7 ms·

I don't worry about scifi stuff that doesn't appear to have any actual bearing in reality.

scarmig 3y ago
Just because something is abstract doesn't mean it's not a threat. Imagine we had started taking climate change seriously in 1990 instead of... Whatever we're doing now.
- pjc50 3y ago
  Climate change has some very scientific projections, while the AI risk crowd get to make up any scenario they want and then say "well it COULD happen".
  - endtime 3y ago
    > the AI risk crowd get to make up any scenario they want and then say "well it COULD happen". This is very much not what they do.
    - yifanl 3y ago
      Well that's just the thing, the AI crowd spans a lot of opinions, from those who believe the endstate is a time travelling cyber Satan that will torture everybody and make clones to torture more people until the end of time, to those who fear large swaths of workers being replaced by an influx of heavily automated processes, to those who are worried about LLM-powered spambots destroying the notion of truth.
      - Xenoamorphous 3y ago
        > those who fear large swaths of workers being replaced by an influx of heavily automated processes, I’m definitely on this camp. Because it is happening already, I’m seeing it before my very eyes. My partner’s employer, a tiny ~50 people company, is already making the copywriters and graphic designers use AI. I work as a developer for a large media company. The chairman, like everybody else not living under a rock for the past few months, has become aware of ChatGPT and wants us to integrate AI stuff in the CMS. We’re working on it, there’s hundreds of people using this CMS daily to create content. Even the best case scenario here, where people are not laid off and just become more productive, results in the profession of many people changing a lot overnight. People who might have loved writing articles or designing stuff from scratch will soon be mere supervisors of AI’s work. I think a lot of some guy’s post in Reddit that made it to HN: he was a 3D artist who loved his work, but was forced by his company to use midjourney, stable diffusion, dall-e or whatever and now was just doing some touches in Photoshop. He hated his “new” job. I haven’t really used ChatGPT, Copilot and the like to generate code yet, because I don’t think I’d like it. I don’t want to correct/touch up some AI’s code as that removes all the joy. It’s weird how roles are changing: we used to have some “AI” autocorrecting the stuff we typed and now we’re the ones correcting the AI. Interesting times for sure, but the “large swaths of people are going to lose their jobs or have any kind of joy removed from them” I’m sure it’ll happen. And no one has a plan to deal with this nor time to come up with something. And having 90% of the workforce being “prompt engineers” is sci-fi worthy dystopia.
        mtlmtlmtlmtl 3y ago
        Gee, it's almost as if everyone is trying to put the shiny new technology in their product because there's a hype/FOMO cycle going on. Remember when blockchain was gonna be in everything? Lots of attempts will be made. We'll see how they pan out. The fact that attempts are being made does not mean they will all succeed. A lot of it could backfire. I would bet good money there are CEOs out there right now contemplating firing their whole support staff and replacing it with ChatGPT. And I would love to know who they are so I could short their company's stock.
        Xenoamorphous 3y ago
        Nah, in both examples I’ve mentioned (the companies my gf and I work for) blockchain wasn’t mentioned even once. This is different.
      - digging 3y ago
        > those who believe the endstate is a time travelling cyber Satan that will torture everybody This smacks of misinformation. If you're referring to that dreaded basilisk, very few people actually believe that scenario has any likelihood at all. Also, it has nothing to do with time travel anyway. The other two things are more or less guaranteed because they're simple extensions of processes that are happening right now and can be seen all around us.
        danaris 3y ago
        Those "very few" people very prominently include Yudkowski himself, or so I understand. Since he's become, for many, the "face of AI risk", that gives it much more (undeserved) appearance of credibility than you imply.
        yifanl 3y ago
        Yes, I listed it first because I think these guys are eating up all the oxygen in the room and the more plausible risks get kinda unfairly lumped with the crankier stuff. (And apologies if I misled people into believing the superintelligence basilisk has time travel powers)
        digging 3y ago
        > Those "very few" people very prominently include Yudkowski himself, or so I understand. I don't think that's true; he's stated before he doesn't and didn't believe it was true. His reaction was more about the stupidity of posting information hazards on public fora rather than that specific information hazard being credible. However, he could be lying post-facto. And I do agree that it kind of sucks that Yud is the "face of AI risk" because it doesn't even matter how correct he might be; a lot of people just don't like him (I'm indifferent). There shouldn't be a "Face of AI risk" because there won't be a single person that everyone like. The idea is bigger than him.
    - onethought 3y ago
      So what is the scenario that we should be worried about? Because I’ve only heard skynet prophecies. Or weird nanobot bullshit. Is there a really boring possible outcome that leads to the destruction of humanity?
