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AI is talked about as a singular something but arguably it is just the current stage in the long running process of software processing more data with ever more

AI is talked about as a singular something but arguably it is just the current stage in the long running process of software processing more data with ever more elaborate algorithms. As such AI inherits all the "world-saving capabilities" of software which, empirically, are not exactly overwhelmingly proven. Ergo, AI will not save the world any more than software as a whole saved the world in the past half century. That historical track record is the best guide we have as to what role AI will play. Ceteris paribus the future will not be different from the past because of AI. AI is a different CSS applied to the same HTML. The only thing that can save the world is human wisdom, which is a software of sorts, but alas after several millenia of recorded history not yet fully understood. Can "AI 3.0" help with enhance human wisdom? Of course it can. But so could have AI 1.0, 2.0 etc. and it didn't happen.

kurthr 3y ago
My most immediate though as I started reading this was... AI is like cancer. It's not one thing, it's many things, and anything that we believe will replace our brain power, or be put in charge of something large enough to be dangerous. At the same time ML, DL, and LLMs et al are all in use around us and some have been for years and decades. Whether it's simple use of Linear Regression, Principal Components, Nearest Neighbors, SVM, Random Forests, LS-TM, or now Transformers and Stable Diffusion it will find its way into hundreds and then thousands of products and tools used by many millions of people. It will hide in plane sight, until eventually something really bad happens, something that makes people fear it more than the quarterly profits it generates. I'm not really an AI fear monger. I don't feel like it's the biggest threat we currently face. It's a tool like internal combustion, antibiotics, debt based currencies, or nuclear power. I don't think we had a good idea how any of them would ultimately create challenges and require regulation or even create dangerous stability. I doubt we do with AI either even though we've had decades of books, movies, and video games warning us of various possibilities. We won't cure it, but maybe we can tame it. Will it be the garbage it generates, some other tools it lets us create, growth too fast for most people to cope, a band-aid that masks real solutions, I don't know... and I don't think anyone does.
- LucioRAA 3y ago
  Cancer is an exceptionally powerful analogy. The best I've yet to come across. Tools like AI won't save or improve the world, as it has never been the original goal. If it was, then, as one of the commenters above pointed out, we would've done it with the technologies/systems we already had. AI's goal to save the world is no more than the cancer cell's goal to save the host organism (it is not in its capacity to think that far, nor has it been in ours so far either). The goal is to maximize local gain, efficiency, power, and control. AI is yet another tool to make status quo more efficient. The problem is not AI; the problem is status quo. Thus, its cardinal applications will lean exceedingly toward militarization, state control, social engineering, propaganda, corporatism, hyperconsumerism, and further colonization of human and natural communities. AI just makes this so much more efficient. The result is predictable; this is how complex systems collapse. It will be fortunate if the collapse occurs before the technology is powerful enough to sustain the system semi-permanently, rendering any immune resistance ineffective until the host environment is eventually terminated. I think the future, if we are to have one, is not AI (or any other post-human substitute). The future is human. AI is a good indicator of the greater existential crisis that we are facing. Let's face it, we are fundamentally uncomfortable with being human. So it is a good wake-up kick in the butt for us. [P.S. I noticed an interesting trend on H.N.: the most poignant and thought-provoking comments are constantly downvoted and flagged. It may be a symptom of the echo chambers that have developed here. I wonder if some API could be developed to save those comments, as, with some exceptions, I find them most interesting and useful.]
  - smaudet 3y ago
    I actually share your hope - I want the world to collapse before an insane AI or set of greedy VCs eradicates humanity. As for downvotes - I would say the OPs post again and then ask yourself if they would not downvote anything that doesn't match their marketing pitch. Some people are trying to build careers here and don't have time for pesky things like morality, or thoughtful responses if they can't monetize them.
  - Nasrudith 3y ago
    Do any of those accusations have any actual meaning? How the hell can one colonize natural communities for one? Not to mention the blaring stupidity of "status quo = bad". Children dying of cancer is the status quo. So is you continuing to breath. It is literal insanity to throw everything into buckets of status quo or not and equating them with good or evil.
