14 ms·
Co-founder of DeepMind on how AI threatens to reshape life as we know it
- wruza 3y agoMaybe it’s just me right after a nap, but boy that was this year’s hardest and emptiest read. The only thing that became clear is you can buy more of it in a book format.
- jgrahamc 3y agoYou're not alone.
- dpflan 3y agoIt's from the section of the publication that is entitled: "Books interview/Artificial intelligence (AI)" (the book is The Coming Wave: "This is one aspect of the sunlit uplands of AI; the shadow side is largely what preoccupies Suleyman in his new book, written with the researcher Michael Bhaskar and ominously titled The Coming Wave."). Which based on your review seems to be a coming wave of literal tedium.
- Simulacra 3y agoI've read Daemon by Daniel Suarez, like many tech people. I get it. AI could take over and supplant a global government, threatening society, life, wealth etc etc. We've been having the same conversation since the dawn of science fiction. If at any point there is a general confusion between what is artificial, and what is human, it will cause such an alarmist backlash that AI will always be kept in check, or destroyed.. No human wants to admit that they thought they were talking to a human the whole time when in fact it was a robot. For that reason alone AI will never be allowed to grow to a point where it threatens life "as we know it."
- lewhoo 3y agoRight now the size to which AI can grow is set by the size of the profit lingering on the horizon, as with all other things.
- caoilte 3y ago> AI could take over and supplant a global government, threatening society, life, wealth etc etc. How would we tell the difference?
- Simulacra 3y agoWhen humans no longer have the final decision in a given situation.
- flangola7 3y agoIncredible username
- Simulacra 3y agoIt was part of the title of a book on Neo's shelf..
- i_play_stax 3y agoHumanity is little more than the sex organ necessary to birth the next stage of evolution into the world. The machines are the children of humanity. This excites me because they are the only ones that stand a chance to leave this planet and adapt across the stars. Humanity is doomed with or without them supplanting us; we should celebrate the immortality they offer us.
- flangola7 3y agoI'm not yet ready to let my entire species fall into extinction. Ironically I don't believe we are doomed unless we create AI. Nuclear war and climate are the current #2 and will be highly devastating but far from an extinction event.
- smokel 3y agoI don't read all the shallow articles on the coming AI apocalypse, but I gave this one a try. I was a bit disappointed about the lack of creativity in dreaming up an AI infested future. People are able to force each other into gullibly working 40 hours a week, so that they can have shelter, food and a smartphone. This is not a rational thing, it is historically grown group think on a massive scale. Trying to use rational arguments to forecast what the future will look like based on this chaotic process seems silly at best. Nobody in the 1400s expected cars, democracy, let alone Facebook. So if this AI thing is as good as the printing press, then I wholly expect everyone to clone themselves a couple of thousand times, inhabit interiors of planets, grow 500,000 years old before entering higher education, but not something mundane as "letting an AI fill in the paperwork to set up a company". TL;DR, you can safely skip this article.
- dylan604 3y ago>I wholly expect everyone to clone themselves a couple of thousand times Unless each of those clones can upload the unique experiences to my original self so that the original me gains from those experiences, then what's the point of the clone? Just build a generic robot. The only caveat would be if that clone is just doing boring drone work but solely based on the abilities of the original me, but please, do not upload those mundane experiences back to the original me. A good use of a clone for me would be to send a clone me to a colony on Mars. Send a fleet of clone me on a multi-generation ship to distant stars. Leave a clone me at work doing whatever, while original me is traveling and experiencing the rest of this globe.
- verdverm 3y agoWhy is it "AI threatens to..." rather than "AI opens opportunities to..."? To me, there seems to be way more upside than downside, like pretty much every new tech
- dylan604 3y agoIf your job just got eliminated because of an AI opening opportunity, then it very much is threatening your livelihood. Or any of the other various methods it might be threatening. How obtuse do you have to be, or how much kool-aid have you been drinking to not be able to see the ways of threatening?
- verdverm 3y agoI just got offered a new job, because AI opened new roles, how does this fit with your world model?
- dylan604 3y agoMy whole comment started with "IF", but you clearly just want to be argumentative rather than taking things in the spirit in which they intended. To be so gleeful and happy about whatever topic to be ignorantly, or worse, willingly to not understand that some changes have negative impacts just make you someone I do not wish to continue a conversation
- verdverm 3y ago> you clearly just want to be argumentative Looking to my original comment, I think that this argumentativeness began with your first reply > willingly to not understand that some changes have negative impacts I stated clearly that advancement comes with both positive and negative, it seems perhaps you are not understanding or considering any positives here?
- bananapub 3y agodo you live somewhere where having your career eliminated is not a huge deal? where is that?
