6 ms·

I am not afraid of robots. I am afraid of people

69 points by headalgorithm 4y ago

labrador 4y ago
I saw a bunch of stories recently about how social media has increased mental illness problems amongst our children, yet I don't see the same level of alarm about that. Mentally ill people shoot up schools with AR-15s yet nobody is banning them. Why AI? What's different? Color me suspicious of the motives of these elites. My comment is not a well reasoned scientific comment, it's an emotional one. I'm feeling much more stressed about children in distress than I am about AI.
- blacksmith_tb 4y ago
  AI doesn't have be out to get us to cause lots more social and economic instability (though ironically ChatGPT seems to be poised to replace a lot of white-collar workers - unlike the robot apocalypse predictions about replacing blue-collar ones... not that both can't happen simultaneously, of course).
  - hooverd 4y ago
    It feels like AI and automation instead of freeing us from drudgery are poised to free us from art and science so we have more time for drudgery.
    - beanbean01 3y ago
      Because they are being deployed wrong. We should be lining up our transition to post-work so we can spend as much time on art and science as we damn well please, and wholly ignore commercialized drudgery. Instead we are using it to commercialize art and science and turn it into drudgery which we already said we would automate. Stupidity singularity achieved.
- eternalban 4y ago
  (The chat boxes themselves could easily exaserbate the mental illness issues for children.) One critical difference is the growth factor. AR-15 shootings don't double every year. Teen suicide don't double every year. https://epochai.org/blog/compute-trends https://epochai.org/blog/compute-trends Another is prevalence. This tech can be the ghost in the machine animating all sorts of processes, interfaces, devices, content. It will affect you at work, it will affect you at home, it will affect you in society. This is the entire point of developing machine intelligence. How safe, reliable, and controlable is this tech as of now? On that list of yours, there is a piece of technology (primitive technology btw) that is illegal to have: a fully automatic rifle. Calls for regulation and restriction are not unreasonable. How we define and enforce them is the challenge, but the need should be self-evident. > the motives of these elites And yet another reason. The powerful variants of this technology has very high financial barrier to entry. The sort of MI that could truly fuck with us is only in reach of nation states and companies like Google, Microsoft, etc. The latter set (we are repeatedly told here and elsewhere) are only obligated to further the profits of shareholders. A pause also lets the emerging wave of open source and operationally accessible projects (such as *.cpp, etc.) to catch up a bit. This disempowers the "elite" but it is an undeniable plus for the plebes.
  - labrador 4y ago
    It's suspicious though that generally the same people that want to ban books because they are "woke" want to ban AI because it is "woke", meanwhile teens commit suicide and get murdered and those same people do nothing.
    - eternalban 4y ago
      I think machine intelligence (which is the term I think to be more appropriate) can be a boon to humanity. I firmly believe this. It could be the beginning of a great relationship. But the q is: is this machines domesticating man, or man domesticating the machine? So I hope you agree that we need to set the boundaries for this relationship.
      - 4y ago
- southernplaces7 4y ago
  An AR-15 is a single weapon that can be used in a specific context by one individual to a limited degree. AI owned by major organizations is a highly complex thing that can be used by all sorts of multiple actors simultaneously, at scale, in all sorts of ways ranging from good, to iffy to ambiguous to dangerous to extremely dangerous. AR-15's in the hands of mentally unstable people or those with malevolent intentions of any age can be very dangerous things, but the nature and level of the danger is of a totally different, much more limited type to powerful AI tools in the hands of mentally unstable powerful people, or self.interested leaders and organizations.. Note; Edits for a bit more context.
