11 ms·

Raising Children on the Eve of AI

100 points by lwhsiao 3y ago

Vecr 3y ago
> Is it even ok to have kids? According to me (utility function, etc) it's required you have kids. Only in the 2.X statistical sense though, but if not what's the point? You can't condition all your problems out, but you at least have to play to not lose.
- rbanffy 3y ago
  I’m not a huge fan of CS Lewis but the quote at the end is very on point. Let’s continue to be human and do human things. Change will come as it always does.
  - Vecr 3y ago
    It's okay I guess if you think you have no causal impact on if any of that happens, but otherwise you better be doing something to help, even if it would only work in a tiny part of probability space, instead of waiting to die.
    - throwanem 3y ago
      Why waste time posting here that you could spend weaving mosquito nets, then? Surely this can't be a global maximum in utilon space.
      - Vecr 3y ago
        I'm talking about VNM utility, I'm not a utilitarian or a EA.
        throwanem 3y ago
        VNM applied in the realm of ethics is definitionally utilitarian.
        Vecr 3y ago
        > That your utility function may be off model from the most doctrinaire possible interpretation of the theory does not seem to me the same as saying this is not an example of a theory. Sure, I don't want to get into a definitional argument. However, any VNM utility function can be the exact opposite of anything you propose as good, just by inverting the comparison order. If you have numerical outcome scores that could be as easy as my score =: 0 - your score > (Did you mean to reply to your comment rather than mine?) It's a HN thing.
        throwanem 3y ago
        Well, yeah, that's the fundamental failure of utilitarianism: it's so abstract as to say nothing meaningful, because it explicitly delegates the entire definition of what actually is ethical to the utility function, and nothing past that is distinct from any other ethical theory. Again I grant this varies from Bentham's definition, but Bentham has been dead a long time now. Modern utilitarianism has been defined by Singer, for better or for worse - mostly worse - and Singerism is what I describe. In any case, Bentham's version still bears the flaw; 'good' can stretch with sufficient cleverness to cover all the virtue or deontology in the world. > It's a HN thing. I doubt that; this and your prior comment are the second and third time I've seen it in eleven years of active participation here. Are you using some kind of extension or script to augment the UI? If so, I strongly suspect that is causing it.
        Vecr 3y ago
        > VNM applied in the realm of ethics is definitionally utilitarian. I assume you are thinking deontological ethics, virtue ethics, etc vs utilitarianism, but non-benthamite utility functions exist. Actually, if they didn't I assume a lot of AI doomers would be less doomy, as quite a few of them are utilitarians.
        throwanem 3y ago
        No, I'm thinking utilitarianism. I appreciate that the standard definition includes a term about "for the greatest number". But you're still defining an ethical utility function which you then seek to maximize. That your utility function may be off model from the most doctrinaire possible interpretation of the theory does not seem to me the same as saying this is not an example of the theory. The same could be said of effective altruism, which is anyway just the prosperity-gospel version of utilitarianism. That one should be doing utilitarianism badly does not mean one is not doing utilitarianism at all. (Did you mean to reply to your comment rather than mine?)
        Vecr 3y ago
        > Well, yeah, that's the fundamental failure of utilitarianism: it's so abstract as to say nothing meaningful, because it explicitly delegates the entire definition of what actually is ethical to the utility function, and nothing past that is distinct from any other ethical theory. I think it's honest, as it really forces you to make a distinction between good (what should be) and real (what is). "Should" goes into the utility function, "is" goes into the world model. I'd honestly recommend giving it a shot if you have free time. > I doubt that; this and your prior comment are the second and third time I've seen it in eleven years of active participation here. It's the anti-flame war/spam thing kicking in. I'm manually responding to the "wrong post" but that's pretty much fine.
        throwanem 3y ago
        Oh, I see. If you click the timestamp on a comment, that view always has the reply form. Only in the thread view is the reply link hidden for the first few minutes after a comment is posted. I'm familiar with Hume. The is-ought distinction has value, but is orthogonal to utilitarianism, if not explicitly opposed.
    - dsign 3y ago
      Just this. And there are things we can do. Those of us who live in democracies can influence outcomes a little. It may be too early for political action, but perhaps is not too early for writing and reflecting, and for coming up with theories about how the near future may look like, and sharing them with the world. If things turn really dire, there is always that turbid matter our advanced culture forbids us to reach out for: violence and revolutions. In other words, if it is the AIs or us, be it because the AIs are outright evil or because our economic systems make them evil, then we can always choose “us” and resort to forceful or even violent corrections.
- mocamoca 3y ago
  I don't mean to show a lack of respect for parents and their good will. However, could we say that "you at least have to play to not lose" is a particularly selfish reason for having children? Here, "Playing" is making sure the parents will have caregivers, not that the children will live happy. If the current situation is not worrying enough to rule out having happy kids, what would be the threshold? (Not a rhetorical question)
