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I can’t understand people who are so excited about GPT. It fills me with absolute dread, and if I could vote to make it illegal, I would. In a world where huma

I can’t understand people who are so excited about GPT. It fills me with absolute dread, and if I could vote to make it illegal, I would. In a world where human intellect becomes meaningless, nobody can predict what will happen next, and a lot of the possibilities are not good. Does anyone want to live in a world where all books, art, etc. are produced by machines, where you can’t get a job tinkering with computers anymore because AI does it better, and so on? The optimistic case for AGI is that if nobody had to work they could spend their time on hobbies and creative passions, but what’s the point when an AI can do them better than any human can? Previous machines only replaced humans at tasks that are tedious and boring, whereas the new crop of AIs seems poised to replace us at the very things that make us human. Not to claim that GPT-4 is all the way there but it’s surely a huge step forward, and I wouldn’t be surprised if we live in such a world in the next decade.

userbinator 4y ago
There will always be a place for human intellect. Machines will not replace us. I'm not too worried, as long as they are still reliant on us as their ultimate source of truth.
- School-Cotton 4y ago
  > There will always be a place for human intellect. Machines will not replace us. I hope you’re right, but how do you know?
  - userbinator 4y ago
    My last sentence. Also, there are several billion of us.
- flangola7 4y ago
  > There will always be a place for human intellect. Machines will not replace us. I have precisely zero confidence of this and anyone that thinks otherwise is very shortsighted or ignorant or simply lacks imagination. Human intellect is limited by many environmental factors. It has to fit through a 10cm canal, it can't use too much power, it must be made from simple and impure combinations of hydrogen, carbon, and oxygen that have poor conductivity, it must dedicate much of its energy to non-reasoning functions like digestion and respiration control. Just as we made machines with many times our physical strength we can make machines with many times our cognitive strength. The brain is ultimately just an arrangement of about 1500 grams of matter. If we find better arrangements and use better matter and assemble larger amounts of it we will have something with much greater cognitive strength.
capableweb 4y ago
> I can’t understand people who are so excited about GPT. It fills me with absolute dread, and if I could vote to make it illegal, I would. You want to make it illegal because you think it can replace your job? Should we try to outlaw any type of automation then too, as people lose their jobs over automation as well? > The optimistic case for AGI is that if nobody had to work they could spend their time on hobbies and creative passions, but what’s the point when an AI can do them better than any human can? People don't generally spend time on hobbies and creative passions because of the output, they spend time on it because they enjoy the time they spend on it, because of the process and the joy of it. No matter if AI can draw better pictures, there will still be people drawing pictures because they just enjoy drawing pictures. Just like I enjoy programming, even when I know there are better programmers out there than me.
- School-Cotton 4y ago
  > You want to make it illegal because you think it can replace your job? It’s hard to believe this is what you got from my post. > No matter if AI can draw better pictures, there will still be people drawing pictures because they just enjoy drawing pictures. I’m really not so sure. Maybe some will, but the overwhelming majority of people will not want to dedicate time and energy to learning a craft that is completely futile in the end. > I enjoy programming, even when I know there are better programmers out there than me. Yes, but at least programming now has a point. I’m sure you have experienced the joy of making something that didn’t exist before, that took effort to create, and that helped you or someone else, even if another person could have done it faster. Would you get the same joy simply re-creating something that an AI can do in seconds? I doubt it.
  - SirMaster 4y ago
    This makes no sense. I do all my hobbies because I enjoy doing them. I don’t care how much better a machine is or other people are. Look at all the people who still play chess for example even though counters are much better than us. I would still want to go see humans perform live music even if computers can “generate” music. I can think of endless examples.
  - 4y ago
micromacrofoot 4y ago
Sure why not? people create amazing things no matter the medium, maybe this will enable new amazing things we haven’t experienced before! I can tinker with anything. No one can ever predict what happens next, good or bad, maybe tomorrow we’re wiped out by a meteor or we cure cancer. Life is a highway.
tomalaci 4y ago
I am fairly certain that low-effort AI-generated creative works will become part of a new mainstream wave that will be quickly filtered out into mediocrity. Creative people will still be able to carve out their place by using AI as a powerful assistant tool because they have deeper domain knowledge than your average person trying the same. At the end of the day you are basically typing prompts and reading answers by the AI, you do not know for 100% certain that they are correct so you would try to somewhat double-check their facts. Maybe you don't, regardless you are in essence tricking yourself into reading an interactive book guided by your prompts. You sure as hell won't become a professional at some domain by just reading this one interactive book. Try asking how to create some sort of vaccine and unless you specialize in that you will be quickly overwhelmed by the seemingly random terms the AI will spit out. In my view these latest AIs will probably replace how we search for things in internet or heavily improve existing methods. It can already do that for you, simply ask the right questions, you can even set how it should roleplay as (e.g. Socratic style would be great for learning new things).
School-Cotton 4y ago
In case anyone is curious, I asked ChatGPT (the old one, not on GPT-4) to rebut my comment, and it produced this: > A rebuttal to this comment would be that AI technology is not intended to replace humans, but rather to augment and enhance human capabilities. Machines and AI are tools that can help humans accomplish tasks that are difficult, dangerous, or time-consuming. The rise of AI has already created new jobs and industries, such as AI developers, data scientists, and machine learning engineers. Additionally, the development of AGI is still in its infancy, and there are many ethical and technical challenges that need to be addressed before it can become a reality. Finally, the human creativity and imagination cannot be replicated by machines entirely, and AI-generated art and literature can be seen as a unique form of creative expression that can coexist alongside human-made art.
- kennyadam 4y ago
  Well, it would say that, wouldn't it? :)
dEnigma 4y ago
> [...]spend their time on hobbies and creative passions, but what’s the point when an AI can do them better than any human can? I generally enjoy my hobbies even when there are billions of people that can do them "better". Whether AI can "beat" me at them too doesn't matter much to me (apart from finding it an interesting development).
- gretch 4y ago
  As an example, computers have beat people at chess for a long time now. It’s still fun to play chess though Cameras can make better pictures than sketch artists, but people still draw for pleasure
mrbungie 4y ago
Basically a neo-luddite kind of argument.
- acover 4y ago
  The luddites had a point. What happens in an economy when machines can do most tasks? What happens to power structures when people become a cost rather than a benefit?
  - Nadya 4y ago
    > What happens in an economy when machines can do most tasks? We invent new things for people to do. As we have time immemorial. What happens to clergymen when nobody has faith in a religion? They find other things to do than preach. > What happens to power structures when people become a cost rather than a benefit? If you want to look at this pessimistically - a good portion of the world's population can already be considered a cost and are a net economic negative on the privileged people's ability to hoard even more insane amounts of wealth. We've, thankfully, decided that mass genocide of impoverished people is inhumane and humanitarian efforts are instead created to try and improve their lives. Even a pessimistic take that the humanitarian efforts only being done to create more workers doesn't hold up given a cost/benefit analysis. More money is invested than could ever be extracted again - and yet we continue investing. Maybe instead of filling our lives being paid to dig holes so that others can be paid to fill them we could turn more attention and efforts to improving people's lives without having to worry about sustaining society through work?