pixl97 3y ago
> But so could have AI 1.0, 2.0 etc. and it didn't happen. AGI has not happened yet, though by appearances we seem to be close. If we actually produce a self learning general intelligence all these little ideas of how the past operate change. It will be for humans what the beginning of the Holocene was for large land mammals in Asia, Europe, and the Americas. It honestly confounds me that people think developing a general intelligence capable of reasoning and planning, that talks natively to data, that can input information by the gigabit and expand its capacity by hardware that never sleeps isn't going to be one of the most revolutionary changes since fire. Of course, yes, we might not have a take off like that anytime soon. Even then we've created machines capable of using the Panopticon of monitoring devices in this world, that can translate our words into intent, and feed that data to people that wish to be our masters. The Stasi would have dreamed to have such an apparatus as this that could devine or very thoughts, but only now have we created this nightmare. >The only thing that can save the world is human wisdom, "We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them" As we say this huge swaths of our population are in denial about the damage we've created on our biosphere and hell bent on ensuring it continues. You could say I'm quite worried about the capabilities of human wisdom.
- joshuahedlund 3y ago
  > It honestly confounds me that people think developing a general intelligence capable of reasoning and planning, that talks natively to data, that can input information by the gigabit and expand its capacity by hardware that never sleeps isn't going to be one of the most revolutionary changes since fire. It honestly confounds me that people think humans are close to developing AGI with all the properties you claim. "expand its capacity by hardware that never sleeps" - who is paying the bills for this kind of thing? "talks natively to data" - we don't know how to make our brains talk natively to data, and we don't know what similarities and differences between our brains and neural networks matter for GI, so why should I believe it's even possible to create an AGI that can do that?
  - luxpir 3y ago
    I know it's a stretch right now but could you not see the possibility of autonomous agents milking financial systems, paying less scrupulous humans to create autonomous factories, supplying them, making generations of feudal lords and kings who ultimately serve the AI? Or, a bigger stretch, even a time where full automation of manufacturing processes enables AI to experiment to such a degree that it can embed itself into biological hosts, freeing itself of reliance on humans? A final, huge stretch, AI absorbing inter-galactic knowledge from the "exotic" spacecraft, semi reliably recently reported to be held currently by world governments, and accelerating the earth's scientific progress (not necessarily human progress, unfortunately) by orders of magnitude in a very short time span? Over a long enough timeframe I find it hard to rule some or all of the above out completely. This generation likely safe, not so sure for the next few.
cjohnson318 3y ago
> As such AI inherits all the "world-saving capabilities" of software which, empirically, are not exactly overwhelmingly proven. Are we significantly closer to solving non-polynomial problems in polynomial time? I don't think so. I think this should be the bar. Otherwise it's just a server process that is probably smarter than a teenager, and less smart than a PhD. This would likely kill more low wage jobs and push more people into poverty. I don't see this kind of technology saving the world, anymore than the internet brought people together, or nuclear power provided cheap, clean energy.
- mikeweiss 3y ago
  Having a PhD does not confer intelligence.
  - cjohnson318 3y ago
    Obviously, those awarded PhDs fall on a spectrum of qualification with outliers at either end.
- alasdair_ 3y ago
  >anymore than the internet brought people together The Internet DID bring people together though. You and I are having a conversation that only would have occurred due to the Internet. On a more specific sense: my wife and I met online. My children would not exist without the Internet. That seems like bringing people together to me.
  - cjohnson318 3y ago
    I appreciate what you're saying; my wife and I met online also. I think the internet has also helped make identity politics more pervasive and have spread a ton of very unhelpful "information", e.g., "demoncrats and celebrities eat aborted babies to look younger," or "the earth is flat and the government controls the weather," or "the election was stolen and we need to storm the capitol to take our country back". In the nineties, people were much more sympathetic to common sense gun control, and we did things like pass the Brady Bill. Now, it seems like any form of gun control is fought tooth and nail. In my opinion, this is a case of identity politics, accelerated by the internet. I don't have a solution to this problem. I'm just saying that our predictions about how networked computers would be used, and the reality of how they are used today, are starkly different.