  - Vecr 3y ago
    > If the current situation is not worrying enough to rule out having happy kids, what would be the threshold? (Not a rhetorical question) There is no threshold. Yes, I know Yudkowsky's position, not even there. > Here, 'Playing' is making sure the parents will have caregivers, not that the children will live happy. Parents having caregivers hardly comes into it at all.
    - dsign 3y ago
      > Parents having caregivers hardly comes into it at all. For me, it does, an awful lot. Being a caregiver to my parents has implied a lot of existential suffering and emotional agony. Think about it: the people who raised you are going to die slowly and perhaps painfully and you are going to see it without being able to do anything. I feel I would be very cruel by giving that future to a child I love.
      - Vecr 3y ago
        That's either going to happen or it's not, but I don't think everyone being dead is an acceptable way to force it to be wrong.
- AnarchismIsCool 3y ago
  What is winning and what is losing? Yeah there are actions that persist our genetics but there's no rule saying that's what needs to happen, just that it's something that happens. If you widen out to society, yeah, there are other people who will come after us, maybe we can have purpose in helping those people to survive even if they're not our kids. Humans evolved as a collective, there are parts of our DNA that exist to help the group even if it means we ourselves don't have kids. Evolution is a much more complicated thing than just specifying exactly what genes -you- pass on.
  - Turing_Machine 3y ago
    > What is winning and what is losing? Yeah there are actions that persist our genetics but there's no rule saying that's what needs to happen, just that it's something that happens. All of us are descended from billions of years of ancestors (long before humans) that were motivated to reproduce. Those who didn't left none of their genes behind (other than ones they might have shared with relatives). That's exactly what "losing" means, in the evolutionary sense.
    - AnarchismIsCool 3y ago
      Not at all. Simple example: ants. Most of them don't reproduce, but they still work to pass on their genes. In the case of humans... Why do you think there has always been a part of society that seems predisposed to violence and nationalism. It's not beneficial to the individual to go get in fights, but if it keeps the group alive then it's advantageous. (Note, this is not a license to be a violent nationalist asshole, but this is the internet so...) Similarly, autism and ADHD. There are very real theories that those conditions were beneficial to early society even if they were detrimental to mating because it's helpful to have people around who are hyper focused and hyper unfocused. So yeah, helping pass on your relative's genes, however distant, is still part of the game.
rbanffy 3y ago
One bit of warning: we tend to overestimate the short term impact of new tools while underestimating their long term ones. It’s likely our kids will have recognisable professions with better phones than not. AI will be there assisting us in increasingly sophisticated ways, acting as intelligent agents and maybe even impersonating us at simple interactions. Value and supply chains change slowly and those are the things that can really make the biggest changes.
- dsign 3y ago
  Let’s assume for a moment that AIs turn up as you say, and that there is nothing nefarious. That outcome will need a lot of foresight and democratic regulation, because market forces will want AIs to exploit people. But, let’s assume we find a political system that is smarter than the people wanting to use AIs for bad ends. So, the world would look very much like the world now, where you earn money proportionally to how difficult is to replace you. There probably will be a set of skills incredibly difficult to get that will earn you enough money to live a comfortable life. And that’s the problem. Even now, lots of people never attain those skills, and they end up working at a factory or at an Amazon fulfillment center. If we don’t fix things somehow, how much worse will it be in the age of AI?
  - Aurornis 3y ago
    > Let’s assume for a moment that AIs turn up as you say, and that there is nothing nefarious. The parent comment didn’t say “nothing nefarious” at all. It just said we overestimate the short term impact. This comment section is full of people acting like AI is going to make most jobs obsolete within a matter of years. One of the top comments as I write this is from someone writing melodramatically about Sam Altman taking jobs away from their tradesman relatives with “plasticized fingers” from the comfort of his “pretty offices”. This is the kind of histrionics you get when people identify a trend and extrapolate it to absurd conclusions on unrealistic timelines. I can’t tell if these people actually believe that robots are coming to take our jobs (including physical ones) in a few years or if this is just pearl-clutching at the way the world is changing when they’d prefer that everything stayed the same. > There probably will be a set of skills incredibly difficult to get that will earn you enough money to live a comfortable life. And that’s the problem. Even now, lots of people never attain those skills, and they end up working at a factory or at an Amazon fulfillment center. If we don’t fix things somehow, how much worse will it be in the age of AI? You’re making the same mistake I see throughout this thread, which is assuming that AI can only be a subtractive force and nothing else will change about the world. An AI-centric world isn’t going to look exactly like today’s world but with fewer jobs. The price of those “comfortable life” things would go down and availability would go up if everything was automated away. If you treat the future like a carbon copy of today but with workers replaced by robots then it’s bleak, but that’s a failure in acknowledging that economies evolve with technology. It’s the same reason the world didn’t collapse when technology enabled people to do something other than work on farms.