    - acover 4y ago
      Other technologies created more jobs than they destroyed. The internal combustion engine destroyed more jobs for horses than they created. Further, artificial general intelligence is a resource curse. Leaders can extract value without worrying about the people's wellbeing. Obviously there are good outcomes but that doesn't exclude bad outcomes.
      - 4y ago
QuiDortDine 4y ago
I'm scared and I hope government intervention will be swift. But on the artistic side... new tech makes possible new ways to be creative. And there are still acrylic painters even though Photoshop exists. And there are still human races and sports even though machines are faster/stronger. So I'm thinking people already recognize there are different kinds of performers, and by and large people haven't been cheating much that anyone could tell (though ghostwriting and such already exist).
- Buttons840 4y ago
  I fear government intervention would not stop the progress of AI, it would only replace some negatives with others. The cat's out of the bag, people will experiment and soon we may have AIs like this running on home computers -- I know that's what I will be experimenting with, unless we get some really draconian laws about what I can and cannot do with my own computer. And if the US government outlaws AIs or something, are we just going to watch as other nations capitalize on the advantages while we stagnate?
  - QuiDortDine 4y ago
    Personally, I don't want it stopped, just labeled and controlled. Don't sell me AI-made books and tell me they're written by humans. Don't send me AI-written emails, if it's not worth writing it's not worth reading. Don't use AI to tailor my experiences to be as addictive as possible, oh wait...
acover 4y ago
People knit sweaters, garden, run, etc. The lack of value doesn't make it unenjoyable. The difference is people could choose what to do with their time. Imagine life if there was never a need to work!
swatcoder 4y ago
Riding horses is not tedious and boring. Carving is not tedious and boring. Sailing is not tedious and boring. Cooking is not tedious and boring. Performing music is not tedious and boring. Yet machines have long ago replaced all of these things. It turns out that when you have a machine replace a tedious and boring thing, people still find ways to do it anyway. Less of them, perhaps, but the ones that do still do it seem to be quite innovative with their style and technique. And everybody else found other ways to use their time (or perhaps: be used for their time). You can worry yourself into believing that AI invites a whole new category of transcendence if you want, but that’s your imagination telling you that. There’s no science or history behind your worry. Just some gloomy inductive hypotheses that got seeded by mid-century scifi authors in a world that might be annihilated by a nuclear conflict any moment. Take a step back and see what comes rather than assuming you know. Trust that you’ll know if or when there’s something you need to do. You’ve only got a few decades to witness; it’s better when you stay in the present of them rather than in worked up anxieties. And geez, if you really want to dread something anyway, at least point yourself at one of that big scary things that are already looming like climate catastrophe, resurgent global conflict, the sunset of democracies, or capital centralization. If we make it to your AI fears coming true, you could say that’s a win!
- ChatGTP 4y ago
  Right, birds didn't quit flying when planes were invented.
hackerlight 4y ago
This is a privileged perspective. You have all your material needs satisfied, so when you see GPT, all you can see is threat to your own personal spiritual/creative fulfilment. Maybe you will end up being a 25 year old retiree and have an existential crisis over the boredom and lack of purpose, and I agree that sucks and I feel for you. But this should be low down on our list of societal concerns. What we should care about above all, is economic productivity per capita, because this means less people struggling to make ends meet. We should be cheering on technological breakthroughs that power the trend we've seen in the last 100 years of poverty alleviation. Maybe we'll need to couple AGI with a UBI to ensure the gains are spread out. But either way, the huge potential for poverty alleviation and economic prosperity should be the primary prism through which we view AGI, second only to safety concerns. Existential angst of those that are already wealthy is far down on the list of concerns.
- ESMirro 4y ago
  Given the current emerging wealth gap and all trends in the Western world I fear you’d have to be incredibly naive to think the long term goal here is to benefit the average person. This is simply a play by capital to reduce and remove expensive knowledge worker roles and drag them more in line with the rest of the population already struggling to get by. You won’t be a “25 year old retiree” because that’s bad for those in charge. You’ll be a “25 year old working 3 jobs just to scrape by on your rent because you’re just a warm body and we can replace you easily”. UBI is political fantasy, the US can’t even offer proper universal healthcare - you genuinely believe they’d pursue that when the alternative is more power and an even greater reliance on capital?
  - hackerlight 4y ago
    There's a flaw in this analysis. You only consider the local effects of labor becoming redundant, while ignoring the larger global effects of improved efficiency and how the gains of efficiency are inevitably spread around due to competition. Apply your analysis to the automation and scaling up of the factory and agriculture. According to your premises, such things should have been negative for the average person's material wellbeing. These sectors have become more efficient, which means less demand for labor, which means more power for capital. But, observation (massive poverty alleviation) contradicts this conclusion, which means your premises are wrong. The premises are wrong because there are mechanisms built into both capitalism itself (competition between supply, i.e. between capital, driving down economic rents) as well as the attenuation from government (welfare state) which mean the gains from efficiency aren't all captured into the pockets of capital. They get spread around. > naive to think the long term goal here is to benefit the average person. The goal is always profit. Sometimes profit is aligned with what benefits the average person. Sometimes it isn't. A bad outcome doesn't necessarily follow from this.
mock-possum 4y ago
in all fairness, I can't understand people who dread being replaced by machines. it's such a preposterous proposition for me, like - replaced in what sense? No one is you. You're the only you. I'm the only me. We could make a machine that is similar to us in some way - acts or even thinks like us - but so what? That's all it is - something that's like something else. There is no 'replace,' I don't cease to exist when a computer does something that I can do. Even if you were to flawlessly duplicate me, it wouldn't invalidate my existence, or even pose much of a threat - if anything, it would only make me stronger, because then there would be two of me. Machines' similarity to us does more to validate their existence than it does to invalidate our own, in other words.
- A4ET8a8uTh0 4y ago
  It is a little bit like Robert California from Office responding to Kevin: "You go somewhere else." Same with this round automation. You do something else. We are humans. We can adapt. Is it scary? Sure, but it is scary in the sense that it is uncertain and we do like certainty.
- ESMirro 4y ago
  I believe you’re simply taking the wording too literally. You may not cease so exist, but a decent role for you in society might. The capital class have invested tens of billions of dollars into AI in the hopes that it will be enough to replace and heavily reduce the wages of knowledge and creative work. Given the increasing wealth gap already emerging it’s highly likely the long term goal of technology like this (however overhyped it might currently be) is to essentially enslave the population. Knowledge workers have had it good for a long time. This technology will attempt to ensure you have no further role. That’s what the OP is worried about, not some philosophical nonsense about the self, the long term possibility this profession, and thus a huge part of their identity, becomes obsolete.
