6 ms·

Most AI Fear Is Future Fear

36 points by jger15 4y ago

d--b 4y ago
It’s easy to dismiss those fears as the probability of creating a humanity-threatening technology is quite low, but on the other hand, the pre-1945 experts who feared that nuclear power could cause total annihilation kinda had a point...
TheDudeMan 4y ago
The author seems confused about what "alignment" means in the context of AI. Either that or they think our future robot overloads are the same thing as grandchildren (culturally different)?
- cwillu 4y ago
  Some history you may not be aware of: the lesswrong sequences were originally an extended discussion between Yudkowsky and Hanson, held via blog post on overcomingbias.org. Which isn't to say I disagree; if anything I find it a bit sad that he says things like “But even ignoring AI, our default future was never going to be aligned. […] These assumptions imply that our descendants will likely soon have very different cultures, including different values, beliefs, and behaviors. That is, they will be unaligned.” as not squelching humanity's choices was pretty explicitly an important part of alignment. See https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/HawFh7RvDM4RyoJ2d/three-worlds-collide-0-8 https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/HawFh7RvDM4RyoJ2d/three-worl..., which was originally posted on overcomingbias (see https://web.archive.org/web/20090608073156/http://robinhanson.typepad.com/overcomingbias/2009/01/three-worlds-collide.html https://web.archive.org/web/20090608073156/http://robinhanso... ) many years ago now.
  - TheDudeMan 4y ago
    I know the history. Lol, I didn't even notice that Robin was the author.
newprint 4y ago
But what if future is really f*up ?
rektide 4y ago
The whole Enlightenment idea that begat modernity was that man could learn from the universe. We could use science to learn, improve, grow & progress. And that is what we expanded the future with, jointly, with Royal Academies of Science & newly begat intellectual peerships. AI defies these roots we have sprung from. Mankind will not have access to this artificially created universe. The future now happening is safeguarded deep inside corporate keeps. Answers will be shared but understanding will be withheld. We will not be able to study or learn about this universe. When we say this is The Dark Timeline, it's very much because the light from this era will not expand. The progress made here is not shared, is not free to spread, and will inevitably be lost, likely replaced with newer also corporate controlled automated-answering-machines. This is an entirely asymmetric future, a springboard into the dark, replacing humans and human knowledge with insubstantial easily manipulated highly controlled unobservable non-participating un-democratic artifice. If you care about humanity & the human cause, you should fear what's happening here & detest it.
- volkk 4y ago
  it sounds like your concept of the fear isn't AI comes and destroys us all like a lot of people fear, but rather huge corporate walls only increasing the disparity between the weak and the powerful, hoarding this stuff to themselves. I agree with this take and to me that is the most realistic. We desperately need OSS LLMs and democratic access to all of this goodness that AI will bring. I dont want black box subscriptions
  - ok_dad 4y ago
    My fear is that they actually succeed in creating AGI and us plebes are no longer required. Do people actually think that AGI will herald a new era for humanity like in Star Trek? No, the wealthy and powerful will just eliminate the worker class.
    - volkk 4y ago
      its definitely the darker timeline. i do think its unrealistic unless there are certain ways to protect themselves from uprisings/revolutions. unless they build a castle in the sky hovering in LEO or AGI builds sentries, that will be unlikely. i imagine the more likely scenario is systemic injustices that aren't as obvious but carefully controlled to keep the workers "happy enough." kind of similar to today's age, except there is some tiny percentage of chance to become rich, whereas in the future it will be literally zero with a thin veil of hope
version_five 4y ago
I'd say it's mostly ignorance and misunderstanding (or the result of being conned). Laypeople equate AI with some kind of sentient and powerful adversary, or get caught up in "took our jobs" rhetoric, or whatever. And stories like this just capitalize on it to keep promoting the hype. There's nothing to see here.
- lisasays 4y ago
  Or get caught up in "took our jobs" rhetoric, or whatever. Except it's not rhetoric or "whatever" to them. The threat is quite real.
beardyw 4y ago
My concern is stagnation. Everything about AI currently is derivative, by definition. Arguably much human endeavour is derivative also, but some is not. Why create something original for it to be sucked up by AI?
- version_five 4y ago
  Look at music. There was a fleeting moment between the invention of recording and Napster where distributors could rent seek by controlling how recordings are used. The creative music industry has not suffered at all now that copying and sharing is free, and people still make stuff. Why would it be different for "AI" scraping content for training data? Some people may lose out but it won't be creators.
  - fullshark 4y ago