- Larrikin 4y ago
  Nobody is banning assault rifles? Aren't school shootings extremely rare in countries that do ban AR-15s?
  - defrost 4y ago
    School shootings are non existant in Australia but it's not directly related to banning semi-automatics. In Australia 12 years can join gun clubs and own weapons when of age, there are classes of gun licence, if someone wants to work as a feral pig shooter they can get a semi automatic weapon. The significant factors in Australia are that guns are regulated uniformly across all states, all sales either through dealers or privately are tracked, gun licenses can be revoked for improper handling, storage, domestic violence convictions, etc, and can be suspended for a period while allegations of particular nature are sorted out. So, guns are treated as seriously as explosives, poisons, other dangerous goods, and they are efficiently tracked and databased (unlike the US with inconsistent regulation and no central electronic databses, etc).
- throwaway22032 4y ago
  The cumulative impact on society of all of the violence that happens in the United States is likely lower than, for example, the invention and wide distribution of the smartphone. AI is likely to have a larger impact than that. You're talking about only one small part of that violence.
- antibasilisk 4y ago
  >I saw a bunch of stories recently about how social media has increased mental illness problems amongst our children, yet I don't see the same level of alarm about that wait til you see what AI will do to children's brains, once the last remnants of human interaction are excised from their lives.
  - CatWChainsaw 3y ago
    Maybe the Butlerian Jihad was treating AI as a virus; it took a hundred years to burn its way through susceptible hosts, and then humanity was inoculated against it. :P
over_bridge 4y ago
Wealthy profit-maximizing executives in perfect control of an AI is far more scary to me than an autonomous AI is. At least with the AI in charge, there's hope that it might act in humanity's interests.
- bigger_inside 4y ago
  the wealthy profit-maximizing executives paid for the engineers who trained the AI, and ran it through the legal department designed to protect the wealth and status of the corporation they are executives of. Under present circumstances, I don't know what an "autonomous" AI might even look like; someone must have trained it, and if another AI trained it, that was also at some point in the chain trained by these same institutional actors...
- __derek__ 4y ago
  TBH, I'm more concerned about their imperfect control. At least if some group of executives has perfect control, then it's possible for someone to force them to turn it off. As with Satya having his team "fix" an issue in 24 hours, though, there's a dog-balancing-plates phenomenon with the current state of development.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
rockzom 4y ago
[flagged]
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
noncoml 4y ago
Imagine Industrial Revolution, only it’s controlled by a single, for profit company. That’s what’s scary about AI for me.
- mateo1 4y ago
  Yep. And the issue is that because AI will depend on some form of expensive ASIC, AI compute and knowledge storage will be heavily centralized, guarded and sooner than later we'll start seeing rentseeking behaviour once again.
qikInNdOutReply 4y ago
OnException(createIssue().onIssueCreate(CallChatGPT("Patchbot", DefaultCommitPrompt, Source.GetWorkspaceHook("Newest")).commit("Fixing Issue ": exception.self).rethrowWith(new Version.push())); is a abomination. How many of us here, have the abomination running? Step forth and confess.. To not design software, but let it grow with chatgpt on a user trial & error base, is a abomination. You would not push a Travel agency page online, that is created one error at a time. It almost writes itself..
slenocchio 4y ago
The set of possibilities for civilizational catastrophe can include both humans wielding AI unwisely and autonomous AI

