4 ms·

This is such a pessimistic view to take that I cannot even begin to describe how you are wrong.

vouaobrasil 3y ago
I would love to see your rebuttals, especially since I have never seen any strong arguments in favour of AI being a net benefit to society, and I have thought and read about this at lenght. Of course, I always expect downvotes on my posts here since there is a strong tendency towards loving technology here. But what I find most interesting is that there is absolutely no taking of responsibility of any technological creations. Before you downvote, please just ask yourself the following: is it reasonable to say that all these latest AI developments have no serious risks? And in response to your reply, humanity is in quite a precarious state now, so isn't it expected that a sober analysis of it is rather pessimistic, especially with regard to hyper-advanced technologies?
- jackstraw14 3y ago
  > But what I find most interesting is that there is absolutely no taking of responsibility of any technological creations. I appreciate your willingness to talk about it, but to be honest it doesn't seem like it matters much what you, or any of us (not singling you out in particular), thinks about it, does it? It probably doesn't even matter who these people are who should take responsibility. This is one genie, like the internet, that probably isn't going back in the bottle anytime soon. I haven't seen any argument against "AI" that's much different than those against "the internet" and "computers" that we've at other times in the last 50 years when tech hit new mind-blowing milestones. It just keeps going regardless, right?
  - lacrimacida 3y ago
    It actually does make a difference. The genie is out of the bottle partially but it depends a lot on what we allow it it be used on. If we sit idly and allow for ingesting all what’s written for instance, including whats currently written and let bros make derivative works for a quick buck then we mostly killed the writer’s incentive to write or publish. If we slow down and not allow ripping one another off it could have the opposite effect and trully lift all the boats at once. There’s a concurent thread about Sarah Silverman suing OpenAI, that’s what Im talking about as well here
    - jackstraw14 3y ago
      > If we sit idly and allow for ingesting all what’s written for instance It's already happened. What do you do now? For decades, it's happened regardless of the robots.txt so you have to assume it's all been ingested by it all, everywhere. What now?
    - Joeri 3y ago
      You can slow things down, but not by more than a few years, because of the gradual democratization of training foundation models. Right now training a model competitive with chatgpt can be done for $150K (microsoft orca 13b). In a few years the cost will be low enough that individuals can train models. At that point regulating it will require draconian dictatorships. I’m also very wary of the copyright angle on this, because just like we don’t prohibit people from learning copyrighted materials in their brains, it feels very wrong to regulate how we train digital brains. I’m ok with forbidding the output of copies of individual existing copyrighted works, but we already have laws on the books for that. I find it downright immoral to prohibit the generation of works “in the style of”. That again reeks like the kind of draconian society I don’t want to live in. People will always be willing to pay for human-made art, just like we pay more for handmade pots, even though machines can make them better, so I think the doomsayers who predict the end of art are flat out wrong. Easy access to mass-generated AI content could be the best thing that happened to true artists, just like chess AI that can beat every human player was the best thing that happened to the chess world. We need labeling laws that show the origin of works so people can choose whether they want artificial or human-made, but please not another extension of the copyright regime to be even more suffocating and hostile of cultural flourishing.
      - YeGoblynQueenne 3y ago
        >> You can slow things down, but not by more than a few years, because of the gradual democratization of training foundation models. Just to be clear, what's being "democratised" is the fine-tuning of second-tier, inferior-performance models; or pre-training of third-tier ones. In the game of training large neural nets, the players that can afford to train the largest models with the most amount of data and compute at any given time will continue to dominate for the foreseeable future. To make it plain, maybe in a couple of years you'll be able to train GPT-4 on your student laptop (unlikely, but let's allow it for the sake of argument). You'll still not be able to get anywhere near the performance of GPT-6 or whatever OpenAI and Google will be able to train by then. Academics, hobbyists and smaller companies will continue to play second fiddle to large corporations as long as the dominant paradigm is more data and more compute.
- ed_mercer 3y ago
  >is it reasonable to say that all these latest AI developments have no serious risks? There are definitely problems today with people abusing ChatGPT for malicious purposes, but given the retardedness of current LLMs I don't think we need to worry about a AI mastermind taking over anytime soon.
- borissk 3y ago
  If we were a rational civilization we'd stop all scientific research immediately. First there's a good chance the great filter is ahead of us and will be triggered by a technology break-trough. Second with nuclear weapons we got lucky in that it's extremely hard to separate fission capable isotope of uranium from mineral ores; if in the future we invent a powerful weapon that's easy to produce organizations like al-Qaeda will destroy every city on Earth.
  - XorNot 3y ago
    I can't figure out if this is a rebuttal by absurdity or serious?
  - mhandley 3y ago
    The great filter is definitely ahead of us if we stop all scientific research. Just ask the dinosaurs.
  - vouaobrasil 3y ago
    I agree with you that we'd stop scientific research immediately, or at least most of it.