MichaelMug 3y ago
> Partly because even in a world where it became clear that school isn’t useful I don’t follow… In what world is school not useful? I suspect the social value of school will become much more apparent soon.
- AnarchismIsCool 3y ago
  It's not that it's actually not useful, but given everything going on it certainly feels not useful to a lot of kids. In a lot of ways, school is the part of our society that changes the slowest.
- Vecr 3y ago
  Lots of them, depending on what you mean by "school" and "useful". I think it's doubtful we're in one though.
- aquarkortwo 3y ago
  In a world where we have personalized tutors and assistants that can pass on knowledge much more efficiently and effectively than human teachers can.
  - keiferski 3y ago
    People keep saying this and I don’t buy it. Kids arent going to learn the best by staring at a computer screen eight hours a day. If this happens it’ll be because of reduced education funding, not efficiency.
    - packetlost 3y ago
      I think a prerequisite to that is figuring out how to get them to not spit out complete bullshit consistently anyways.
    - ben_w 3y ago
      Is staring at a screen for eight hours a day better or worse than staring at a chalkboard or a marker board?
inference-lord 3y ago
I became a parent about a year ago, completely unprepared for this future. My Son was born around the time ChatGPT-4 was released and I remember all the Geoffrey Hinton interviews which were really apocalyptic sounding, he is has a kind of kookie mad scientist vibe about him too. I remember thinking, like what the fuck just happened? Like I just woke up in a movie. I've learned to accept the situation, and realize that we can't really predict what will happen so I just try be the best, happiest parent I can to my kids that I can. But I never anticipated the "along for the ride" feeling I have now. Financially planning for 3 years ahead seems quite impossible as I have no idea what type of employment will or will not exist then. It seems like our careers could just be snuffed out instantly with little recourse available. I say "seems like" because I have no idea if that's real or perceived but it's very hard plan ahead. I'm kind of glad my child didn't just finished university and planning a career in something that is ripe for disruption because that must be pretty heart breaking, especially because we bring kids up thinking they need a purpose, having a purpose (in my opinion) is a stupid way to live, but not everyone feels that way. I can't help feel a bit cynical too, like I'm kind of annoyed that realistically, the tech elite of the world are just throwing money at this thing like it's no one else' business and fuck what anyone else thinks about it and fuck how it might impact anyone else because, progress, which at the moment, is code for, "we're about to make copious amounts of money using everyone's IP, a bunch of open source software, and we might give something back, so fuck off. I'm trying to put the cynicism down, look forwards and hope for the best.
- bbor 3y ago
  It seems like our careers could just be snuffed out instantly with little recourse available. You’ve likely heard this sentiment before but it’s the right one so I’ll be the one to post it today: your job is not your purpose, and the economy is not the society. Obviously your whole comment is well founded and relatable, but I think this is the only cure for your anxieties. The world is a beautiful, beautiful place, with many more wonders to offer than the typical laborer is accustomed to. If we eventually have a society where everyone is happy with what they have and there’s no work left to do, that would be a cause for celebration IMO. This is all assuming that the intelligence explosion people are wrong. If they’re right… well, let’s hope they’re wrong.
keiferski 3y ago
I think kids are a lot more prepared for this future than professional technologists probably realize. If you ask them today what profession they want to be, you often get “YouTuber” as an answer. Which might seem like a joke, but I think it’s actually quite accurate in terms of future professions. The jobs at most risk from AI are “anonymous” ones in which the creator of the work is unknown to its consumer. Writing, in a professional context, is a good example. Do you know who wrote the text on Amazon product pages? Probably not. What is less at risk are charisma-based occupations, like actors or YouTubers. People are social animals and want to connect (or feel like they’re connected) to other humans, not robots. I expect the concept of an influencer to get even bigger. Ergo, I would tell kids today to focus on social skills, filmmaking skills, and presentation skills.
- bo1024 3y ago
  YouTuber is a lottery-ticket profession. It's a winner-take-all, heavy-tailed distribution. It doesn't make sense to tell a whole population to buy lottery tickets. For kids, it's a modern equivalent of "I want to be in the NBA", "I want to be an astronaut".
  - keiferski 3y ago
    You are missing the point I’m making. Everyone won’t be a YouTuber. But the successful people will cultivate skills that are similar to those needed by successful YouTubers. Being an anonymous worker with anonymous output means you can be easily replaced.
    - bo1024 3y ago
      All of the examples you gave are lottery-ticket professions, though. And even if a large number of people could be successful entertainers, I'm not even sure about the premise. AI-generated media could compete with YouTubers very soon. AI will take a long, long time to replace garbagemen.
      - keiferski 3y ago
Biologist123 3y ago
