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> They didn’t suggest a Council of the Elect. Instead, they proposed that we should “make AI work for eight billion people, not eight billionaires”. It might be
by ctoth 3y ago
> They didn’t suggest a Council of the Elect. Instead, they proposed that we should “make AI work for eight billion people, not eight billionaires”. It might be nice to hear from some of those 8bn voices.
Good sloganizing, A+++ would slogan with them.
But any concrete suggestions?
- kolme 3y agoThe Hollywood writers had some very good suggestions!
- _heimdall 3y agoIf there was any serious concern over the 8bn voices, I'd assume we would first have been offered some say in whether we even wanted this research done in the first place. Getting to the point of developing an AGI and only then asking what we collectively want to do with it seems pointless.
- arjun_krishna1 3y agoI'd like to bring up that most people in the developing world (China, India, Pakistan) are absolutely thrilled with AI and ChatGPT as long as they are allowed to use them. They see it as a plus
- mr_toad 3y agoAs if you could ever stop research in what is essentially just maths. The concept of neural networks has been around since before many of those people were born. The statistical and mathematical underpinnings of AI predate anyone alive today. It might seem to an outsider that ChatGPT and the other household name AI came out of nowhere, but they didn’t. The research has been ongoing for decades and will continue with or without the big name AI companies.
- truculent 3y agoThe math has been around for decades, but the hardware and capital requirements are huge.
- truculent 3y agoLikewise, given the ideas have been around for decades, the question of why it took so long for the fire to light is instructive: https://gwern.net/scaling-hypothesis#prospects https://gwern.net/scaling-hypothesis#prospects
- _heimdall 3y agoTheoretical math is one thing, capital and hardware requirements are very different. You need people willing to do the research, money to pay them, and a mountain of hardware. If you are concerned with at least putting on a show of risk management you need expensive lawyers, a large PR budget, and teams working on safety and ethics to at least act like it matters. If you actually are concerned with risks you need time to first consider what you do upon successfully developing an AGI. How would you recognize it? Does it have rights? Would turning it off be murder? More importantly, how do you ensure that it doesn't escape controls you put in place, if that possible at all?
- mr_toad 3y agoFor now, but in a decade or two that hardware will become cheaper and more widely available. What happens when people can run the equivalent of GPT-4 on a desktop GPU?
- _heimdall 3y agoThe hardware market would very likely be much different if those years don't include a heavily funded AI research industry driving up innovation and demand for that hardware, but even if nothing changed we would at least be buying a decade or two for us to be better prepared and more thoughtful about any technological advancements we want to pursue with AI. Today the industry is driven entirely by the promise of future profits and the love of innovation with no real regard for actual risks that could be in play.
- tavavex 3y agoGiven the ever-growing computing power, computation itself becoming cheaper and the extremely wide reach of information on the internet, the outcome is inevitable either way. Even if you time-traveled 10 years back and somehow erased all modern ML research from existence, there'd still be a point in time where, eventually, some guy in a garage would do the work. Eventually, the work we use massive server clusters for today would be run on consumer-grade computers, and someone would try their hand at it. It has always been the case that new technology doesn't ask for permission to exist. Even if we lived in this society that was extremely risk-averse and suspicious of any new developments, at some point the bar would get so low that, if companies refused to invest and do the research, individuals would.
- Animats 3y ago> It might be nice to hear from some of those 8bn voices. They won't matter. Where AI is likely to take us is a society where a few people at the top run things and most of the mid-level bureaucracy is automated, optimizing for the benefit of the people at the top. People at the bottom do what they are told, supervised by computers. Amazon and Uber gig workers are there now. That's what corporations do, post-Friedman. AI just makes them better at it. AI mostly replaces the middle class. People in offices. People at desks. Like farmers, there will be far fewer of them. Somebody will try a revolution, but the places that revolt will get worse, not better.
- WillAdams 3y agoFor an exploration of that, see the novella "Manna": https://marshallbrain.com/manna https://marshallbrain.com/manna
- Animats 3y agoYes, I know. So do most people on here. Manna doesn't really explore how the middle class disappears, though. Do we really need all those people in offices? Probably not.
- a_bonobo 3y ago>Do we really need all those people in offices? Probably not. In Bullshit Jobs, Graeber argued that we already didn't need most of those people in offices, pre-AI. They're there as status and power symbols for the higher ups - 'look at the size of my team! i am important! pay me more!' - not to do any actual value-generating work. Modern fiefdoms.
- Animats 3y agoThe financial services sector has gone from 6% of the workforce to 12% over the past few decades. Despite automation of everything routine. There's a lot of fat to cut there.
- 3y ago