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> As the AI improves over time, it progressively becomes much better at these things than their employees. People looooooooooooove speculating about things tha

> As the AI improves over time, it progressively becomes much better at these things than their employees. People looooooooooooove speculating about things that are nowhere near happening. It's more fun the more distant and baseless it gets, but it's also more useless. As usual, I invite you to bookmark this post and make fun of me in 5-10 years if I'm wrong. I'm not that interested in the latest fashionable scaling argument for imminent ASI, or whatever people are saying at the moment.

cubefox 3y ago
> People looooooooooooove speculating about things that are nowhere near happening. You probably would have said the same thing about something like ChatGPT a few years ago. Pure science fiction! Nowhere near happening!
- civilized 3y ago
  Tech's hype artists didn't predict ChatGPT either. Hype artists predict the ambitious futures found in sci-fi novels. They predict things that would be cool if they happened, without any understanding of how they would happen and the strengths and limitations of the methods that might be used. Thus, the futures they predict are not what actually occur. Only the people actually inventing the future, things like AlphaGo and GPT, have a limited crystal ball into the future. They have some understanding of what their methods can and can't do. And even they succumb to hype when they are more successful than they expected to be. Tech pundits on LinkedIn and Twitter and HN have rarely if ever gotten anything right about what exactly the future will look like, and I expect that pattern to continue.
- ChatGTP 3y ago
  To be fair though, I still don’t think ChatGPT is the AI we expected to be talking too. The talking AI was a Hal 9000, current an LLM isn’t that and it might never be. Time will tell I guess. Personally I think there is a hidden special property of ChatGPT-4 that makes it so unreal. It talks and because it talks, we can say this: “I bet you never thought that would happen, we’re close to solving all problems.”. Not discounting the talking bit but if it washed dishes or even those that just generate images, we’d be less convinced the AI is about to take over. Someone once commented, why don’t we worry about stable diffusion taking over the world. I have to say I do agree a little because being trained on image data must help it build some type of world model too. We just don’t worry about that though.
ben_w 3y ago
On the contrary, the loop is: 1. "Computers will never be able to X, as that requires imagination and intuitive thinking" 2. "X is at least 50 years away" 3. Press release: Computers do X (last I saw: Diplomacy (the game not the job), interpretation of medical scans) 4. "X isn't real AI, it's just brute force search/a big database/a glorified Markov chain/linear algebra" (LLMs and diffusion models go here, self driving cars) 5. Computers better at X than most/all humans, but still improved by having human collaborators (Go is either here or 6, IIRC also some variations of Poker, Starcraft, half the Amstrad back catalog) 6. Computers only made worse by having a human trying to help (Chess goes here)
- throwuwu 3y ago
  You conveniently left out the media hype cycles
  - ben_w 3y ago
    The hype cycles are not relevant.
- paxys 3y ago
  Now do flying cars, self driving cars, brain interfaces, 3D printed organs, fusion power, humanoid robots... For every piece of tech that exceeded people's expectations, there are five more that never got out of science fiction books despite decades of continuous investment and constant media hype.
  - ben_w 3y ago
    > flying cars, Helicopters. Also a bajillion startups that charge 100k, currently iterations are basically human sized quadcopters. Not sure how relevant any of that is though, as I was specifically writing about AI… > self driving cars, I tagged #4 already > brain interfaces, 3D printed organs, fusion power, humanoid robots. All #2, IMO, with a few that might count as a #3 technically but not being good enough to deserve it. Although, again, not sure it's relevant, as they're not AI. (Have any of those been dismissed as absolutely impossible rather than just hard? I'm not a student of mass media, so I don't know where to look. But brain interfaces seem to me to be what the very first use of galvanic cells on frog's legs were pointing towards, and artificial fusion has been obviously possible in principle since the 50s because of the fusion bomb…)
donmcronald 3y ago
> As the AI improves over time, it progressively becomes much better at these things than their employees. > People looooooooooooove speculating about things that are nowhere near happening. I agree with that, but I think the real risk isn't that AI improves and gets better than an employee. I think the real risk is that it replaces employees, regardless of whether or not it's better, because it's cheaper. It'll be like the first tier of tech support, but without an option for escalation. My personal opinion is that is dumb, oversold garbage and people are falling for it because it's good at grammar and spelling. I base that on asking it about things where I know there are common misunderstandings with authoritative clarification. The dumb loud people confidently repeat incorrect claims in large volumes while the authoritative sources are silently bewildered at the stupidity. From what I've seen AI is trained on data produced, at least in part, by the "dumb loud masses" and it's "knowledge" is based on quantity over quality. As it about the ZFS scrub of death which is a mass mania of idiocy and it'll gladly tell you all about it. Or ask it what the validation methods are for TLS certificates and it'll happily regurgitate the common knowledge of DV, OV, and EV even though the official docs [1] definitively state it's DV, IV, OV, and EV in section 7.1.2.7.1. It's unreliable and perpetuates misinformation because, AFAIK, it treats most of the input information equally and that's not how things work. I don't remember who, but I remember seeing a famous marketer from the 70s or 80s (?) talking about how most of their success came from realizing that "visibility is credibility". That's true, and unfortunate because we're ignoring a lot of intelligent people that aren't willing to engage in a shouting match to get their voice heard while the dumbest, loudest half of the population is having their viewpoints used to train the LLMs that people are going to rely on for information discovery. The really scary part is that, based on what I've seen, people that do contract work for the government seem to be very eager to replace their workforce (costs) with AI (not costs). Just wait until you need to deal with the government for something and the whole process is like having an argument with a super Redditor. 1. https://cabforum.org/wp-content/uploads/CA-Browser-Forum-BR-v2.0.0.pdf https://cabforum.org/wp-content/uploads/CA-Browser-Forum-BR-...
- cubefox 3y ago
  > I think the real risk isn't that AI improves and gets better than an employee. As long as they are less intelligent than us, they probably won't spiral out of control. The real risk is that they get substantially smarter than us. Gorillas can't control us, because we are smarter. We don't even actively dislike them, but they are nonetheless threatened with extinction. We do not want to be in the role of the gorillas.

