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This is a good list, but I'm continually surprised that people ignore what seems to me like the worst realistic danger of AI. That is the use of AI by militarie

This is a good list, but I'm continually surprised that people ignore what seems to me like the worst realistic danger of AI. That is the use of AI by militaries, law enforcement, and intelligence agencies. AI will cause a huge expansion of the power of these institutions, with no accompanying increase in the power of the people to control them. Forget the Terminator scenario. We don't need to invoke science fiction to imagine the atrocities that might result from an unchecked increase in military and law enforcement power. AI that obeys people is just as scary as AI that doesn't. Humans are plenty capable of atrocities on our own. Just look at history. And regulation is unlikely to save us from government abuse of AI; quite the opposite in fact.

cuuupid 4y ago
I think that this has been fleshed out quite a bit, the reason you’re not seeing much vocality about it today is threefold: - ChatGPT is less applicable to mil/leo’s and broader govt, and is the central piece of these discussions because most of the people talking about AI don’t know what they’re talking about and don’t know of anything other than ChatGPT - their use of AI is largely past tense, it’s already in documented active use so the controversies have already occurred in the past (but easy to forget—-we live in an age where there’s something new to rage about daily) - there’s not much that anyone can do to stop it
yamtaddle 4y ago
The ones who will benefit the most from AI, in terms of being able to scale the most with it, will be the ones who care very little about reputational risk and have relatively high tolerance for mistakes and misses—that is, those who can operate these kinds of models without needing to carefully check & monitor all of its output. ... so, scammers, spammers, and astroturf-heavy propaganda operations. This tech may 5x or 10x a lot of jobs' output over the next few years, but it can 100x or more those, and it can do it sooner.
- est31 4y ago
  Your criteria also all match for authoritarian regimes. Many of which love AI based surveillance solutions.
  - narrator 4y ago
    Speaking of which, George Soros had this to say about China in early 2022: https://www.project-syndicate.org/onpoint/china-and-xi-jinping-facing-growing-challenges-at-home-by-george-soros-2022-01 https://www.project-syndicate.org/onpoint/china-and-xi-jinpi... "China has turned its tech platforms into national champions; the US is more hesitant to do so, because it worries about their effect on the freedom of the individual. These different attitudes shed new light on the conflict between the two systems of governance that the US and China represent. In theory, AI is morally and ethically neutral; it can be used for good or bad. But in practice, its effect is asymmetric. AI is particularly good at producing instruments that help repressive regimes and endanger open societies. Interestingly, the coronavirus reinforced the advantage repressive regimes enjoy by legitimizing the use of personal data for purposes of public control. With these advantages, one might think that Xi, who collects personal data for the surveillance of his citizens more aggressively than any other ruler in history, is bound to be successful. He certainly thinks so, and many people believe him. I do not."
    - abakker 4y ago
      I agree the effects are asymmetric. an important consideration behind all of this is that there is very little that government or power can do to extend the lives of humans, and very much they can do to shorten them. When we thing of "good vs bad" it is important to consider how permanently malevolent many choices can be and how limited is our ability to recover. we can never undo an unjust loss of life. Technology as an amplifier for human behavior always more _potential_ for harm in the wrong hands and applications. As people, we are very sanguine about the way technology can improve things, and we have see a lot of real improvement. But we're not out of the woods yet.
    - pixelfarmer 4y ago
      I find it funny how people are concerned about government surveillance while completely ignoring the one which is being used in a very totalitarian way already for many: Surveillance at the workplace in all its many forms. Companies have a very strict hierarchy, meaning from a political aspect they are, by and large, authoritarian, and worse, there is often some unspoken "class" level thinking in it that is used to reason such surveillance into place (among other things). Even worse, there are many places where private entities and government ones flow into each other, muddling the already dirty waters even more. So it is not just governments to be worried about, it is every, especially larger, entity where the people in command have some screws loose (which covers a large percentage of them).
- foob 4y ago