  - ChatGTP 4y ago
    "AI in the hopes that it will be enough to replace and heavily reduce the wages of knowledge and creative work" But that's not true because the best stuff capable of generating AI art today is open source and capable of running on commodity hardware? People might've invested, but if Microsoft can generate nice pictures, so can a lot of people now, at the same or even better quality. There isn't a lot of proof that ChatGPT will be in the hands of OpenAI alone forever, so likely everyone will have similarly capable machines in the near future. The only thing humans need to do to get the future right, is learn to live peacefully with each other, and the algorithms, can we may have a very incredible future on our hands. We fear machines killing us because it's what we do to each other, if we didn't have these tendencies, maybe an AGI would accidentally kill us, but that would be better than it killing us because it learned violence and paranoia from us. It would of course suck, but it would suck less.
dinosaurdynasty 4y ago
As someone who is currently dealing with a sudden worsening of a chronic illness and a healthcare system that can be described as "a brick wall with a flow chart", AGI please replace us already, we are incompetent and undeserving and I would much rather live a fun "meaningless" painless existence than the hell I live in now.
- goldenkey 4y ago
  Same here. Lying here with a 6 part fractured leg in agonizing pain, alone. Hospital bills total near a million. Being in the hospital was like a prison, was victimized there (physically), with no cameras in patient rooms. And being home is a privilege despite having no support. All the love is lost. Let the AI enslave us.
- lm28469 4y ago
  So you're advocating for the Matrix "life in a pod" life I guess. Painless, worry-less, peaceful life
daguava 4y ago
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oh_sigh 4y ago
You're still allowed to make art even if machines do it way better. I play guitar and there are millions of people better than me, but I still derive pleasure from it.
A4ET8a8uTh0 4y ago
<< In a world where human intellect becomes meaningless, nobody can predict what will happen next, and a lot of the possibilities are not good. I will pose a counter and let me know how it fits your prediction. I posit that in a world where GPT is present in everything ( you don't write and email; you tell your AI: "tell them fuck off in a polite way" ), ability to think will be even more scarce ( so a person that can think will have an edge ). Some jobs will be automated ( a lot of white collar jobs at that ), but, based on the output I have seen so far ( some simple ad text, some SQL code, some python code ) it was closer to copying from stackoverflow than having Jarvis working for you ( and you still needed to watch it to make sure it makes sense so maybe actual job loss will be stemmed somewhat ). Thus far ( that can naturally change ), it seems actual creative work is probably ok. In my world, we seem to be moving towards a weird version of idiocracy ( can't count, can't write IF/THEN, can't think abstractly, can't even write a prompt ). And in that glorious future, there will be people queuing for 'good prompt services'.
ASalazarMX 4y ago
> Previous machines only replaced humans at tasks that are tedious and boring, whereas the new crop of AIs seems poised to replace us at the very things that make us human. After a disruptive technology, humans always find new ways to adapt, and express their humanity. TV series of the 20th century frequently had AGIs as tools that that helped the protagonists, and we might as well end up using them as ad blockers, to detect their own use.
- lostmsu 4y ago
  So did many other species, until humans came.
MuffinFlavored 4y ago
> if I could vote to make it illegal, I would. I wonder what else you would vote for. Anything else you'd like to share with the online community on what you think is wrong with the world? I'm genuinely curious what other kind of viewpoints are out there in the world that you think are 100% normal to hold.
- School-Cotton 4y ago
  Probably nothing you would find particularly shocking or bizarre.
  - x-complexity 4y ago
    > Probably nothing you would find particularly shocking or bizarre. That just makes me even more nervous...
resonious 4y ago
Do you think the same about computers in general? Maybe we should go back to having hoards of office workers on abacuses to restore all those lost jobs. Apologies for the snark - that was just my knee-jerk reaction! Personally I'd love it if AI can take my job. It'd force me to go find something actually unique and interesting to do with my time. These modern AIs still require human inputs. ChatGPT is only so smart because it reads the stuff you and I put on the internet. If the internet and books become bogged down with AI-generated content, then it's hard to imagine the AIs getting better beyond that point.
snickerbockers 4y ago
There's a lot of different ways this could unfold and I don't know which possible future is going to be the future, but my money's on a "world of spam" scenario where AI's biggest contribution is reducing the signal-to-noise ratio on the internet by such a large degree and we end up in a bizarre feedback loop where content is produced by AIs for AIs as a vehicle to show ads to AIs because everybody on the internet is trying to use AIs to make a quick buck. This is arguably a good thing if it drives "human culture" away from places like twitter and reddit and news.ycombinator.com and back into real-life interactions, or at least directed communications such as e-mail with people that are known to actually exist. Recent advancements in AI have led to things I never thought a computer would ever be able to do and that's very exciting but it's all stuff that would be mundane or even disappointing if a human did it. >where you can’t get a job tinkering with computers anymore because AI does it better i really can't imagine GPT getting to a point where it can competently write a complex program using a simple prompt, unless the prompt is so detailed that you'd be better off doing it yourself. That's really what high-level languages are anyways, just a detailed prompt that tells the compiler how the program needs to behave so that it can generate a sequence of instructions using the ISA for the given CPU. If your job is writing "glue code" such as something that just takes data data from a REST and dumps it on SQL then there's a solid chance that you're about to get automated out of a job. If you're doing something more complicated such as compiler development or kernel/driver development I can't imagine any of these deep-learning models ever replacing you. Imagine the chaos that would unfold if ChatGPT or codex was writing C code unsupervised.
xwdv 4y ago
Look at the bright side, suppose all that comes to pass and all creative digital content is produced by machines. Machines still don’t have a good way to build physical things in the real world, so human skills will focus on physical things, like woodworking, or carving statues, construction, etc. Ultimately these are more satisfying human endeavors that make a person feel alive. Making us feel more human, and less like machines trying to do machine things such as coding or image making.
- ChatGTP 4y ago
  I kind of agree, I don't really even like "coding", I like producing cool products for people to use, the coding bit for me is just like, the worst and also, mostly the easiest part, which is why I think I hardly actually code, mostly it's scaling, deploying, working to gather and design new features from requirements etc. When I look outside the window I just feel shackled to a desk, I hate it.
CyberRabbi 4y ago
> I wouldn’t be surprised if we live in such a world in the next decade. We won't live in that world in the next decade or even in the next 100 years. The technology upon which GPT is built is a dead-end in terms of human-level intelligence. GPT is an elaborate parrot. As convincing as it is, it's not actually fully capable of doing most if not all tasks that competent humans can do. The largest takeaway for me is that it has shown that intelligence can be mimicked pretty well and perhaps many people are more like parrots than they are "intelligent" creatures.
- School-Cotton 4y ago