cubefox 3y ago

> People looooooooooooove speculating about things that are nowhere near happening. You probably would have said the same thing about something like ChatGPT a few years ago. Pure science fiction! Nowhere near happening!

civilized 3y ago
Tech's hype artists didn't predict ChatGPT either. Hype artists predict the ambitious futures found in sci-fi novels. They predict things that would be cool if they happened, without any understanding of how they would happen and the strengths and limitations of the methods that might be used. Thus, the futures they predict are not what actually occur. Only the people actually inventing the future, things like AlphaGo and GPT, have a limited crystal ball into the future. They have some understanding of what their methods can and can't do. And even they succumb to hype when they are more successful than they expected to be. Tech pundits on LinkedIn and Twitter and HN have rarely if ever gotten anything right about what exactly the future will look like, and I expect that pattern to continue.
ChatGTP 3y ago
To be fair though, I still don’t think ChatGPT is the AI we expected to be talking too. The talking AI was a Hal 9000, current an LLM isn’t that and it might never be. Time will tell I guess. Personally I think there is a hidden special property of ChatGPT-4 that makes it so unreal. It talks and because it talks, we can say this: “I bet you never thought that would happen, we’re close to solving all problems.”. Not discounting the talking bit but if it washed dishes or even those that just generate images, we’d be less convinced the AI is about to take over. Someone once commented, why don’t we worry about stable diffusion taking over the world. I have to say I do agree a little because being trained on image data must help it build some type of world model too. We just don’t worry about that though.