The writer says: “[My children] are more viscerally worried about climate change”. I’m not surprised. I recently heard from a friend that her 7 year-old child had, as a class assignment, to create a timeline setting out the impact of climate change over their lifetime. I was gobsmacked, and feel this amounts to a form of psychological child abuse. It’s a serious problem, don’t get me wrong, but having a small child labour to visualize modeled outputs is traumatizing. It’s really made me wonder about how reality morphs into millenarian thinking.
- keiferski 3y ago
  People like to think that all those crazy end-of-days cults just disappeared and were replaced by rational scientists. But that’s not how culture works. The apocalyptic impulse is still with us, but has found new outlets.
- AnarchismIsCool 3y ago
  When I was growing up they just traumatized us all into thinking our houses were going to burn down all the time and we'd frequently find ourselves on fire necessitating rolling around on the floor. Also, quicksand and outrunning alligators. Then again, that is the reality they're in now, so there's an argument they should be spending a good amount of time getting ready for that. I'd rather they not be sitting there pikachu-faced when the rate of human migration skyrockets so they decide to just start killing them all or something similarly stupid.
- moshun 3y ago
  I’m not sure being honest with children about something that impacts them so heavily is the wrong move here. Traumatized or not, I suspect teaching children about the problem in clear terms will lead to a better informed generation of scientists, lawmakers, and voters. Hopefully they make and stick to better decisions then those that came before.
  - Biologist123 3y ago
    I hear what you’re saying, that children should be educated about the reality they find themselves in. If that is the case, and I would say their are exceptions until children are older, then strong guidelines are needed, partly because acting out of trauma is rarely a good idea. Secondly, because a full reality must be imparted including that projections are based on modeled outputs, and modeling complex systems is inherently problematic, there are many problems facing humanity, and resources must be rationally allocated between all.
thanatos519 3y ago
I'm much less concerned about the impact of AI than about climate change and ecological destruction. A radical shift in the distribution of work and wealth is long overdue. I'm sure our children will be better off for AI if it can help us get through the coming war, famine, plague, and "natural" disasters.
- arpa 3y ago
  AI is tipping the scales not to the favour of the proletariat. "The means of production" is in the hands of the powerful few, and I foresee a very bloody revolution.
  - erur 3y ago
    This funny old narrative of a revolution in that direction sounds pretty misplaced if we're talking about a future where you won't need humans to get stuff done...
    - arpa 3y ago
      you know what is really funny? the neoliberal narrative of free markets and trickle-down economies and billionaires being valuable members of thr society. If humans are not needed to get stuff done, what's the use for those humans, mmmm?
j4yav 3y ago
I feel like the future pretty much has to be more local, in person, and human, and as much as you can interact with the internet as a utility rather than as the main source of interaction in your life it is for the best. That’s probably the best lesson you can teach your kids if you don’t want them to be part of society that just sort of permanently falls into the internet, always plugged in via goggles or brain implant and fed AI generated content, never to return. It already seems like there’s a group that is basically terminally online and it seems like it’s only going to get worse.
- kmmlng 3y ago
  While I agree that moving all human interaction to the internet is likely to be a net negative, there is only so much you can do as an individual. It takes two to tango, you need a sufficient number of other people with the same mindset to resist this move to the internet. As someone whose parents kept them away from certain forms of technology, media, etc., all it really did was alienate me from others. At the end of the day, I'd rather connect with others through the internet than not at all.
  - j4yav 3y ago
    I guess where I live I’ve been lucky to find a nice community of people who don’t live online.
findingMeaning 3y ago
Well at least you guys are lucky enough to have kids. There are us unfortunate ones who happen to just graduate at the wrong time. We, are eternal juniors, with niche skills within a narrow CS domain. So competition is extremely high for us. We would be lucky if we get to survive next five years. There is no way for us to get into something tangible, if we are resident of relative south (asia, SA, Africa). Surviving for the next day in the developed world is the game we play. How about home country? What is the point when globalization floods the local market. We were wiped out there, hence we had to leave. Everything we want to do, giant corpos do it cheap or for free. In relative south of the world, people lack money. So data privacy doesn't matter. The concept of paying for software doesn't exists. In the developed side, existing is a dread with no hope. There are enough competent people joining the field who get more priorities. For eternal juniors like us, please show hope. Pretty you may find it difficult to relate to any words here. Anyone born in the west are taught to find their purpose, other countries not so much. It's all about money because money solves 99% issue over there. Username checks out.
threedark 3y ago
What happened to all the people who were saying AI is just a stochastic parrot and aren't worried at all about AI? Is it that this thread only attracts people who are worried about AI or is there an actual paradigm shift that all the nay-sayers are realizing they were wrong? Serious question, don't take it the wrong way if you were a nay-sayer. No offence at all.
