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I have more fear of the people running the system than any AI. I also think that AR/VR is more scary than AI. My fear is how poorly rendered AR/VR can be more p

I have more fear of the people running the system than any AI. I also think that AR/VR is more scary than AI. My fear is how poorly rendered AR/VR can be more positive interaction than interactions with the people that surround the observer.

Kiro 3y ago
If it's a positive interaction, then what is your fear?
- TheOtherHobbes 3y ago
  That it's a negative interaction pretending to be a positive one.
  - detourdog 3y ago
    The "fear" is that people instinctively gravitate towards comfort and the easy accessibility of the comfort could be detrimental. Anyone that used the web pre and post ads can watch a useful tool degrade to the lowest common denominator. If people love their phones so much imagine if they rarely saw anything else. Maybe they constantly only see 80% of the world most of the time they are awake. I don't think it is society ending future. I would rather people perform virtual coups.
- halostatue 3y ago
  I suspect that the OP meant that it triggers a stimulus reaction which is mistaken for a positive interaction.
- pipo234 3y ago
  If @detourdog meant AR/VR in the snow crash / Metaverse sense, I guess the apprehension is similar to the discourse about "Leo Tolstoy on why people drink (2014)" a couple of days ago https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36526645 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36526645 People tend to turn to substances / AR/VR / texting / phone calls / read books / ... to take the edge of confronting the sometimes harsh reality. Of course, there is no way in which AR/VR is likely to intrinsically improve interaction, but is is so much worse that we need to worry?
  - detourdog 3y ago
    I worry about it more the AI. I also make no claim that it is worse or better. Maybe an easy example to examine the difference between A Rave alone in your cubicle with everybody in the world vs. A Rave with a 1,000 people in abandoned waterfront warehouse. That Rave can simultaneously experience the sunrise before making their way back to where they belong. They are very different and I'm sure with the right stimulants equally intense. Could be it's just nostalgia that makes me worry about it.
pipo234 3y ago
Might have completely missed something, but I thought AR/VR was (and still is) a solution looking for a problem. Have they finally stumbled into something people want to do with them, beyond games and porn?
- CuriouslyC 3y ago
  AR will take off like crazy when they develop lightweight, clear goggles than can display color with a range of opacities. A million jobs are begging for HUDS that guide the worker, but the current equipment isn't there yet.
  - pipo234 3y ago
    > A million jobs are begging for HUDS that guide the worker [..] I have a pretty dull, comfortable desk job and lack the imagination to come up with any. Can you name some? (I've been wrong before when I was skeptical when everyone was hyped about iPad, Deep Learning, etc. so please convince me about Apple Vision, Mark's metaverse, or google's glasses and paint what might be in 5 years.)
    - proamdev123 3y ago
      Here’s one: a warehouse worker with HUD that guides picking and/or packing visually. The HUD could overlay SKU, product description, weight, volume, etc — directly onto the actual item in the storage rack.
    - sheepscreek 3y ago
      Oil drill worker. Industrial worker on the factory floor. A car mechanic. A surgeon… Even an artist (make a sketch, blow it up a 100x using AR on a wall, trace paint to keep proportions right - heck the artist doesn’t even need to do it themselves, they could hire an associate to do it).
    - mecsred 3y ago
      This is something I've worked on so I can comment a bit. The most popular use case I've seen so far is AR manuals, with the sell that you can have technicians up to speed on a piece of equipment without needing human coaching or training. I was shown a demo in the context of robotics recently where you look at a robot and explanations of signals in the wiring harness were shown, hydraulic connections, wear parts, etc. It was visually pretty impressive but quite telling that the two most interested people were my manager and the CEO. The engineers just kinda sat looking at each other with a non verbal "Must have been a fun project to build huh? I'll stick to PDFs".
DennisP 3y ago
As long as the AI is less generally intelligent than people, it makes sense to be more afraid of the people. Once the AI is more intelligent than the smartest people, it's more sensible to be most afraid of the AI.
- blowski 3y ago
  The AI is already more intelligent than the smartest people in some senses - it has more knowledge in aggregate than any single person will ever have, but doesn't have the depth of the smartest people in a particular niche. In other ways, it's smarter than the average person even in their niche, but can still make dumb mistakes that a 3 year old would work out fairly quickly. Note that we say the same of humans. My friend always wins pub quizzes, but can barely add 2 and 2, and has the emotional intelligence of a rock. Is he "intelligent"? It's my problem with how we treat intelligence like it's a single sliding scale for everything.
- lolinder 3y ago
  The implication of OP's statement is that they don't believe that AGI is on the horizon, and I'm inclined to agree. This feels a lot like the hype surrounding self-driving cars a few years back, where everyone was convinced fully autonomous vehicles were ~5 years away. It turned out that, while the results we had were impressive, getting the rest of the way to fully replacing humans was much, much harder than was generally expected.
  - DennisP 3y ago
    That may well be the case, but it's still worth thinking about longer-term risks. If it takes, say, forty years to get to AGI, then it's still pretty sobering to consider a serious threat of extinction, just forty years away. Most of the arguments over what's worth worrying about are people talking past each other, because one side worries about short-term risks and the other side is more focused on the long term. Another conflict may be between people making linear projections, and those making exponential ones. Whether full self-driving happens next year or in 2050, it will probably still look pretty far away, when it's really just a year or two from exceeding human capabilities. When it's also hard to know exactly how difficult the problem is, there's a good chance that these great leaps will take us by surprise.
detourdog 3y ago
It took me 3 days to really understand the demos. I definitely plan on checking it out. I see many uses. Does anyone know how easy it would be translate American Sign Language? That must be goal if it's not already done.
spaceman_2020 3y ago
> I also think that AR/VR is more scary than AI Absolutely agree. I was never bothered by Oculus, but Apple's Vision Pro demonstration was equal parts fascinating and terrifying. I can see the next generation getting completely lost in alternate realities. Smartphone addiction got nothing on what's about to come.
- detourdog 3y ago
  I only have experience with the Apple Vision demo and the terrifying/emotional part for me was the beautiful people using the device in beautiful places. Everything was so clean and stress free that it was obviously artificial. I could only imagine stressed out people using it in squalor. The whole demo seemed geared to keep that thought far away.

