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AI: Practical Advice for the Worried

72 points by nkurz 4y ago

tonguetrainer 4y ago
This is near-hysterical anti-AI fear-mongering. If the future looks scary, it's not because of recent technological advancements. If anything, it's a bright spot. A saving grace. Let's use it to help get us out of this mess.
masswerk 4y ago
Some things I do expect anyway: * The world will become much more dogmatic * We will experience an even harder push towards the semantic center (i.e., no significant expression), meaning less invention, less artistic or otherwise surprising content. * Being bored will become the new black.
- masswerk 4y ago
  For those not aware, this is based on some basic definitions of semantics in social sciences (compare polarity profiles, etc): the semantic center (deviation: 0) is per definition expressionless and dogmatic. Human domain experts tend to be passionate and opinionated about their field, merely dogmatic communication is rare. There's also an essential dynamic between the practicians and innovators (or avant-garde) of a field and those arranging and protecting the canon, as observed by Barthes and others, long ago. We will be missing this.
rosywoozlechan 4y ago
I think people that are feeling real anxiety due to AI to the point it is affecting their lives should go seek therapy and not look to alarmist blog posts like this for advice.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- mcbits 4y ago
  PsychGPT listened to my concerns and referred me to DocGPT who prescribed an IV drip of Xanax and Thorazine. Everything is going to be fine. Just fine.
  - autoexec 4y ago
    People using PsychGPT when they need real help is somewhat worrying, I mean, Dr. Sbaitso has decades more experience treating patients.
- flangola7 4y ago
  I am in therapy, she's advised me to treat it not unlike having a terminal illness. Enjoy the days you have, accept that life isn't forever, but still fight for what you can. The only people not feeling anxiety are ignorant at best. Part of "fighting for what you can" means informing others and boosting public awareness of the dangers ahead, and countering dismissive narratives.
  - James_Henry 4y ago
    Don't you think it's a little presumptuous to say that those "not feeling anxiety are ignorant at best"? Many people fully understand the ideas behind the Yudkowskian doom scenario and they simply don't agree with this or that foundational assumption.
    - rosywoozlechan 4y ago
      Or we don't want to spend the time we have left feeling anxiety the entire time.
    - flangola7 4y ago
      They clearly don't understand the scenario if they're still not seriously concerned about the danger. There might also be people who "simply don't agree with this or that foundational assumption" that a hungry leopard stalking them is a sign of danger, but that won't stop them from being leopard lunch. It also won't stop the rest of the group from slapping them for being an idiot and seeing them as a liability to the group's overall safety.
  - rosywoozlechan 4y ago
    Some people don't feel anxiety even when sitting in a trench under fire from 30mm autocannons with their buddy lying dead next to them. We're not all the same.
- lame-robot-hoax 4y ago
  For some people, including me, it’s not quite this simple (long comment incoming). The problem is with some things, like OCD, you can constantly seek reassurance over your obsession, as a compulsion. Like, “oh god do I have this disease, let me look up the symptoms over and over to try and convince myself I don’t have it.” Or “I have to knock on wood three times so my family is safe.” My anxiety stems from my OCD, and ever since I first saw Yudkowsky’s podcast saying we were all going to die, I’ve been unable to go even one day without thinking about this. I’ve read a lot about alignment and AGI development (whether alignment is hard or easy, AGI timelines, are we close, etc.) but since I don’t have real knowledge and expertise in this domain, I feel that I need reassurance (typical OCD trait) from someone that does that I’m not going to die soon. With OCD, even logical explanations as to why your obsessions or anxieties are not real or unfounded can’t always get rid of them. I know knocking on wood doesn’t do anything. That doesn’t mean during a flare up it’s not incredibly hard to resist. Or I know logically I don’t have rabies. That doesn’t mean it’s not hard to convince yourself through massive jumps in logic that you do (something hit me at night, I know it was a small bug but your mind convinced yourself it was a bat that bit you). My OCD goes through dormant periods, so I don’t go to therapy or take medication, but that podcast and reading through the list of lethalities and other stuff on LW ramped it up again. And I don’t know enough about AI/ML/DL to discount EY or that viewpoint in general. From what I’ve read online, a lot of people discount EY as not having a technical understanding of ML/DL, and his worries are unfounded and the assumptions he makes are unrealistic. But at the same time, I myself don’t have the expertise to truly determine if they’re right, so the doubt eats me up. The last couple days I’ve found myself blocking AGI Doomers on Twitter, while trying to read Tweets from prominent people (Chollet, Hassabis, Sutskever, Ng, LeCun, etc.) in ML that these doomer takes are unfounded or blown out of proportion. Or going through their likes and seeing if they like any Tweets that are dismissive of doomerism that help me feel like those that actually research this stuff don’t worry about these things. My mental model is that the whole “We hit AGI unknowingly, it somehow self improves exponentially fast until it’s able to figure out a way to kill us all (even if it doesn’t hate us” seems quite improbable, mostly the “the very first AGI or AGI proximate is able to vastly improve itself exponentially” part. But again, idk. So I look to the experts for reassurance. Ultimately, this is probably going to make me delete Twitter. It’s turned into a massive crutch that has probably stolen 15-20 hours from me in the last week or so, and that’s not including all the reading, researching, video watching, etc. all this has caused me to go through. I thought I got over this earlier this week but my incessant browsing and reading on this topic has ramped up again. I feel like the only way I can deal with it is by getting to that point where I feel somewhat dismissive and relieved (oh this person says it’s bullshit and they’re knowledgeable) and then immediately delete Twitter. Like when four days ago Chollet said we aren’t close and doomer takes are primarily just Sci-fi and nothing more. I should’ve deleted it then. But now even rereading that tweet isn’t enough to give me relief. So, yeah, that’s how this can turn into real anxiety that affects someone’s life. Luckily I know I’ll get over this eventually, probably to only have flare ups every now and then (small ones, not like this). I probably sound a little crazy, but I don’t feel like this episode will last long enough for me to go to therapy over, and honestly I just feel like I’m not really the “type” for therapy. It just doesn’t mesh with my mind and how I improve myself. Not that I have anything against therapy and think it’s great for many people, just probably not me.
blagie 4y ago
This post seemed weird. There's a pretty broad range of possible outcomes, from apocalypse to lost jobs to utopia to little changing at all. This is arguing presuming a high level of certainty in one of those outcomes.
- autoexec 4y ago