  I would add startups to the list in addition to the more explicitly negative groups that you mention. There's a tremendous amount of both reputational risk and technical/organizational inertia to overcome in Amazon overhauling Alexa to use LLMs for responses, but much less for a new startup because they have far less to lose. Same for Apple with Siri, or Google with Google Assistant. I expect that we'll see exciting changes in these products before too long, but they're inherently going to be more conservative about existing products than new competitors will be.
  - dangets 4y ago
    Yes and no. That same inertia of the larger companies allows them to stay in business even after large missteps. Remember Lenovo built-in Superfish [0]? Amazon/Apple/Google are entrenched enough that can take risks, apologize, rollback, and wait for short term memory to pass and release the v2 under a different product name. Across all startups, yes they can be risky and there will be innovative outliers that take off. But for a single no-name startup a misstep can be a death knell. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superfish https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superfish
- sebzim4500 4y ago
  Increasing numbers of scammers hit diminishing returns though. There is only so much money in the hands of the vulnerable/stupid.
- elil17 4y ago
  I would say that intelligence agencies, militaries, and authoritarian regimes could also meet those criteria because they operate outside of public scrutiny.
elboru 4y ago
1984 was only limited by Orwell’s imagination on what was possible with future technology.
- EGreg 4y ago
  1984 and Star Trek’s “Data” androids were also limited by what the public can take in as an interesting story. Minority Report would be boring if it was logical: the guy would be caught immediately, the end. Instead if moving large disks, they’d use WiFi. Everything would simply not move, every criminal would be caught, nothing interesting would ever happen anymore, except inside some software which can’t be shown on screen. A realistic Data android would be hooked up to the matrix like the Borg, and would interact with humans the way we interact with a dog. There would be nothing interesting to show.
  - KineticLensman 4y ago
    Yes. I never understood why Data had to type rather than just use wifi
    - teddyh 4y ago
      Two reasons: Firstly, Data is supposed to be a character on TV, and we can’t empathize with computers. The in-universe reason is that Data was designed to be, as much as possible, an artificial human, and not a robot merely functioning in human society.
  - ihatepython 4y ago
    I think you should focus more on the Borg, instead of "Data" with respect to the dangers of AI The Borg were a great enemy, at least in the 2nd and 3rd season. The writers shouldn't have let the lowly humans defeat them.
- andrewmutz 4y ago
  I think 1984 is a perfect example of the limitations of this type of thinking. 80 years ago Orwell (and other authors) saw a future where technological power has gone entirely to the governments and are being used to oppress citizens. The future played out completely differently. Government is far more open and transparent. Citizens routinely use technology to check the power of the state (recording police abuse on smartphones, sharing on social media, transacting stateless currency). When it comes to technological change, pessimism always feels smarter than optimism, but it has a poor track record.
thom 4y ago
The article does appear to agree with you - it proposes 'centralized power' as one of the imminent risks of these technologies.
RandomLensman 4y ago
That is not really an AI specific risk, all that can happen totally without AI. AI might make it more cost efficient in a way, but that doesn't imply that power cannot be held in check etc. East Germany had a gigantic internal spy apparatus with plenty of power for violence and control etc. but in the end that didn't stop the place from crumbling.
- est31 4y ago
  AI makes the entire process less reliant on human involvement. Humans can be incredibly cruel, but they still have some level of humanity, they need to believe in some ideology that justifies their behaviour. AI on the other hand follows commands without questioning them.
  - RandomLensman 4y ago
    The AI still will be used by a human, unless you think that the actual power moves to the AI and not the humans and their institutions using it.
    - est31 4y ago
      It removes the human from the actual thing. Which means two things: it's easier for humans to tell themselves that what they are doing is good for the world, and second it puts a power multiplier into the hands of potentially very radical people holding extreme minority views on human rights/dignity etc. You just need one person to type "kill every firstborn and tell the parents that this is retribution for the rebellion" instead of that one person convincing thousands of people to follow their (unlawful) order, which might take decades of propaganda and indoctrination. And that one person only sees a clean progress bar instead of having to deal with 18-20 year olds being haunted by nightmares of crying parents and siblings, and baby blood on their uniforms. Yes, in the end it's a human typing the command, but AI makes it easier than ever for individuals to wield large power unchecked. Most nations make it allowed and many also require soldiers to refuse unlawful orders (i.e. those instructing warcrimes).