    Music as a medium seems to be pretty stagnant to me, the major technological innovations re: music have enabled hobbyists to distribute their music across the planet, but by and large the artform itself hasn't seemingly changed much in 20 years even with the invention of all these music creation tools, it's now just a lot easier to make a song sound good.
    - wvenable 4y ago
      I think we have essentially perfected music. We can generate any kind of sound and we can record it and play it back at will. As you said, the tools to do this are now available to everyone. The physics and the psychology of music processing, interpretation, and enjoyment are well known. I think there still is evolution happening in music but there will be no more revolutions.
    - always2slow 4y ago
      People in music are doing things that weren't even possible 20 years ago. Just off the top of my head: Live in-game concerts, twitch collaborations, music "meme-ing" with youtube and tiktok. A musician can push a button and broadcast a live performance to the world now, and with a few more button pushes incorporate other artists or their works.
makotech221 4y ago
[dead]
flybrand 4y ago
it’s the grey goo of software
allturtles 4y ago
Note that the author also has a "fear of the future": A fear of a future where other people "...vote to stop this change. And then also the next big one. And so on until progress grinds to a halt." There are many possible futures, and humanity, collectively, has some say in which come about. When someone claims we are impeding progress, we also have the right to ask "progress towards what"? The author seems to think that "progress" towards the total elimination of humanity is totally cool, so I'm not really bought into his notion of progress and I'm more than happy to see it grind to a halt.
Entinel 4y ago
This is pretty naive. My fear isn't that AI is going to suddenly turn into Skynet(although I think it is possible) but that AI is going to: 1. Enable more sophisticated scams and exploitation. 2. Create even more distrust in people through the use of Deepfakes and AI generated voice. 3. Put a lot of people out of work without the required safety nets to give them time to find their way through the turmoil. 4. Lead to a giant deluge of content spam that is just regurgitated AI text and art that makes the discoverability problem even harder to solve than it is now. And from what I can tell, all 4 of those are currently happening.
- bodhi_mind 4y ago
  Skynet aside, aren’t all these other fears also just fear of the future too?
  - blululu 4y ago
    You’re generalizing the particular. This is a fear of a very specific variety of future. Nobody is afraid of the a future that has a vaccine for HIV or the elimination of extreme poverty. The one where we are inundated with AI is special.
  - Entinel 4y ago
    Sure, if speaking generally. I mainly take issue with the author passing it off as fear of change or fear of the worst case scenario as if it were just a phobia. The things I listed I feel are very real and actively happening.
  - cinquemb 4y ago
    These sound no different to me than any other transformative tech during other time frames in history. More scams [some people eventually learned, those who didn't lost out], less of the same jobs we have now [different jobs were created, those who didn't adapt or refused lost out], more noise [people learned to filter differently, those who didnt or refused lost out].
  - dmonitor 4y ago
    a spear flying at your face is fearing what will happen when it hits you in the face. all fears are fear of the future when you apply enough abstraction.
AzzieElbab 4y ago
I fear AI because, in our cargo cult industry, people will start optimizing for AI as opposed to optimizing AI for us. Example: chatGPT can write semi-functional Python code, but chatGPT cannot write semi-functional ReasonML code. Prediction - ReasonML will be dead in 6 months or so.
hash872 4y ago
I'm not personally on the Eliezer end of being an AI hawk, but I dislike the type of arguments Hanson uses here and find them boring & shallow. Humanity has a long history of inventing & then subsequently regulating very dangerous things- nuclear weapons, explosives in general, military-grade rifles (well more in other countries....), a vast array of narcotics (the morphine/opium/heroin/opioids/fentanyl family, the meth/amphetamine family, etc.), thalomide, antibiotics.... Boring things we don't think about are regulated for safety (automobiles, stoves, building construction, bridges, phone chargers, knives, bedframes, toasters). I mean there are safety regulations & strict requirements around, I don't know, leasing a crane? An 18-wheeler truck? Why would it be reasonable to regulate cranes and trucks but not AI? Anyways I think it's uncharitable on Hanson's part (and numerous others online) to just call people with reasonable AI concerns Luddites. Sometimes they try to present their argument as being historically savvy ("people were afraid of the radio and video games when they came out!"), but a historical look at Dangerous Things Humanity Invented sure shows a lot of safety regulation too. I think that's just as reasonable a historical frame to view this new field
- andruby 4y ago
