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> In May, hundreds of industry leaders endorsed a statement that equated the risk of runaway A.I. with that of nuclear war. Huang didn’t sign it. Some economist
by gwern 3y ago
> In May, hundreds of industry leaders endorsed a statement that equated the risk of runaway A.I. with that of nuclear war. Huang didn’t sign it. Some economists have observed that the Industrial Revolution led to a relative decline in the global population of horses, and have wondered if A.I. might do the same to humans. “Horses have limited career options,” Huang said. “For example, horses can’t type.” As he finished eating, I expressed my concerns that, someday soon, I would feed my notes from our conversation into an intelligence engine, then watch as it produced structured, superior prose. Huang didn’t dismiss this possibility, but he assured me that I had a few years before my John Henry moment. “It will come for the fiction writers first,” he said. Then he tipped the waitress a thousand dollars, and stood up to accept his award.
If you ever wondered if you had what it took to be a NYer writer, consider if you could have provoked & recorded this vignette.
- matthewmcg 3y agoMy all time favorite from Ian Parker’s NYer profile of Johnny Ive: I asked Jeff Williams, the senior vice-president, if the Apple Watch seemed more purely Ive’s than previous company products. After a silence of twenty-five seconds, during which Apple made fifty thousand dollars in profit, he said, “Yes.”
- atleastoptimal 3y agoNot sure if you're implying that it's easy or hard to be a NYer writer
- Dr_Birdbrain 3y agoI’m going to say “hard”. That’s a beautiful piece of prose, both because of the social skills needed to elicit the behavior from Huang and because of the narrative skill to tell the story well.
- HDThoreaun 3y agoThe horse anecdote has always struck me as stupid as hell. Horses were replaced because they have no political power, they are tools. As long as we live in a democracy people will not become horses.
- pmfgpmfg 3y agoGood point! People are already horses in russia.
- Nathanba 3y agoPeople have political power ultimately because they have military and economic power. That would potentially change if politicians have artificial people under their control that can patrol the streets and enforce any law they want and man the factories.
- HDThoreaun 3y agoThere are 400 million guns in America. The citizen's military power is not going anywhere.
- Nathanba 3y agoIn relation to artificial robotic power it will go down
- HDThoreaun 3y agoYou think the government is going to create an ai military to kill millions of civilians without being overthrown by the other hundreds of millions of armed civilians in this country?
- Nathanba 3y agoThis is ironically a simple issue of demographics. Whether the biological humans like it or not there will be a larger demographic of artificial entities that do more of the economic and military work and therefore will have more weight in all things political.
- didibus 3y agoI think the question is more, will there be a country somewhere that emerges as an AI/robotic super power. You shouldn't just be worried of your own government here. And the other issue is, why would the post-revolt government/businesses abandon AI/robotics? The truth is, this won't happen over night. People will have less work over time, be paid less and less, the gap between classes will grow bigger, etc. I guess another way to put it, take a country like India with lots of unemployment and high corruption, I don't think if they had guns they'd all revolt. You have to believe there's a point to revolting, an alternative that's better and worth the risk.
- cactusplant7374 3y agoIt's not hard to insert oneself into a story. It's harder not to do it.
- dclowd9901 3y agoI want to stand up and applaud them. Wonderful… no, _ideal_ non-fiction prose.
- dkqmduems 3y agoSo did he try to feed in his notes?
- dkga 3y agoPeople using the horse analogy often put it to illustrate that it could be bad for us. As if the horses loved hurling stuff for humans!
- lucubratory 3y agoBut now we don't need horses so there are far fewer of them, and they are so completely unimportant to the economy that if they caused us any significant inconvenience we could kill them all without it being a significant issue. From our perspective the lives of horses look pretty horrible, particularly their lives in service to us, but I don't think it would be very comforting to have an AI explain to me that humans aren't fully aware of the world in the way that greater intelligences are, that because of the mental issues in humanity which cause them to do annoying things like bombing data centres or cutting fibre optics cables the human population needs to be significantly resized to a more sustainable number, or anything else a human-equivalent that actually cared might explain to a horse-equivalent that could actually listen. The point is that horses don't control their own destiny, and they aren't even important enough for us to particularly care about said destiny in anything other than vagaries. Horses that interfere with human society in some way get put down. I don't want to be put down or have no say in the future, so we shouldn't attempt to build something which has a reasonable likelihood of being as much smarter than us as we are smarter than horses.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]