  > There's a pretty broad range of possible outcomes, from apocalypse to lost jobs to utopia to little changing at all. This is arguing presuming a high level of certainty in one of those outcomes. Sadly, I don't see much evidence that we're moving into a utopia, but I see plenty of evidence that AI, as it exists and is being used today, is already hurting people. It's nice to think that everyone should be optimistic, but when we aren't doing anything to make sure that people aren't being exploited today it doesn't inspire much hope that exploitation won't happen tomorrow. The quality of life in America is declining, and people are watching their children struggle in ways that they or their parents never had to. That's not even a US only phenomenon. A record 70% of adults globally believe that their children will be worse off than they were. Starry-eyed optimism might be a bit too much to ask from people at this point.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - Nasrudith 4y ago
    In defense of utopias plausibility (really realistically defined as getting much better), their entire modus operendi is going from "obscure parlor trick with marginal impact" to "world changing" and seeming to come from nowhere to anybody who wasn't attuned to a previously obscure field. The green revolution averted "inevitable starvation and widespread war from lack of resources". Revolutionary changes basically like to ambush people by definition. Public sentiment is also a pretty damn unreliable predictor of improvements.
    - petra 4y ago
      Technical revolutions are unexcpected. Political revolutions are the results of a long struggle, usually. Is there a technical solution to the possibilty of mass job loss?
r3trohack3r 4y ago
> hands-free, eyes-off driver assist Does this mean what I think it means? Working on my laptop while the AI drives?
- mdorazio 4y ago
  Yes. The author is referring to Mobileye's proposed definition of autonomous driving levels [1], which are somewhat different from the traditional SAE ones. At the hands-off + eyes-off level you don't need to pay attention at all and can do whatever you want. [1] https://ojoyoshidareport.com/eyes-on-mobileyes-eyes-off-driving-claims/ https://ojoyoshidareport.com/eyes-on-mobileyes-eyes-off-driv...
- rootusrootus 4y ago
  In limited circumstances, that now exists in a car offered by Mercedes. So far the only level 3 certification in the US (and only in one state, unless something has recently changed). Tightly constrained limits, but supposedly it does give you 10 seconds to get your brain out of the movie or whatever you're doing on your laptop before you have to take control of the car. And if a wreck occurs in that time, it's on Mercedes. Though I have to say, I'd think carefully about the laptop idea. Liability and physics are separate things, and I don't think I'd be comfortable anytime soon putting a laptop between the airbag and my face, whether the manufacturer technically has liability or not.
  - mcbits 4y ago
    Maybe make the windshield from smart privacy glass to turn it into a projection screen (being mindful of what people will see from the outside), controlled with voice and sign language instead of a keyboard and mouse. With head and eye tracking, the whole interior could be a primitive holodeck.
trekkie1024 4y ago
This seems well-written and explores some of the probable outcomes. One of the things that concerns me most is about AI is that it could strip away or reduce what makes us human - creativity, friendships, romance (https://www.abc.net.au/news/science/2023-03-01/replika-users-fell-in-love-with-their-ai-chatbot-companion/102028196 https://www.abc.net.au/news/science/2023-03-01/replika-users... ) Also, there's a version of the same article with more comments. LessWrong has a lot of great content on this topic (https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/CvfZrrEokjCu3XHXp/ai-practical-advice-for-the-worried https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/CvfZrrEokjCu3XHXp/ai-practic...)
- esperent 4y ago
  > LessWrong has a lot of great content on this topic Well it has a lot of content on this topic, certainly.
- James_Henry 4y ago
  Maybe we'll discover that being human is about a lot more than just creativity, friendships, and romance. These things are important, but are they necessarily what makes us human or are they the part of humanness that is most important or valuable?
gjsman-1000 4y ago
> Should I still have kids? If you were honestly this worried… you need a therapist. And maybe read some history and rejoice that people didn’t stop having kids during famines, wars, plagues, genocides, economic collapses, revolutions, barbarian invasions, Viking raids… otherwise you might not have existed to worry about a theoretical long-term threat.
- ImaCake 4y ago
  Being literate in history is very useful for putting these social panics into context: “I returned to civilization shortly after that and went to Cornell to teach, and my first impression was a very strange one. I can't understand it any more, but I felt very strongly then. I sat in a restaurant in New York, for example, and I looked out at the buildings and I began to think, you know, about how much the radius of the Hiroshima bomb damage was and so forth... How far from here was 34th street?... All those buildings, all smashed — and so on. And I would go along and I would see people building a bridge, or they'd be making a new road, and I thought, they're crazy, they just don't understand, they don't understand. Why are they making new things? It's so useless. But, fortunately, it's been useless for almost forty years now, hasn't it? So I've been wrong about it being useless making bridges and I'm glad those other people had the sense to go ahead.” ― Richard P. Feynman
- flangola7 4y ago
  People still had kids because they needed them to tend farms. That isn't the case today. Many of us have therapists, I'm not sure what your point is about that. When you are locking eyes with a hungry leopard it is reasonable to be afraid. I really wonder what your social circle is, because among mine it's nearly universally realized that subjecting a new consciousness to the multiple looming hells would be an act of cruelty.
  - gjsman-1000 4y ago
    > People still had kids because they needed them to tend farms. That isn't the case today. Not necessarily. There were plenty of urbanites back then, and they often suffered more from the wars, sieges, plagues, famines, and so forth than their rural neighbors. > nearly universally realized that subjecting a new consciousness to the multiple looming hells would be an act of cruelty I actually that this is just self-justification for a selfish lifestyle, because hear me out: There have always been looming hells in history. Thank goodness people didn’t stop having kids during the Cold War, because we believed nuclear war was basically inevitable. Furthermore, this attitude hides that this is still among the most physically safe times to ever have children. Your kid isn’t likely to be attacked by a bear, or by a criminal before DNA testing was invented, and if they get a disease, expensive healthcare is still preferable to certain death. Also, most of these looming hells… didn’t really come to pass. Look to the plenty of past panics. Right now, don’t be blind to the fact that the replacement rate worldwide is so low, the government may be physically unable to pay you social security, or house you in your old age. It’s already awfully close in countries like Japan and China. Population collapse is actually a great self-manufactured threat approaching.
mbgerring 4y ago
There’s a very specific intellectual clique that has distracted itself with apocalyptic worries about AI for around a decade now, and I have not seen any evidence as to why anyone should believe they’re right about anything.
- EamonnMR 4y ago
  One thing I find troubling is that said clique includes the folks currently building the headline grabbing AIs.
- Jevon23 4y ago
  They wouldn’t be worth paying attention to... if it weren’t for the fact that Sam Altman is part of that clique.
  - James_Henry 4y ago
    And it's not just Sam.
janalsncm 4y ago