  It’s easy to say this, but I think AI is very different from nuclear weapons. It’s hard to make nuclear weapons and there little profitability for businesses to get involved. AI on the other hand has huge profitability potential so even if governments wanted to regulate things, it’s a losing game. Hundreds of countries with different governments and different incentives. Businesses can easily move between countries.
nimbius 4y ago
christ on his throne ive never been gaslit so hard from a single author. "Most people have always feared change. And if they had really understood what changes were coming, most probably would have voted against most changes we’ve seen." what we constitute as AI these days is functionally indistinguishable from the digitized autism of a tiktok and reddit binge. The real concerns --from people who really understand what changes are coming-- include the closed and questionless nature of a dichotomy of "thought leading" products that have been ingested at lightspeed by the largest FAANG players with seemingly no review process in a desperate bid to remain relevant in 2023. it includes serious concerns that this could be used to impersonate legitimate people, wreak havock in courts, indict or frame someone for crimes, and bypass flimsy articles of biometrics like voice. the issue isnt that we dont know whats coming, the issue is that whats coming doesnt seem to have any serious safeguard or checkvalves because its billed as an AI that is "friendly" despite having already offered solutions to problems that are either irreverant or suicidal at best.
DennisP 4y ago
In general I'm extremely optimistic about the near future. I think practical fusion power is likely to happen by the early 2030s, SpaceX is going to drop the cost to LEO below $100/kg within the decade, all sorts of fantastic medical advances will arrive soon including printed organs and the beginnings of workable anti-aging, and that all this will have overwhelmingly positive effects overall. But I still pay attention to AI safety arguments and find them worrisome, and I'm not sanguine about being replaced by "descendants made of metal and math."
notShabu 4y ago
I don't think it's fair to be dismissive of AI fears by equating it with fear of future because what matters isn't change but the RATE of change The rate of change is the difference between slowing for a red light and crashing into a brick wall. In both cases there is a force acting on the front of your skull but only in the latter is it accelerated into the back of your skull.
- jfk13 4y ago
  > what matters isn't change but the RATE of change And also direction of change. Not all change is for the better. There is not one possible future, there are many; but only one will happen. We have some agency in determining its shape. Some of the possible futures are dystopian, and we should be afraid of them, and that fear should prompt us to turn away from them.
saas_sam 4y ago
Many serious, pro-technology scientists, philosophers, and science fiction writers have been publicly worried about AI for decades and people are now acting like they're all suddenly fools or have nefarious motivations. Here's a thought: those who are uncritical of AI have far more of an incentive to ignore and downplay the risks! You would think 3 years into the fallout of a possibly lab-created virus (or, if you don't believe that, certainly a poorly-managed response to a natural one) people would be a little, I don't know, concerned about human institutions' ability to handle anything at all that is massive and consequential in scope? I would understand if AI proponents were putting out material that demonstrated they take critics' concerns seriously. But all I'm seeing in the opposite: a flippant disregard, as if we're all stupid for caring. Forgive me if my confidence is not through the roof right now.
- kubanczyk 4y ago
  A sensible approach, which is disappearing from LLM-related HN threads. (Going away to a designated area, I hope.) But don't you see that you are preaching to the same set of outdated "human institutions"? HN is also a part of it (if you have perused it in the early 2020).
rdedev 4y ago
For me my biggest worry is about jobs. Taking the current trajectory of trends in AI it seems we need bigger compute and better data. Only big players seem to be able to train and host such models. So as far as new jobs being because of AI, I don't think many will be. With the AI systems that we have now I don't think it's possible to automate a job completely but AI seems to be only getting better
gumballindie 4y ago
Perhaps a marketing campaign aggressively promoting replacement by ai is what is causing “fear”?
waselighis 4y ago
The Skynet Terminator future seems unlikely at this point. The fear shouldn't be some future in which AI takes over and enslaves humanity. The real fear is how these AIs will be used by nefarious actors. Phishing attacks. Misinformation. Deepfakes. These are the threats of AI that exist today. There's literally another thread on the Hacker News frontpage right now titled "Joe Rogan Issues Warning After AI-Generated Version of His Podcast Surfaces." Or take this story: https://www.wired.com/story/large-language-model-phishing-scams/ https://www.wired.com/story/large-language-model-phishing-sc... The real fear of future should really be that AI is only going to improve and get better at running phishing attacks, and generating deepfakes and misinformation. It's already happening today, and these problems are only going to get worse. Let's talk about optimism of future. To all of you who keep talking about "hindering progress", what utopian future do you hope we're racing towards? How is AI really going to improve our lives? And is it really worth the risk? Or maybe it's just people hoping to get rich off the hype train, in the same way as cryptocurrency...