69 points by headalgorithm 4y ago

I saw a bunch of stories recently about how social media has increased mental illness problems amongst our children, yet I don't see the same level of alarm about that. Mentally ill people shoot up schools with AR-15s yet nobody is banning them. Why AI? What's different? Color me suspicious of the motives of these elites. My comment is not a well reasoned scientific comment, it's an emotional one. I'm feeling much more stressed about children in distress than I am about AI.

blacksmith_tb 4y ago
AI doesn't have be out to get us to cause lots more social and economic instability (though ironically ChatGPT seems to be poised to replace a lot of white-collar workers - unlike the robot apocalypse predictions about replacing blue-collar ones... not that both can't happen simultaneously, of course).
- hooverd 4y ago
  It feels like AI and automation instead of freeing us from drudgery are poised to free us from art and science so we have more time for drudgery.
  - beanbean01 3y ago
    Because they are being deployed wrong. We should be lining up our transition to post-work so we can spend as much time on art and science as we damn well please, and wholly ignore commercialized drudgery. Instead we are using it to commercialize art and science and turn it into drudgery which we already said we would automate. Stupidity singularity achieved.
eternalban 4y ago
(The chat boxes themselves could easily exaserbate the mental illness issues for children.) One critical difference is the growth factor. AR-15 shootings don't double every year. Teen suicide don't double every year. https://epochai.org/blog/compute-trends https://epochai.org/blog/compute-trends Another is prevalence. This tech can be the ghost in the machine animating all sorts of processes, interfaces, devices, content. It will affect you at work, it will affect you at home, it will affect you in society. This is the entire point of developing machine intelligence. How safe, reliable, and controlable is this tech as of now? On that list of yours, there is a piece of technology (primitive technology btw) that is illegal to have: a fully automatic rifle. Calls for regulation and restriction are not unreasonable. How we define and enforce them is the challenge, but the need should be self-evident. > the motives of these elites And yet another reason. The powerful variants of this technology has very high financial barrier to entry. The sort of MI that could truly fuck with us is only in reach of nation states and companies like Google, Microsoft, etc. The latter set (we are repeatedly told here and elsewhere) are only obligated to further the profits of shareholders. A pause also lets the emerging wave of open source and operationally accessible projects (such as *.cpp, etc.) to catch up a bit. This disempowers the "elite" but it is an undeniable plus for the plebes.
- labrador 4y ago
  It's suspicious though that generally the same people that want to ban books because they are "woke" want to ban AI because it is "woke", meanwhile teens commit suicide and get murdered and those same people do nothing.
  - eternalban 4y ago
    I think machine intelligence (which is the term I think to be more appropriate) can be a boon to humanity. I firmly believe this. It could be the beginning of a great relationship. But the q is: is this machines domesticating man, or man domesticating the machine? So I hope you agree that we need to set the boundaries for this relationship.
    - 4y ago
southernplaces7 4y ago
An AR-15 is a single weapon that can be used in a specific context by one individual to a limited degree. AI owned by major organizations is a highly complex thing that can be used by all sorts of multiple actors simultaneously, at scale, in all sorts of ways ranging from good, to iffy to ambiguous to dangerous to extremely dangerous. AR-15's in the hands of mentally unstable people or those with malevolent intentions of any age can be very dangerous things, but the nature and level of the danger is of a totally different, much more limited type to powerful AI tools in the hands of mentally unstable powerful people, or self.interested leaders and organizations.. Note; Edits for a bit more context.
Larrikin 4y ago
Nobody is banning assault rifles? Aren't school shootings extremely rare in countries that do ban AR-15s?
- defrost 4y ago
  School shootings are non existant in Australia but it's not directly related to banning semi-automatics. In Australia 12 years can join gun clubs and own weapons when of age, there are classes of gun licence, if someone wants to work as a feral pig shooter they can get a semi automatic weapon. The significant factors in Australia are that guns are regulated uniformly across all states, all sales either through dealers or privately are tracked, gun licenses can be revoked for improper handling, storage, domestic violence convictions, etc, and can be suspended for a period while allegations of particular nature are sorted out. So, guns are treated as seriously as explosives, poisons, other dangerous goods, and they are efficiently tracked and databased (unlike the US with inconsistent regulation and no central electronic databses, etc).
throwaway22032 4y ago
The cumulative impact on society of all of the violence that happens in the United States is likely lower than, for example, the invention and wide distribution of the smartphone. AI is likely to have a larger impact than that. You're talking about only one small part of that violence.
antibasilisk 4y ago
>I saw a bunch of stories recently about how social media has increased mental illness problems amongst our children, yet I don't see the same level of alarm about that wait til you see what AI will do to children's brains, once the last remnants of human interaction are excised from their lives.
- CatWChainsaw 3y ago
  Maybe the Butlerian Jihad was treating AI as a virus; it took a hundred years to burn its way through susceptible hosts, and then humanity was inoculated against it. :P

over_bridge 4y ago

Wealthy profit-maximizing executives in perfect control of an AI is far more scary to me than an autonomous AI is. At least with the AI in charge, there's hope that it might act in humanity's interests.

bigger_inside 4y ago
the wealthy profit-maximizing executives paid for the engineers who trained the AI, and ran it through the legal department designed to protect the wealth and status of the corporation they are executives of. Under present circumstances, I don't know what an "autonomous" AI might even look like; someone must have trained it, and if another AI trained it, that was also at some point in the chain trained by these same institutional actors...
__derek__ 4y ago
TBH, I'm more concerned about their imperfect control. At least if some group of executives has perfect control, then it's possible for someone to force them to turn it off. As with Satya having his team "fix" an issue in 24 hours, though, there's a dog-balancing-plates phenomenon with the current state of development.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

rockzom 4y ago

[flagged]

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

noncoml 4y ago

Imagine Industrial Revolution, only it’s controlled by a single, for profit company. That’s what’s scary about AI for me.

mateo1 4y ago
Yep. And the issue is that because AI will depend on some form of expensive ASIC, AI compute and knowledge storage will be heavily centralized, guarded and sooner than later we'll start seeing rentseeking behaviour once again.

qikInNdOutReply 4y ago

OnException(createIssue().onIssueCreate(CallChatGPT("Patchbot", DefaultCommitPrompt, Source.GetWorkspaceHook("Newest")).commit("Fixing Issue ": exception.self).rethrowWith(new Version.push())); is a abomination. How many of us here, have the abomination running? Step forth and confess.. To not design software, but let it grow with chatgpt on a user trial & error base, is a abomination. You would not push a Travel agency page online, that is created one error at a time. It almost writes itself..

slenocchio 4y ago

The set of possibilities for civilizational catastrophe can include both humans wielding AI unwisely and autonomous AI