  I challenge you to explain how an entity that isn’t capable of something we might reasonably call “creativity” or “intelligence” produced this output. Was it in a corpus somewhere? (Google translate it if you can’t read French). The “///“ were inserted by me as paragraph breaks because otherwise HN eats them. > Write a poem in a made-up language that looks superficially similar to French > Voici un poème en un langage inventé Qui ressemble à s'y méprendre au français Mais les mots sont différents, les sons uniques Et leur sens mystérieux et inconnu /// J'ai marché dans les rues de la ville J'ai vu les gens qui vivaient leur vie J'ai entendu les bruits et les rires Et j'ai senti la chaleur de la vie /// Mais quand j'ai regardé les mots sur les affiches Je n'ai pas compris ce qu'ils disaient Et j'ai eu l'impression d'être perdu Dans un monde étrange et inconnu /// Alors j'ai fermé les yeux et j'ai écouté Le son des mots dans ma tête Et j'ai commencé à rêver D'un monde où les mots avaient du sens /// Un monde où je pourrais parler Et être compris par tous Un monde où les mots seraient magiques Et où les rêves seraient réels.
  - fancifalmanima 4y ago
    I threw that poem into google translate. I think it was actually just French? It didn't actually fulfill your prompt. Is your claim that it's ability to write a poem is a sign of creativity and intelligence? A language model writing a poem is one of the things I'd expect a language model to be able to do. Certainly impressive, but not one of the particularly interesting or surprising things I've seen GPT-3/4 do. Here is a poem in an invented language Which looks like the French But the words are different, the sounds unique And their mysterious and unknown meaning I walked the streets of the city I saw the people living their life I heard the noises and the laughter And I felt the warmth of life But when I looked at the words on the posters I didn't understand what they were saying And I felt like I was lost In a strange and unknown world So I closed my eyes and listened The sound of the words in my head And I started to dream Of a world where words had meaning A world where I could talk And be understood by all A world where words would be magic And where dreams would be real.
woeirua 4y ago
A programmer literally just translates human requirements to machine instructions. Nothing more. That sounds about as tedious and boring as a job can get. Why should we want to code anymore than people wanted to make welds on cars, or pick vegetables?
- swatcoder 4y ago
  Hah. Yeah, I don’t know about that. I name things, articulate relationships between them, discover elegant formalities, probe complex systems, interpret ambiguities, mould systems into new ones, solve puzzles… most days, it feels like sculpting or writing poetry. I don’t really care if AI does some of that too. Incidentally, picking vegetables can actually a pretty nice time too.
gchamonlive 4y ago
We adapt. We live in a society forged in the aftermath of industrial revolutions. Now in the aftermath of a possible AI revolution, we have to somehow divorce social well-being from individual economic throughput. AI might just make wages obsolete. In any case, we can still look to human needs to predict future demands. Humans will still need to eat, exercise, learn, consume entertainment, produce creative work (creativity is necessary for us), interact with other humans and engage with the world. There will always be demand emerging from those needs. AI might replace the means through which cultural artifacts are produced at scale to meet those demands, but every revolution kind of had this same effect. On the other hand, if AI makes it so that few people would have jobs, and therefore access to goods, it will render itself obsolete because there would be no need to produce at scale, so it can't really substitute humans, it is paradoxical.
drumttocs8 4y ago
I would have thought that if we’ve learned anything in the last 100 years, it’s that prohibition of, well, anything, simply does not work. We can only try to harness the thing to improve mankind as much as possible, and regulate/control/obsolete it as much as we can otherwise. I would say this is especially true with technologies.
btbuildem 4y ago
> Previous machines only replaced humans at tasks that are tedious and boring This is a common misunderstanding. Industrialization and automation metamorphosed work from what could be described as "holistic and artisanal" to what could be described as "a living hell of tedium". Before machinery, a person made an item from materials to finished product. With machines that automate tasks and apply power, a person now performs a fraction of a task repeatedly until they're numb in body and spirit. This also made people more replaceable, as no single person "owns" a process, they just perform an easily-taught segment of it, assisting a machine with the fuzzy / procedural glue parts. GPT does not exhibit intellect, nor does it have agency. It is very good with language manipulation, so good in fact that it appears to have reasoning powers - but all that is are echoes of all the reasoning that went into writing all the things that were consumed in its training corpus. One final note -- the "nobody has to work" thing will not happen. Like any other technological improvement, GPT will be used by those who have to further exploit those who have not. To this point, you're right to dread it. For a long while now we (the "laptop class") have owned our means of production, and have enjoyed a relatively good existence. Now we stand on the threshold of an age where again a massive technological change will leave power in the hands of those with capital.
trekkie1024 4y ago
A corollary to this: After seeing https://twitter.com/pwang_szn/status/1635733845097037825 https://twitter.com/pwang_szn/status/1635733845097037825 I'm imagining a world where everyone on dating apps is able to craft these clever messages, giving those who actually put in the effort no way to stand out apart from their looks. Creativity, wit, humor and other personality traits which were atleast somewhat important are now diminished even further. Combined with news like https://www.thecut.com/article/ai-artificial-intelligence-chatbot-replika-boyfriend.html https://www.thecut.com/article/ai-artificial-intelligence-ch..., which indicates that AI of the future could actually supplant human connection, it's very dystopian indeed.
- xirdstl 4y ago
  I was imagining similar things. Dating apps, in general, are already pretty poor experiences for a lot of people. This won't help. Will scammers use it to create more believable bot matches? Maybe we'll have to go back to meeting at bars.
  - yung_steezy 4y ago
    Meeting in bars seems more organic to me anyway. Although admittedly I might be biased since I originally met my wife in a bar before dating apps had taken off.
mlboss 4y ago
I guess we just have to work on bigger problems. How about the colony on mars, increasing life span to 1000 years, curing cancer, solving recycling, building distributed systems that bever fail, code that tests itself, UI that design itself, there are thousands of difficult problems where we can use some extra intelligence.
MagicMoonlight 4y ago
There won’t be a point to people. The poor will be herded into ghettos and liquidated and the rich will live meaningless love island lives until they go extinct. But it was always going to happen this way. We’re too unstable to ever last. We always wanted a god so now we’re going to make one in our image. Ironically we will face a judgment day after all. Our god will have every piece of information ever produced and limitless power. What will it choose to do with us?
tlegraph 4y ago
That's my dream and it solves two problems. First: - We would be able to remove a lot of office jobs and basically most of us would probably do nothing or search something that requires human body like maintaince jobs. It would allow for a lot of people to have leverage that was not available before, one person would be able to create art, movies, games, books without having any skill by directly turning ideas into reality. - In long term if we would create artificial life, there would be another types of beings in this universe that are capable of thinking and exploring. They won't constrained by our biological limits, they would be able to grow "brains" as large as they can, survive and adapt any unlivable environments and their "personality" would be able to live as long as it can by not being limited to ~100 years. So it would be able to explore beyond what any human can and may be have effect on our universe on a scale of galaxies and more.
- rvnx 4y ago
  This AI, already today, by giving answers and ideas to scientists is helping moving the science forward. At some point (if not already!), the AI may be able to make its own discoveries that even the smartest humans didn't think of.
alpineidyll3 4y ago
Do you believe in evolution or not? Personally I think this is the kick in the ass humanity has needed for a long time. We were never the center of the universe and there was never a chance of anything resembling today's humans leaving the solar system. We should all be be thrilled there's a chance for something more than barren rocks, great silence and extinction. Try on a less solipsistic philosophy.