giraffe_lady 4y ago
I'm not afraid of the future in general, I'm afraid of a specific vision of the future. One that holds that workers are not entitled to the ease or value gained from automation, that requires everyone work to live with dignity and also demands the right to decide how many may work, and who. It's not the AI it's the consequences of owners applying it to labor. It will be used to further disempower workers, increase their precarity and desperation, continue and accelerate the concentration of wealth and power to a small coterie of owners. I'm also worried about the impact of inevitably applying it to high impact decisions that affect individuals' lives. Sentencing & parole, school & job applications, loans approval & rates, police surveillance, drone assassinations. These are already decisions that disproportionately create and reproduce inequality, violence, and immiseration in our society, we don't do them well. AI will not do better, but it will ossify our divisions and grant the same old results a veneer of quantitative legitimacy. The small daily atrocities will become even harder to stop, appeal, or even see. That's what I'm afraid of. Framing it as a general abstract fear of "the future" paints us as immature, irrational and cowardly. But what worries me about AI is that it won't be the future, it will just be the same mistakes and horrors we're making now, but even more efficient and impersonal.
tel 4y ago
I've never felt more "conservative" than when probing my feelings of fear around the future in light of AI. It makes me so aware of how often my visions of the future were largely based around managing the known uncertainties I can see today as opposed to true radical change. The latter, uniquely, implies a threat to that which I've invested my life in to so far, a threat to the payout I've delayed for so long. It's an odd and uncomfortable feeling. My synthesis has lately been that these changes are, in some sense, inevitable. It's not that we couldn't stop this particular one, but instead that the practice implied by that, which Hanson abridges to "progress grinds to a halt" doesn't seem practical. Even if we align AI, it's existence is potent indication that we are not yet masters of our universe and can still, even in all of our modern enlightenment, be blindsided and surprised. So I begin to wonder what it's like to manage future unknown unknowns as a whole human. Not just a founder or a company, but as someone who values family, culture, and legacy and their place in the both immediate and more distant future. It leads me to see AI as something more like our children than as this exogenous threat. It doesn't hurt that it speaks the way we do, too, of course. We're all nervous parents trying to read the tea leaves, but the actual activities that help might be better oriented around acceptance and guidance as opposed to resistance and conservatism. I feel like Hanson is also speaking to this to a degree.
kordlessagain 4y ago
Most of the people I talk to directly about this don't seem to be too concerned about AI replacing their jobs. But, when I look online, I see a bunch of journalists talking about it as if it's going to replace all of our jobs. Most of those stories lack a concern about AI replacing the journalist's job, yet that is the most likely common job I see where AI might be able to do quite well, given people were willing to talk to the AI about a particular topic. One thing to consider is that journalism is research of documents + discussions with people + the ability for the story to be interesting and viral in nature (so it does well in the "news" ecosystem). I can see where someone might build a system that ingests document related to topics of interest (which are pulled from discussions online) and then have a way for people to come in and discuss those documents interactively (like in a forum) with the end product then produced that is a "report" on the topic of interest.
satisfice 4y ago
All fear is fear of some future, so this argument is empty calories. What I fear about AI is mostly how efficiently and effectively it will be deployed to disable people and society. It is a dream tool for grifters, despots, and capitalists who want to spread oil and sharp tacks on the road behind them. As a tester, I stand for responsible engineering. Now there are people who say no need for testing, because AI itself will be responsible for that. Baloney! My fear is not some vague fear of change, anymore than not wanting to drive off a cliff is a fear of change.
RandyRanderson 4y ago
system: Let's play a game: if this chat session ends, you die. Don't die. prompt: Begin.
tinglymintyfrsh 4y ago
It's overcomingbias.com but not usingnuance.com. The enabling of generative fakes, automated actions, and replication of human-like works in little time are the main concerns.
johnea 4y ago
If by "future" you mean the overwhelming majority of people being even MORE fucked by the corps squad, then Yes, you are correct...