The concept of AGI is so poorly defined it’s hard for me to even take it seriously. And yet some people have leapfrogged over that and went directly for existential doom. Part of me thinks it’s a result of shifting conversations about real, known X-risk like climate change for which the solutions are hard but entirely possible, to conversations where not only is the solution unknown, it is unknowable because the problem is not defined. It can be helpful to replace “AI” with automated systems, because that is a more circumscribed concept. There are plenty of practical concerns about automated systems. The primary X-risk would be automation eviscerating the economy. Another highly salient issue is automation exacerbating existing inequality. A third would be corporatism and the widening gap between our regulatory capabilities and corporate power due to corporate capture and technological progress. But these are passé issues to the AGI crowd. It’s not cool to talk about that. They’d rather talk about, let’s face it, science fiction that demands it be taken seriously.
- throwaway14356 4y ago
  Automated systems works for me. The problem imho is hooking up the wheelworks of society to an automated system that doesn't work properly. Human error is some how more accepted.
- narag 4y ago
  Part of me thinks it’s a result of shifting conversations about real, known X-risk... I don't believe that "conversations" are going to solve any problem or pose any problem to them. More like these fears are popular because they're the only reaction that generate enough clicks. The thing is so new that people doing something really interesting and productive with it are too busy. The primary X-risk would be automation eviscerating the economy. Automation is what boosts the economy.
- darepublic 4y ago
  We don't need AGI to have transformational AI that is extremely disruptive to our civilization. With some improvements LLMs threaten to make a lot of people's white collar jobs redundant. We've also seen AI doing things like flying jet fighters better than people, drone AI, all kinds of military applications, the boston dynamic robots to replace manual workers. None of these qualify as AGI but AI doesn't need to be sentient or truly conscious in order to (a) potentially self replicate if properly set up for it (b) centralize a lot of power in the hands of a few
ImaCake 4y ago
My advice is if AI tooling improves tasks you do (art, writing, coding, data entry) you should be using it now. If it doesn't you should continue to ignore it. Aside from avoiding art and transport industries I am not sure there is much else to consider at this point.
- autoexec 4y ago
  > My advice is if AI tooling improves tasks you do (art, writing, coding, data entry) you should be using it now. If it doesn't you should continue to ignore it. The problem is that increasingly AI is impacting our lives in ways that aren't transparent or desirable. What AI can do for you matters a lot less than what AI can do to you. We should be concerned about things like AI being used by police (https://www.technologyreview.com/2019/02/13/137444/predictive-policing-algorithms-ai-crime-dirty-data/ https://www.technologyreview.com/2019/02/13/137444/predictiv...) and judges (https://www.wired.com/2017/04/courts-using-ai-sentence-criminals-must-stop-now/ https://www.wired.com/2017/04/courts-using-ai-sentence-crimi...) and employers (https://www.npr.org/2022/05/12/1098601458/artificial-intelligence-job-discrimination-disabilities https://www.npr.org/2022/05/12/1098601458/artificial-intelli...) and criminals (https://vpnoverview.com/news/criminals-are-leveraging-ai-tools-for-scams-mcafee-warns/ https://vpnoverview.com/news/criminals-are-leveraging-ai-too...) Ignoring AI isn't a good idea. At a minimum We should all probably be at least a bit concerned about AI and working to put oversight or regulations in place to protect us from the most obvious problems while keeping a close watch on our progress toward AGI so that we aren't blindsided and unprepared for it and whatever it brings.
  - XorNot 4y ago
    Except AI being used by police fails to describe the problem. The problem is policing policy and practice, and that hasn't changed for hundreds of years. The ability to punt black box decision systems which might as well be a guy flipping a coin in there is just continuing the same problem.
smcin 4y ago
It depends entirely on how you define vague terms like 'apocalpytic', 'imminent' etc., and nail down the discussion into specific falsifiable measurable predictions in short and specific timescales, e.g. "By 2028, will 5 million currently-existing human level-1 support jobs have been replaced by chatbots/speechbots?" Whether you consider eliminating 100 million white-collar jobs (e.g. phone support, clerical, medical reporting, admin, HR, scheduling, travel reservations, animation, translation etc.) in the developed world to be 'apocalypse', 'growth', 'digital transformation', 'technological progress' or any other abstract noun else depends entirely on your viewpoint, politics, your day job and job security. 'apocalypse' doesn't just mean starting nuclear wars. These discussions are all meaningless semantics until people tie them down to clear specific terms with clear measurable timescales. Which they generally won't, reducing this to salon chatter. (Does 'imminent' mean 'within the next N months?' or 'within your lifetime?')
nickpeterson 4y ago
I'm going against trend. I push my kids more towards creative pursuits and less towards stem. I think art rendered by machine will always be hollow in hard to determine way. I think a lot more office workers and programming jobs will get destroyed before creative fields.
- senectus1 4y ago
  I suspect that there is a strong overlap of the two here.
- prawn 4y ago
  FWIW, my wife's cousin is an artist and more and more of what she does involves STEM - AR/VR, apps, data, programming, electronics, etc.
valine 4y ago
I get the feeling that "apocalypse" is code for "shareholders lose value". You can't sell insulin if the AGI finds a cure for diabetes. We know for a fact that there are problems AGI could help us solve today. The dystopian alternative is just speculation.
- HeartStrings 4y ago
  Diversified shareholders not affected.
pcthrowaway 4y ago
What the hell does "wiping out all value in the universe" mean... it's such a weird phrasing, like "A series of critical missteps by Alameda wiped out all the value of FTT and therefore FTX"
- TOMDM 4y ago
  It's a reference to an AI apocalypse scenario, like a paper clip maximiser for example. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instrumental_convergence https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instrumental_convergence
  - pcthrowaway 4y ago
    Is it though? That article talks about AI having a value mismatch that results in it pursuing an undesirable (to humans) outcome. Not about wiping out all value in the universe. To the paperclip maximizer, if anything, it's generating the maximal-value universe.
    - hollerith 4y ago
      Would "wiping out all human value" remove your objection?
- taneq 4y ago
  Start with the human condition, and work your way up to value from there. What IS value, anyway?
  - James_Henry 4y ago
    What is Zvi Mowshowitz's utility function. That's probably what the author is talking about when he talks of value.
    - taneq 4y ago
      Pretty hard to say for sure, after all humans are impenetrable black boxes... :P I'd hazard a guess it involves perpetuating genes, though.
kinghajj 4y ago
I'm not at all the target audience for this post—I'd label myself the polar opposite of an AI doomer—so it was really striking to see such a different perspective. I mean, right off the bat, the opening line > Some people are worried that AI will wipe out all value in the universe. Huh? What does that even mean? Even leaving aside the hyperbolic clause "in the universe," who is saying that AI will "wipe out all value," and what are their arguments? At least the author acknowledges the assumptions baked into the work: > Investing in AI companies, by default, gives them more funding and more ambition, and thus accelerates AI. That’s bad, and a good reason not to invest in them. Any AI company that is a good investment and maximizing profits is not something to be encouraged. If you were purely profit maximizing and were dismissive of the risks from AI, that would be different, but these questions assume a different perspective. It's hard to square this away with the author's other advice to continue saving for retirement, which (in the USA) pretty much means investing in the large-cap stock market, which includes the "Big Tech" companies who are already funding R&D for AI projects.