ben_w 3y ago

On the contrary, the loop is: 1. "Computers will never be able to X, as that requires imagination and intuitive thinking" 2. "X is at least 50 years away" 3. Press release: Computers do X (last I saw: Diplomacy (the game not the job), interpretation of medical scans) 4. "X isn't real AI, it's just brute force search/a big database/a glorified Markov chain/linear algebra" (LLMs and diffusion models go here, self driving cars) 5. Computers better at X than most/all humans, but still improved by having human collaborators (Go is either here or 6, IIRC also some variations of Poker, Starcraft, half the Amstrad back catalog) 6. Computers only made worse by having a human trying to help (Chess goes here)

throwuwu 3y ago
You conveniently left out the media hype cycles
- ben_w 3y ago
  The hype cycles are not relevant.
paxys 3y ago
Now do flying cars, self driving cars, brain interfaces, 3D printed organs, fusion power, humanoid robots... For every piece of tech that exceeded people's expectations, there are five more that never got out of science fiction books despite decades of continuous investment and constant media hype.
- ben_w 3y ago
  > flying cars, Helicopters. Also a bajillion startups that charge 100k, currently iterations are basically human sized quadcopters. Not sure how relevant any of that is though, as I was specifically writing about AI… > self driving cars, I tagged #4 already > brain interfaces, 3D printed organs, fusion power, humanoid robots. All #2, IMO, with a few that might count as a #3 technically but not being good enough to deserve it. Although, again, not sure it's relevant, as they're not AI. (Have any of those been dismissed as absolutely impossible rather than just hard? I'm not a student of mass media, so I don't know where to look. But brain interfaces seem to me to be what the very first use of galvanic cells on frog's legs were pointing towards, and artificial fusion has been obviously possible in principle since the 50s because of the fusion bomb…)

donmcronald 3y ago

> As the AI improves over time, it progressively becomes much better at these things than their employees. > People looooooooooooove speculating about things that are nowhere near happening. I agree with that, but I think the real risk isn't that AI improves and gets better than an employee. I think the real risk is that it replaces employees, regardless of whether or not it's better, because it's cheaper. It'll be like the first tier of tech support, but without an option for escalation. My personal opinion is that is dumb, oversold garbage and people are falling for it because it's good at grammar and spelling. I base that on asking it about things where I know there are common misunderstandings with authoritative clarification. The dumb loud people confidently repeat incorrect claims in large volumes while the authoritative sources are silently bewildered at the stupidity. From what I've seen AI is trained on data produced, at least in part, by the "dumb loud masses" and it's "knowledge" is based on quantity over quality. As it about the ZFS scrub of death which is a mass mania of idiocy and it'll gladly tell you all about it. Or ask it what the validation methods are for TLS certificates and it'll happily regurgitate the common knowledge of DV, OV, and EV even though the official docs [1] definitively state it's DV, IV, OV, and EV in section 7.1.2.7.1. It's unreliable and perpetuates misinformation because, AFAIK, it treats most of the input information equally and that's not how things work. I don't remember who, but I remember seeing a famous marketer from the 70s or 80s (?) talking about how most of their success came from realizing that "visibility is credibility". That's true, and unfortunate because we're ignoring a lot of intelligent people that aren't willing to engage in a shouting match to get their voice heard while the dumbest, loudest half of the population is having their viewpoints used to train the LLMs that people are going to rely on for information discovery. The really scary part is that, based on what I've seen, people that do contract work for the government seem to be very eager to replace their workforce (costs) with AI (not costs). Just wait until you need to deal with the government for something and the whole process is like having an argument with a super Redditor. 1. https://cabforum.org/wp-content/uploads/CA-Browser-Forum-BR-v2.0.0.pdf https://cabforum.org/wp-content/uploads/CA-Browser-Forum-BR-...

cubefox 3y ago
> I think the real risk isn't that AI improves and gets better than an employee. As long as they are less intelligent than us, they probably won't spiral out of control. The real risk is that they get substantially smarter than us. Gorillas can't control us, because we are smarter. We don't even actively dislike them, but they are nonetheless threatened with extinction. We do not want to be in the role of the gorillas.