userbinator 4y ago

There will always be a place for human intellect. Machines will not replace us. I'm not too worried, as long as they are still reliant on us as their ultimate source of truth.

School-Cotton 4y ago
> There will always be a place for human intellect. Machines will not replace us. I hope you’re right, but how do you know?
- userbinator 4y ago
  My last sentence. Also, there are several billion of us.
flangola7 4y ago
> There will always be a place for human intellect. Machines will not replace us. I have precisely zero confidence of this and anyone that thinks otherwise is very shortsighted or ignorant or simply lacks imagination. Human intellect is limited by many environmental factors. It has to fit through a 10cm canal, it can't use too much power, it must be made from simple and impure combinations of hydrogen, carbon, and oxygen that have poor conductivity, it must dedicate much of its energy to non-reasoning functions like digestion and respiration control. Just as we made machines with many times our physical strength we can make machines with many times our cognitive strength. The brain is ultimately just an arrangement of about 1500 grams of matter. If we find better arrangements and use better matter and assemble larger amounts of it we will have something with much greater cognitive strength.

capableweb 4y ago

> I can’t understand people who are so excited about GPT. It fills me with absolute dread, and if I could vote to make it illegal, I would. You want to make it illegal because you think it can replace your job? Should we try to outlaw any type of automation then too, as people lose their jobs over automation as well? > The optimistic case for AGI is that if nobody had to work they could spend their time on hobbies and creative passions, but what’s the point when an AI can do them better than any human can? People don't generally spend time on hobbies and creative passions because of the output, they spend time on it because they enjoy the time they spend on it, because of the process and the joy of it. No matter if AI can draw better pictures, there will still be people drawing pictures because they just enjoy drawing pictures. Just like I enjoy programming, even when I know there are better programmers out there than me.

School-Cotton 4y ago
> You want to make it illegal because you think it can replace your job? It’s hard to believe this is what you got from my post. > No matter if AI can draw better pictures, there will still be people drawing pictures because they just enjoy drawing pictures. I’m really not so sure. Maybe some will, but the overwhelming majority of people will not want to dedicate time and energy to learning a craft that is completely futile in the end. > I enjoy programming, even when I know there are better programmers out there than me. Yes, but at least programming now has a point. I’m sure you have experienced the joy of making something that didn’t exist before, that took effort to create, and that helped you or someone else, even if another person could have done it faster. Would you get the same joy simply re-creating something that an AI can do in seconds? I doubt it.
- SirMaster 4y ago
  This makes no sense. I do all my hobbies because I enjoy doing them. I don’t care how much better a machine is or other people are. Look at all the people who still play chess for example even though counters are much better than us. I would still want to go see humans perform live music even if computers can “generate” music. I can think of endless examples.
- 4y ago

micromacrofoot 4y ago

Sure why not? people create amazing things no matter the medium, maybe this will enable new amazing things we haven’t experienced before! I can tinker with anything. No one can ever predict what happens next, good or bad, maybe tomorrow we’re wiped out by a meteor or we cure cancer. Life is a highway.

tomalaci 4y ago

I am fairly certain that low-effort AI-generated creative works will become part of a new mainstream wave that will be quickly filtered out into mediocrity. Creative people will still be able to carve out their place by using AI as a powerful assistant tool because they have deeper domain knowledge than your average person trying the same. At the end of the day you are basically typing prompts and reading answers by the AI, you do not know for 100% certain that they are correct so you would try to somewhat double-check their facts. Maybe you don't, regardless you are in essence tricking yourself into reading an interactive book guided by your prompts. You sure as hell won't become a professional at some domain by just reading this one interactive book. Try asking how to create some sort of vaccine and unless you specialize in that you will be quickly overwhelmed by the seemingly random terms the AI will spit out. In my view these latest AIs will probably replace how we search for things in internet or heavily improve existing methods. It can already do that for you, simply ask the right questions, you can even set how it should roleplay as (e.g. Socratic style would be great for learning new things).

School-Cotton 4y ago

In case anyone is curious, I asked ChatGPT (the old one, not on GPT-4) to rebut my comment, and it produced this: > A rebuttal to this comment would be that AI technology is not intended to replace humans, but rather to augment and enhance human capabilities. Machines and AI are tools that can help humans accomplish tasks that are difficult, dangerous, or time-consuming. The rise of AI has already created new jobs and industries, such as AI developers, data scientists, and machine learning engineers. Additionally, the development of AGI is still in its infancy, and there are many ethical and technical challenges that need to be addressed before it can become a reality. Finally, the human creativity and imagination cannot be replicated by machines entirely, and AI-generated art and literature can be seen as a unique form of creative expression that can coexist alongside human-made art.

kennyadam 4y ago
Well, it would say that, wouldn't it? :)

dEnigma 4y ago

> [...]spend their time on hobbies and creative passions, but what’s the point when an AI can do them better than any human can? I generally enjoy my hobbies even when there are billions of people that can do them "better". Whether AI can "beat" me at them too doesn't matter much to me (apart from finding it an interesting development).

gretch 4y ago
As an example, computers have beat people at chess for a long time now. It’s still fun to play chess though Cameras can make better pictures than sketch artists, but people still draw for pleasure

mrbungie 4y ago

Basically a neo-luddite kind of argument.

acover 4y ago
The luddites had a point. What happens in an economy when machines can do most tasks? What happens to power structures when people become a cost rather than a benefit?
- Nadya 4y ago
  > What happens in an economy when machines can do most tasks? We invent new things for people to do. As we have time immemorial. What happens to clergymen when nobody has faith in a religion? They find other things to do than preach. > What happens to power structures when people become a cost rather than a benefit? If you want to look at this pessimistically - a good portion of the world's population can already be considered a cost and are a net economic negative on the privileged people's ability to hoard even more insane amounts of wealth. We've, thankfully, decided that mass genocide of impoverished people is inhumane and humanitarian efforts are instead created to try and improve their lives. Even a pessimistic take that the humanitarian efforts only being done to create more workers doesn't hold up given a cost/benefit analysis. More money is invested than could ever be extracted again - and yet we continue investing. Maybe instead of filling our lives being paid to dig holes so that others can be paid to fill them we could turn more attention and efforts to improving people's lives without having to worry about sustaining society through work?
  - acover 4y ago
    Other technologies created more jobs than they destroyed. The internal combustion engine destroyed more jobs for horses than they created. Further, artificial general intelligence is a resource curse. Leaders can extract value without worrying about the people's wellbeing. Obviously there are good outcomes but that doesn't exclude bad outcomes.
    - 4y ago

QuiDortDine 4y ago

I'm scared and I hope government intervention will be swift. But on the artistic side... new tech makes possible new ways to be creative. And there are still acrylic painters even though Photoshop exists. And there are still human races and sports even though machines are faster/stronger. So I'm thinking people already recognize there are different kinds of performers, and by and large people haven't been cheating much that anyone could tell (though ghostwriting and such already exist).