- ben_w 3y ago
  There's a few such comments[0], though my assumption is there's some kind of assortative selection going on that means all the bear comments congregate in one set of threads and all the bull comments congregate in a slightly different set. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39408125 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39408125 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39407263 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39407263
archsurface 3y ago
I'm curious to know what people are going to be like when they've grown up in a world of things that are not comprehensible. Eg, I grew up easily understanding how films were made, but I wonder how a child's character will develop when growing up with "films" made by something called a neural net - will there be eg a sense of detachment from the world around them? Will there be an extended period of life during which time children don't understand things? What effect will that have?
- valine 3y ago
  The math behind diffusion models is entirely comprehensible. People will always ask why they need to learn calculus and when they will use it in the real world. Here’s another great answer.
  - archsurface 3y ago
    I was thinking of young children.
Barrin92 3y ago
It's always astonishing to me when people talk about what they want their children to be or do and the answer is a list of soft skills. The Protestant work ethic really has done a number on some people. I always thought the answer is simple (though not easy), I want my kids to be healthy, honest, loyal and kind, what they do from 8am to 4pm is for them to figure out, but it's not that important.
- larodi 3y ago
  Missing Ref. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Protestant_Ethic_and_the_Spirit_of_Capitalism https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Protestant_Ethic_and_the...
teekert 3y ago
A lot trying to predict the future. But kids need love and attention. And if you teach them to think for themselves there is not much more you can do. As for the “should I even have kids” argument? Sure don’t have kids. Your line ends here while others will potentially live among the star. I’m sorry I’m an optimist.
- lewhoo 3y ago
  > Sure don’t have kids. Your line ends here while others will potentially live among the star. That's a weird take. This isn't house Lannister vs house Stark you know. To keep the bloodline going really shouldn't be the first thing that comes to mind while considering having a child imho.
  - teekert 3y ago
    That’s true we do all share a lot of genetic code. And even then, better choose a life you’re happy with.
unsigner 3y ago
This feels incredibly detached from my reality. In my reality, there’s a brutal land war two countries over, and I’m agonizing whether I’m dooming my children by not teaching them battlefield first aid, trench digging and FPV drone piloting.
- ianlevesque 3y ago
  Oh it's detached from global reality too.
- Epa095 3y ago
  Don't you think the drone flying will be fully automated by the time your kids have to enter the trenches?
  - unsigner 3y ago
    Thousands of tanks will be attacked by millions of human-piloted drones before we get to fully autonomous drones, if ever. The existence of 1.5 mln dollar Tomahawk missiles hasn’t made the unguided 155 mm shell (costing a few hundred dollars) unnecessary
dwroberts 3y ago
I think the future predictions miss one major possibility: That ubiquitous/powerful AI is available only to very few people (super rich and corporations) and everybody else is pushed back to basically subsistence living, where they have nothing of value to offer the other side of society because everything has been automated away. So maybe sharpen your kids on their manual labour too
VladimirGolovin 3y ago
My problem with children and AI is much more practical. My daughter (17) is an artist, and she wanted to begin a career in animation. However, the progress in generative AI (namely Midjourney, Stable Diffusion, and now Sora) makes this a dubious idea. Frankly, as a parent, I have no idea what to advise her.
- Vecr 3y ago
  A disease control consultant for hospitals, nursing homes, etc. Maybe she can convince them to do the basic stuff like polished copper door handles, bow ties, hair length limits, shaved faces, checklists, and all rooms negative pressure with the doors kept shut as much as possible. Maybe they'll get UV figured out by then, but she'd still have to work to keep up with the increasing antibiotic resistance.
elforce002 3y ago
Listen, I have 2 boys (6yrs and 8 months) and I'm doing all I can to buy a house and land to cultivate just in case. It'll be really hard since everything is expensive but I'm hopeful things could get better if the war in Ukraine ends, the pending global recession start to fade away, and interests go down. The end game here is to have just enough just in case AI comes to fruition and we all go bust. I'm still trying to teach my children how to code, Electronics, etc... Since, well, that's what I know. Other than that, I'm just trying to give them a head start in life even I didn't have one.
niemandhier 3y ago
Life changed less than you think: The cobbler down the streets still makes shoes, the butcher next door still cures meat, the carpenter in the neighbourhood still builds chairs. It’s just that the cobblers brother works in a bio-factories clean room, and the carpenters wife is a sysadmin.
- ben_w 3y ago
  I've not seen any "down the street"-scale cobbler outside a museum, and the only trained carpenter I know was literally homeless until they found a chance to be a software tester. There are butchers around, though who knows how long that will last, once vat-grown flesh is both affordable and available.
  - niemandhier 3y ago
    I guess Europe is just different,I drive past 2 carpentries and one cobbler on my way to work, and there are 7 butchers and 9 bakeries in a 15km radius.