Kiro 3y ago

If it's a positive interaction, then what is your fear?

TheOtherHobbes 3y ago
That it's a negative interaction pretending to be a positive one.
- detourdog 3y ago
  The "fear" is that people instinctively gravitate towards comfort and the easy accessibility of the comfort could be detrimental. Anyone that used the web pre and post ads can watch a useful tool degrade to the lowest common denominator. If people love their phones so much imagine if they rarely saw anything else. Maybe they constantly only see 80% of the world most of the time they are awake. I don't think it is society ending future. I would rather people perform virtual coups.
halostatue 3y ago
I suspect that the OP meant that it triggers a stimulus reaction which is mistaken for a positive interaction.
pipo234 3y ago
If @detourdog meant AR/VR in the snow crash / Metaverse sense, I guess the apprehension is similar to the discourse about "Leo Tolstoy on why people drink (2014)" a couple of days ago https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36526645 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36526645 People tend to turn to substances / AR/VR / texting / phone calls / read books / ... to take the edge of confronting the sometimes harsh reality. Of course, there is no way in which AR/VR is likely to intrinsically improve interaction, but is is so much worse that we need to worry?
- detourdog 3y ago
  I worry about it more the AI. I also make no claim that it is worse or better. Maybe an easy example to examine the difference between A Rave alone in your cubicle with everybody in the world vs. A Rave with a 1,000 people in abandoned waterfront warehouse. That Rave can simultaneously experience the sunrise before making their way back to where they belong. They are very different and I'm sure with the right stimulants equally intense. Could be it's just nostalgia that makes me worry about it.

pipo234 3y ago

Might have completely missed something, but I thought AR/VR was (and still is) a solution looking for a problem. Have they finally stumbled into something people want to do with them, beyond games and porn?

