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> - AIs becoming sentient and causing harm for their own ends. You can scratch that one off the list. This is pure pseudo-intellectual fantasy. This notion isn

> - AIs becoming sentient and causing harm for their own ends. You can scratch that one off the list. This is pure pseudo-intellectual fantasy. This notion isn't backed by anything and there are good reasons to disregard it, to put it mildly. It is fair to say that this concern isn't even wrong. The concerns over "AI" have been and continue to be of a practical nature, namely, that of increasingly sophisticated automation. If we frame things in terms of automation, we can have a more productive discussion that stands of chance of contributing to good legislation and regulation instead of mystification and obscurantism.

goodpoint 4y ago
Citation needed on everything you wrote.
concordDance 4y ago
No one sane worries about AI "becoming sentient". But a lot of serious people worry about the alignment problem when applied to future, actually "intelligent" (in the sense of having powerful planning ability), AIs. We don't know when they'll be possible, but we do know that we don't currently know how to train them in a manner where they'll behave as we like when far outside the training domain (we cant even clearly define what we'd like!). This is actually a very complex topic and I wouldn't be able to do it justice in a hackernews comment.
- lolsal 4y ago
  > No one sane worries about AI "becoming sentient". See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_true_Scotsman https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_true_Scotsman for a rebuttal to your dismissal.
tarruda 4y ago
> This notion isn't backed by anything Maybe by the fact that big LLMs have sophisticated behaviors that no one understands and/or can explain yet?
knodi123 4y ago
I'm far more worried about a sentient human using an AI to cause harm for their own ends. AI is nothing but a force multiplier, and as far as outcomes go, there's not much difference to my smoking corpse whether the decision to kill me came from a meat brain or a silicon brain. In 1962, John F. Kennedy famously said, "Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable." But AI can make violent revolution impossible as well, by tracking and surveilling and intervening. The fewer people are needed to maintain such a system, the easier the end of democracy will be. It's not going to happen today, or tomorrow, but that's what I'm betting my money on for "end of society as we know it" scenarios.

goodpoint 4y ago

Citation needed on everything you wrote.

concordDance 4y ago

No one sane worries about AI "becoming sentient". But a lot of serious people worry about the alignment problem when applied to future, actually "intelligent" (in the sense of having powerful planning ability), AIs. We don't know when they'll be possible, but we do know that we don't currently know how to train them in a manner where they'll behave as we like when far outside the training domain (we cant even clearly define what we'd like!). This is actually a very complex topic and I wouldn't be able to do it justice in a hackernews comment.

lolsal 4y ago
> No one sane worries about AI "becoming sentient". See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_true_Scotsman https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_true_Scotsman for a rebuttal to your dismissal.

tarruda 4y ago

> This notion isn't backed by anything Maybe by the fact that big LLMs have sophisticated behaviors that no one understands and/or can explain yet?

knodi123 4y ago

I'm far more worried about a sentient human using an AI to cause harm for their own ends. AI is nothing but a force multiplier, and as far as outcomes go, there's not much difference to my smoking corpse whether the decision to kill me came from a meat brain or a silicon brain. In 1962, John F. Kennedy famously said, "Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable." But AI can make violent revolution impossible as well, by tracking and surveilling and intervening. The fewer people are needed to maintain such a system, the easier the end of democracy will be. It's not going to happen today, or tomorrow, but that's what I'm betting my money on for "end of society as we know it" scenarios.