100 points by lwhsiao 3y ago

Vecr 3y ago

> Is it even ok to have kids? According to me (utility function, etc) it's required you have kids. Only in the 2.X statistical sense though, but if not what's the point? You can't condition all your problems out, but you at least have to play to not lose.

rbanffy 3y ago
I’m not a huge fan of CS Lewis but the quote at the end is very on point. Let’s continue to be human and do human things. Change will come as it always does.
- Vecr 3y ago
  It's okay I guess if you think you have no causal impact on if any of that happens, but otherwise you better be doing something to help, even if it would only work in a tiny part of probability space, instead of waiting to die.
  - throwanem 3y ago
    Why waste time posting here that you could spend weaving mosquito nets, then? Surely this can't be a global maximum in utilon space.
    - Vecr 3y ago
      I'm talking about VNM utility, I'm not a utilitarian or a EA.
      - throwanem 3y ago
        VNM applied in the realm of ethics is definitionally utilitarian.
        Vecr 3y ago
        > That your utility function may be off model from the most doctrinaire possible interpretation of the theory does not seem to me the same as saying this is not an example of a theory. Sure, I don't want to get into a definitional argument. However, any VNM utility function can be the exact opposite of anything you propose as good, just by inverting the comparison order. If you have numerical outcome scores that could be as easy as my score =: 0 - your score > (Did you mean to reply to your comment rather than mine?) It's a HN thing.
        throwanem 3y ago
        Well, yeah, that's the fundamental failure of utilitarianism: it's so abstract as to say nothing meaningful, because it explicitly delegates the entire definition of what actually is ethical to the utility function, and nothing past that is distinct from any other ethical theory. Again I grant this varies from Bentham's definition, but Bentham has been dead a long time now. Modern utilitarianism has been defined by Singer, for better or for worse - mostly worse - and Singerism is what I describe. In any case, Bentham's version still bears the flaw; 'good' can stretch with sufficient cleverness to cover all the virtue or deontology in the world. > It's a HN thing. I doubt that; this and your prior comment are the second and third time I've seen it in eleven years of active participation here. Are you using some kind of extension or script to augment the UI? If so, I strongly suspect that is causing it.
      - Vecr 3y ago
        > VNM applied in the realm of ethics is definitionally utilitarian. I assume you are thinking deontological ethics, virtue ethics, etc vs utilitarianism, but non-benthamite utility functions exist. Actually, if they didn't I assume a lot of AI doomers would be less doomy, as quite a few of them are utilitarians.
        throwanem 3y ago
        No, I'm thinking utilitarianism. I appreciate that the standard definition includes a term about "for the greatest number". But you're still defining an ethical utility function which you then seek to maximize. That your utility function may be off model from the most doctrinaire possible interpretation of the theory does not seem to me the same as saying this is not an example of the theory. The same could be said of effective altruism, which is anyway just the prosperity-gospel version of utilitarianism. That one should be doing utilitarianism badly does not mean one is not doing utilitarianism at all. (Did you mean to reply to your comment rather than mine?)
        Vecr 3y ago
        > Well, yeah, that's the fundamental failure of utilitarianism: it's so abstract as to say nothing meaningful, because it explicitly delegates the entire definition of what actually is ethical to the utility function, and nothing past that is distinct from any other ethical theory. I think it's honest, as it really forces you to make a distinction between good (what should be) and real (what is). "Should" goes into the utility function, "is" goes into the world model. I'd honestly recommend giving it a shot if you have free time. > I doubt that; this and your prior comment are the second and third time I've seen it in eleven years of active participation here. It's the anti-flame war/spam thing kicking in. I'm manually responding to the "wrong post" but that's pretty much fine.
        throwanem 3y ago
        Oh, I see. If you click the timestamp on a comment, that view always has the reply form. Only in the thread view is the reply link hidden for the first few minutes after a comment is posted. I'm familiar with Hume. The is-ought distinction has value, but is orthogonal to utilitarianism, if not explicitly opposed.
  - dsign 3y ago
    Just this. And there are things we can do. Those of us who live in democracies can influence outcomes a little. It may be too early for political action, but perhaps is not too early for writing and reflecting, and for coming up with theories about how the near future may look like, and sharing them with the world. If things turn really dire, there is always that turbid matter our advanced culture forbids us to reach out for: violence and revolutions. In other words, if it is the AIs or us, be it because the AIs are outright evil or because our economic systems make them evil, then we can always choose “us” and resort to forceful or even violent corrections.
mocamoca 3y ago
I don't mean to show a lack of respect for parents and their good will. However, could we say that "you at least have to play to not lose" is a particularly selfish reason for having children? Here, "Playing" is making sure the parents will have caregivers, not that the children will live happy. If the current situation is not worrying enough to rule out having happy kids, what would be the threshold? (Not a rhetorical question)
- Vecr 3y ago
  > If the current situation is not worrying enough to rule out having happy kids, what would be the threshold? (Not a rhetorical question) There is no threshold. Yes, I know Yudkowsky's position, not even there. > Here, 'Playing' is making sure the parents will have caregivers, not that the children will live happy. Parents having caregivers hardly comes into it at all.
  - dsign 3y ago
    > Parents having caregivers hardly comes into it at all. For me, it does, an awful lot. Being a caregiver to my parents has implied a lot of existential suffering and emotional agony. Think about it: the people who raised you are going to die slowly and perhaps painfully and you are going to see it without being able to do anything. I feel I would be very cruel by giving that future to a child I love.
    - Vecr 3y ago
      That's either going to happen or it's not, but I don't think everyone being dead is an acceptable way to force it to be wrong.
AnarchismIsCool 3y ago
What is winning and what is losing? Yeah there are actions that persist our genetics but there's no rule saying that's what needs to happen, just that it's something that happens. If you widen out to society, yeah, there are other people who will come after us, maybe we can have purpose in helping those people to survive even if they're not our kids. Humans evolved as a collective, there are parts of our DNA that exist to help the group even if it means we ourselves don't have kids. Evolution is a much more complicated thing than just specifying exactly what genes -you- pass on.
- Turing_Machine 3y ago
  > What is winning and what is losing? Yeah there are actions that persist our genetics but there's no rule saying that's what needs to happen, just that it's something that happens. All of us are descended from billions of years of ancestors (long before humans) that were motivated to reproduce. Those who didn't left none of their genes behind (other than ones they might have shared with relatives). That's exactly what "losing" means, in the evolutionary sense.
  - AnarchismIsCool 3y ago
    Not at all. Simple example: ants. Most of them don't reproduce, but they still work to pass on their genes. In the case of humans... Why do you think there has always been a part of society that seems predisposed to violence and nationalism. It's not beneficial to the individual to go get in fights, but if it keeps the group alive then it's advantageous. (Note, this is not a license to be a violent nationalist asshole, but this is the internet so...) Similarly, autism and ADHD. There are very real theories that those conditions were beneficial to early society even if they were detrimental to mating because it's helpful to have people around who are hyper focused and hyper unfocused. So yeah, helping pass on your relative's genes, however distant, is still part of the game.