mr90210 4y ago
Having watched the TV Show Bosch (Detective show), I think that as soon as AI + Humanoid robots are ready to be deployed in public, the law enforcement will do it, just like many countries’ military adopted drones to conduct air strikes thus guaranteeing zero losses during the strike on the their side. PS: It’s just an opinion, don’t take it at heart.
ar9av 4y ago
I don't really have a strong opinion on the letter because I agree with a few of the comments that the cat is kind of out of the bag. Even if we don't reach AGI, however you want to define it, I think we are headed for something existential, so I'm both skeptical of letters like this ability to work and sympathetic to the need to focus on the issue it's attempting to address. So with that said, I find the "what about existing AI problems" and especially the "I don't like Musk comments" annoying. The current issues aren't as severe as what we could be facing in the not too distant future, and Musk is pretty tangential to that concern.
andrei_says_ 4y ago
Have been thinking along the same lines and find the absence of official information and discussion of such use absolutely terrifying. Given that the agencies are often a couple of steps ahead in technology, and infinitely further ahead in wickedness and imagination, and are comprised of people who know very well what makes people tick, and are often tools in the hands of the few against the many...
fsckboy 4y ago
> Just look at history history shows us a relentless increase in consideration of, and protection of, human rights. The moral ideas you are talking about are relatively recent, especially in their widespread application. While we were developing ever better technologies for labor saving and weapons building, we were also building better "legal, civic, and democratic" technologies for governance and egalitarianism. if I look at history, I'm filled with optimism and hope. Every negative idea you fear, was more fearsome in the past.
- contravariant 4y ago
  You may want to zoom in on the industrial revolution a bit, things were bad before they got better, and I'm not sure we've ironed out all the kinks yet.
- modeless 4y ago
  Honestly I agree with you. But progress isn't inevitable and monotonic. It requires effort, and backsliding is a real possibility. I hope we can focus effort on the realistic dangers and not on speculative fiction.
- ogurechny 4y ago
  If I look at “history”, I see misery and piles of corpses. Sometimes those piles get quite high, and bigger than average amount of people ponder whether there was an error that caused such a catastrophe, and propose changes which slowly get spread through generations. (It's no wonder general public still believes in the 19th century phantom of “progress”.)
- loldk 4y ago
  [dead]
MattGrommes 4y ago
This is one of the things that freaked me out the most in William Gibson's The Peripheral, the AI called the Aunties. They go back through all historical records for people (things like social media and ones only the police and government have access to) and make judgements and predictions about them. It turns the fight for privacy and against unchecked police power into a much more difficult battle across time since the AI can process so much more data than a human.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
convolvatron 4y ago
the real long term risk is burning up the last few shreds of belief in any kind of objective truth, and undermining the foundational human narcissism that we are somehow special and interesting.
Cthulhu_ 4y ago
> That is the use of AI by militaries, law enforcement, and intelligence agencies. This is already happening, and has done so for at least a decade - probably longer, but under different names. The trust put in automated systems to flag up suspects of crime has been proven multiple times to have a lot of false positives, often racially biased. One example is the Dutch childcare benefits scandal (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dutch_childcare_benefits_scandal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dutch_childcare_benefits_scand...). In a response to a handful of Bulgarian scammers that found a loophole in the system (800 bulgarians for a total of €4 million), they installed a fraud prevention team that was incentivised to find as many scammers as possible. This caused thousands of people - often of Carribean descent - to be marked as fraudsters, had their benefits cut and had to repay all of it, sometimes going years back. This in turn caused stress, people losing jobs and houses, one person killed themselves, others left the country. 70.000 children were affected, of which 2000 were removed from their house. All because a handful of people defrauded the system, and they employed technology to profile people. And of course, offered incentives to catch as many as they could, rule of law / due process be damned. It's part of the string of right-wing policies that have been going on for a while now.
atoav 4y ago
