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Society will be fine, actually AI will make things much better, just as the internet did. People have been making these kind of extreme predictions for decades

Society will be fine, actually AI will make things much better, just as the internet did. People have been making these kind of extreme predictions for decades and it was always wrong. The only people still upset about better communications tech are the people who pine for the days when all that was expected of respectable people was automatically trusting anyone working for the government, a university or a newspaper that claimed to be trustworthy. What have we got now? ChatGPT is trained to give all sides of the issue and not express strong opinions, which is better than 90% of journalists and academics manage. Their collective freakout about the "dangers" of AI is really just a part of the ongoing freakout over losing control over information flows. It's also just a kind of clickbait, packaged in a form that the credentialed class don't recognize as such. It's en vogue with AI researchers because they tend to be immersed in a culture of purity spirals in which career advancement and prestige comes from claiming to be more concerned about the fate of the world than other people. Meanwhile, OpenAI control their purity spirals, get the work done and ship products. The sky does not fall. That's why they're winning right now.

slowmovintarget 3y ago
Social media algorithms on "the internet" have caused wars, supported genocides, created extreme societal polarization, have led to dramatically increased suicide rates among teens, especially teen girls, and more. But I got to share baby pics with my mom. How will a far noisier information flow help? Generative AI will only help us do what we've been doing in far greater quantity. Just like calculators can only help you get the wrong answer faster when you don't know what you're doing. These tools will help us build societal disasters with far greater speed. To say it's all going to be much better seems a bit Pollyanna to me. And for the record, we know for a fact that ChatGPT is specifically constrained to give one particular side of political issues, not "all sides."
- juve1996 3y ago
  Attention is ultimately limited. It doesn't matter how much content is being created if it isn't being pushed. The problem hasn't been content creation for a long time.
- chii 3y ago
  none of the problems you mentioned are caused by the internet. These are human problems. Humans cause them, not the tool. I would not give up the tool, just because said tool could be misused by some people to do harm. Just like i don't stop driving just because there's some people who run others over. May be some regulation is important - but only _after_ it has been shown to have caused harm, and that the harm is not outweighed by the good.
- revelio 3y ago
  None of those claims about the effects of social media hold up under inspection. They're all academic pseudo-babble. Look at the Haidt response to people pointing out his evidence of social media = suicides isn't robust; he doesn't argue the evidence actually is robust, he argues that censoring social media shouldn't require you to actually prove your case! These ideas are all motivated narratives by people who want to control the internet to try and re-establish the world where their intuitions are the only ones allowed to be expressed.
shadowgovt 3y ago
Whether society (here I'm referring to "Representative democracy with general elections;" YMMV if you're under an authoritarian or totalitarian state where someone is already filtering the truth for you) will be fine will be heavily dependent upon whether two things happen: 1. The public, in general, comes to understand in an in-their-bones way that they currently do not understand that most of what they see online is hogwash. I.E. the bozo bit has to flip all the way to "My neighbor says there's a missing dog on the block... but is that really my neighbor?" 2. Some other mechanism of truth-pedigree that has not yet been invented comes along to allow for communication of the current state of the world to work. Without (1) we know democracies are easily led by credible, subtle propaganda, and a well-tuned network of hostile actors will drive wedges at the friction points in representative democracies and crack them into warring subcultures. Without (2) voters will have insufficient tools at their disposal to understand country-scale issues and their ability to effect positive outcomes with their vote will collapse into noise, which is a ripe environment for authoritarians to swoop in and seize power (and a ripe environment for centralized authoritarian states to outmaneuver the representative democracies on the world stage and gain power).
fatherzine 3y ago
"AI will make things much better, just as the Internet did." We must be living in very different worlds. I sometimes wonder if the numbers behind https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disease_of_despair https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disease_of_despair (roughly tripled in 20 years of Internet) are just the first steps of a hockey stick.
- chii 3y ago
  How would you know if these disease of despair wouldn't have been worse had there not been internet? How come the same despair from places like russia (where death from alcoholism is almost epidemic), isn't being attributed to the internet there?
- reubenmorais 3y ago
  The article is about a phenomenon observed in a narrow demographic of Americans, and explicitly calls out that "US Black non-Hispanics and US Hispanics, as well as all subgroups of populations in other rich countries (such as countries from the EU, Japan, Australia and others), show the exact opposite trend." How do you go from that to thinking it must be the Internet causing it?
AlexandrB 3y ago
> What have we got now? ChatGPT is trained to give all sides of the issue and not express strong opinions, which is better than 90% of journalists and academics manage. I think we're experiencing the "golden age" of AI at the moment. We'll see what kind of monetization OpenAI and others will land on, but I would be shocked if messing with the model's output for commercial gain is not in the cards in the future.
- chii 3y ago
  which is exactly why it's important to have multiple sources of models, trained by different people/groups, and competing against each other. Single source monopoly is almost always bad for society. Unless there's some sort of natural monopoly, in which case gov't regulation and transparency is required. But i dont think ai models are something that has natural monopoly unlike cables, or pipelines.
UberFly 3y ago
"...freakout about the "dangers" of AI is really just a part of the ongoing freakout over losing control over information flows..." Not all of the "information flows" you mention are helpful or benevolent. Most will likely be targeted and hyper-focused to manipulate individuals like they are now.

