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I am all for the AI debate, but it being the first time technologists that are already in their 50s or older and/or billionaires or with vast generational wealt
by pvarangot 4y ago
I am all for the AI debate, but it being the first time technologists that are already in their 50s or older and/or billionaires or with vast generational wealth is something I find monumentally suspicious.
- Big tech monopolizing the models, data, and hardware: that's going to happen because "we" already let them monopolize everything else
- Copyright concerns: like when streaming services started? oh ok only that now it's not only musicians but celebrity faces? yeah sorry about that.
- Job security: for whom? and of course cheap PCs, smartphones, search engines, social media, didn't move the job security floor for anyone? What about WFH?
- AIs becoming sentient and causing harm for their own ends: yeah I guess we only want humans to cause harm for their own ends then.
- Corporations intentionally using AI to cause harm for their own ends: because they are not already harmful enough without AI?
- Feedback loops will flood the internet with content of unknown provenance, which get included in the next model, etc: oh no! people will have to _verify_ if what they read on the Internet is real? What a travesty!!! we are doomed!!
- AI hallucinations resulting in widespread persistent errors that cause an epistemological crisis: have you met any academics? are you sure we don't already are dealing with this and AI is not going to make it worse in any possible metric?
- The training set is inherently biased; human knowledge and perspectives not represented in this set could be systematically wiped from public discourse: everything is biased, reality doesn't exist at 0. If you think AI with a different bias would be cool, just go try make it happen. If you get the government involved or start doing all this weird "6 months to think about it" stuff, that will only make private actors that don't abide by the rules have better AI than the rest.
- stcredzero 4y ago- AIs becoming sentient and causing harm for their own ends: yeah I guess we only want humans to cause harm for their own ends then. Well, here's the thing. Even the worst villains of history had human values and feelings: In other words, alignment. A superoptimizer AI might have the ability to wipe out the whole human species, in a way we won't be able to understand in time to prevent it, and all for an instrumental goal incidental to whatever it's doing. (In a way, this thread is a data point for why we need a more sophisticated debate about AI.)
- mordymoop 4y agoIt is very hard for people to avoid dragging in anthropomorphic assumptions. A person will scream and curse at a door jamb for crushing their thumbnail. A person will fantasize about smashing a printer. The idea that an AI might exterminate humanity with no more feeling or hesitation than a combine harvester obliterating a colony of groundhogs is not only uncomfortable and unpleasant to people, but also unnatural to our psychology, which looks for agency and moral responsibility in door jambs.