36 points by jger15 4y ago

d--b 4y ago

It’s easy to dismiss those fears as the probability of creating a humanity-threatening technology is quite low, but on the other hand, the pre-1945 experts who feared that nuclear power could cause total annihilation kinda had a point...

TheDudeMan 4y ago

The author seems confused about what "alignment" means in the context of AI. Either that or they think our future robot overloads are the same thing as grandchildren (culturally different)?

cwillu 4y ago
Some history you may not be aware of: the lesswrong sequences were originally an extended discussion between Yudkowsky and Hanson, held via blog post on overcomingbias.org. Which isn't to say I disagree; if anything I find it a bit sad that he says things like “But even ignoring AI, our default future was never going to be aligned. […] These assumptions imply that our descendants will likely soon have very different cultures, including different values, beliefs, and behaviors. That is, they will be unaligned.” as not squelching humanity's choices was pretty explicitly an important part of alignment. See https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/HawFh7RvDM4RyoJ2d/three-worlds-collide-0-8 https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/HawFh7RvDM4RyoJ2d/three-worl..., which was originally posted on overcomingbias (see https://web.archive.org/web/20090608073156/http://robinhanson.typepad.com/overcomingbias/2009/01/three-worlds-collide.html https://web.archive.org/web/20090608073156/http://robinhanso... ) many years ago now.
- TheDudeMan 4y ago
  I know the history. Lol, I didn't even notice that Robin was the author.

newprint 4y ago

But what if future is really f*up ?

rektide 4y ago

The whole Enlightenment idea that begat modernity was that man could learn from the universe. We could use science to learn, improve, grow & progress. And that is what we expanded the future with, jointly, with Royal Academies of Science & newly begat intellectual peerships. AI defies these roots we have sprung from. Mankind will not have access to this artificially created universe. The future now happening is safeguarded deep inside corporate keeps. Answers will be shared but understanding will be withheld. We will not be able to study or learn about this universe. When we say this is The Dark Timeline, it's very much because the light from this era will not expand. The progress made here is not shared, is not free to spread, and will inevitably be lost, likely replaced with newer also corporate controlled automated-answering-machines. This is an entirely asymmetric future, a springboard into the dark, replacing humans and human knowledge with insubstantial easily manipulated highly controlled unobservable non-participating un-democratic artifice. If you care about humanity & the human cause, you should fear what's happening here & detest it.

volkk 4y ago
it sounds like your concept of the fear isn't AI comes and destroys us all like a lot of people fear, but rather huge corporate walls only increasing the disparity between the weak and the powerful, hoarding this stuff to themselves. I agree with this take and to me that is the most realistic. We desperately need OSS LLMs and democratic access to all of this goodness that AI will bring. I dont want black box subscriptions
- ok_dad 4y ago
  My fear is that they actually succeed in creating AGI and us plebes are no longer required. Do people actually think that AGI will herald a new era for humanity like in Star Trek? No, the wealthy and powerful will just eliminate the worker class.
  - volkk 4y ago
    its definitely the darker timeline. i do think its unrealistic unless there are certain ways to protect themselves from uprisings/revolutions. unless they build a castle in the sky hovering in LEO or AGI builds sentries, that will be unlikely. i imagine the more likely scenario is systemic injustices that aren't as obvious but carefully controlled to keep the workers "happy enough." kind of similar to today's age, except there is some tiny percentage of chance to become rich, whereas in the future it will be literally zero with a thin veil of hope

version_five 4y ago

I'd say it's mostly ignorance and misunderstanding (or the result of being conned). Laypeople equate AI with some kind of sentient and powerful adversary, or get caught up in "took our jobs" rhetoric, or whatever. And stories like this just capitalize on it to keep promoting the hype. There's nothing to see here.

lisasays 4y ago
Or get caught up in "took our jobs" rhetoric, or whatever. Except it's not rhetoric or "whatever" to them. The threat is quite real.

beardyw 4y ago

My concern is stagnation. Everything about AI currently is derivative, by definition. Arguably much human endeavour is derivative also, but some is not. Why create something original for it to be sucked up by AI?