      - JohnFen 3y ago
        The biggest risk I see is massive socioeconomic disruption as AI replaces more and more workers and those workers can no longer earn a living. The second biggest risk is just humans being afraid. A scared human is a dangerous, irrational human.
      - digging 3y ago
        Why does it need to be boring to be credible? Anything is non-credible if you arbitrarily label it to be "weird ... bullshit". That doesn't make your arguments sound.
        onethought 3y ago
        Nanobots don’t exist in any meaningful let alone threatening way. So any ai scenario involving them is bullshit, and actually about nanotech not ai. That’s what you hear from the likes of Yudkowsky. It doesn’t have to be boring, but boring sounds more likely to me, because it’s soemthing we don’t think much about… because it’s boring.
  - HDThoreaun 3y ago
    I mean it could though. The US military has drone swarms that can automatically search for and kill people with incredible ease. AI systems are already capable of killing tons of people through similar homemade devices. Just attach a gun and facial recognition to a drone and you've got a product that works.
    - onethought 3y ago
      Right, but there is a long way between that and civilisation collapse. Also neither of those systems have long planning or self improvement capabilities.
- zoogeny 3y ago
  > Imagine we had started taking climate change seriously in 1990 I don't want to completely derail this thought but I am a bit older than some of the crowd on HN and I was in high school in the 90s so my perspective is a bit different I guess on this. Do Millennials think that Gen-X generation wasn't fighting against client change? I remember even further back to elementary school and just having a constant flow of ecological/environmental stuff thrown at us. It used to be deforestation, species extincition and the ozone layer ... but it was taken very seriously even then. I mean, I just looked at the Paris Agreement [1] Wikipedia and the "Lead Up" section mentions: The UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), adopted at the 1992 Earth Summit is one of the first international treaties on the topic. I remember one of the first conversations I had on "global warming" specifically and it was around 1996. But even before I had heard that specific term we were talking about losing large coastal regions due to rising sea levels. The rock band Tool released the album Ænema in 1996 and there is the constant refrain: "Learn to Swim". By the time Al Gore published "An Inconvenient Truth" in 2006, I was feeling the topic was a bit played out, to be honest. At any rate, you may find yourself in 30 years faced with the same kind of attitude ... like people in 2050 saying "imagine people in 2023 actually took climate change seriously!" and you might then feel the same as I do. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paris_Agreement https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paris_Agreement
  - JohnFen 3y ago
    > Do Millennials think that Gen-X generation wasn't fighting against client change? Even boomers were taking the risks of climate change very seriously.
    - digging 3y ago
      Define "very seriously". I know of cover-ups, mass propaganda, antagonistic lobbying, and political inaction. I don't really know of any very serious actions against global climate change predating the 90s.
      - JohnFen 3y ago
        > I don't really know of any very serious actions against global climate change predating the 90s. There was quite a lot, including public demonstrations, etc. Not so different from now, really, except that now the problem has become urgent enough that it's harder to be a denier. Although I was a child then, I even remember a lot of serious agitation happening in the 70s.
digging 3y ago
That's the fun part about being human: we each get to define reality for ourselves.
inkblotuniverse 3y ago
Aeroplanes were science fiction, and widely called such, until they flew.
- danaris 3y ago
  The Wright Brothers flew at Kitty Hawk in 1900. [0] The Bernoulli Equation, which gave us the basic understanding of how lift can be generated with an airfoil, was developed in the mid-1700s. [1] We don't have any fundamental understanding today of how an AGI could be built. We have a bunch of interesting ideas, with varying degrees of evidence for them, but we don't have the same kind of solidly-established scientific foundation for understanding intelligence and the human brain today that we did for understanding lift in 1900. "Some people didn't understand the science, and so called it fiction" isn't a very strong argument. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wright_brothers#Flights https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wright_brothers#Flights [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernoulli%27s_principle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernoulli%27s_principle
  - digging 3y ago
    Human flight was science fiction before Bernoulli. See: Icarus, Abbas ibn Firnas, Leonardo da Vinci.
    - danaris 3y ago
      But Bernoulli proved the scientific foundation of it well over a century before anyone actually did it. No one has provided us with an ironclad scientific foundation for AGI. Some people keep declaring very firmly that it must logically be possible, but even if there are no gaps in your logic whatsoever, that's not the same thing as providing equations for how it would work.