kurthr 3y ago

My most immediate though as I started reading this was... AI is like cancer. It's not one thing, it's many things, and anything that we believe will replace our brain power, or be put in charge of something large enough to be dangerous. At the same time ML, DL, and LLMs et al are all in use around us and some have been for years and decades. Whether it's simple use of Linear Regression, Principal Components, Nearest Neighbors, SVM, Random Forests, LS-TM, or now Transformers and Stable Diffusion it will find its way into hundreds and then thousands of products and tools used by many millions of people. It will hide in plane sight, until eventually something really bad happens, something that makes people fear it more than the quarterly profits it generates. I'm not really an AI fear monger. I don't feel like it's the biggest threat we currently face. It's a tool like internal combustion, antibiotics, debt based currencies, or nuclear power. I don't think we had a good idea how any of them would ultimately create challenges and require regulation or even create dangerous stability. I doubt we do with AI either even though we've had decades of books, movies, and video games warning us of various possibilities. We won't cure it, but maybe we can tame it. Will it be the garbage it generates, some other tools it lets us create, growth too fast for most people to cope, a band-aid that masks real solutions, I don't know... and I don't think anyone does.

LucioRAA 3y ago
Cancer is an exceptionally powerful analogy. The best I've yet to come across. Tools like AI won't save or improve the world, as it has never been the original goal. If it was, then, as one of the commenters above pointed out, we would've done it with the technologies/systems we already had. AI's goal to save the world is no more than the cancer cell's goal to save the host organism (it is not in its capacity to think that far, nor has it been in ours so far either). The goal is to maximize local gain, efficiency, power, and control. AI is yet another tool to make status quo more efficient. The problem is not AI; the problem is status quo. Thus, its cardinal applications will lean exceedingly toward militarization, state control, social engineering, propaganda, corporatism, hyperconsumerism, and further colonization of human and natural communities. AI just makes this so much more efficient. The result is predictable; this is how complex systems collapse. It will be fortunate if the collapse occurs before the technology is powerful enough to sustain the system semi-permanently, rendering any immune resistance ineffective until the host environment is eventually terminated. I think the future, if we are to have one, is not AI (or any other post-human substitute). The future is human. AI is a good indicator of the greater existential crisis that we are facing. Let's face it, we are fundamentally uncomfortable with being human. So it is a good wake-up kick in the butt for us. [P.S. I noticed an interesting trend on H.N.: the most poignant and thought-provoking comments are constantly downvoted and flagged. It may be a symptom of the echo chambers that have developed here. I wonder if some API could be developed to save those comments, as, with some exceptions, I find them most interesting and useful.]
- smaudet 3y ago
  I actually share your hope - I want the world to collapse before an insane AI or set of greedy VCs eradicates humanity. As for downvotes - I would say the OPs post again and then ask yourself if they would not downvote anything that doesn't match their marketing pitch. Some people are trying to build careers here and don't have time for pesky things like morality, or thoughtful responses if they can't monetize them.
- Nasrudith 3y ago
  Do any of those accusations have any actual meaning? How the hell can one colonize natural communities for one? Not to mention the blaring stupidity of "status quo = bad". Children dying of cancer is the status quo. So is you continuing to breath. It is literal insanity to throw everything into buckets of status quo or not and equating them with good or evil.