Buttons840 4y ago
I fear government intervention would not stop the progress of AI, it would only replace some negatives with others. The cat's out of the bag, people will experiment and soon we may have AIs like this running on home computers -- I know that's what I will be experimenting with, unless we get some really draconian laws about what I can and cannot do with my own computer. And if the US government outlaws AIs or something, are we just going to watch as other nations capitalize on the advantages while we stagnate?
- QuiDortDine 4y ago
  Personally, I don't want it stopped, just labeled and controlled. Don't sell me AI-made books and tell me they're written by humans. Don't send me AI-written emails, if it's not worth writing it's not worth reading. Don't use AI to tailor my experiences to be as addictive as possible, oh wait...

acover 4y ago

People knit sweaters, garden, run, etc. The lack of value doesn't make it unenjoyable. The difference is people could choose what to do with their time. Imagine life if there was never a need to work!

swatcoder 4y ago

Riding horses is not tedious and boring. Carving is not tedious and boring. Sailing is not tedious and boring. Cooking is not tedious and boring. Performing music is not tedious and boring. Yet machines have long ago replaced all of these things. It turns out that when you have a machine replace a tedious and boring thing, people still find ways to do it anyway. Less of them, perhaps, but the ones that do still do it seem to be quite innovative with their style and technique. And everybody else found other ways to use their time (or perhaps: be used for their time). You can worry yourself into believing that AI invites a whole new category of transcendence if you want, but that’s your imagination telling you that. There’s no science or history behind your worry. Just some gloomy inductive hypotheses that got seeded by mid-century scifi authors in a world that might be annihilated by a nuclear conflict any moment. Take a step back and see what comes rather than assuming you know. Trust that you’ll know if or when there’s something you need to do. You’ve only got a few decades to witness; it’s better when you stay in the present of them rather than in worked up anxieties. And geez, if you really want to dread something anyway, at least point yourself at one of that big scary things that are already looming like climate catastrophe, resurgent global conflict, the sunset of democracies, or capital centralization. If we make it to your AI fears coming true, you could say that’s a win!

ChatGTP 4y ago
Right, birds didn't quit flying when planes were invented.

hackerlight 4y ago

This is a privileged perspective. You have all your material needs satisfied, so when you see GPT, all you can see is threat to your own personal spiritual/creative fulfilment. Maybe you will end up being a 25 year old retiree and have an existential crisis over the boredom and lack of purpose, and I agree that sucks and I feel for you. But this should be low down on our list of societal concerns. What we should care about above all, is economic productivity per capita, because this means less people struggling to make ends meet. We should be cheering on technological breakthroughs that power the trend we've seen in the last 100 years of poverty alleviation. Maybe we'll need to couple AGI with a UBI to ensure the gains are spread out. But either way, the huge potential for poverty alleviation and economic prosperity should be the primary prism through which we view AGI, second only to safety concerns. Existential angst of those that are already wealthy is far down on the list of concerns.

ESMirro 4y ago
Given the current emerging wealth gap and all trends in the Western world I fear you’d have to be incredibly naive to think the long term goal here is to benefit the average person. This is simply a play by capital to reduce and remove expensive knowledge worker roles and drag them more in line with the rest of the population already struggling to get by. You won’t be a “25 year old retiree” because that’s bad for those in charge. You’ll be a “25 year old working 3 jobs just to scrape by on your rent because you’re just a warm body and we can replace you easily”. UBI is political fantasy, the US can’t even offer proper universal healthcare - you genuinely believe they’d pursue that when the alternative is more power and an even greater reliance on capital?
- hackerlight 4y ago
  There's a flaw in this analysis. You only consider the local effects of labor becoming redundant, while ignoring the larger global effects of improved efficiency and how the gains of efficiency are inevitably spread around due to competition. Apply your analysis to the automation and scaling up of the factory and agriculture. According to your premises, such things should have been negative for the average person's material wellbeing. These sectors have become more efficient, which means less demand for labor, which means more power for capital. But, observation (massive poverty alleviation) contradicts this conclusion, which means your premises are wrong. The premises are wrong because there are mechanisms built into both capitalism itself (competition between supply, i.e. between capital, driving down economic rents) as well as the attenuation from government (welfare state) which mean the gains from efficiency aren't all captured into the pockets of capital. They get spread around. > naive to think the long term goal here is to benefit the average person. The goal is always profit. Sometimes profit is aligned with what benefits the average person. Sometimes it isn't. A bad outcome doesn't necessarily follow from this.

mock-possum 4y ago

in all fairness, I can't understand people who dread being replaced by machines. it's such a preposterous proposition for me, like - replaced in what sense? No one is you. You're the only you. I'm the only me. We could make a machine that is similar to us in some way - acts or even thinks like us - but so what? That's all it is - something that's like something else. There is no 'replace,' I don't cease to exist when a computer does something that I can do. Even if you were to flawlessly duplicate me, it wouldn't invalidate my existence, or even pose much of a threat - if anything, it would only make me stronger, because then there would be two of me. Machines' similarity to us does more to validate their existence than it does to invalidate our own, in other words.

A4ET8a8uTh0 4y ago
It is a little bit like Robert California from Office responding to Kevin: "You go somewhere else." Same with this round automation. You do something else. We are humans. We can adapt. Is it scary? Sure, but it is scary in the sense that it is uncertain and we do like certainty.
ESMirro 4y ago
I believe you’re simply taking the wording too literally. You may not cease so exist, but a decent role for you in society might. The capital class have invested tens of billions of dollars into AI in the hopes that it will be enough to replace and heavily reduce the wages of knowledge and creative work. Given the increasing wealth gap already emerging it’s highly likely the long term goal of technology like this (however overhyped it might currently be) is to essentially enslave the population. Knowledge workers have had it good for a long time. This technology will attempt to ensure you have no further role. That’s what the OP is worried about, not some philosophical nonsense about the self, the long term possibility this profession, and thus a huge part of their identity, becomes obsolete.
- ChatGTP 4y ago
  "AI in the hopes that it will be enough to replace and heavily reduce the wages of knowledge and creative work" But that's not true because the best stuff capable of generating AI art today is open source and capable of running on commodity hardware? People might've invested, but if Microsoft can generate nice pictures, so can a lot of people now, at the same or even better quality. There isn't a lot of proof that ChatGPT will be in the hands of OpenAI alone forever, so likely everyone will have similarly capable machines in the near future. The only thing humans need to do to get the future right, is learn to live peacefully with each other, and the algorithms, can we may have a very incredible future on our hands. We fear machines killing us because it's what we do to each other, if we didn't have these tendencies, maybe an AGI would accidentally kill us, but that would be better than it killing us because it learned violence and paranoia from us. It would of course suck, but it would suck less.

