5 ms·

Does anyone else feel a sense of doom from these advancements? I'm definitely not a Luddite, I've been working professionally as a programmer for quite some tim

• slothtrop 3y ago
  It allows the technical possibility for a post-truth reality, where it's impossible to tell what's true and what isn't. Every piece of information fed through your machine and smartphone. That's the scariest part to me. We need to get ahead of that, because certain interests will be fabricating things with it. As jobs go, well, we're a long ways from full automation but this represents some serious growing pains that will decimate certain jobs and replace them with few. Not sure what the reaction will be on the consumption side, revulsion or enthusiasm. The "handcrafted" market will still be there but then you wouldn't really know if any AI was used. In a long enough timeline we can hand-wave this away with UBI/negative tax. But ah, the most at-risk workers are the professional services, white-collar upper-middle class types, even engineers but to a lesser extent. So I wonder what kind of upheaval that would cause.
  • sweetbacon 3y ago
    Certain interests are already fabricating voices in political robocalls in New Hampshire. I chill at what the US will see as we approach the Presidential election this fall. Then again, maybe it will give us an early taste to better prepare for what is to come.
    • a_wild_dandan 3y ago
      The proliferation of convincing fakes will be a massive problem in about twenty years ago.
  • ShamelessC 3y ago
    > It allows the technical possibility for a post-truth reality Social media already did that. Donald Trump got elected POTUS which is effectively the sum of all fears w.r.t. a "post truth reality".
    • slothtrop 3y ago
      I agree, but this cranks it up to 11 to threaten every vector, not just facebook feeds. Unfriendly governments will also have a field day.
• hansoolo 3y ago
  I think my thoughts went in a similarly sinister direction, when I saw it. I couldn't quiet grasp it. My mood wasn't euphoric, to say the least.
  • a_wild_dandan 3y ago
    Tom Scott elaborated on this experience last year.[1] We should form a support group to commiserate. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jPhJbKBuNnA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jPhJbKBuNnA
• survirtual 3y ago
  The compute and innovations behind it should be owned by the planet, not by a handful of billionaires. It is far too powerful to be controlled by such a small group of humans, who decide what is "safe" and what isn't. It took billions of years for all of our ancestors to enable this technology, and now a handful claim it for themselves. The GPUs to run these models cost $20,000+ each, and only the ultra-rich can afford to have that compute. Compute power needs to be radically redistributed and equalized across the board. This is too much power.
  • ThrowawayTestr 3y ago
    It's amazing that this is what it takes to turn a forum of libertarians into a forum of communists.
    • throwaway743 3y ago
      > libertarians Please. Speak for yourself.
    • kortilla 3y ago
      >into a forum of communists. Speak for yourself
    • krapp 3y ago
      Yes, everyone considers themselves a dyed in the wool capitalist until circumstances lead them to realize the difference between the sheep and the wolves.
  • dogcomplex 3y ago
    Actually, you can live-render around 12fps videos on a consumer gaming rig using software installable in a night ($3k). Not as fancy internally-consistent videos as these, but still impressive - and that's just an algorithm update and model download away. And every second a corporate AI model is exposed publicly to the world that's more training that can be siphoned to open source models at far more cost effective rates than the initial leaders. You're impressed by the lions. But us hyenas and vultures will get our turns still too. This is not over. Information innately diffuses. We need to organize, and we need to build.
• strikelaserclaw 3y ago
  yes this is both exciting and scary.
• tsunamifury 3y ago
  The Congress and Until the End of the World lay out some possible outcomes of tech like this. Specifically the dream fed back to the brain in an endless loop of personalization until individuals no longer share the same world.
• Trasmatta 3y ago
  I felt the same thing when I saw LLMs writing code for the first time
• geor9e 3y ago
  I feel the opposite. I've been overwhelmed with a sense of my mortality, that I need to care for my body better, in order to live as long as possible into this age. I feel like I won the lottery of birth date to be able to see this. I get your perspective, and I have no doubt the wealth gap will widen painfully, but I'm also optimistic about humanity's ability to work it out.
  • davidmurdoch 3y ago
    Where does your optimism come from?
    • brink 3y ago
      Not history.
      • geor9e 3y ago
        Yes history. If you ignore the clickbait headlines designed to elicit rage, and the news feeds designed to spiral you into a cycle of fear, and just google "poverty graph" to find raw data sources you'll find it's generally a good trend like https://blogs.worldbank.org/opendata/dataviz-remake-fall-extreme-poverty-best-news-world https://blogs.worldbank.org/opendata/dataviz-remake-fall-ext...
        • brink 3y ago
          What I mean is the problem with wealth gaps is historically they typically get remedied with violent revolution.
