issue. Unless the issue is that now they have more competition since there are easier tools to use, which is just stupid. It is like ancient lumberjack complaining how much easier it is to cut down trees with a chainsaw compare to just using axe and how that is killing lumberjacking industry. If you can’t compete after AI tools your business was built on lies
- yunwal 4y ago
  Technical skill was already devalued. Modern art is about ideas, and many of the most expensive and renowned works of recent require almost no technical skill. At the very least, technical skill is rarely what distinguishes a great artist anymore.

AustinDev 4y ago

And this my friend is why the richest 100 people all advocate for a disarming and dumbing down of their respective populace. It's bleak.

yunwal 4y ago

I don’t necessarily disagree with your point, but there are lots of people using AI for big problems. Medical diagnosis is basically undergoing a complete transformation right now. The reason creative pursuits get tackled first is because they’re plentiful and pretty universal. The same person can develop an AI and admire a painting. This is not true of diagnosing disease.

tempera 4y ago

A major root of the problems you enumerate is constant money printing by Central Banks. It makes life more difficult each year by 3% (as was the wisdom on needed inflation), now each year 10% more difficult to get the same bread. No wonder we see the gloom, disease and poverty brought by that policy all around us.