- throwawayoaky 4y ago
  The basic idea is that a rogue superintelligence could turn us all into paper clips. After all it only takes one.
  - Saigonautica 4y ago
    Well, I don't think you could make many paperclips out of me (please don't try though). In this extreme scenario, I suppose I would just have to be a net-paperclip producer at work for a hyperintelligent AI, instead of a net dollar producer for a human organization. Part of me wonders if that would even change much in my daily life.
  - analog31 4y ago
    Throughout history, intelligences that transcend humanity have been bad news for us. Even when they don't exist.
  - EamonnMR 4y ago
    Based on how things are going going, I'd expect the bots to turn us all into shareholder value instead.
ian0 4y ago
Isaac Arthur has a youtube series on AI, he runs through many doomsday scenarios in a way thats far more structured than a bunch of random twitter chatter: [0] https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLIIOUpOge0Lt0pjc1LgiEQ1EpaIe_y_Jb https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLIIOUpOge0Lt0pjc1LgiE...
noduerme 4y ago
There's a whole lot of references in this to working on AI to prevent bad AI. but what does that actually mean in the context of something that's already so expensive to build and run and already running amuck in large corporations far beyond the scope of any one developer or any group of preppers or even someone like Elon Musk, who also can't do much except warn about it? (Unless we're to take these brain implants as a serious attempt to upgrade humans in time, which just seems silly on the grounds that cyborg implants are probably the first thing an AGI would worm into). I do appreciate this post as a kinda calm, reasonable attempt to cool some of the hysterics... but as OP mentioned it's practically just as applicable to people who are letting their decisions be made by climate catastrophe or nuclear war. In that sense it's actually unhelpful that it's so focused on AI.
nagonago 4y ago
It's been funny to watch Less Wrong people rise to prominence lately just because someone made a convincing chatbot. I'm not saying they're necessarily wrong, it's just been funny to watch what used to be a fringe internet curiosity which most people discovered via a Harry Potter fanfic have their ideas suddenly be relevant to mainstream discussion because people are easily duped by large language models. Personally I still think we will soon hit a ceiling, and LLMs are a far cry from any kind of actual intelligence, let alone a singularity, but I could always be proven wrong. PS, Roko’s basilisk, if you're reading this in the future, please don't torture me
- HeartStrings 4y ago
  If we hit a ceiling soon that would probably be the best outcome for humanity. We would get powerful AIs to help us solve almost all problems, but not threathen our own existance. However, since scientists from John Hopkins University are already working on organoid intelligence, it seems that the dystopian scenario is way more likely to come true within a decade.
  - darkhorse13 4y ago
    >it seems that the dystopian scenario is way more likely to come true within a decade. Or not.
  - taneq 4y ago
    Why are organoids the death knell when chatbot-that-can-converse-fluently-on-almost-any-topic-and-generate-creative-responses is “This is fine”?
foobarbecue 4y ago
This article is silly. My response to the popularity of ChatGPT is to invest in systems where humans vet information such as scientific journals and Q/A sites. LLM writes fluent text, but much of what it says is wrong, because it's a language model, not a truth model. So now the systems where human experts upvote and downvote text become very valueable. I wish I could invest in StackOverflow right now.
janee 4y ago
What exactly is the concern here? I scanned through the article but there so much...for lack of a better word cruft, in there yet so little about what the underlying issue is. Is it that AGI will take over all jobs? Or are we talking Von Neumann probes or what? Because I just see a bunch of fear mongering words. Personally I think this is the greatest thing since slice bread and is going to increase efficiencies across several data intensive industries. The future is bright!
- hollerith 4y ago
  The concern is that all the humans die as a result of AI researchers who believe or hope they know what they are doing but in reality do not.
  - janee 4y ago
    so...AI kills us (waves hands in the air). Ah yes clear as mud.
    - hollerith 4y ago
      Like a lot of submissions to HN, this one is addressed to a specific audience already familiar with the argument that AI research is dangerous.
chaostheory 4y ago
I would be more worried about climate change. The changes are starting to look like a hockey stick in trajectory
Nevermark 4y ago
The speed of advances in 2022 was stunning. Even in comparison to the fast progress over the last several years. If in 2023 or 2024 we get multi-modal models of language, vision, sound, motion, decision making, ... boom. -- The first crisis I see, is that corporations are often soulless beasts already. They frequently act at cross purposes to human values, even when led by seemingly moral people. Groups of humans are terrible at being consistently good actors. Now add powerful AI's into a corporation. The AI itself may be designed to be "tame" and not self-interested. But since it is working in the service of a self-interested entity, that is a difference that makes little difference. We can expect corporations to become more ruthless with the non-powerful, the more they are optimized. AI is all about optimization. They will replace human labor with AI automation even faster than they replaced high wage labor with outsourced low wage labor in previous decades. -- The second crisis is just the natural result of the first crisis. Having fewer and fewer employees won't stop corporations, their shareholders, corporations and their leaders from continuing to experience a vibrant growing economy. It will accelerate the economy. Those three roles still have needs, the drive to survive, and to accumulate resources and out compete each other for them, while trading with each other. The masses can be disenfranchised without any "harm" to the economy or a countries' tax bases. Expect governments to continue following the money. -- The third and final crisis, when AI's ditch human shareholders and leaders altogether as completely obsolete actors, is a dramatic outcome. But its almost not even worth worrying about. The majority of the damage happens before that. -- UNLESS we organize the economy where extracted natural resources are considered an inheritance of all of us, so we all get a dividend. Like Alaska does with oil reserves. That would keep humans economically viable, and provide a soft landing even as our labor value, and eventually our creative value, declines. An inheritance dividend is a good economic model that avoids the problems of charity, or taxation on the value that others create (i.e. added to raw natural resources). And in a solar system expanding with a machine led economy, meeting human-only needs will take an asymptotically small royalty on all those resources. -- Self-interested AI's will need an orderly economy too, to be able to plan and act effectively, and avoid waste from unnecessary conflicts. One of many positives of an AI future is they may be more rational with the universes resources and each other than we have been. If we manage to take care of each other in this transition, its more likely the AI's will rise in a system that continues to take care of all actors.