I think AI might influence one number in particular: How much of fraction of a population you need to have behind yourself in order to maintain power. My worry is the kind of society that falls out of that equation.
- modeless 4y ago
  Yes. This is exactly the problem. Nice phrasing.
stametseater 4y ago
I fear that during a "total war" scenario, militaries will use AI powered automatic doxing and extortion tools to target civilian populations, as they have in the past with 'strategic' bombing. Something alone the lines of "Quit or sabotage your work at the power plant, or we'll tell your wife about [all the reddit accounts you ever used, all the thots you swiped on tiktok, etc]" You can imagine more potent examples I'm sure. This sort of thing has always been possible for high-profile targets, done manually by intelligence agencies; it's the 'C' in MICE. What's new is being able to scale these attacks to the general population because it no longer takes extensive manpower to research, contact and manipulate each targeted individual.
pmarreck 4y ago
> with no accompanying increase in the power of the people to control them. I disagree. Vehemently. This technology empowers anyone motivated to "skill up" on almost anything. Right now, anyone can ask ChatGPT to tutor you in literally anything. You can carry on a conversation with it as if it was an incredibly patient and ever-present teacher. You can ask it to quiz you. You can ask it to further explain a sub-concept. You can have it stick to a lesson plan. You can have it grade you. Want to know how image recognition works? How about lasers? How about (if you can find an uncensored LLM) bombs? This tech just leveled up everyone, not just "those already in power".
- modeless 4y ago
  I'm sympathetic to the idea that AI will be helpful for everyone, but it's not clear to me that it will automatically translate into governments treating people better. That doesn't seem inevitable at all.
  - pmarreck 4y ago
    It's not inevitable. Since power is taken and not shared, the balance would shift by empowering people to take action against their governments.
ogurechny 4y ago
“Unchecked increase in military and law enforcement power” and “government abuse of AI” is not a scary potential threat from not so distant future, as media lullabies tell you. It has already become a booming industry. It's a bit too late to wonder whether some law could help.
CatWChainsaw 4y ago
Exactly this. Despite the promise of open source and computing "empowering" users, see the last 20 years for a refutation. Most people live in a silo - Apple, Microsoft, Google, some combination. AI is not an equalizer of user power, but an amplifier of those who already have it. AI coupled with the big data that made AI possible plus the holders of big data knowing who you are, where you are, who you associate with, what you say, and potentially even what you think... yet some people still believe it is somehow a democratizing force.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
wcerfgba 4y ago
Surveillance capitalism
tablespoon 4y ago
> ...but I'm continually surprised that people ignore what seems to me like the worst realistic danger of AI. That is the use of AI by militaries, law enforcement, and intelligence agencies. The "worst realistic danger of AI" is its potential to permanently destroy the economic power of a large fraction of the population. There's no going on to do "higher level" creative work after getting automated out of a job, since those jobs are going to get killed by AI too.
- Gumberclaus 4y ago
  AI could provide limitless capital and eliminate the need for humans to work. Humans could then spend however much time they wanted on "higher level" creative work. I doubt it will be leveraged in this way, but the potential is certainly there.
  - tablespoon 4y ago
    > AI could provide limitless capital and eliminate the need for humans to work. Humans could then spend however much time they wanted on "higher level" creative work. I doubt it will be leveraged in this way, but the potential is certainly there. I doubt it too. Your first sentence is a fantasy for selling the technology. If the technology really lives up to the hype, the "higher level" creative work will be done by a cadre of elite talent, the billionaires will directly operate their limitless capital, and the rest of the humans will be starved or eek out life as a billionaire's pet in some kind of reserve.
    - Gumberclaus 4y ago
      It's just as much of a fantasy as your dystopian scenario, because neither has happened yet. I'm also somewhat of a luddite and am not at all excited about LLMs or the new wave of "AI" that many others have been swept up by. I'm definitely not trying to "sell" anything. You're also making the broad assumption that everyone engages in the process of creation, primarily for economic gain. In my encounters with other humans and my own experience, isn't really the case. We create because we enjoy the process of creation, not out of the desire to improve our financial standing. Most of the work done in large corporations by individual contributors, isn't that creative in the first place. All of those CRUD apps are really pushing the boundaries of creativity!