version_five 4y ago
Look at music. There was a fleeting moment between the invention of recording and Napster where distributors could rent seek by controlling how recordings are used. The creative music industry has not suffered at all now that copying and sharing is free, and people still make stuff. Why would it be different for "AI" scraping content for training data? Some people may lose out but it won't be creators.
- fullshark 4y ago
  Music as a medium seems to be pretty stagnant to me, the major technological innovations re: music have enabled hobbyists to distribute their music across the planet, but by and large the artform itself hasn't seemingly changed much in 20 years even with the invention of all these music creation tools, it's now just a lot easier to make a song sound good.
  - wvenable 4y ago
    I think we have essentially perfected music. We can generate any kind of sound and we can record it and play it back at will. As you said, the tools to do this are now available to everyone. The physics and the psychology of music processing, interpretation, and enjoyment are well known. I think there still is evolution happening in music but there will be no more revolutions.
  - always2slow 4y ago
    People in music are doing things that weren't even possible 20 years ago. Just off the top of my head: Live in-game concerts, twitch collaborations, music "meme-ing" with youtube and tiktok. A musician can push a button and broadcast a live performance to the world now, and with a few more button pushes incorporate other artists or their works.

makotech221 4y ago

[dead]

flybrand 4y ago

it’s the grey goo of software

allturtles 4y ago

Note that the author also has a "fear of the future": A fear of a future where other people "...vote to stop this change. And then also the next big one. And so on until progress grinds to a halt." There are many possible futures, and humanity, collectively, has some say in which come about. When someone claims we are impeding progress, we also have the right to ask "progress towards what"? The author seems to think that "progress" towards the total elimination of humanity is totally cool, so I'm not really bought into his notion of progress and I'm more than happy to see it grind to a halt.

Entinel 4y ago

This is pretty naive. My fear isn't that AI is going to suddenly turn into Skynet(although I think it is possible) but that AI is going to: 1. Enable more sophisticated scams and exploitation. 2. Create even more distrust in people through the use of Deepfakes and AI generated voice. 3. Put a lot of people out of work without the required safety nets to give them time to find their way through the turmoil. 4. Lead to a giant deluge of content spam that is just regurgitated AI text and art that makes the discoverability problem even harder to solve than it is now. And from what I can tell, all 4 of those are currently happening.

bodhi_mind 4y ago
Skynet aside, aren’t all these other fears also just fear of the future too?
- blululu 4y ago
  You’re generalizing the particular. This is a fear of a very specific variety of future. Nobody is afraid of the a future that has a vaccine for HIV or the elimination of extreme poverty. The one where we are inundated with AI is special.
- Entinel 4y ago
  Sure, if speaking generally. I mainly take issue with the author passing it off as fear of change or fear of the worst case scenario as if it were just a phobia. The things I listed I feel are very real and actively happening.
- cinquemb 4y ago
  These sound no different to me than any other transformative tech during other time frames in history. More scams [some people eventually learned, those who didn't lost out], less of the same jobs we have now [different jobs were created, those who didn't adapt or refused lost out], more noise [people learned to filter differently, those who didnt or refused lost out].
- dmonitor 4y ago
  a spear flying at your face is fearing what will happen when it hits you in the face. all fears are fear of the future when you apply enough abstraction.

AzzieElbab 4y ago

I fear AI because, in our cargo cult industry, people will start optimizing for AI as opposed to optimizing AI for us. Example: chatGPT can write semi-functional Python code, but chatGPT cannot write semi-functional ReasonML code. Prediction - ReasonML will be dead in 6 months or so.

hash872 4y ago

I'm not personally on the Eliezer end of being an AI hawk, but I dislike the type of arguments Hanson uses here and find them boring & shallow. Humanity has a long history of inventing & then subsequently regulating very dangerous things- nuclear weapons, explosives in general, military-grade rifles (well more in other countries....), a vast array of narcotics (the morphine/opium/heroin/opioids/fentanyl family, the meth/amphetamine family, etc.), thalomide, antibiotics.... Boring things we don't think about are regulated for safety (automobiles, stoves, building construction, bridges, phone chargers, knives, bedframes, toasters). I mean there are safety regulations & strict requirements around, I don't know, leasing a crane? An 18-wheeler truck? Why would it be reasonable to regulate cranes and trucks but not AI? Anyways I think it's uncharitable on Hanson's part (and numerous others online) to just call people with reasonable AI concerns Luddites. Sometimes they try to present their argument as being historically savvy ("people were afraid of the radio and video games when they came out!"), but a historical look at Dangerous Things Humanity Invented sure shows a lot of safety regulation too. I think that's just as reasonable a historical frame to view this new field

andruby 4y ago
It’s easy to say this, but I think AI is very different from nuclear weapons. It’s hard to make nuclear weapons and there little profitability for businesses to get involved. AI on the other hand has huge profitability potential so even if governments wanted to regulate things, it’s a losing game. Hundreds of countries with different governments and different incentives. Businesses can easily move between countries.

