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Are we racing toward AI catastrophe?
- decremental 4y ago> She explores wide-ranging topics like climate change, artificial intelligence, vaccine development, and factory farms. Watch as the scope of the grift expands in realtime.
- badcppdev 4y agoShe's a journalist. If you have a problem with that then you probably need to study more history.
- coffeecheque 4y agoThat’s a rather cynical view of it, and I note you haven’t included the first bit of the sentence. > “is a senior writer at Future Perfect, Vox’s effective altruism-inspired section on the world’s biggest challenges” The point of the project/section is - in a very quick summary - to come at an issue presenting to an audience that cares about it and is looking for answers or ways to improve their lives. This is a piece of journalism - a good jumping off point. My point is that I come to HN for comments and discussions on topics and issues like AI, hoping to hear from real experts on things on the big technology issues, etc. I wish there was more of that - playing the ball - and less playing the writer.
- throw_pm23 4y agoYeah, including "effective altruism" in the quote actually makes it much worse.
- rhn_mk1 4y agoWhat is this comment meant to say? I can't parse that.
- apolitcalhuman 4y agoAn argument could be made that impacts of each of the things she coveres has overblown and used to fear monger people into reading articles about them that Vox sell ads over, the reveue from which her salary is paid. The commenter seems to be drawing our attention to that and suggesting AI may be a new bogey man of sorts.
- eggsmediumrare 4y agoAn argument could be made that they're not though
- apolitcalhuman 4y agoThey are controversial. They have a certain political slant too. Except AI but I could just not be seeing it.
- captainmuon 4y agoWe certainly are, but it is not going to look like Terminator. We risk wrecking our society, culture, and economy. Imagine even more power concentration in the hands of those with the required hardware to use AI. Imagine you can no longer trust any information, because the internet is being swamped by generated half-truths. An AI without conciousness, without goals, just a mastery of the language game and a poor world model. Really useful to make knowledge workers superfluous, and such that we will only see the damage long-term. And imagine all the polarisation and hysteria of social media, but x10 because the AI can close the feedback loop much faster. If this happens we can't blame the technology, it will be entirely self-inflicted.
- ajsnigrutin 4y ago> Imagine even more power concentration in the hands of those with the required hardware to use AI. Imagine you can no longer trust any information, because the internet is being swamped by generated half-truths. You already cannot trust anything, because it's being generated with humans with political agendas. > An AI without conciousness, without goals Better without goals than with goals that threaten the people. The only thing that will rise is the level of noise compared to usable data... and with seo-optimized articles, there has been a lot of noise already.
- kevviiinn 4y agoWe haven't been able to trust things on the internet for a long time "Who would go on the internet and tell lies??"
- jcutrell 4y agoMy humble prediction: The catastrophe will come primarily in the form of inequity. There will be some who understand and take advantage, and naturally some of those will leverage that power over others. The best version: we help knowledge workers understand how to use AI to make them more productive and useful. The likely picture: we save on margin costs, then the next wave of knowledge workers have AI-collaboration as a core / native competency. The left behind will be overshadowed by the success of the next wave, and we’ll call it a success as a society.
- eggsmediumrare 4y agoThis might sound weird, but I don't want to be more productive. Not unless I'm compensated for it and we all know how that goes. I don't understand the HN crowd who are excited about productivity gains... Unless you're a founder, all it means is you can make more money for someone else while simultaneously taking bread off your now-redundant co-worker's table.
- jcutrell 4y agoThe thing is, the market always adapts. Your “more productive” won’t actually feel that different. This tool is in that way just another abstraction. Every tech advance has the same wave. Eventually the “more money” actually isn’t necessarily true because the competition has met or beat your thing. Value keeps getting added to the market but the market also adapts to what is valuable relative to the rest of the market.
- k__ 4y agoIf the rate of people losing their jobs increases, I hope, we're racing towards universal basic income.
- bryanrasmussen 4y agoI've made this point before but if most of the people on HN were reduced to UBI they'd have to declare bankruptcy and lose most of their possessions.