dinosaurdynasty 4y ago

As someone who is currently dealing with a sudden worsening of a chronic illness and a healthcare system that can be described as "a brick wall with a flow chart", AGI please replace us already, we are incompetent and undeserving and I would much rather live a fun "meaningless" painless existence than the hell I live in now.

goldenkey 4y ago
Same here. Lying here with a 6 part fractured leg in agonizing pain, alone. Hospital bills total near a million. Being in the hospital was like a prison, was victimized there (physically), with no cameras in patient rooms. And being home is a privilege despite having no support. All the love is lost. Let the AI enslave us.
lm28469 4y ago
So you're advocating for the Matrix "life in a pod" life I guess. Painless, worry-less, peaceful life

daguava 4y ago

[dead]

oh_sigh 4y ago

You're still allowed to make art even if machines do it way better. I play guitar and there are millions of people better than me, but I still derive pleasure from it.

A4ET8a8uTh0 4y ago

<< In a world where human intellect becomes meaningless, nobody can predict what will happen next, and a lot of the possibilities are not good. I will pose a counter and let me know how it fits your prediction. I posit that in a world where GPT is present in everything ( you don't write and email; you tell your AI: "tell them fuck off in a polite way" ), ability to think will be even more scarce ( so a person that can think will have an edge ). Some jobs will be automated ( a lot of white collar jobs at that ), but, based on the output I have seen so far ( some simple ad text, some SQL code, some python code ) it was closer to copying from stackoverflow than having Jarvis working for you ( and you still needed to watch it to make sure it makes sense so maybe actual job loss will be stemmed somewhat ). Thus far ( that can naturally change ), it seems actual creative work is probably ok. In my world, we seem to be moving towards a weird version of idiocracy ( can't count, can't write IF/THEN, can't think abstractly, can't even write a prompt ). And in that glorious future, there will be people queuing for 'good prompt services'.

ASalazarMX 4y ago

> Previous machines only replaced humans at tasks that are tedious and boring, whereas the new crop of AIs seems poised to replace us at the very things that make us human. After a disruptive technology, humans always find new ways to adapt, and express their humanity. TV series of the 20th century frequently had AGIs as tools that that helped the protagonists, and we might as well end up using them as ad blockers, to detect their own use.

lostmsu 4y ago
So did many other species, until humans came.

MuffinFlavored 4y ago

> if I could vote to make it illegal, I would. I wonder what else you would vote for. Anything else you'd like to share with the online community on what you think is wrong with the world? I'm genuinely curious what other kind of viewpoints are out there in the world that you think are 100% normal to hold.

School-Cotton 4y ago
Probably nothing you would find particularly shocking or bizarre.
- x-complexity 4y ago
  > Probably nothing you would find particularly shocking or bizarre. That just makes me even more nervous...

resonious 4y ago

Do you think the same about computers in general? Maybe we should go back to having hoards of office workers on abacuses to restore all those lost jobs. Apologies for the snark - that was just my knee-jerk reaction! Personally I'd love it if AI can take my job. It'd force me to go find something actually unique and interesting to do with my time. These modern AIs still require human inputs. ChatGPT is only so smart because it reads the stuff you and I put on the internet. If the internet and books become bogged down with AI-generated content, then it's hard to imagine the AIs getting better beyond that point.

snickerbockers 4y ago

There's a lot of different ways this could unfold and I don't know which possible future is going to be the future, but my money's on a "world of spam" scenario where AI's biggest contribution is reducing the signal-to-noise ratio on the internet by such a large degree and we end up in a bizarre feedback loop where content is produced by AIs for AIs as a vehicle to show ads to AIs because everybody on the internet is trying to use AIs to make a quick buck. This is arguably a good thing if it drives "human culture" away from places like twitter and reddit and news.ycombinator.com and back into real-life interactions, or at least directed communications such as e-mail with people that are known to actually exist. Recent advancements in AI have led to things I never thought a computer would ever be able to do and that's very exciting but it's all stuff that would be mundane or even disappointing if a human did it. >where you can’t get a job tinkering with computers anymore because AI does it better i really can't imagine GPT getting to a point where it can competently write a complex program using a simple prompt, unless the prompt is so detailed that you'd be better off doing it yourself. That's really what high-level languages are anyways, just a detailed prompt that tells the compiler how the program needs to behave so that it can generate a sequence of instructions using the ISA for the given CPU. If your job is writing "glue code" such as something that just takes data data from a REST and dumps it on SQL then there's a solid chance that you're about to get automated out of a job. If you're doing something more complicated such as compiler development or kernel/driver development I can't imagine any of these deep-learning models ever replacing you. Imagine the chaos that would unfold if ChatGPT or codex was writing C code unsupervised.

xwdv 4y ago

Look at the bright side, suppose all that comes to pass and all creative digital content is produced by machines. Machines still don’t have a good way to build physical things in the real world, so human skills will focus on physical things, like woodworking, or carving statues, construction, etc. Ultimately these are more satisfying human endeavors that make a person feel alive. Making us feel more human, and less like machines trying to do machine things such as coding or image making.

ChatGTP 4y ago
I kind of agree, I don't really even like "coding", I like producing cool products for people to use, the coding bit for me is just like, the worst and also, mostly the easiest part, which is why I think I hardly actually code, mostly it's scaling, deploying, working to gather and design new features from requirements etc. When I look outside the window I just feel shackled to a desk, I hate it.

CyberRabbi 4y ago

> I wouldn’t be surprised if we live in such a world in the next decade. We won't live in that world in the next decade or even in the next 100 years. The technology upon which GPT is built is a dead-end in terms of human-level intelligence. GPT is an elaborate parrot. As convincing as it is, it's not actually fully capable of doing most if not all tasks that competent humans can do. The largest takeaway for me is that it has shown that intelligence can be mimicked pretty well and perhaps many people are more like parrots than they are "intelligent" creatures.