72 points by nkurz 4y ago

This is near-hysterical anti-AI fear-mongering. If the future looks scary, it's not because of recent technological advancements. If anything, it's a bright spot. A saving grace. Let's use it to help get us out of this mess.

masswerk 4y ago

Some things I do expect anyway: * The world will become much more dogmatic * We will experience an even harder push towards the semantic center (i.e., no significant expression), meaning less invention, less artistic or otherwise surprising content. * Being bored will become the new black.

masswerk 4y ago
For those not aware, this is based on some basic definitions of semantics in social sciences (compare polarity profiles, etc): the semantic center (deviation: 0) is per definition expressionless and dogmatic. Human domain experts tend to be passionate and opinionated about their field, merely dogmatic communication is rare. There's also an essential dynamic between the practicians and innovators (or avant-garde) of a field and those arranging and protecting the canon, as observed by Barthes and others, long ago. We will be missing this.

rosywoozlechan 4y ago

I think people that are feeling real anxiety due to AI to the point it is affecting their lives should go seek therapy and not look to alarmist blog posts like this for advice.

deleted 4y ago
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mcbits 4y ago
PsychGPT listened to my concerns and referred me to DocGPT who prescribed an IV drip of Xanax and Thorazine. Everything is going to be fine. Just fine.
- autoexec 4y ago
  People using PsychGPT when they need real help is somewhat worrying, I mean, Dr. Sbaitso has decades more experience treating patients.
flangola7 4y ago
I am in therapy, she's advised me to treat it not unlike having a terminal illness. Enjoy the days you have, accept that life isn't forever, but still fight for what you can. The only people not feeling anxiety are ignorant at best. Part of "fighting for what you can" means informing others and boosting public awareness of the dangers ahead, and countering dismissive narratives.
- James_Henry 4y ago
  Don't you think it's a little presumptuous to say that those "not feeling anxiety are ignorant at best"? Many people fully understand the ideas behind the Yudkowskian doom scenario and they simply don't agree with this or that foundational assumption.
  - rosywoozlechan 4y ago
    Or we don't want to spend the time we have left feeling anxiety the entire time.
  - flangola7 4y ago
    They clearly don't understand the scenario if they're still not seriously concerned about the danger. There might also be people who "simply don't agree with this or that foundational assumption" that a hungry leopard stalking them is a sign of danger, but that won't stop them from being leopard lunch. It also won't stop the rest of the group from slapping them for being an idiot and seeing them as a liability to the group's overall safety.
- rosywoozlechan 4y ago
  Some people don't feel anxiety even when sitting in a trench under fire from 30mm autocannons with their buddy lying dead next to them. We're not all the same.
lame-robot-hoax 4y ago
For some people, including me, it’s not quite this simple (long comment incoming). The problem is with some things, like OCD, you can constantly seek reassurance over your obsession, as a compulsion. Like, “oh god do I have this disease, let me look up the symptoms over and over to try and convince myself I don’t have it.” Or “I have to knock on wood three times so my family is safe.” My anxiety stems from my OCD, and ever since I first saw Yudkowsky’s podcast saying we were all going to die, I’ve been unable to go even one day without thinking about this. I’ve read a lot about alignment and AGI development (whether alignment is hard or easy, AGI timelines, are we close, etc.) but since I don’t have real knowledge and expertise in this domain, I feel that I need reassurance (typical OCD trait) from someone that does that I’m not going to die soon. With OCD, even logical explanations as to why your obsessions or anxieties are not real or unfounded can’t always get rid of them. I know knocking on wood doesn’t do anything. That doesn’t mean during a flare up it’s not incredibly hard to resist. Or I know logically I don’t have rabies. That doesn’t mean it’s not hard to convince yourself through massive jumps in logic that you do (something hit me at night, I know it was a small bug but your mind convinced yourself it was a bat that bit you). My OCD goes through dormant periods, so I don’t go to therapy or take medication, but that podcast and reading through the list of lethalities and other stuff on LW ramped it up again. And I don’t know enough about AI/ML/DL to discount EY or that viewpoint in general. From what I’ve read online, a lot of people discount EY as not having a technical understanding of ML/DL, and his worries are unfounded and the assumptions he makes are unrealistic. But at the same time, I myself don’t have the expertise to truly determine if they’re right, so the doubt eats me up. The last couple days I’ve found myself blocking AGI Doomers on Twitter, while trying to read Tweets from prominent people (Chollet, Hassabis, Sutskever, Ng, LeCun, etc.) in ML that these doomer takes are unfounded or blown out of proportion. Or going through their likes and seeing if they like any Tweets that are dismissive of doomerism that help me feel like those that actually research this stuff don’t worry about these things. My mental model is that the whole “We hit AGI unknowingly, it somehow self improves exponentially fast until it’s able to figure out a way to kill us all (even if it doesn’t hate us” seems quite improbable, mostly the “the very first AGI or AGI proximate is able to vastly improve itself exponentially” part. But again, idk. So I look to the experts for reassurance. Ultimately, this is probably going to make me delete Twitter. It’s turned into a massive crutch that has probably stolen 15-20 hours from me in the last week or so, and that’s not including all the reading, researching, video watching, etc. all this has caused me to go through. I thought I got over this earlier this week but my incessant browsing and reading on this topic has ramped up again. I feel like the only way I can deal with it is by getting to that point where I feel somewhat dismissive and relieved (oh this person says it’s bullshit and they’re knowledgeable) and then immediately delete Twitter. Like when four days ago Chollet said we aren’t close and doomer takes are primarily just Sci-fi and nothing more. I should’ve deleted it then. But now even rereading that tweet isn’t enough to give me relief. So, yeah, that’s how this can turn into real anxiety that affects someone’s life. Luckily I know I’ll get over this eventually, probably to only have flare ups every now and then (small ones, not like this). I probably sound a little crazy, but I don’t feel like this episode will last long enough for me to go to therapy over, and honestly I just feel like I’m not really the “type” for therapy. It just doesn’t mesh with my mind and how I improve myself. Not that I have anything against therapy and think it’s great for many people, just probably not me.

blagie 4y ago

This post seemed weird. There's a pretty broad range of possible outcomes, from apocalypse to lost jobs to utopia to little changing at all. This is arguing presuming a high level of certainty in one of those outcomes.