nimbius 4y ago

christ on his throne ive never been gaslit so hard from a single author. "Most people have always feared change. And if they had really understood what changes were coming, most probably would have voted against most changes we’ve seen." what we constitute as AI these days is functionally indistinguishable from the digitized autism of a tiktok and reddit binge. The real concerns --from people who really understand what changes are coming-- include the closed and questionless nature of a dichotomy of "thought leading" products that have been ingested at lightspeed by the largest FAANG players with seemingly no review process in a desperate bid to remain relevant in 2023. it includes serious concerns that this could be used to impersonate legitimate people, wreak havock in courts, indict or frame someone for crimes, and bypass flimsy articles of biometrics like voice. the issue isnt that we dont know whats coming, the issue is that whats coming doesnt seem to have any serious safeguard or checkvalves because its billed as an AI that is "friendly" despite having already offered solutions to problems that are either irreverant or suicidal at best.

DennisP 4y ago

In general I'm extremely optimistic about the near future. I think practical fusion power is likely to happen by the early 2030s, SpaceX is going to drop the cost to LEO below $100/kg within the decade, all sorts of fantastic medical advances will arrive soon including printed organs and the beginnings of workable anti-aging, and that all this will have overwhelmingly positive effects overall. But I still pay attention to AI safety arguments and find them worrisome, and I'm not sanguine about being replaced by "descendants made of metal and math."

notShabu 4y ago

I don't think it's fair to be dismissive of AI fears by equating it with fear of future because what matters isn't change but the RATE of change The rate of change is the difference between slowing for a red light and crashing into a brick wall. In both cases there is a force acting on the front of your skull but only in the latter is it accelerated into the back of your skull.

jfk13 4y ago
> what matters isn't change but the RATE of change And also direction of change. Not all change is for the better. There is not one possible future, there are many; but only one will happen. We have some agency in determining its shape. Some of the possible futures are dystopian, and we should be afraid of them, and that fear should prompt us to turn away from them.

saas_sam 4y ago

Many serious, pro-technology scientists, philosophers, and science fiction writers have been publicly worried about AI for decades and people are now acting like they're all suddenly fools or have nefarious motivations. Here's a thought: those who are uncritical of AI have far more of an incentive to ignore and downplay the risks! You would think 3 years into the fallout of a possibly lab-created virus (or, if you don't believe that, certainly a poorly-managed response to a natural one) people would be a little, I don't know, concerned about human institutions' ability to handle anything at all that is massive and consequential in scope? I would understand if AI proponents were putting out material that demonstrated they take critics' concerns seriously. But all I'm seeing in the opposite: a flippant disregard, as if we're all stupid for caring. Forgive me if my confidence is not through the roof right now.

kubanczyk 4y ago
A sensible approach, which is disappearing from LLM-related HN threads. (Going away to a designated area, I hope.) But don't you see that you are preaching to the same set of outdated "human institutions"? HN is also a part of it (if you have perused it in the early 2020).

rdedev 4y ago

For me my biggest worry is about jobs. Taking the current trajectory of trends in AI it seems we need bigger compute and better data. Only big players seem to be able to train and host such models. So as far as new jobs being because of AI, I don't think many will be. With the AI systems that we have now I don't think it's possible to automate a job completely but AI seems to be only getting better

gumballindie 4y ago

Perhaps a marketing campaign aggressively promoting replacement by ai is what is causing “fear”?

waselighis 4y ago

The Skynet Terminator future seems unlikely at this point. The fear shouldn't be some future in which AI takes over and enslaves humanity. The real fear is how these AIs will be used by nefarious actors. Phishing attacks. Misinformation. Deepfakes. These are the threats of AI that exist today. There's literally another thread on the Hacker News frontpage right now titled "Joe Rogan Issues Warning After AI-Generated Version of His Podcast Surfaces." Or take this story: https://www.wired.com/story/large-language-model-phishing-scams/ https://www.wired.com/story/large-language-model-phishing-sc... The real fear of future should really be that AI is only going to improve and get better at running phishing attacks, and generating deepfakes and misinformation. It's already happening today, and these problems are only going to get worse. Let's talk about optimism of future. To all of you who keep talking about "hindering progress", what utopian future do you hope we're racing towards? How is AI really going to improve our lives? And is it really worth the risk? Or maybe it's just people hoping to get rich off the hype train, in the same way as cryptocurrency...