Just because something is abstract doesn't mean it's not a threat. Imagine we had started taking climate change seriously in 1990 instead of... Whatever we're doing now.

pjc50 3y ago
Climate change has some very scientific projections, while the AI risk crowd get to make up any scenario they want and then say "well it COULD happen".
- endtime 3y ago
  > the AI risk crowd get to make up any scenario they want and then say "well it COULD happen". This is very much not what they do.
  - yifanl 3y ago
    Well that's just the thing, the AI crowd spans a lot of opinions, from those who believe the endstate is a time travelling cyber Satan that will torture everybody and make clones to torture more people until the end of time, to those who fear large swaths of workers being replaced by an influx of heavily automated processes, to those who are worried about LLM-powered spambots destroying the notion of truth.
    - Xenoamorphous 3y ago
      > those who fear large swaths of workers being replaced by an influx of heavily automated processes, I’m definitely on this camp. Because it is happening already, I’m seeing it before my very eyes. My partner’s employer, a tiny ~50 people company, is already making the copywriters and graphic designers use AI. I work as a developer for a large media company. The chairman, like everybody else not living under a rock for the past few months, has become aware of ChatGPT and wants us to integrate AI stuff in the CMS. We’re working on it, there’s hundreds of people using this CMS daily to create content. Even the best case scenario here, where people are not laid off and just become more productive, results in the profession of many people changing a lot overnight. People who might have loved writing articles or designing stuff from scratch will soon be mere supervisors of AI’s work. I think a lot of some guy’s post in Reddit that made it to HN: he was a 3D artist who loved his work, but was forced by his company to use midjourney, stable diffusion, dall-e or whatever and now was just doing some touches in Photoshop. He hated his “new” job. I haven’t really used ChatGPT, Copilot and the like to generate code yet, because I don’t think I’d like it. I don’t want to correct/touch up some AI’s code as that removes all the joy. It’s weird how roles are changing: we used to have some “AI” autocorrecting the stuff we typed and now we’re the ones correcting the AI. Interesting times for sure, but the “large swaths of people are going to lose their jobs or have any kind of joy removed from them” I’m sure it’ll happen. And no one has a plan to deal with this nor time to come up with something. And having 90% of the workforce being “prompt engineers” is sci-fi worthy dystopia.
      - mtlmtlmtlmtl 3y ago
        Gee, it's almost as if everyone is trying to put the shiny new technology in their product because there's a hype/FOMO cycle going on. Remember when blockchain was gonna be in everything? Lots of attempts will be made. We'll see how they pan out. The fact that attempts are being made does not mean they will all succeed. A lot of it could backfire. I would bet good money there are CEOs out there right now contemplating firing their whole support staff and replacing it with ChatGPT. And I would love to know who they are so I could short their company's stock.
        Xenoamorphous 3y ago
        Nah, in both examples I’ve mentioned (the companies my gf and I work for) blockchain wasn’t mentioned even once. This is different.
    - digging 3y ago
      > those who believe the endstate is a time travelling cyber Satan that will torture everybody This smacks of misinformation. If you're referring to that dreaded basilisk, very few people actually believe that scenario has any likelihood at all. Also, it has nothing to do with time travel anyway. The other two things are more or less guaranteed because they're simple extensions of processes that are happening right now and can be seen all around us.
      - danaris 3y ago
        Those "very few" people very prominently include Yudkowski himself, or so I understand. Since he's become, for many, the "face of AI risk", that gives it much more (undeserved) appearance of credibility than you imply.
        yifanl 3y ago
        Yes, I listed it first because I think these guys are eating up all the oxygen in the room and the more plausible risks get kinda unfairly lumped with the crankier stuff. (And apologies if I misled people into believing the superintelligence basilisk has time travel powers)
        digging 3y ago
        > Those "very few" people very prominently include Yudkowski himself, or so I understand. I don't think that's true; he's stated before he doesn't and didn't believe it was true. His reaction was more about the stupidity of posting information hazards on public fora rather than that specific information hazard being credible. However, he could be lying post-facto. And I do agree that it kind of sucks that Yud is the "face of AI risk" because it doesn't even matter how correct he might be; a lot of people just don't like him (I'm indifferent). There shouldn't be a "Face of AI risk" because there won't be a single person that everyone like. The idea is bigger than him.
  - onethought 3y ago
    So what is the scenario that we should be worried about? Because I’ve only heard skynet prophecies. Or weird nanobot bullshit. Is there a really boring possible outcome that leads to the destruction of humanity?
    - JohnFen 3y ago
      The biggest risk I see is massive socioeconomic disruption as AI replaces more and more workers and those workers can no longer earn a living. The second biggest risk is just humans being afraid. A scared human is a dangerous, irrational human.
    - digging 3y ago
      Why does it need to be boring to be credible? Anything is non-credible if you arbitrarily label it to be "weird ... bullshit". That doesn't make your arguments sound.
      - onethought 3y ago
        Nanobots don’t exist in any meaningful let alone threatening way. So any ai scenario involving them is bullshit, and actually about nanotech not ai. That’s what you hear from the likes of Yudkowsky. It doesn’t have to be boring, but boring sounds more likely to me, because it’s soemthing we don’t think much about… because it’s boring.
- HDThoreaun 3y ago
  I mean it could though. The US military has drone swarms that can automatically search for and kill people with incredible ease. AI systems are already capable of killing tons of people through similar homemade devices. Just attach a gun and facial recognition to a drone and you've got a product that works.
  - onethought 3y ago
    Right, but there is a long way between that and civilisation collapse. Also neither of those systems have long planning or self improvement capabilities.
zoogeny 3y ago
> Imagine we had started taking climate change seriously in 1990 I don't want to completely derail this thought but I am a bit older than some of the crowd on HN and I was in high school in the 90s so my perspective is a bit different I guess on this. Do Millennials think that Gen-X generation wasn't fighting against client change? I remember even further back to elementary school and just having a constant flow of ecological/environmental stuff thrown at us. It used to be deforestation, species extincition and the ozone layer ... but it was taken very seriously even then. I mean, I just looked at the Paris Agreement [1] Wikipedia and the "Lead Up" section mentions: The UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), adopted at the 1992 Earth Summit is one of the first international treaties on the topic. I remember one of the first conversations I had on "global warming" specifically and it was around 1996. But even before I had heard that specific term we were talking about losing large coastal regions due to rising sea levels. The rock band Tool released the album Ænema in 1996 and there is the constant refrain: "Learn to Swim". By the time Al Gore published "An Inconvenient Truth" in 2006, I was feeling the topic was a bit played out, to be honest. At any rate, you may find yourself in 30 years faced with the same kind of attitude ... like people in 2050 saying "imagine people in 2023 actually took climate change seriously!" and you might then feel the same as I do. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paris_Agreement https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paris_Agreement
- JohnFen 3y ago
  > Do Millennials think that Gen-X generation wasn't fighting against client change? Even boomers were taking the risks of climate change very seriously.
  - digging 3y ago
    Define "very seriously". I know of cover-ups, mass propaganda, antagonistic lobbying, and political inaction. I don't really know of any very serious actions against global climate change predating the 90s.
    - JohnFen 3y ago
      > I don't really know of any very serious actions against global climate change predating the 90s. There was quite a lot, including public demonstrations, etc. Not so different from now, really, except that now the problem has become urgent enough that it's harder to be a denier. Although I was a child then, I even remember a lot of serious agitation happening in the 70s.