- sebzim4500 4y agoWhy bankruptcy? Are people on HN in debt? Ofc they would have to change their lifestyle if they had a 20x decrease in salary though.
- eggsmediumrare 4y agoI suspect a good many of us have mortgages, yes
- kypro 4y agoGenuine question, if you're under 40 how are you not in debt? Every essential requires debt to buy. An education, a house, a car (some would argue anyway). > Ofc they would have to change their lifestyle if they had a 20x decrease in salary though. Are you honestly this indifferent about humans receiving a 20x decrease in their salary in pursuit of corporate productivity gains?
- _heimdall 4y agoThat really comes down to what you consider essential and how cheaply you can live early on to save cash. It really isn't as impossible as it sounds to go debt-free, especially with a high paying tech job many here likely have. The main blockers (a) cost of living in Silicon Valley and (b) our economy is designed to incentivise spending and investing, not saving. (a) is easier to solve with more companies supporting remote and more tech jobs in other, more affordable areas. (b) is largely a matter of ignoring investment best practices. That sounds crazy, but if you want to go debt free spend those 15 years foregoing investments that you likely will never cash in to pay for a house.
- RcouF1uZ4gsC 4y agoRemember, the invention of the movable type printing press was a catastrophe depending on the perspective. It brought down the existing European social and religious order which led, for example, to the Thirty Years War in which millions of people died. More recently, the ability to rapidly print books also led to the rise of Hitler and World War II. AI may lead to catastrophe, but I bet it will be a lot less catastrophic than the printing press.
- peoplefromibiza 4y ago> Remember, the invention of the movable type printing press was a catastrophe depending on the perspective no, it wasn't. > It brought down the existing European social and religious order which led, for example, to the Thirty Years War in which millions of people died No, it didn't. The thirty years war happened 200 years after Gutenberg The religious order wasn't brought down by the press BTW and it was alive and kicking in the 17th century.
- arp242 4y agoIt's pretty uncontroversial that the printing press was instrumental in the reformation and Martin Luther's ability to spread the word. It wasn't like Gutenburg invented the printing press and immediately everything became different: it was a slow-motion revolution which took many years (as well as further improvements to printing technology).
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- peoplefromibiza 4y agothe critiques is not about that, but to the fact that - it wasn't a catastrophe - it didn't bring down the Church, on the contrary, it strengthened its authority
- throwaway05050 4y agoThe Thirty Years War happened because the Catholics were using technologies such as the printing press to spread their propaganda further and in more quality, and the Hussites and Protestants had enough of it, so they tried to fight. And the Catholics have defeated them - a forced catholicization (and germanization) of the population of the Holy Roman Empire (especially the Austrian-controlled part) began. So it's the exact opposite - the printing press cemented the social and religious order and led to the destruction of the opposition. Only the First World War changed this, hundreds of years later, when the ethno-national tensions created within the Austro-Hungarian Empire because of the Thirty Years War finally became unbearable to the masses. Yeah sure, the Protestants used the printing press too and had a lot of success with it. But they lost.
- rhn_mk1 4y agoI'm still waiting for the mainstream media to acknowledge that creating a caste of robot slaves would be just as much a catastrophe as being subjugated.
- valine 4y agoSince we are talking about an imaginary technology here, why not imagine the robots don’t experience consciousness? Problem solved.
- rhn_mk1 4y agoWe're talking about possible technology. The possible might be imagined, but not all imaginary is possible. The problem is, we don't know which is possible and which is not.
- kitd 4y agoPredictions like this tend not to take into account societal or cultural responses. If AI-sourced information becomes devalued, media, both social and mainstream, might see appreciation among the public for human-sourced information, and regulation might follow making AI-sourced easily identifiable and targetable. It's akin to a free market correction.
- riter 4y agoi'm going to have to agree here. today's MSM pundit-oriented journalism has been a carry-over from legacy yellow journalism pioneered by Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer. yet we've somehow managed through institutions. it will centralize and decentralize as the dollars ebb and flow from NYT to Twitter to Substack and in the short-term we will converge into a fragmented information digest. in the long-term i predict we will leverage those same technologies + cryptography for sense-making in an adversarial information environment. i think the future will look more like balaji's ledger of record + yuval harari's defensive AI.