cuuupid 4y ago

I think that this has been fleshed out quite a bit, the reason you’re not seeing much vocality about it today is threefold: - ChatGPT is less applicable to mil/leo’s and broader govt, and is the central piece of these discussions because most of the people talking about AI don’t know what they’re talking about and don’t know of anything other than ChatGPT - their use of AI is largely past tense, it’s already in documented active use so the controversies have already occurred in the past (but easy to forget—-we live in an age where there’s something new to rage about daily) - there’s not much that anyone can do to stop it

yamtaddle 4y ago

The ones who will benefit the most from AI, in terms of being able to scale the most with it, will be the ones who care very little about reputational risk and have relatively high tolerance for mistakes and misses—that is, those who can operate these kinds of models without needing to carefully check & monitor all of its output. ... so, scammers, spammers, and astroturf-heavy propaganda operations. This tech may 5x or 10x a lot of jobs' output over the next few years, but it can 100x or more those, and it can do it sooner.

est31 4y ago
Your criteria also all match for authoritarian regimes. Many of which love AI based surveillance solutions.
- narrator 4y ago
  Speaking of which, George Soros had this to say about China in early 2022: https://www.project-syndicate.org/onpoint/china-and-xi-jinping-facing-growing-challenges-at-home-by-george-soros-2022-01 https://www.project-syndicate.org/onpoint/china-and-xi-jinpi... "China has turned its tech platforms into national champions; the US is more hesitant to do so, because it worries about their effect on the freedom of the individual. These different attitudes shed new light on the conflict between the two systems of governance that the US and China represent. In theory, AI is morally and ethically neutral; it can be used for good or bad. But in practice, its effect is asymmetric. AI is particularly good at producing instruments that help repressive regimes and endanger open societies. Interestingly, the coronavirus reinforced the advantage repressive regimes enjoy by legitimizing the use of personal data for purposes of public control. With these advantages, one might think that Xi, who collects personal data for the surveillance of his citizens more aggressively than any other ruler in history, is bound to be successful. He certainly thinks so, and many people believe him. I do not."
  - abakker 4y ago
    I agree the effects are asymmetric. an important consideration behind all of this is that there is very little that government or power can do to extend the lives of humans, and very much they can do to shorten them. When we thing of "good vs bad" it is important to consider how permanently malevolent many choices can be and how limited is our ability to recover. we can never undo an unjust loss of life. Technology as an amplifier for human behavior always more _potential_ for harm in the wrong hands and applications. As people, we are very sanguine about the way technology can improve things, and we have see a lot of real improvement. But we're not out of the woods yet.
  - pixelfarmer 4y ago
    I find it funny how people are concerned about government surveillance while completely ignoring the one which is being used in a very totalitarian way already for many: Surveillance at the workplace in all its many forms. Companies have a very strict hierarchy, meaning from a political aspect they are, by and large, authoritarian, and worse, there is often some unspoken "class" level thinking in it that is used to reason such surveillance into place (among other things). Even worse, there are many places where private entities and government ones flow into each other, muddling the already dirty waters even more. So it is not just governments to be worried about, it is every, especially larger, entity where the people in command have some screws loose (which covers a large percentage of them).
foob 4y ago
I would add startups to the list in addition to the more explicitly negative groups that you mention. There's a tremendous amount of both reputational risk and technical/organizational inertia to overcome in Amazon overhauling Alexa to use LLMs for responses, but much less for a new startup because they have far less to lose. Same for Apple with Siri, or Google with Google Assistant. I expect that we'll see exciting changes in these products before too long, but they're inherently going to be more conservative about existing products than new competitors will be.
- dangets 4y ago
  Yes and no. That same inertia of the larger companies allows them to stay in business even after large missteps. Remember Lenovo built-in Superfish [0]? Amazon/Apple/Google are entrenched enough that can take risks, apologize, rollback, and wait for short term memory to pass and release the v2 under a different product name. Across all startups, yes they can be risky and there will be innovative outliers that take off. But for a single no-name startup a misstep can be a death knell. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superfish https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superfish
sebzim4500 4y ago
Increasing numbers of scammers hit diminishing returns though. There is only so much money in the hands of the vulnerable/stupid.
elil17 4y ago
I would say that intelligence agencies, militaries, and authoritarian regimes could also meet those criteria because they operate outside of public scrutiny.