digging 3y ago

That's the fun part about being human: we each get to define reality for ourselves.

inkblotuniverse 3y ago

Aeroplanes were science fiction, and widely called such, until they flew.

danaris 3y ago
The Wright Brothers flew at Kitty Hawk in 1900. [0] The Bernoulli Equation, which gave us the basic understanding of how lift can be generated with an airfoil, was developed in the mid-1700s. [1] We don't have any fundamental understanding today of how an AGI could be built. We have a bunch of interesting ideas, with varying degrees of evidence for them, but we don't have the same kind of solidly-established scientific foundation for understanding intelligence and the human brain today that we did for understanding lift in 1900. "Some people didn't understand the science, and so called it fiction" isn't a very strong argument. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wright_brothers#Flights https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wright_brothers#Flights [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernoulli%27s_principle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernoulli%27s_principle
- digging 3y ago
  Human flight was science fiction before Bernoulli. See: Icarus, Abbas ibn Firnas, Leonardo da Vinci.
  - danaris 3y ago
    But Bernoulli proved the scientific foundation of it well over a century before anyone actually did it. No one has provided us with an ironclad scientific foundation for AGI. Some people keep declaring very firmly that it must logically be possible, but even if there are no gaps in your logic whatsoever, that's not the same thing as providing equations for how it would work.