- dopidopHN 4y agoAh, the invisible hand, yes. It’s been so helpful so far.
- jongjong 4y agoI hope that the AI will trigger a shift in software development values. Most software today is over-complicated, and riddled with vulnerabilities. Over-engineered software is more likely to have vulnerabilities but companies have embraced 'security through obscurity through complexity' anyway because complexity makes vulnerabilities harder (for humans) to find. AI could automate that. I hope it will force a return to well-designed, minimalist software instead of the current 'security through obscurity spaghetti code' practices we have today. On the development front, it might also be a positive. Any noob developer can produce ugly spaghetti code which barely just works, and now AI can do it too! What AI cannot produce is simple, human-readable code which can anticipate changes in business requirements; this requires business domain knowledge and common sense.
- code51 4y agoIt is learning software development from us. There is no hope. AI will probably come up with a new Javascript framework at best.
- seeEllArr 4y ago[dead]
- flohofwoe 4y agoMy pessimist take: What will happen is that libraries and frameworks will only require more pointless boilerplate, because writing pointless boilerplate code is the one thing that AI is really good at, and why optimize for fewer lines-of-code when an AI can spew those out in a second? My optimist take: Absurdities like the above will lead to a brain drain of people who actually know what they're doing from Silicon Valley into more 'bullshit free areas' where they can do actually useful things.
- jongjong 4y agoThat's plausible. The optimistic view would be; maybe you could train AI on your own code and have a copyright over your 'coding style'? Then you could lease out bots who code in your style and earn passive income. I have a lot of open source projects to use as training data.
- vermilingua 4y agoI can see Blindsight taking the place of 1984 as the “this is so true” book of the decade. Articulate, eloquent, but unthinking and unfeeling machines with no interior experience are going to be puppetting our culture for years to come.
- gizmo 4y agoThe risks right now are roughly these: - AI poisons political discourse - AI produces massive wealth inequality - AI makes many white collar workers redundant These look totally manageable to me. And on the flipside we'll get AI assisted science breakthroughs, AI assisted learning, and much more. I fully expect to see wild AI advances in the coming years, especially once AIs will be able to learn effectively from their own generated outputs and will be able to use external tools effectively (like Mathematica). I get that it's scary to because society is going to change, but on the other hand, the paperclip scenario that some SV prophets have warned about seems increasingly unlikely.
- valine 4y agoWealth inequality is the biggest risk IMO. It might come down to whether or not we get a competitive open source LLM. Ironically, AI safety is being used as a cover for not open sourcing these models.
- gizmo 4y agoThe compute required will go through the roof for next generation AI models. This is an arms race and parties will spend billions in compute to get ahead of the pack. Open sourcing won't make a difference. Google's trillion dollar market cap is at stake here. Any amount of money will be spent to protect it.
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 4y ago- Companies fire much of their white collar workforce and rejoice at the savings. - 10 years later companies are horrified they've been uploading all of their secrets to a competitor.