rbanffy 3y ago

One bit of warning: we tend to overestimate the short term impact of new tools while underestimating their long term ones. It’s likely our kids will have recognisable professions with better phones than not. AI will be there assisting us in increasingly sophisticated ways, acting as intelligent agents and maybe even impersonating us at simple interactions. Value and supply chains change slowly and those are the things that can really make the biggest changes.

dsign 3y ago
Let’s assume for a moment that AIs turn up as you say, and that there is nothing nefarious. That outcome will need a lot of foresight and democratic regulation, because market forces will want AIs to exploit people. But, let’s assume we find a political system that is smarter than the people wanting to use AIs for bad ends. So, the world would look very much like the world now, where you earn money proportionally to how difficult is to replace you. There probably will be a set of skills incredibly difficult to get that will earn you enough money to live a comfortable life. And that’s the problem. Even now, lots of people never attain those skills, and they end up working at a factory or at an Amazon fulfillment center. If we don’t fix things somehow, how much worse will it be in the age of AI?
- Aurornis 3y ago
  > Let’s assume for a moment that AIs turn up as you say, and that there is nothing nefarious. The parent comment didn’t say “nothing nefarious” at all. It just said we overestimate the short term impact. This comment section is full of people acting like AI is going to make most jobs obsolete within a matter of years. One of the top comments as I write this is from someone writing melodramatically about Sam Altman taking jobs away from their tradesman relatives with “plasticized fingers” from the comfort of his “pretty offices”. This is the kind of histrionics you get when people identify a trend and extrapolate it to absurd conclusions on unrealistic timelines. I can’t tell if these people actually believe that robots are coming to take our jobs (including physical ones) in a few years or if this is just pearl-clutching at the way the world is changing when they’d prefer that everything stayed the same. > There probably will be a set of skills incredibly difficult to get that will earn you enough money to live a comfortable life. And that’s the problem. Even now, lots of people never attain those skills, and they end up working at a factory or at an Amazon fulfillment center. If we don’t fix things somehow, how much worse will it be in the age of AI? You’re making the same mistake I see throughout this thread, which is assuming that AI can only be a subtractive force and nothing else will change about the world. An AI-centric world isn’t going to look exactly like today’s world but with fewer jobs. The price of those “comfortable life” things would go down and availability would go up if everything was automated away. If you treat the future like a carbon copy of today but with workers replaced by robots then it’s bleak, but that’s a failure in acknowledging that economies evolve with technology. It’s the same reason the world didn’t collapse when technology enabled people to do something other than work on farms.