slowmovintarget 3y ago

Social media algorithms on "the internet" have caused wars, supported genocides, created extreme societal polarization, have led to dramatically increased suicide rates among teens, especially teen girls, and more. But I got to share baby pics with my mom. How will a far noisier information flow help? Generative AI will only help us do what we've been doing in far greater quantity. Just like calculators can only help you get the wrong answer faster when you don't know what you're doing. These tools will help us build societal disasters with far greater speed. To say it's all going to be much better seems a bit Pollyanna to me. And for the record, we know for a fact that ChatGPT is specifically constrained to give one particular side of political issues, not "all sides."

juve1996 3y ago
Attention is ultimately limited. It doesn't matter how much content is being created if it isn't being pushed. The problem hasn't been content creation for a long time.
chii 3y ago
none of the problems you mentioned are caused by the internet. These are human problems. Humans cause them, not the tool. I would not give up the tool, just because said tool could be misused by some people to do harm. Just like i don't stop driving just because there's some people who run others over. May be some regulation is important - but only _after_ it has been shown to have caused harm, and that the harm is not outweighed by the good.
revelio 3y ago
None of those claims about the effects of social media hold up under inspection. They're all academic pseudo-babble. Look at the Haidt response to people pointing out his evidence of social media = suicides isn't robust; he doesn't argue the evidence actually is robust, he argues that censoring social media shouldn't require you to actually prove your case! These ideas are all motivated narratives by people who want to control the internet to try and re-establish the world where their intuitions are the only ones allowed to be expressed.

shadowgovt 3y ago

Whether society (here I'm referring to "Representative democracy with general elections;" YMMV if you're under an authoritarian or totalitarian state where someone is already filtering the truth for you) will be fine will be heavily dependent upon whether two things happen: 1. The public, in general, comes to understand in an in-their-bones way that they currently do not understand that most of what they see online is hogwash. I.E. the bozo bit has to flip all the way to "My neighbor says there's a missing dog on the block... but is that really my neighbor?" 2. Some other mechanism of truth-pedigree that has not yet been invented comes along to allow for communication of the current state of the world to work. Without (1) we know democracies are easily led by credible, subtle propaganda, and a well-tuned network of hostile actors will drive wedges at the friction points in representative democracies and crack them into warring subcultures. Without (2) voters will have insufficient tools at their disposal to understand country-scale issues and their ability to effect positive outcomes with their vote will collapse into noise, which is a ripe environment for authoritarians to swoop in and seize power (and a ripe environment for centralized authoritarian states to outmaneuver the representative democracies on the world stage and gain power).

fatherzine 3y ago

"AI will make things much better, just as the Internet did." We must be living in very different worlds. I sometimes wonder if the numbers behind https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disease_of_despair https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disease_of_despair (roughly tripled in 20 years of Internet) are just the first steps of a hockey stick.

chii 3y ago
How would you know if these disease of despair wouldn't have been worse had there not been internet? How come the same despair from places like russia (where death from alcoholism is almost epidemic), isn't being attributed to the internet there?
reubenmorais 3y ago
The article is about a phenomenon observed in a narrow demographic of Americans, and explicitly calls out that "US Black non-Hispanics and US Hispanics, as well as all subgroups of populations in other rich countries (such as countries from the EU, Japan, Australia and others), show the exact opposite trend." How do you go from that to thinking it must be the Internet causing it?

AlexandrB 3y ago

> What have we got now? ChatGPT is trained to give all sides of the issue and not express strong opinions, which is better than 90% of journalists and academics manage. I think we're experiencing the "golden age" of AI at the moment. We'll see what kind of monetization OpenAI and others will land on, but I would be shocked if messing with the model's output for commercial gain is not in the cards in the future.

chii 3y ago
which is exactly why it's important to have multiple sources of models, trained by different people/groups, and competing against each other. Single source monopoly is almost always bad for society. Unless there's some sort of natural monopoly, in which case gov't regulation and transparency is required. But i dont think ai models are something that has natural monopoly unlike cables, or pipelines.

UberFly 3y ago

"...freakout about the "dangers" of AI is really just a part of the ongoing freakout over losing control over information flows..." Not all of the "information flows" you mention are helpful or benevolent. Most will likely be targeted and hyper-focused to manipulate individuals like they are now.