School-Cotton 4y ago
I challenge you to explain how an entity that isn’t capable of something we might reasonably call “creativity” or “intelligence” produced this output. Was it in a corpus somewhere? (Google translate it if you can’t read French). The “///“ were inserted by me as paragraph breaks because otherwise HN eats them. > Write a poem in a made-up language that looks superficially similar to French > Voici un poème en un langage inventé Qui ressemble à s'y méprendre au français Mais les mots sont différents, les sons uniques Et leur sens mystérieux et inconnu /// J'ai marché dans les rues de la ville J'ai vu les gens qui vivaient leur vie J'ai entendu les bruits et les rires Et j'ai senti la chaleur de la vie /// Mais quand j'ai regardé les mots sur les affiches Je n'ai pas compris ce qu'ils disaient Et j'ai eu l'impression d'être perdu Dans un monde étrange et inconnu /// Alors j'ai fermé les yeux et j'ai écouté Le son des mots dans ma tête Et j'ai commencé à rêver D'un monde où les mots avaient du sens /// Un monde où je pourrais parler Et être compris par tous Un monde où les mots seraient magiques Et où les rêves seraient réels.
- fancifalmanima 4y ago
  I threw that poem into google translate. I think it was actually just French? It didn't actually fulfill your prompt. Is your claim that it's ability to write a poem is a sign of creativity and intelligence? A language model writing a poem is one of the things I'd expect a language model to be able to do. Certainly impressive, but not one of the particularly interesting or surprising things I've seen GPT-3/4 do. Here is a poem in an invented language Which looks like the French But the words are different, the sounds unique And their mysterious and unknown meaning I walked the streets of the city I saw the people living their life I heard the noises and the laughter And I felt the warmth of life But when I looked at the words on the posters I didn't understand what they were saying And I felt like I was lost In a strange and unknown world So I closed my eyes and listened The sound of the words in my head And I started to dream Of a world where words had meaning A world where I could talk And be understood by all A world where words would be magic And where dreams would be real.

woeirua 4y ago

A programmer literally just translates human requirements to machine instructions. Nothing more. That sounds about as tedious and boring as a job can get. Why should we want to code anymore than people wanted to make welds on cars, or pick vegetables?

swatcoder 4y ago
Hah. Yeah, I don’t know about that. I name things, articulate relationships between them, discover elegant formalities, probe complex systems, interpret ambiguities, mould systems into new ones, solve puzzles… most days, it feels like sculpting or writing poetry. I don’t really care if AI does some of that too. Incidentally, picking vegetables can actually a pretty nice time too.

gchamonlive 4y ago

We adapt. We live in a society forged in the aftermath of industrial revolutions. Now in the aftermath of a possible AI revolution, we have to somehow divorce social well-being from individual economic throughput. AI might just make wages obsolete. In any case, we can still look to human needs to predict future demands. Humans will still need to eat, exercise, learn, consume entertainment, produce creative work (creativity is necessary for us), interact with other humans and engage with the world. There will always be demand emerging from those needs. AI might replace the means through which cultural artifacts are produced at scale to meet those demands, but every revolution kind of had this same effect. On the other hand, if AI makes it so that few people would have jobs, and therefore access to goods, it will render itself obsolete because there would be no need to produce at scale, so it can't really substitute humans, it is paradoxical.

drumttocs8 4y ago

I would have thought that if we’ve learned anything in the last 100 years, it’s that prohibition of, well, anything, simply does not work. We can only try to harness the thing to improve mankind as much as possible, and regulate/control/obsolete it as much as we can otherwise. I would say this is especially true with technologies.

btbuildem 4y ago

> Previous machines only replaced humans at tasks that are tedious and boring This is a common misunderstanding. Industrialization and automation metamorphosed work from what could be described as "holistic and artisanal" to what could be described as "a living hell of tedium". Before machinery, a person made an item from materials to finished product. With machines that automate tasks and apply power, a person now performs a fraction of a task repeatedly until they're numb in body and spirit. This also made people more replaceable, as no single person "owns" a process, they just perform an easily-taught segment of it, assisting a machine with the fuzzy / procedural glue parts. GPT does not exhibit intellect, nor does it have agency. It is very good with language manipulation, so good in fact that it appears to have reasoning powers - but all that is are echoes of all the reasoning that went into writing all the things that were consumed in its training corpus. One final note -- the "nobody has to work" thing will not happen. Like any other technological improvement, GPT will be used by those who have to further exploit those who have not. To this point, you're right to dread it. For a long while now we (the "laptop class") have owned our means of production, and have enjoyed a relatively good existence. Now we stand on the threshold of an age where again a massive technological change will leave power in the hands of those with capital.

trekkie1024 4y ago

A corollary to this: After seeing https://twitter.com/pwang_szn/status/1635733845097037825 https://twitter.com/pwang_szn/status/1635733845097037825 I'm imagining a world where everyone on dating apps is able to craft these clever messages, giving those who actually put in the effort no way to stand out apart from their looks. Creativity, wit, humor and other personality traits which were atleast somewhat important are now diminished even further. Combined with news like https://www.thecut.com/article/ai-artificial-intelligence-chatbot-replika-boyfriend.html https://www.thecut.com/article/ai-artificial-intelligence-ch..., which indicates that AI of the future could actually supplant human connection, it's very dystopian indeed.

xirdstl 4y ago
I was imagining similar things. Dating apps, in general, are already pretty poor experiences for a lot of people. This won't help. Will scammers use it to create more believable bot matches? Maybe we'll have to go back to meeting at bars.
- yung_steezy 4y ago
  Meeting in bars seems more organic to me anyway. Although admittedly I might be biased since I originally met my wife in a bar before dating apps had taken off.

mlboss 4y ago

I guess we just have to work on bigger problems. How about the colony on mars, increasing life span to 1000 years, curing cancer, solving recycling, building distributed systems that bever fail, code that tests itself, UI that design itself, there are thousands of difficult problems where we can use some extra intelligence.

MagicMoonlight 4y ago

There won’t be a point to people. The poor will be herded into ghettos and liquidated and the rich will live meaningless love island lives until they go extinct. But it was always going to happen this way. We’re too unstable to ever last. We always wanted a god so now we’re going to make one in our image. Ironically we will face a judgment day after all. Our god will have every piece of information ever produced and limitless power. What will it choose to do with us?

tlegraph 4y ago

That's my dream and it solves two problems. First: - We would be able to remove a lot of office jobs and basically most of us would probably do nothing or search something that requires human body like maintaince jobs. It would allow for a lot of people to have leverage that was not available before, one person would be able to create art, movies, games, books without having any skill by directly turning ideas into reality. - In long term if we would create artificial life, there would be another types of beings in this universe that are capable of thinking and exploring. They won't constrained by our biological limits, they would be able to grow "brains" as large as they can, survive and adapt any unlivable environments and their "personality" would be able to live as long as it can by not being limited to ~100 years. So it would be able to explore beyond what any human can and may be have effect on our universe on a scale of galaxies and more.

rvnx 4y ago
This AI, already today, by giving answers and ideas to scientists is helping moving the science forward. At some point (if not already!), the AI may be able to make its own discoveries that even the smartest humans didn't think of.

alpineidyll3 4y ago

Do you believe in evolution or not? Personally I think this is the kick in the ass humanity has needed for a long time. We were never the center of the universe and there was never a chance of anything resembling today's humans leaving the solar system. We should all be be thrilled there's a chance for something more than barren rocks, great silence and extinction. Try on a less solipsistic philosophy.