I would love to see your rebuttals, especially since I have never seen any strong arguments in favour of AI being a net benefit to society, and I have thought and read about this at lenght. Of course, I always expect downvotes on my posts here since there is a strong tendency towards loving technology here. But what I find most interesting is that there is absolutely no taking of responsibility of any technological creations. Before you downvote, please just ask yourself the following: is it reasonable to say that all these latest AI developments have no serious risks? And in response to your reply, humanity is in quite a precarious state now, so isn't it expected that a sober analysis of it is rather pessimistic, especially with regard to hyper-advanced technologies?

jackstraw14 3y ago
> But what I find most interesting is that there is absolutely no taking of responsibility of any technological creations. I appreciate your willingness to talk about it, but to be honest it doesn't seem like it matters much what you, or any of us (not singling you out in particular), thinks about it, does it? It probably doesn't even matter who these people are who should take responsibility. This is one genie, like the internet, that probably isn't going back in the bottle anytime soon. I haven't seen any argument against "AI" that's much different than those against "the internet" and "computers" that we've at other times in the last 50 years when tech hit new mind-blowing milestones. It just keeps going regardless, right?
- lacrimacida 3y ago
  It actually does make a difference. The genie is out of the bottle partially but it depends a lot on what we allow it it be used on. If we sit idly and allow for ingesting all what’s written for instance, including whats currently written and let bros make derivative works for a quick buck then we mostly killed the writer’s incentive to write or publish. If we slow down and not allow ripping one another off it could have the opposite effect and trully lift all the boats at once. There’s a concurent thread about Sarah Silverman suing OpenAI, that’s what Im talking about as well here
  - jackstraw14 3y ago
    > If we sit idly and allow for ingesting all what’s written for instance It's already happened. What do you do now? For decades, it's happened regardless of the robots.txt so you have to assume it's all been ingested by it all, everywhere. What now?
  - Joeri 3y ago
    You can slow things down, but not by more than a few years, because of the gradual democratization of training foundation models. Right now training a model competitive with chatgpt can be done for $150K (microsoft orca 13b). In a few years the cost will be low enough that individuals can train models. At that point regulating it will require draconian dictatorships. I’m also very wary of the copyright angle on this, because just like we don’t prohibit people from learning copyrighted materials in their brains, it feels very wrong to regulate how we train digital brains. I’m ok with forbidding the output of copies of individual existing copyrighted works, but we already have laws on the books for that. I find it downright immoral to prohibit the generation of works “in the style of”. That again reeks like the kind of draconian society I don’t want to live in. People will always be willing to pay for human-made art, just like we pay more for handmade pots, even though machines can make them better, so I think the doomsayers who predict the end of art are flat out wrong. Easy access to mass-generated AI content could be the best thing that happened to true artists, just like chess AI that can beat every human player was the best thing that happened to the chess world. We need labeling laws that show the origin of works so people can choose whether they want artificial or human-made, but please not another extension of the copyright regime to be even more suffocating and hostile of cultural flourishing.
    - YeGoblynQueenne 3y ago
      >> You can slow things down, but not by more than a few years, because of the gradual democratization of training foundation models. Just to be clear, what's being "democratised" is the fine-tuning of second-tier, inferior-performance models; or pre-training of third-tier ones. In the game of training large neural nets, the players that can afford to train the largest models with the most amount of data and compute at any given time will continue to dominate for the foreseeable future. To make it plain, maybe in a couple of years you'll be able to train GPT-4 on your student laptop (unlikely, but let's allow it for the sake of argument). You'll still not be able to get anywhere near the performance of GPT-6 or whatever OpenAI and Google will be able to train by then. Academics, hobbyists and smaller companies will continue to play second fiddle to large corporations as long as the dominant paradigm is more data and more compute.
ed_mercer 3y ago
>is it reasonable to say that all these latest AI developments have no serious risks? There are definitely problems today with people abusing ChatGPT for malicious purposes, but given the retardedness of current LLMs I don't think we need to worry about a AI mastermind taking over anytime soon.
borissk 3y ago
If we were a rational civilization we'd stop all scientific research immediately. First there's a good chance the great filter is ahead of us and will be triggered by a technology break-trough. Second with nuclear weapons we got lucky in that it's extremely hard to separate fission capable isotope of uranium from mineral ores; if in the future we invent a powerful weapon that's easy to produce organizations like al-Qaeda will destroy every city on Earth.
- XorNot 3y ago
  I can't figure out if this is a rebuttal by absurdity or serious?
- mhandley 3y ago
  The great filter is definitely ahead of us if we stop all scientific research. Just ask the dinosaurs.
- vouaobrasil 3y ago
  I agree with you that we'd stop scientific research immediately, or at least most of it.