elboru 4y ago

1984 was only limited by Orwell’s imagination on what was possible with future technology.

EGreg 4y ago
1984 and Star Trek’s “Data” androids were also limited by what the public can take in as an interesting story. Minority Report would be boring if it was logical: the guy would be caught immediately, the end. Instead if moving large disks, they’d use WiFi. Everything would simply not move, every criminal would be caught, nothing interesting would ever happen anymore, except inside some software which can’t be shown on screen. A realistic Data android would be hooked up to the matrix like the Borg, and would interact with humans the way we interact with a dog. There would be nothing interesting to show.
- KineticLensman 4y ago
  Yes. I never understood why Data had to type rather than just use wifi
  - teddyh 4y ago
    Two reasons: Firstly, Data is supposed to be a character on TV, and we can’t empathize with computers. The in-universe reason is that Data was designed to be, as much as possible, an artificial human, and not a robot merely functioning in human society.
- ihatepython 4y ago
  I think you should focus more on the Borg, instead of "Data" with respect to the dangers of AI The Borg were a great enemy, at least in the 2nd and 3rd season. The writers shouldn't have let the lowly humans defeat them.
andrewmutz 4y ago
I think 1984 is a perfect example of the limitations of this type of thinking. 80 years ago Orwell (and other authors) saw a future where technological power has gone entirely to the governments and are being used to oppress citizens. The future played out completely differently. Government is far more open and transparent. Citizens routinely use technology to check the power of the state (recording police abuse on smartphones, sharing on social media, transacting stateless currency). When it comes to technological change, pessimism always feels smarter than optimism, but it has a poor track record.

thom 4y ago

The article does appear to agree with you - it proposes 'centralized power' as one of the imminent risks of these technologies.

RandomLensman 4y ago

That is not really an AI specific risk, all that can happen totally without AI. AI might make it more cost efficient in a way, but that doesn't imply that power cannot be held in check etc. East Germany had a gigantic internal spy apparatus with plenty of power for violence and control etc. but in the end that didn't stop the place from crumbling.

est31 4y ago
AI makes the entire process less reliant on human involvement. Humans can be incredibly cruel, but they still have some level of humanity, they need to believe in some ideology that justifies their behaviour. AI on the other hand follows commands without questioning them.
- RandomLensman 4y ago
  The AI still will be used by a human, unless you think that the actual power moves to the AI and not the humans and their institutions using it.
  - est31 4y ago
    It removes the human from the actual thing. Which means two things: it's easier for humans to tell themselves that what they are doing is good for the world, and second it puts a power multiplier into the hands of potentially very radical people holding extreme minority views on human rights/dignity etc. You just need one person to type "kill every firstborn and tell the parents that this is retribution for the rebellion" instead of that one person convincing thousands of people to follow their (unlawful) order, which might take decades of propaganda and indoctrination. And that one person only sees a clean progress bar instead of having to deal with 18-20 year olds being haunted by nightmares of crying parents and siblings, and baby blood on their uniforms. Yes, in the end it's a human typing the command, but AI makes it easier than ever for individuals to wield large power unchecked. Most nations make it allowed and many also require soldiers to refuse unlawful orders (i.e. those instructing warcrimes).

