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How is this trash upvoted here? I love HN because most people here are smart and open minded, but when it comes to the risk of AI it's crazy the amount of irrat

by kypro 3y ago

How is this trash upvoted here? I love HN because most people here are smart and open minded, but when it comes to the risk of AI it's crazy the amount of irrationality I see here. For a start, dismissing someone as a "doomer" because they believe bad things could happen is just unproductive. I didn't see this behaviour so much in the past, but today I see it everywhere. Recently I've noticed a trend where whenever people raise concerns about issues like climate change or public debt there's always someone laughing dismissively, "haha, what a doomer. We've heard it all before bro!" If you're someone who does this, please stop. Try being less intellectually arrogant and make actual counter arguments instead. Secondly, whether you personally believe AI will be good or bad for humanity this notion that because something didn't happen in the past it won't happen in the future is obviously not a logically sound position to hold... The field of AI prior to the ~2010s was in a very different place than it is today. For decades neural networks were extremely limited in their capabilities. What we've been able to do with deep neural networks over the several years has progressed rapidly and has finally allowed us to build useful commercial applications such as AI voice assistances, chat bots, and self driving vehicles. It's an observable reality that things are different today. We're no longer in a time where AI systems might hypothetically do things humans once did – we're now starting to see this play out in real time, perhaps exponentially. Some will argue this has always been the trend with technological progress. Notably the industrial revolution allowed us to replace many repetitive manual labour jobs with machines. But thankfully humans weren't great at lifting heavy objects and precise repetitive motion anyway. I think one could argue that the industrial revolution actually freed up humans to do what they excel at, thinking. I'd argue it wasn't the machines that drove the growth of the industrial revolution but a mass unshackling of human creativity that hadn't occurred since the development of agriculture. That's why this time this could be different. Machines are stronger, faster and cheaper than human labourers. The only thing we have is our intelligence... Obviously we humans are extremely adaptable and dynamic, but not infinitely so.

marvin 3y ago
I wish we got more substantial critique than ad hominems, but it is out there, and some of it’s really scathing. Essentially, it boils down to that the most pessimist AI doom arguments are built on a stack of mind experiment hypotheses that are each far from certain to actually occur, or to be unsolvable if they do. And also that a significant portion of those holding those views fall in fallacious mind-traps that resemble a classical doomsday cult too similarly to ignore. All of these claims can and should be continuously investigated during future research, as both the hypothetical accidents and deliberate misuse definitely seem anything between possible and likely. But when the suggested solutions — totalitarian research bans and in the extreme, literal nuclear war causing near-extinction of humans (Yudkowsky deleted a tweet to this effect) — are so counterproductive, strongly worded rebuttals are appropriate. I do agree that those strongly-worded objections should be more prominent.
- rafaelero 3y ago
  Yeah, the thing about debating doomers is that there is no empirical data to ground the debate. They require us to abide to their framework on how things will run out but why should I? If you have no evidence then this is just a fun imaginative game to play, not a serious discussion. And no, this is not equivalent to the climate change debate. We have a very well established arrow of causality between carbon emission to higher temperatures to more extreme weather. With AI doomers we have increasing process power > rapid self-improving AI > rise of a will to exterminate humans that can't be contained by us > doom.
  - pixl97 3y ago
    Hold on here, you act like this is without president and yet you are the testament to the dangers of a runaway intelligence, at least if you're a non-human animal or ecosystem on the planet. I mean there is already a well established causality between human expansion and extinction of species. If you were a large predator species on Earth, the time to fight and remove humans from the playing field we before they picked up their first tool. After that point it was too late. Now you have to answer some questions to see the potential trajectory. 1) Does intelligence begat intelligence? Can an intelligent optimize itself to become more intelligent? What are the limits of this? 2) Are humans the pinnacle of intelligence? Why would evolution optimize humans to be the most possible universal configuration for intelligence? Now, those questions just give us the 'is super intelligences possible' depending on your answers. But this is where you/they/most people in these arguments make a mistake >rise of a will to exterminate humans that can't be contained by us When a virus spreads over a species and kills large portion of a species does it have a will? I mean, I guess you could say the will is programmed in, but there is no larger intelligence occuring. This is where the parable of the paperclip optimizer comes in, said optimizers goal was never to kill humans, and yet via instrumental convergence that is what happens. Humanity is running headlong into a problem I do not know how we'll overcome. Unrestrained attempts to build super intelligence will lead from human extinction, to lessor versions where society falls apart and elects authoritarians. Otherwise we have the straight into authoritarianism option, which likely only buys us time as the authoritarians are just as apt to build super intelligence to consolidate their own power and control others.

by kypro 3y ago

marvin 3y ago

I wish we got more substantial critique than ad hominems, but it is out there, and some of it’s really scathing. Essentially, it boils down to that the most pessimist AI doom arguments are built on a stack of mind experiment hypotheses that are each far from certain to actually occur, or to be unsolvable if they do. And also that a significant portion of those holding those views fall in fallacious mind-traps that resemble a classical doomsday cult too similarly to ignore. All of these claims can and should be continuously investigated during future research, as both the hypothetical accidents and deliberate misuse definitely seem anything between possible and likely. But when the suggested solutions — totalitarian research bans and in the extreme, literal nuclear war causing near-extinction of humans (Yudkowsky deleted a tweet to this effect) — are so counterproductive, strongly worded rebuttals are appropriate. I do agree that those strongly-worded objections should be more prominent.

rafaelero 3y ago
Yeah, the thing about debating doomers is that there is no empirical data to ground the debate. They require us to abide to their framework on how things will run out but why should I? If you have no evidence then this is just a fun imaginative game to play, not a serious discussion. And no, this is not equivalent to the climate change debate. We have a very well established arrow of causality between carbon emission to higher temperatures to more extreme weather. With AI doomers we have increasing process power > rapid self-improving AI > rise of a will to exterminate humans that can't be contained by us > doom.
- pixl97 3y ago
  Hold on here, you act like this is without president and yet you are the testament to the dangers of a runaway intelligence, at least if you're a non-human animal or ecosystem on the planet. I mean there is already a well established causality between human expansion and extinction of species. If you were a large predator species on Earth, the time to fight and remove humans from the playing field we before they picked up their first tool. After that point it was too late. Now you have to answer some questions to see the potential trajectory. 1) Does intelligence begat intelligence? Can an intelligent optimize itself to become more intelligent? What are the limits of this? 2) Are humans the pinnacle of intelligence? Why would evolution optimize humans to be the most possible universal configuration for intelligence? Now, those questions just give us the 'is super intelligences possible' depending on your answers. But this is where you/they/most people in these arguments make a mistake >rise of a will to exterminate humans that can't be contained by us When a virus spreads over a species and kills large portion of a species does it have a will? I mean, I guess you could say the will is programmed in, but there is no larger intelligence occuring. This is where the parable of the paperclip optimizer comes in, said optimizers goal was never to kill humans, and yet via instrumental convergence that is what happens. Humanity is running headlong into a problem I do not know how we'll overcome. Unrestrained attempts to build super intelligence will lead from human extinction, to lessor versions where society falls apart and elects authoritarians. Otherwise we have the straight into authoritarianism option, which likely only buys us time as the authoritarians are just as apt to build super intelligence to consolidate their own power and control others.