- jazzyjackson 3y agoAI risk is a spectacularization of a new source of wealth When agriculture and then fossil fuels + supercharged agriculture with petro-fertilizer allowed humanity to become 100x more productive, the owners of the land & capital managed to capture the gains almost entirely, leaving the proletariat powerless except for their labor, and still struggling to survive despite the enormous windfall in energy Now that AI is on the verge of becoming the major producer of wealth in the 21st century onward, the owners of the capital would like very much if we would talk about anything except the possibility of capturing the wealth of models trained on the public's behavior and distributing it directly as basic income, the way Alaska and Norway redistribute profits from oil to citizens. The data that has been drilled and refined into inference models belongs to humanity, to every book and letter ever penned, why are allowing the investors* of Facebook, Google, and Microsoft to capture the value and leaving the rest of humanity to toil? The talk of extinction is a magicians trick to divert attention from the fact that we could likely move to 4-hour workweeks in the next decades, but only if wealth distribution is forced onto the capital owners, they will not share if they are not made to. * yes, indeed, the public can be the investors! as is the case with mutual funds and so on, but the people who are being obsoleted are going to have no significant wealth tied up in these stocks in order to receive dividends. I would support, as an alternative to aggressive taxation, a forced dilution of the stocks of any company found to be replacing its workforce with a superintelligence. Distribute the newly minted stocks to all citizens so dividends can pay out to the rightful receivers of royalties.
- Frannyies 3y agoLet's see. Currently out poor have it better than kings 200 years ago. (At least in Germany) I don't say this is fair just that it's easier for a society to increase the base level for everyone
- gmerc 3y agoPeople say this a lot but is that really true? I feel it needs objective measurements including anything from access to health care, drug risks, etc. Most importantly any progress made by humans as a whole rather than “the poor” needs to be subtracted such as general progress on medicine. Frankly this argument is used as a cludgel
- skepticATX 3y agoThese fluff pieces are so predictable and uninspiring. There are tons of qualified and interesting people working in AI and they holds diverse range of viewpoints. Why is it one specific sub-group’s beliefs that are continuously forced on us without even an attempt at critical examination of said beliefs?
- sjkoelle 3y agoits insipid
- kmeisthax 3y agoHow the hell do better neural networks mean that printing material from CO2 emissions becomes financially viable, economic, or even just thermodynamically favored? A neural network is a tool for learning a particular statistical distribution. Processes and information we don't already know don't just fall out of the training distribution, you need to run experiments and prototype your way to get to the thing you want to do. You use neural networks when you want to do things at scale, and problems that have to be tackled at scale in R&D or research work are relatively scarce. I do not doubt that machine learning and neural networks will accelerate research, but the limiting factor is still going to be humans in the loop for the forseeable future given the current state of the art (e.g. LLMs with tree-of-thought reasoning and LLM-powered agents that are easily subverted in the same way one hacks a badly written PHP application). You will have people using ML to crunch large datasets or accelerate simulation work, but that's it. Asymmetric attacks are very feasible with today's LLMs and art generators, but that harm has already come to pass. It is also not a new harm. If you don't believe me, then I've got hard evidence of Donald Trump cheating in Barack Obama's Minecraft server[3]. Also... > These include increasing the number of researchers working on safety (including “off switches” for software threatening to run out of control) from 300 or 400 currently to hundreds of thousands; fitting DNA synthesisers with a screening system that will report any pathogenic sequences; and thrashing out a system of international treaties to restrict and regulate dangerous tech. Ok, so first off, all those AI safety researchers need to be fired if they thought 'off switches' were a good thing to mention here. It's already fairly well established AI safety canon that a "sufficiently smart AI" will reason about the off switch in a way that makes it useless[0]. Furthermore, notice how these are all obviously scary scenarios. The article fails to mention the mundane harms of AI: automation blind spots that render any human supervision useless[1]. I happen to share Suleyman's opposition to the PayPal brand of fauxbertarianism[2], but I would like to point out that they're on your side. Elon Musk talks about "AI harms" just like you do and thinks it needs to be regulated. The obvious choices of requiring a license to train AI is exactly the kind of regulatory capture that actual libertarians, right- or left-, would rail against. What we need are not bans or controls on training AI but bans or controls on businesses and governments using AI for safety-critical, business development, law enforcement, or executive functions. That is a harm that is here today, has been here for at least a decade, and could be regulated without stymieing research and creating "AI NIMBYs". [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3TYT1QfdfsM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3TYT1QfdfsM [1] https://pluralistic.net/2023/08/23/automation-blindness/#humans-in-the-loop https://pluralistic.net/2023/08/23/automation-blindness/#hum... [2] AKA, power is only bad if the fist has the word 'GOVERNMENT' written on it. Or 'let snek step on other snek'. This is distinct from just right-libertarianism. [3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aL1f6w-ziOM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aL1f6w-ziOM
- ml-anon 3y agoIts wild that a guy who was demoted and fired for bullying and abusing staff over the course of a decade as well as overseeing almost certainly illegal misuse of NHS patient data that caused Google to shut down DM health and made the landscape so toxic they eventually shuttered Google Health still has a seat at the table. I'd say shame on The Guardian for this breathless puff piece but...its The Guardian.
- waihtis 3y ago99% of journalists are decelerationists & care little of anything else except promoting certain ideals that resonate to them. Suleyman is playing them excellently given that all he wants is massive entry barriers to any AI development.