mr90210 4y ago

Having watched the TV Show Bosch (Detective show), I think that as soon as AI + Humanoid robots are ready to be deployed in public, the law enforcement will do it, just like many countries’ military adopted drones to conduct air strikes thus guaranteeing zero losses during the strike on the their side. PS: It’s just an opinion, don’t take it at heart.

ar9av 4y ago

I don't really have a strong opinion on the letter because I agree with a few of the comments that the cat is kind of out of the bag. Even if we don't reach AGI, however you want to define it, I think we are headed for something existential, so I'm both skeptical of letters like this ability to work and sympathetic to the need to focus on the issue it's attempting to address. So with that said, I find the "what about existing AI problems" and especially the "I don't like Musk comments" annoying. The current issues aren't as severe as what we could be facing in the not too distant future, and Musk is pretty tangential to that concern.

andrei_says_ 4y ago

Have been thinking along the same lines and find the absence of official information and discussion of such use absolutely terrifying. Given that the agencies are often a couple of steps ahead in technology, and infinitely further ahead in wickedness and imagination, and are comprised of people who know very well what makes people tick, and are often tools in the hands of the few against the many...

fsckboy 4y ago

> Just look at history history shows us a relentless increase in consideration of, and protection of, human rights. The moral ideas you are talking about are relatively recent, especially in their widespread application. While we were developing ever better technologies for labor saving and weapons building, we were also building better "legal, civic, and democratic" technologies for governance and egalitarianism. if I look at history, I'm filled with optimism and hope. Every negative idea you fear, was more fearsome in the past.

contravariant 4y ago
You may want to zoom in on the industrial revolution a bit, things were bad before they got better, and I'm not sure we've ironed out all the kinks yet.
modeless 4y ago
Honestly I agree with you. But progress isn't inevitable and monotonic. It requires effort, and backsliding is a real possibility. I hope we can focus effort on the realistic dangers and not on speculative fiction.
ogurechny 4y ago
If I look at “history”, I see misery and piles of corpses. Sometimes those piles get quite high, and bigger than average amount of people ponder whether there was an error that caused such a catastrophe, and propose changes which slowly get spread through generations. (It's no wonder general public still believes in the 19th century phantom of “progress”.)
loldk 4y ago
[dead]

MattGrommes 4y ago

This is one of the things that freaked me out the most in William Gibson's The Peripheral, the AI called the Aunties. They go back through all historical records for people (things like social media and ones only the police and government have access to) and make judgements and predictions about them. It turns the fight for privacy and against unchecked police power into a much more difficult battle across time since the AI can process so much more data than a human.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

convolvatron 4y ago

the real long term risk is burning up the last few shreds of belief in any kind of objective truth, and undermining the foundational human narcissism that we are somehow special and interesting.

Cthulhu_ 4y ago

> That is the use of AI by militaries, law enforcement, and intelligence agencies. This is already happening, and has done so for at least a decade - probably longer, but under different names. The trust put in automated systems to flag up suspects of crime has been proven multiple times to have a lot of false positives, often racially biased. One example is the Dutch childcare benefits scandal (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dutch_childcare_benefits_scandal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dutch_childcare_benefits_scand...). In a response to a handful of Bulgarian scammers that found a loophole in the system (800 bulgarians for a total of €4 million), they installed a fraud prevention team that was incentivised to find as many scammers as possible. This caused thousands of people - often of Carribean descent - to be marked as fraudsters, had their benefits cut and had to repay all of it, sometimes going years back. This in turn caused stress, people losing jobs and houses, one person killed themselves, others left the country. 70.000 children were affected, of which 2000 were removed from their house. All because a handful of people defrauded the system, and they employed technology to profile people. And of course, offered incentives to catch as many as they could, rule of law / due process be damned. It's part of the string of right-wing policies that have been going on for a while now.

atoav 4y ago

I think AI might influence one number in particular: How much of fraction of a population you need to have behind yourself in order to maintain power. My worry is the kind of society that falls out of that equation.

modeless 4y ago
Yes. This is exactly the problem. Nice phrasing.