CuriouslyC 3y ago
AR will take off like crazy when they develop lightweight, clear goggles than can display color with a range of opacities. A million jobs are begging for HUDS that guide the worker, but the current equipment isn't there yet.
- pipo234 3y ago
  > A million jobs are begging for HUDS that guide the worker [..] I have a pretty dull, comfortable desk job and lack the imagination to come up with any. Can you name some? (I've been wrong before when I was skeptical when everyone was hyped about iPad, Deep Learning, etc. so please convince me about Apple Vision, Mark's metaverse, or google's glasses and paint what might be in 5 years.)
  - proamdev123 3y ago
    Here’s one: a warehouse worker with HUD that guides picking and/or packing visually. The HUD could overlay SKU, product description, weight, volume, etc — directly onto the actual item in the storage rack.
  - sheepscreek 3y ago
    Oil drill worker. Industrial worker on the factory floor. A car mechanic. A surgeon… Even an artist (make a sketch, blow it up a 100x using AR on a wall, trace paint to keep proportions right - heck the artist doesn’t even need to do it themselves, they could hire an associate to do it).
  - mecsred 3y ago
    This is something I've worked on so I can comment a bit. The most popular use case I've seen so far is AR manuals, with the sell that you can have technicians up to speed on a piece of equipment without needing human coaching or training. I was shown a demo in the context of robotics recently where you look at a robot and explanations of signals in the wiring harness were shown, hydraulic connections, wear parts, etc. It was visually pretty impressive but quite telling that the two most interested people were my manager and the CEO. The engineers just kinda sat looking at each other with a non verbal "Must have been a fun project to build huh? I'll stick to PDFs".

DennisP 3y ago

As long as the AI is less generally intelligent than people, it makes sense to be more afraid of the people. Once the AI is more intelligent than the smartest people, it's more sensible to be most afraid of the AI.

blowski 3y ago
The AI is already more intelligent than the smartest people in some senses - it has more knowledge in aggregate than any single person will ever have, but doesn't have the depth of the smartest people in a particular niche. In other ways, it's smarter than the average person even in their niche, but can still make dumb mistakes that a 3 year old would work out fairly quickly. Note that we say the same of humans. My friend always wins pub quizzes, but can barely add 2 and 2, and has the emotional intelligence of a rock. Is he "intelligent"? It's my problem with how we treat intelligence like it's a single sliding scale for everything.
lolinder 3y ago
The implication of OP's statement is that they don't believe that AGI is on the horizon, and I'm inclined to agree. This feels a lot like the hype surrounding self-driving cars a few years back, where everyone was convinced fully autonomous vehicles were ~5 years away. It turned out that, while the results we had were impressive, getting the rest of the way to fully replacing humans was much, much harder than was generally expected.
- DennisP 3y ago
  That may well be the case, but it's still worth thinking about longer-term risks. If it takes, say, forty years to get to AGI, then it's still pretty sobering to consider a serious threat of extinction, just forty years away. Most of the arguments over what's worth worrying about are people talking past each other, because one side worries about short-term risks and the other side is more focused on the long term. Another conflict may be between people making linear projections, and those making exponential ones. Whether full self-driving happens next year or in 2050, it will probably still look pretty far away, when it's really just a year or two from exceeding human capabilities. When it's also hard to know exactly how difficult the problem is, there's a good chance that these great leaps will take us by surprise.

detourdog 3y ago

It took me 3 days to really understand the demos. I definitely plan on checking it out. I see many uses. Does anyone know how easy it would be translate American Sign Language? That must be goal if it's not already done.

spaceman_2020 3y ago

> I also think that AR/VR is more scary than AI Absolutely agree. I was never bothered by Oculus, but Apple's Vision Pro demonstration was equal parts fascinating and terrifying. I can see the next generation getting completely lost in alternate realities. Smartphone addiction got nothing on what's about to come.

detourdog 3y ago
I only have experience with the Apple Vision demo and the terrifying/emotional part for me was the beautiful people using the device in beautiful places. Everything was so clean and stress free that it was obviously artificial. I could only imagine stressed out people using it in squalor. The whole demo seemed geared to keep that thought far away.