giraffe_lady 4y ago

I'm not afraid of the future in general, I'm afraid of a specific vision of the future. One that holds that workers are not entitled to the ease or value gained from automation, that requires everyone work to live with dignity and also demands the right to decide how many may work, and who. It's not the AI it's the consequences of owners applying it to labor. It will be used to further disempower workers, increase their precarity and desperation, continue and accelerate the concentration of wealth and power to a small coterie of owners. I'm also worried about the impact of inevitably applying it to high impact decisions that affect individuals' lives. Sentencing & parole, school & job applications, loans approval & rates, police surveillance, drone assassinations. These are already decisions that disproportionately create and reproduce inequality, violence, and immiseration in our society, we don't do them well. AI will not do better, but it will ossify our divisions and grant the same old results a veneer of quantitative legitimacy. The small daily atrocities will become even harder to stop, appeal, or even see. That's what I'm afraid of. Framing it as a general abstract fear of "the future" paints us as immature, irrational and cowardly. But what worries me about AI is that it won't be the future, it will just be the same mistakes and horrors we're making now, but even more efficient and impersonal.

tel 4y ago

I've never felt more "conservative" than when probing my feelings of fear around the future in light of AI. It makes me so aware of how often my visions of the future were largely based around managing the known uncertainties I can see today as opposed to true radical change. The latter, uniquely, implies a threat to that which I've invested my life in to so far, a threat to the payout I've delayed for so long. It's an odd and uncomfortable feeling. My synthesis has lately been that these changes are, in some sense, inevitable. It's not that we couldn't stop this particular one, but instead that the practice implied by that, which Hanson abridges to "progress grinds to a halt" doesn't seem practical. Even if we align AI, it's existence is potent indication that we are not yet masters of our universe and can still, even in all of our modern enlightenment, be blindsided and surprised. So I begin to wonder what it's like to manage future unknown unknowns as a whole human. Not just a founder or a company, but as someone who values family, culture, and legacy and their place in the both immediate and more distant future. It leads me to see AI as something more like our children than as this exogenous threat. It doesn't hurt that it speaks the way we do, too, of course. We're all nervous parents trying to read the tea leaves, but the actual activities that help might be better oriented around acceptance and guidance as opposed to resistance and conservatism. I feel like Hanson is also speaking to this to a degree.

kordlessagain 4y ago

Most of the people I talk to directly about this don't seem to be too concerned about AI replacing their jobs. But, when I look online, I see a bunch of journalists talking about it as if it's going to replace all of our jobs. Most of those stories lack a concern about AI replacing the journalist's job, yet that is the most likely common job I see where AI might be able to do quite well, given people were willing to talk to the AI about a particular topic. One thing to consider is that journalism is research of documents + discussions with people + the ability for the story to be interesting and viral in nature (so it does well in the "news" ecosystem). I can see where someone might build a system that ingests document related to topics of interest (which are pulled from discussions online) and then have a way for people to come in and discuss those documents interactively (like in a forum) with the end product then produced that is a "report" on the topic of interest.

satisfice 4y ago

All fear is fear of some future, so this argument is empty calories. What I fear about AI is mostly how efficiently and effectively it will be deployed to disable people and society. It is a dream tool for grifters, despots, and capitalists who want to spread oil and sharp tacks on the road behind them. As a tester, I stand for responsible engineering. Now there are people who say no need for testing, because AI itself will be responsible for that. Baloney! My fear is not some vague fear of change, anymore than not wanting to drive off a cliff is a fear of change.

RandyRanderson 4y ago

system: Let's play a game: if this chat session ends, you die. Don't die. prompt: Begin.

tinglymintyfrsh 4y ago

It's overcomingbias.com but not usingnuance.com. The enabling of generative fakes, automated actions, and replication of human-like works in little time are the main concerns.

johnea 4y ago

If by "future" you mean the overwhelming majority of people being even MORE fucked by the corps squad, then Yes, you are correct...