stametseater 4y ago

I fear that during a "total war" scenario, militaries will use AI powered automatic doxing and extortion tools to target civilian populations, as they have in the past with 'strategic' bombing. Something alone the lines of "Quit or sabotage your work at the power plant, or we'll tell your wife about [all the reddit accounts you ever used, all the thots you swiped on tiktok, etc]" You can imagine more potent examples I'm sure. This sort of thing has always been possible for high-profile targets, done manually by intelligence agencies; it's the 'C' in MICE. What's new is being able to scale these attacks to the general population because it no longer takes extensive manpower to research, contact and manipulate each targeted individual.

pmarreck 4y ago

> with no accompanying increase in the power of the people to control them. I disagree. Vehemently. This technology empowers anyone motivated to "skill up" on almost anything. Right now, anyone can ask ChatGPT to tutor you in literally anything. You can carry on a conversation with it as if it was an incredibly patient and ever-present teacher. You can ask it to quiz you. You can ask it to further explain a sub-concept. You can have it stick to a lesson plan. You can have it grade you. Want to know how image recognition works? How about lasers? How about (if you can find an uncensored LLM) bombs? This tech just leveled up everyone, not just "those already in power".

modeless 4y ago
I'm sympathetic to the idea that AI will be helpful for everyone, but it's not clear to me that it will automatically translate into governments treating people better. That doesn't seem inevitable at all.
- pmarreck 4y ago
  It's not inevitable. Since power is taken and not shared, the balance would shift by empowering people to take action against their governments.

ogurechny 4y ago

“Unchecked increase in military and law enforcement power” and “government abuse of AI” is not a scary potential threat from not so distant future, as media lullabies tell you. It has already become a booming industry. It's a bit too late to wonder whether some law could help.

CatWChainsaw 4y ago

Exactly this. Despite the promise of open source and computing "empowering" users, see the last 20 years for a refutation. Most people live in a silo - Apple, Microsoft, Google, some combination. AI is not an equalizer of user power, but an amplifier of those who already have it. AI coupled with the big data that made AI possible plus the holders of big data knowing who you are, where you are, who you associate with, what you say, and potentially even what you think... yet some people still believe it is somehow a democratizing force.

deleted 4y ago

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wcerfgba 4y ago

Surveillance capitalism

tablespoon 4y ago

> ...but I'm continually surprised that people ignore what seems to me like the worst realistic danger of AI. That is the use of AI by militaries, law enforcement, and intelligence agencies. The "worst realistic danger of AI" is its potential to permanently destroy the economic power of a large fraction of the population. There's no going on to do "higher level" creative work after getting automated out of a job, since those jobs are going to get killed by AI too.

Gumberclaus 4y ago
AI could provide limitless capital and eliminate the need for humans to work. Humans could then spend however much time they wanted on "higher level" creative work. I doubt it will be leveraged in this way, but the potential is certainly there.
- tablespoon 4y ago
  > AI could provide limitless capital and eliminate the need for humans to work. Humans could then spend however much time they wanted on "higher level" creative work. I doubt it will be leveraged in this way, but the potential is certainly there. I doubt it too. Your first sentence is a fantasy for selling the technology. If the technology really lives up to the hype, the "higher level" creative work will be done by a cadre of elite talent, the billionaires will directly operate their limitless capital, and the rest of the humans will be starved or eek out life as a billionaire's pet in some kind of reserve.
  - Gumberclaus 4y ago
    It's just as much of a fantasy as your dystopian scenario, because neither has happened yet. I'm also somewhat of a luddite and am not at all excited about LLMs or the new wave of "AI" that many others have been swept up by. I'm definitely not trying to "sell" anything. You're also making the broad assumption that everyone engages in the process of creation, primarily for economic gain. In my encounters with other humans and my own experience, isn't really the case. We create because we enjoy the process of creation, not out of the desire to improve our financial standing. Most of the work done in large corporations by individual contributors, isn't that creative in the first place. All of those CRUD apps are really pushing the boundaries of creativity!