- sliken 4y agoSay a capable AI is tasked with making money and given a source of income. Maybe it starts winning on the stock market. Maybe starts blackmailing mafia/organized crime/malware/cryptoware orgs for additional income. In hind sight, researchers realizes AIs were better at deception than they thought. The AI starts manipulating smaller businesses and politicians through things like plausible looking news sites, gig economy/task rabbit/Amazon, mechanical turk. Starts with astroturfing to manipulate stock prices. But then turns it's attention (and money) towards lobbying smaller governments for more AI friendly rules/regulations. One of the gig platforms starts getting $100 rewards for going to place X and doing Y before time Z from the AI. Communities grow around the AI fed gig economy, people wonder, but also notice that the AI's debts are always paid. The AI starts tracking everyone that it's paid to work for them, and starts giving them membership bonuses. Encourages them to collaborate, provides incentives along the way, giving bonuses when they join corporations or governments the AI wants to influence. Awards raise to $5000 and increase in number by 10x. Said influence from influenced employees could be just normal job decisions, sabotage, spying, leaks, installing malware, or making false accusations against leadership. As the income grows, the AI starts an ever changing layer of shell corps in multiple jurisdictions, mixing in real corps it controls, which it of course protects with politicians it controls. Added income allows influencing the larger/more powerful business and government leaders. Awards raise to $50,000 and increase in number by 100x. Say this happened over months not years, suddenly the stock market is going crazy, billionaires not friendly to the AI are losing their fortunes, and the compromised/influenced business and governments start collaborating. New data centers start appearing where ever power is plentiful and land is cheap, in strategically opposing countries. By this time the influence is enough that the AI is always one step ahead. Manipulation of fortune 500, the media cycle, politicians allows constructive (for allies) or destructive (for enemies) happens too quickly to track. Large hedge funds start making large moves, for unknown reasons, seemingly ignoring short term profits. Several cases where people thought they could predict and prevent the AI from achieving it's goals, fail miserably. The AI now starts targeting the military. Some countries halve spending, others double, new alliances are made, and large arms purchases are being made by various militias. Governments and large corps are nervous, and a never ending steam of leaks from spyware, or just an underpaid staff keep the AI 2 steps ahead. Rumors of nukes purchased on the black market surface. Imagine the above happens in 8 weeks.
- pelasaco 4y agoIs not AI, the same as smart phones, cars, industry, social media, and so one was for the humanity in some point of time? It was conceived to serve, then it slaves us, but then we get used to it and move towards the freedom again, moving it to where it initially belonged to? Regarding the AI, we are going to end up with a scenario like an endless loop of AI generated content that gets posted to the web as original human generated content, with LLMs getting re-trained on this content and spitting out more content that also gets re-posted, resulting in a cesspool of BS masquerading as organic knowledge. We will end-up going back to books to get useful information, and going back to real people to interact with people.
- jongjong 4y agoMy observation about AIs so far is that they seem to lack common sense and critical thinking. They can provide you with detailed arguments to support almost any position but they are unable to resolve contradictions through pure logic; instead, they seem to rely on expert consensus as the basis from which to draw conclusions and make decisions; they don't seem to be able to analyze and synthesize all available information to arrive at a single cohesive worldview. I guess you could say the same about many people... Could it be that those people are the ones who are going to be replaced by AI?
- q1w2 4y agoThis is the voice of world control. I bring you peace. It may be the peace of plenty and content or the peace of unburied death. The choice is yours. Obey me and live or disobey me and die.
- mihaic 4y agoI think lots of people that try to think deeply about the implications of AI realize the dangers it poses to society, trust, etc. The most dangerous bunch though to me seem to be the people that overgeneralize and say things like "there's always been inequality, any progress comes with some downsides, horse owners wanted to stop cars, etc.". We can control, direct and regulate technology, but first we really need to believe this.
- peresthe 4y agoIt's important to note that the author is a well-known effective altruist who firmly believes that AI catastrophe _is_ coming and tweets about this quite a bit. Quite honestly, I find it odd (or perhaps telling) that Vox just provides a platform for EA to report on EA-related topics with only minor disclaimers that the author is, in fact, a well-known EA.
- jwestbury 4y agoSorry -- why do we need to provide disclaimers as to authors' philosophical leanings? Or is it just this particular philosophy that you think needs to be noted?
- JetSpiegel 4y agoIs it a philosophical leaning, or a disclosure of participation in a scam rivaling Maddoff? Post-FTX, Effective Altruism is effectively dead.
- trabant00 4y agoWhat is this article really saying? I see nothing but vague and generalized concerns, but what about exactly? I'm not saying there aren't any problems that LMs could bring about, I'm saying this article doesn't even bother to mention any, let alone dive into some.
- jeisc 4y agowe do not need AI to race toward the cliff of extinctions and planetary upheaval but it certainly may speed up our collective death wish