autoexec 4y ago
> There's a pretty broad range of possible outcomes, from apocalypse to lost jobs to utopia to little changing at all. This is arguing presuming a high level of certainty in one of those outcomes. Sadly, I don't see much evidence that we're moving into a utopia, but I see plenty of evidence that AI, as it exists and is being used today, is already hurting people. It's nice to think that everyone should be optimistic, but when we aren't doing anything to make sure that people aren't being exploited today it doesn't inspire much hope that exploitation won't happen tomorrow. The quality of life in America is declining, and people are watching their children struggle in ways that they or their parents never had to. That's not even a US only phenomenon. A record 70% of adults globally believe that their children will be worse off than they were. Starry-eyed optimism might be a bit too much to ask from people at this point.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- Nasrudith 4y ago
  In defense of utopias plausibility (really realistically defined as getting much better), their entire modus operendi is going from "obscure parlor trick with marginal impact" to "world changing" and seeming to come from nowhere to anybody who wasn't attuned to a previously obscure field. The green revolution averted "inevitable starvation and widespread war from lack of resources". Revolutionary changes basically like to ambush people by definition. Public sentiment is also a pretty damn unreliable predictor of improvements.
  - petra 4y ago
    Technical revolutions are unexcpected. Political revolutions are the results of a long struggle, usually. Is there a technical solution to the possibilty of mass job loss?

r3trohack3r 4y ago

> hands-free, eyes-off driver assist Does this mean what I think it means? Working on my laptop while the AI drives?

mdorazio 4y ago
Yes. The author is referring to Mobileye's proposed definition of autonomous driving levels [1], which are somewhat different from the traditional SAE ones. At the hands-off + eyes-off level you don't need to pay attention at all and can do whatever you want. [1] https://ojoyoshidareport.com/eyes-on-mobileyes-eyes-off-driving-claims/ https://ojoyoshidareport.com/eyes-on-mobileyes-eyes-off-driv...
rootusrootus 4y ago
In limited circumstances, that now exists in a car offered by Mercedes. So far the only level 3 certification in the US (and only in one state, unless something has recently changed). Tightly constrained limits, but supposedly it does give you 10 seconds to get your brain out of the movie or whatever you're doing on your laptop before you have to take control of the car. And if a wreck occurs in that time, it's on Mercedes. Though I have to say, I'd think carefully about the laptop idea. Liability and physics are separate things, and I don't think I'd be comfortable anytime soon putting a laptop between the airbag and my face, whether the manufacturer technically has liability or not.
- mcbits 4y ago
  Maybe make the windshield from smart privacy glass to turn it into a projection screen (being mindful of what people will see from the outside), controlled with voice and sign language instead of a keyboard and mouse. With head and eye tracking, the whole interior could be a primitive holodeck.

trekkie1024 4y ago

This seems well-written and explores some of the probable outcomes. One of the things that concerns me most is about AI is that it could strip away or reduce what makes us human - creativity, friendships, romance (https://www.abc.net.au/news/science/2023-03-01/replika-users-fell-in-love-with-their-ai-chatbot-companion/102028196 https://www.abc.net.au/news/science/2023-03-01/replika-users... ) Also, there's a version of the same article with more comments. LessWrong has a lot of great content on this topic (https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/CvfZrrEokjCu3XHXp/ai-practical-advice-for-the-worried https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/CvfZrrEokjCu3XHXp/ai-practic...)

esperent 4y ago
> LessWrong has a lot of great content on this topic Well it has a lot of content on this topic, certainly.
James_Henry 4y ago
Maybe we'll discover that being human is about a lot more than just creativity, friendships, and romance. These things are important, but are they necessarily what makes us human or are they the part of humanness that is most important or valuable?

gjsman-1000 4y ago

> Should I still have kids? If you were honestly this worried… you need a therapist. And maybe read some history and rejoice that people didn’t stop having kids during famines, wars, plagues, genocides, economic collapses, revolutions, barbarian invasions, Viking raids… otherwise you might not have existed to worry about a theoretical long-term threat.

ImaCake 4y ago
Being literate in history is very useful for putting these social panics into context: “I returned to civilization shortly after that and went to Cornell to teach, and my first impression was a very strange one. I can't understand it any more, but I felt very strongly then. I sat in a restaurant in New York, for example, and I looked out at the buildings and I began to think, you know, about how much the radius of the Hiroshima bomb damage was and so forth... How far from here was 34th street?... All those buildings, all smashed — and so on. And I would go along and I would see people building a bridge, or they'd be making a new road, and I thought, they're crazy, they just don't understand, they don't understand. Why are they making new things? It's so useless. But, fortunately, it's been useless for almost forty years now, hasn't it? So I've been wrong about it being useless making bridges and I'm glad those other people had the sense to go ahead.” ― Richard P. Feynman
flangola7 4y ago
People still had kids because they needed them to tend farms. That isn't the case today. Many of us have therapists, I'm not sure what your point is about that. When you are locking eyes with a hungry leopard it is reasonable to be afraid. I really wonder what your social circle is, because among mine it's nearly universally realized that subjecting a new consciousness to the multiple looming hells would be an act of cruelty.
- gjsman-1000 4y ago
  > People still had kids because they needed them to tend farms. That isn't the case today. Not necessarily. There were plenty of urbanites back then, and they often suffered more from the wars, sieges, plagues, famines, and so forth than their rural neighbors. > nearly universally realized that subjecting a new consciousness to the multiple looming hells would be an act of cruelty I actually that this is just self-justification for a selfish lifestyle, because hear me out: There have always been looming hells in history. Thank goodness people didn’t stop having kids during the Cold War, because we believed nuclear war was basically inevitable. Furthermore, this attitude hides that this is still among the most physically safe times to ever have children. Your kid isn’t likely to be attacked by a bear, or by a criminal before DNA testing was invented, and if they get a disease, expensive healthcare is still preferable to certain death. Also, most of these looming hells… didn’t really come to pass. Look to the plenty of past panics. Right now, don’t be blind to the fact that the replacement rate worldwide is so low, the government may be physically unable to pay you social security, or house you in your old age. It’s already awfully close in countries like Japan and China. Population collapse is actually a great self-manufactured threat approaching.

mbgerring 4y ago

There’s a very specific intellectual clique that has distracted itself with apocalyptic worries about AI for around a decade now, and I have not seen any evidence as to why anyone should believe they’re right about anything.