          • dogcomplex 3y ago
            Or appeased with a tiny fraction of the total gains - just enough to keep a middle class happily with their basic little toys while wealth inequality grows. This could easily be the same, except the toy is "you don't have to work anymore and here's some houses and robot chefs! Now play nice while the adults go build star fleets"
• antegamisou 3y ago
  Feeling anything else other than concern is unpopular only on this website where most believe the entire world is cute like the nerds hanging out at the office's game room. Nothing good is coming out of this. I don't give a shit if you believe this is Luddism.
• trungaczne 3y ago
  I have felt the same since Stable Diffusion came out. The thing is, things have value in society partly because human efforts were involved in its making. It's not just about the end result; people still go to concert on top of listening to studio recordings for example, and people still watch humans play chess even though it's clear that good enough algorithms can beat the best humans easily. Technology like these which takes away too much immediate effort (hours needed to create the product) and long term effort (decades of training) are inherently absent of underlying value that I spoke of. Of course, if a person is only interested in consumption, it matters not how the "thing" is created. Much of the sense of doom I have comes from the inherent erosion of this human effort element in the creative process. Whether we like it or not, the availability of mass produced content naturally threatens crafts themselves. After all, nobody wants to spend a few decades on their skills only to have their creation compared to an AI generated image produced in a few seconds. I understand there are a lot of hypes around these technology to "humanity" but I have yet to see it. It just feels like more power consolidation to billionaires (especially when done as ClosedAI). There are artists who have tried to incorporate these but they have always felt the need to willingly not label their work as AI-generated or AI-assisted to sell (but still leaves in enough details for keen observers to tell it's AI touched). As a whole, it just feels wrong. The most optimistic (and reasonable) take I have seen is "Just wait and see". It might feel like a non-argument, but it's the only realistic take between the hyped up techbros and the doomer cult (admittedly, I might belong to the latter group). I think one of the most worrying thing for me is that regardless of how this plays out, this technology has only added more complexity to our society. That people are divided into camps about how they feel about the technology is simply a symptom about how much uncertainty there is in the future. This last bit will be a personal quarrel, but I personally lose any last desire to have children seeing the AI advancement. It's not right creating sentient life in an age where every year people have to play lottery to see whether technological advancement has deemed their life long effort unworthy.
  • Spacecosmonaut 3y ago
    I think you're right. A large part of the joy from creative endevours is actually getting good at something, and having other people enjoy your work. In the face of instant high quality generative AI placating the entertainment needs of the masses, we are creating a society where most people are unable to enjoy human creative expression, in part because human artists are just too slow. Attention spans are already shrinking, and after getting used to generative AI, few people will have the patience to wait for an author to write the second part of his magnum opus.
• deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
• nonbirithm 3y ago
  I think of it like: The only reason humans still drive cars is we have yet to find a good enough way of replacing ourselves with something more effective. It's merely an implementation detail of "getting from A to B" that would be disrupted if a true autonomous solution was discovered. Many would want to optimize away drunk drivers and road rage if it were possible in some faraway future. So something like a steering wheel could be seen like a compromise of sorts, until the next big thing makes them obsolete. That, and the state of missing a technology in a period of time is irreplaceable once it's been discovered. Nobody can live in an era without social media anymore, barring a global-scale catastrophic reset. So I believe it's important to consider what technology is not yet totally pervasive, for example by realizing there is still a steering wheel for you to grip in your car. And in my mind, the sinister feeling stems from the fact that all it takes to irreversibly shift society like that is enough smart people with honest intentions but little foresight of what will happen in a few decades as a result of proliferating all this. The problems that result stop being in anyone's control, "throwing it over the wall" so to speak, and instead become yet another fact of life that could weigh us down (mostly I think of the ubiquity of social media and how it has changed human interaction). And it all stems from just a few engineering type people getting overexcited about cool possibilities they can grasp at, not considering there are billions of people unlike them who may have other ideas.
• jiggawatts 3y ago
  For me, it's my kid. He's just turned three. He had just turned two when GPT4 was announced. Going back generations, my grandparents' lives were virtually identical to my great grandparents'. My parents grew up with radio, but they were adults by the time TV changed their world. All three generations got the bulk of their information from books and newsprint. I grew up together with computers. I remember riding that exponential wave of tech like a surfer. From Commodore 64 to a laptop with 64GB of memory, a million-to-one ratio. Tetris to Doom Eternal. Dialup modem to gigabit... in a mobile device that fits in my pocket. All of this took decades, but now changes like this happen in months. I keep thinking that "this tech will change my kid's childhood", but what "this" is, is already outdated and being replaced in a blink of an eye, and he hasn't even reached that point yet where he'd notice! When image generators were first released... what... a year ago... I thought: Wow! One day, when my kid is a little older, I'll be able to use this to create illustrations for stories we make up as we go along! Won't that be great! I still haven't gotten around to that yet, he's still too young to appreciate that, and anyway, with this Sora I'll be able to create video instead by the time he's old enough! I keep trying to imagine what his life will be like when he grows up to be a teenager, but realistically I'm having a hard time predicting what will already be outdated by the time he's four.