5 ms·

> 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.

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.