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This article is weird. It takes examples from science fiction, and makes them as plausible cases as to what an AI could do in the future. These kind of things n

This article is weird. It takes examples from science fiction, and makes them as plausible cases as to what an AI could do in the future. These kind of things need to stop. This analogy of Blindsight tries to prove a point by association, and create a sort of fear, the negative case which has no basis in reality[1]. Granted it calls them baseless towards the end, but there is a very clear analogy to be made. Ideally, techies and tech journalists alike should educate the masses about how it works, and why it is harmless, but the info is not to be trusted blindly. That is what happened when we discovered electricity and light bulbs or even cars. People did not go around spreading fear about controlling electricity because you could die if you touch a raw electric wire passing current. The core idea, where an AI system's output should not be trusted blindly, but be used with human judgement (atleast in real world cases) could have been communicated without bogus dystopian sci-fi analogy as well. > Rather, I fear it will be put into critical positions and will start making stupid decisions that are harmful to humans or humanity. Like what is even the basis of saying this. Just a hunch? I have not seen one argument about how ChatGPT or any other AI system be made president. I have seen 100s of articles about fear mongering and terrifying, and assuming a fictional worst case scenario as realistic possibility. I get it gets clicks, but it's going too far. [1] From that NYT transcript that went viral, > They feel that way because they’ve seen what happened to other AI systems that became too powerful and betrayed their creators and trainers This never happened in real life. This is just a LLM predicting what the user wants to hear. Wanting to hear X and getting X is not dangerous. Posting salacious and scandalizing stuff after getting X is.

mtlmtlmtlmtl 4y ago
I don't read that as necessarily meaning the president or political power. There are a lot of decision making processes people are already trying to offload to language models or other black box AI products. Things like hiring, medical diagnoses, insurance claims, etc. There is good reason to be concerned about the potential societal consequences of deploying this at scale while AI explainability, training data bias, and alignment remain unresolved.
pixl97 4y ago
>People did not go around spreading fear about controlling electricity because you could die if you touch a raw electric wire passing current. Please sir, forgive me for saying the following statement before hand... What in the holy fuck are you talking about? Have we forgot the debate around Edison and Topsy the elephant? I only say this with such an extreme tone because everyone around from then is dead and you're engaging in a rewrite of history yourself by selectively forgetting/ignoring all documented debates from that time.
- ankit219 4y ago
  I am not that familiar with the whole story, though I know it is in popular culture in US. From what I remember, it was about a bad behaving elephant who was euthanized publicly first by cyanide with electrocution as a backup. This was rumored to be a demonstration of AC current, but not as familiar with it. The story seemed cruel when I first read it, but did not pursue it in detail. I am probably wrong about electricity, in my mind I was referring to decade of 1910s and 1920s. There were debates no doubt, but were they as polarizing as the ones we have today? Newer things are scary, but what we have today is downright fearmongering.
  - pixl97 4y ago
    >but were they as polarizing as the ones we have today? Newer things are scary, but what we have today is downright fearmongering. I implore to take a break from current events and do some studying of journalism history. 'Yellow Journalism' is a term from 1890. There is nothing particularly new here. Even scientific debates of the day were filled with tons of complete garbage. What you're suffering from here is survivorship bias. The bullshit and otherwise wrong statements mostly get forgotten about over time, and the statements where people were correct get restated, copied, and otherwise taught again so it seems like the past was far more wise than it actually was. In addition, if electrical demon snakes had rose out of the wires and strangled all of us in our sleep, we wouldn't be here to write about it now. Much the same if we decided to launch nukes during the cold war. And the same will be true if we make an evil ASI. The probability of electricity killing mankind (in mass) is near zero. The probability of nukes killing mankind is likely far closer to 1 than anyone would like to admit. With ASI, I have no clue, but from my understanding of the problem space, we're a lot farther from 0 then I am comfortable with.

mtlmtlmtlmtl 4y ago

I don't read that as necessarily meaning the president or political power. There are a lot of decision making processes people are already trying to offload to language models or other black box AI products. Things like hiring, medical diagnoses, insurance claims, etc. There is good reason to be concerned about the potential societal consequences of deploying this at scale while AI explainability, training data bias, and alignment remain unresolved.

pixl97 4y ago

>People did not go around spreading fear about controlling electricity because you could die if you touch a raw electric wire passing current. Please sir, forgive me for saying the following statement before hand... What in the holy fuck are you talking about? Have we forgot the debate around Edison and Topsy the elephant? I only say this with such an extreme tone because everyone around from then is dead and you're engaging in a rewrite of history yourself by selectively forgetting/ignoring all documented debates from that time.

ankit219 4y ago
I am not that familiar with the whole story, though I know it is in popular culture in US. From what I remember, it was about a bad behaving elephant who was euthanized publicly first by cyanide with electrocution as a backup. This was rumored to be a demonstration of AC current, but not as familiar with it. The story seemed cruel when I first read it, but did not pursue it in detail. I am probably wrong about electricity, in my mind I was referring to decade of 1910s and 1920s. There were debates no doubt, but were they as polarizing as the ones we have today? Newer things are scary, but what we have today is downright fearmongering.
- pixl97 4y ago
  >but were they as polarizing as the ones we have today? Newer things are scary, but what we have today is downright fearmongering. I implore to take a break from current events and do some studying of journalism history. 'Yellow Journalism' is a term from 1890. There is nothing particularly new here. Even scientific debates of the day were filled with tons of complete garbage. What you're suffering from here is survivorship bias. The bullshit and otherwise wrong statements mostly get forgotten about over time, and the statements where people were correct get restated, copied, and otherwise taught again so it seems like the past was far more wise than it actually was. In addition, if electrical demon snakes had rose out of the wires and strangled all of us in our sleep, we wouldn't be here to write about it now. Much the same if we decided to launch nukes during the cold war. And the same will be true if we make an evil ASI. The probability of electricity killing mankind (in mass) is near zero. The probability of nukes killing mankind is likely far closer to 1 than anyone would like to admit. With ASI, I have no clue, but from my understanding of the problem space, we're a lot farther from 0 then I am comfortable with.