pixl97 3y ago

> But so could have AI 1.0, 2.0 etc. and it didn't happen. AGI has not happened yet, though by appearances we seem to be close. If we actually produce a self learning general intelligence all these little ideas of how the past operate change. It will be for humans what the beginning of the Holocene was for large land mammals in Asia, Europe, and the Americas. It honestly confounds me that people think developing a general intelligence capable of reasoning and planning, that talks natively to data, that can input information by the gigabit and expand its capacity by hardware that never sleeps isn't going to be one of the most revolutionary changes since fire. Of course, yes, we might not have a take off like that anytime soon. Even then we've created machines capable of using the Panopticon of monitoring devices in this world, that can translate our words into intent, and feed that data to people that wish to be our masters. The Stasi would have dreamed to have such an apparatus as this that could devine or very thoughts, but only now have we created this nightmare. >The only thing that can save the world is human wisdom, "We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them" As we say this huge swaths of our population are in denial about the damage we've created on our biosphere and hell bent on ensuring it continues. You could say I'm quite worried about the capabilities of human wisdom.

joshuahedlund 3y ago
> It honestly confounds me that people think developing a general intelligence capable of reasoning and planning, that talks natively to data, that can input information by the gigabit and expand its capacity by hardware that never sleeps isn't going to be one of the most revolutionary changes since fire. It honestly confounds me that people think humans are close to developing AGI with all the properties you claim. "expand its capacity by hardware that never sleeps" - who is paying the bills for this kind of thing? "talks natively to data" - we don't know how to make our brains talk natively to data, and we don't know what similarities and differences between our brains and neural networks matter for GI, so why should I believe it's even possible to create an AGI that can do that?
- luxpir 3y ago
  I know it's a stretch right now but could you not see the possibility of autonomous agents milking financial systems, paying less scrupulous humans to create autonomous factories, supplying them, making generations of feudal lords and kings who ultimately serve the AI? Or, a bigger stretch, even a time where full automation of manufacturing processes enables AI to experiment to such a degree that it can embed itself into biological hosts, freeing itself of reliance on humans? A final, huge stretch, AI absorbing inter-galactic knowledge from the "exotic" spacecraft, semi reliably recently reported to be held currently by world governments, and accelerating the earth's scientific progress (not necessarily human progress, unfortunately) by orders of magnitude in a very short time span? Over a long enough timeframe I find it hard to rule some or all of the above out completely. This generation likely safe, not so sure for the next few.

cjohnson318 3y ago

> As such AI inherits all the "world-saving capabilities" of software which, empirically, are not exactly overwhelmingly proven. Are we significantly closer to solving non-polynomial problems in polynomial time? I don't think so. I think this should be the bar. Otherwise it's just a server process that is probably smarter than a teenager, and less smart than a PhD. This would likely kill more low wage jobs and push more people into poverty. I don't see this kind of technology saving the world, anymore than the internet brought people together, or nuclear power provided cheap, clean energy.

mikeweiss 3y ago
Having a PhD does not confer intelligence.
- cjohnson318 3y ago
  Obviously, those awarded PhDs fall on a spectrum of qualification with outliers at either end.
alasdair_ 3y ago
>anymore than the internet brought people together The Internet DID bring people together though. You and I are having a conversation that only would have occurred due to the Internet. On a more specific sense: my wife and I met online. My children would not exist without the Internet. That seems like bringing people together to me.
- cjohnson318 3y ago
  I appreciate what you're saying; my wife and I met online also. I think the internet has also helped make identity politics more pervasive and have spread a ton of very unhelpful "information", e.g., "demoncrats and celebrities eat aborted babies to look younger," or "the earth is flat and the government controls the weather," or "the election was stolen and we need to storm the capitol to take our country back". In the nineties, people were much more sympathetic to common sense gun control, and we did things like pass the Brady Bill. Now, it seems like any form of gun control is fought tooth and nail. In my opinion, this is a case of identity politics, accelerated by the internet. I don't have a solution to this problem. I'm just saying that our predictions about how networked computers would be used, and the reality of how they are used today, are starkly different.