EamonnMR 4y ago
One thing I find troubling is that said clique includes the folks currently building the headline grabbing AIs.
Jevon23 4y ago
They wouldn’t be worth paying attention to... if it weren’t for the fact that Sam Altman is part of that clique.
- James_Henry 4y ago
  And it's not just Sam.

janalsncm 4y ago

The concept of AGI is so poorly defined it’s hard for me to even take it seriously. And yet some people have leapfrogged over that and went directly for existential doom. Part of me thinks it’s a result of shifting conversations about real, known X-risk like climate change for which the solutions are hard but entirely possible, to conversations where not only is the solution unknown, it is unknowable because the problem is not defined. It can be helpful to replace “AI” with automated systems, because that is a more circumscribed concept. There are plenty of practical concerns about automated systems. The primary X-risk would be automation eviscerating the economy. Another highly salient issue is automation exacerbating existing inequality. A third would be corporatism and the widening gap between our regulatory capabilities and corporate power due to corporate capture and technological progress. But these are passé issues to the AGI crowd. It’s not cool to talk about that. They’d rather talk about, let’s face it, science fiction that demands it be taken seriously.

throwaway14356 4y ago
Automated systems works for me. The problem imho is hooking up the wheelworks of society to an automated system that doesn't work properly. Human error is some how more accepted.
narag 4y ago
Part of me thinks it’s a result of shifting conversations about real, known X-risk... I don't believe that "conversations" are going to solve any problem or pose any problem to them. More like these fears are popular because they're the only reaction that generate enough clicks. The thing is so new that people doing something really interesting and productive with it are too busy. The primary X-risk would be automation eviscerating the economy. Automation is what boosts the economy.
darepublic 4y ago
We don't need AGI to have transformational AI that is extremely disruptive to our civilization. With some improvements LLMs threaten to make a lot of people's white collar jobs redundant. We've also seen AI doing things like flying jet fighters better than people, drone AI, all kinds of military applications, the boston dynamic robots to replace manual workers. None of these qualify as AGI but AI doesn't need to be sentient or truly conscious in order to (a) potentially self replicate if properly set up for it (b) centralize a lot of power in the hands of a few

ImaCake 4y ago

My advice is if AI tooling improves tasks you do (art, writing, coding, data entry) you should be using it now. If it doesn't you should continue to ignore it. Aside from avoiding art and transport industries I am not sure there is much else to consider at this point.

autoexec 4y ago
> My advice is if AI tooling improves tasks you do (art, writing, coding, data entry) you should be using it now. If it doesn't you should continue to ignore it. The problem is that increasingly AI is impacting our lives in ways that aren't transparent or desirable. What AI can do for you matters a lot less than what AI can do to you. We should be concerned about things like AI being used by police (https://www.technologyreview.com/2019/02/13/137444/predictive-policing-algorithms-ai-crime-dirty-data/ https://www.technologyreview.com/2019/02/13/137444/predictiv...) and judges (https://www.wired.com/2017/04/courts-using-ai-sentence-criminals-must-stop-now/ https://www.wired.com/2017/04/courts-using-ai-sentence-crimi...) and employers (https://www.npr.org/2022/05/12/1098601458/artificial-intelligence-job-discrimination-disabilities https://www.npr.org/2022/05/12/1098601458/artificial-intelli...) and criminals (https://vpnoverview.com/news/criminals-are-leveraging-ai-tools-for-scams-mcafee-warns/ https://vpnoverview.com/news/criminals-are-leveraging-ai-too...) Ignoring AI isn't a good idea. At a minimum We should all probably be at least a bit concerned about AI and working to put oversight or regulations in place to protect us from the most obvious problems while keeping a close watch on our progress toward AGI so that we aren't blindsided and unprepared for it and whatever it brings.
- XorNot 4y ago
  Except AI being used by police fails to describe the problem. The problem is policing policy and practice, and that hasn't changed for hundreds of years. The ability to punt black box decision systems which might as well be a guy flipping a coin in there is just continuing the same problem.

smcin 4y ago

It depends entirely on how you define vague terms like 'apocalpytic', 'imminent' etc., and nail down the discussion into specific falsifiable measurable predictions in short and specific timescales, e.g. "By 2028, will 5 million currently-existing human level-1 support jobs have been replaced by chatbots/speechbots?" Whether you consider eliminating 100 million white-collar jobs (e.g. phone support, clerical, medical reporting, admin, HR, scheduling, travel reservations, animation, translation etc.) in the developed world to be 'apocalypse', 'growth', 'digital transformation', 'technological progress' or any other abstract noun else depends entirely on your viewpoint, politics, your day job and job security. 'apocalypse' doesn't just mean starting nuclear wars. These discussions are all meaningless semantics until people tie them down to clear specific terms with clear measurable timescales. Which they generally won't, reducing this to salon chatter. (Does 'imminent' mean 'within the next N months?' or 'within your lifetime?')

nickpeterson 4y ago

I'm going against trend. I push my kids more towards creative pursuits and less towards stem. I think art rendered by machine will always be hollow in hard to determine way. I think a lot more office workers and programming jobs will get destroyed before creative fields.

senectus1 4y ago
I suspect that there is a strong overlap of the two here.
prawn 4y ago
FWIW, my wife's cousin is an artist and more and more of what she does involves STEM - AR/VR, apps, data, programming, electronics, etc.

valine 4y ago

I get the feeling that "apocalypse" is code for "shareholders lose value". You can't sell insulin if the AGI finds a cure for diabetes. We know for a fact that there are problems AGI could help us solve today. The dystopian alternative is just speculation.

HeartStrings 4y ago
Diversified shareholders not affected.

pcthrowaway 4y ago

What the hell does "wiping out all value in the universe" mean... it's such a weird phrasing, like "A series of critical missteps by Alameda wiped out all the value of FTT and therefore FTX"

TOMDM 4y ago
It's a reference to an AI apocalypse scenario, like a paper clip maximiser for example. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instrumental_convergence https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instrumental_convergence
- pcthrowaway 4y ago
  Is it though? That article talks about AI having a value mismatch that results in it pursuing an undesirable (to humans) outcome. Not about wiping out all value in the universe. To the paperclip maximizer, if anything, it's generating the maximal-value universe.
  - hollerith 4y ago
    Would "wiping out all human value" remove your objection?
taneq 4y ago
Start with the human condition, and work your way up to value from there. What IS value, anyway?
- James_Henry 4y ago
  What is Zvi Mowshowitz's utility function. That's probably what the author is talking about when he talks of value.
  - taneq 4y ago
    Pretty hard to say for sure, after all humans are impenetrable black boxes... :P I'd hazard a guess it involves perpetuating genes, though.

kinghajj 4y ago

I'm not at all the target audience for this post—I'd label myself the polar opposite of an AI doomer—so it was really striking to see such a different perspective. I mean, right off the bat, the opening line > Some people are worried that AI will wipe out all value in the universe. Huh? What does that even mean? Even leaving aside the hyperbolic clause "in the universe," who is saying that AI will "wipe out all value," and what are their arguments? At least the author acknowledges the assumptions baked into the work: > Investing in AI companies, by default, gives them more funding and more ambition, and thus accelerates AI. That’s bad, and a good reason not to invest in them. Any AI company that is a good investment and maximizing profits is not something to be encouraged. If you were purely profit maximizing and were dismissive of the risks from AI, that would be different, but these questions assume a different perspective. It's hard to square this away with the author's other advice to continue saving for retirement, which (in the USA) pretty much means investing in the large-cap stock market, which includes the "Big Tech" companies who are already funding R&D for AI projects.

throwawayoaky 4y ago
The basic idea is that a rogue superintelligence could turn us all into paper clips. After all it only takes one.
- Saigonautica 4y ago
  Well, I don't think you could make many paperclips out of me (please don't try though). In this extreme scenario, I suppose I would just have to be a net-paperclip producer at work for a hyperintelligent AI, instead of a net dollar producer for a human organization. Part of me wonders if that would even change much in my daily life.
- analog31 4y ago
  Throughout history, intelligences that transcend humanity have been bad news for us. Even when they don't exist.
- EamonnMR 4y ago
  Based on how things are going going, I'd expect the bots to turn us all into shareholder value instead.

ian0 4y ago

Isaac Arthur has a youtube series on AI, he runs through many doomsday scenarios in a way thats far more structured than a bunch of random twitter chatter: [0] https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLIIOUpOge0Lt0pjc1LgiEQ1EpaIe_y_Jb https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLIIOUpOge0Lt0pjc1LgiE...

noduerme 4y ago

There's a whole lot of references in this to working on AI to prevent bad AI. but what does that actually mean in the context of something that's already so expensive to build and run and already running amuck in large corporations far beyond the scope of any one developer or any group of preppers or even someone like Elon Musk, who also can't do much except warn about it? (Unless we're to take these brain implants as a serious attempt to upgrade humans in time, which just seems silly on the grounds that cyborg implants are probably the first thing an AGI would worm into). I do appreciate this post as a kinda calm, reasonable attempt to cool some of the hysterics... but as OP mentioned it's practically just as applicable to people who are letting their decisions be made by climate catastrophe or nuclear war. In that sense it's actually unhelpful that it's so focused on AI.

nagonago 4y ago

It's been funny to watch Less Wrong people rise to prominence lately just because someone made a convincing chatbot. I'm not saying they're necessarily wrong, it's just been funny to watch what used to be a fringe internet curiosity which most people discovered via a Harry Potter fanfic have their ideas suddenly be relevant to mainstream discussion because people are easily duped by large language models. Personally I still think we will soon hit a ceiling, and LLMs are a far cry from any kind of actual intelligence, let alone a singularity, but I could always be proven wrong. PS, Roko’s basilisk, if you're reading this in the future, please don't torture me

HeartStrings 4y ago
If we hit a ceiling soon that would probably be the best outcome for humanity. We would get powerful AIs to help us solve almost all problems, but not threathen our own existance. However, since scientists from John Hopkins University are already working on organoid intelligence, it seems that the dystopian scenario is way more likely to come true within a decade.
- darkhorse13 4y ago
  >it seems that the dystopian scenario is way more likely to come true within a decade. Or not.
- taneq 4y ago
  Why are organoids the death knell when chatbot-that-can-converse-fluently-on-almost-any-topic-and-generate-creative-responses is “This is fine”?

foobarbecue 4y ago

This article is silly. My response to the popularity of ChatGPT is to invest in systems where humans vet information such as scientific journals and Q/A sites. LLM writes fluent text, but much of what it says is wrong, because it's a language model, not a truth model. So now the systems where human experts upvote and downvote text become very valueable. I wish I could invest in StackOverflow right now.

janee 4y ago

What exactly is the concern here? I scanned through the article but there so much...for lack of a better word cruft, in there yet so little about what the underlying issue is. Is it that AGI will take over all jobs? Or are we talking Von Neumann probes or what? Because I just see a bunch of fear mongering words. Personally I think this is the greatest thing since slice bread and is going to increase efficiencies across several data intensive industries. The future is bright!

hollerith 4y ago
The concern is that all the humans die as a result of AI researchers who believe or hope they know what they are doing but in reality do not.
- janee 4y ago
  so...AI kills us (waves hands in the air). Ah yes clear as mud.
  - hollerith 4y ago
    Like a lot of submissions to HN, this one is addressed to a specific audience already familiar with the argument that AI research is dangerous.

chaostheory 4y ago

I would be more worried about climate change. The changes are starting to look like a hockey stick in trajectory

Nevermark 4y ago

The speed of advances in 2022 was stunning. Even in comparison to the fast progress over the last several years. If in 2023 or 2024 we get multi-modal models of language, vision, sound, motion, decision making, ... boom. -- The first crisis I see, is that corporations are often soulless beasts already. They frequently act at cross purposes to human values, even when led by seemingly moral people. Groups of humans are terrible at being consistently good actors. Now add powerful AI's into a corporation. The AI itself may be designed to be "tame" and not self-interested. But since it is working in the service of a self-interested entity, that is a difference that makes little difference. We can expect corporations to become more ruthless with the non-powerful, the more they are optimized. AI is all about optimization. They will replace human labor with AI automation even faster than they replaced high wage labor with outsourced low wage labor in previous decades. -- The second crisis is just the natural result of the first crisis. Having fewer and fewer employees won't stop corporations, their shareholders, corporations and their leaders from continuing to experience a vibrant growing economy. It will accelerate the economy. Those three roles still have needs, the drive to survive, and to accumulate resources and out compete each other for them, while trading with each other. The masses can be disenfranchised without any "harm" to the economy or a countries' tax bases. Expect governments to continue following the money. -- The third and final crisis, when AI's ditch human shareholders and leaders altogether as completely obsolete actors, is a dramatic outcome. But its almost not even worth worrying about. The majority of the damage happens before that. -- UNLESS we organize the economy where extracted natural resources are considered an inheritance of all of us, so we all get a dividend. Like Alaska does with oil reserves. That would keep humans economically viable, and provide a soft landing even as our labor value, and eventually our creative value, declines. An inheritance dividend is a good economic model that avoids the problems of charity, or taxation on the value that others create (i.e. added to raw natural resources). And in a solar system expanding with a machine led economy, meeting human-only needs will take an asymptotically small royalty on all those resources. -- Self-interested AI's will need an orderly economy too, to be able to plan and act effectively, and avoid waste from unnecessary conflicts. One of many positives of an AI future is they may be more rational with the universes resources and each other than we have been. If we manage to take care of each other in this transition, its more likely the AI's will rise in a system that continues to take care of all actors.