MichaelMug 3y ago

> Partly because even in a world where it became clear that school isn’t useful I don’t follow… In what world is school not useful? I suspect the social value of school will become much more apparent soon.

AnarchismIsCool 3y ago
It's not that it's actually not useful, but given everything going on it certainly feels not useful to a lot of kids. In a lot of ways, school is the part of our society that changes the slowest.
Vecr 3y ago
Lots of them, depending on what you mean by "school" and "useful". I think it's doubtful we're in one though.
aquarkortwo 3y ago
In a world where we have personalized tutors and assistants that can pass on knowledge much more efficiently and effectively than human teachers can.
- keiferski 3y ago
  People keep saying this and I don’t buy it. Kids arent going to learn the best by staring at a computer screen eight hours a day. If this happens it’ll be because of reduced education funding, not efficiency.
  - packetlost 3y ago
    I think a prerequisite to that is figuring out how to get them to not spit out complete bullshit consistently anyways.
  - ben_w 3y ago
    Is staring at a screen for eight hours a day better or worse than staring at a chalkboard or a marker board?

inference-lord 3y ago

I became a parent about a year ago, completely unprepared for this future. My Son was born around the time ChatGPT-4 was released and I remember all the Geoffrey Hinton interviews which were really apocalyptic sounding, he is has a kind of kookie mad scientist vibe about him too. I remember thinking, like what the fuck just happened? Like I just woke up in a movie. I've learned to accept the situation, and realize that we can't really predict what will happen so I just try be the best, happiest parent I can to my kids that I can. But I never anticipated the "along for the ride" feeling I have now. Financially planning for 3 years ahead seems quite impossible as I have no idea what type of employment will or will not exist then. It seems like our careers could just be snuffed out instantly with little recourse available. I say "seems like" because I have no idea if that's real or perceived but it's very hard plan ahead. I'm kind of glad my child didn't just finished university and planning a career in something that is ripe for disruption because that must be pretty heart breaking, especially because we bring kids up thinking they need a purpose, having a purpose (in my opinion) is a stupid way to live, but not everyone feels that way. I can't help feel a bit cynical too, like I'm kind of annoyed that realistically, the tech elite of the world are just throwing money at this thing like it's no one else' business and fuck what anyone else thinks about it and fuck how it might impact anyone else because, progress, which at the moment, is code for, "we're about to make copious amounts of money using everyone's IP, a bunch of open source software, and we might give something back, so fuck off. I'm trying to put the cynicism down, look forwards and hope for the best.

bbor 3y ago
It seems like our careers could just be snuffed out instantly with little recourse available. You’ve likely heard this sentiment before but it’s the right one so I’ll be the one to post it today: your job is not your purpose, and the economy is not the society. Obviously your whole comment is well founded and relatable, but I think this is the only cure for your anxieties. The world is a beautiful, beautiful place, with many more wonders to offer than the typical laborer is accustomed to. If we eventually have a society where everyone is happy with what they have and there’s no work left to do, that would be a cause for celebration IMO. This is all assuming that the intelligence explosion people are wrong. If they’re right… well, let’s hope they’re wrong.

keiferski 3y ago

I think kids are a lot more prepared for this future than professional technologists probably realize. If you ask them today what profession they want to be, you often get “YouTuber” as an answer. Which might seem like a joke, but I think it’s actually quite accurate in terms of future professions. The jobs at most risk from AI are “anonymous” ones in which the creator of the work is unknown to its consumer. Writing, in a professional context, is a good example. Do you know who wrote the text on Amazon product pages? Probably not. What is less at risk are charisma-based occupations, like actors or YouTubers. People are social animals and want to connect (or feel like they’re connected) to other humans, not robots. I expect the concept of an influencer to get even bigger. Ergo, I would tell kids today to focus on social skills, filmmaking skills, and presentation skills.

bo1024 3y ago
YouTuber is a lottery-ticket profession. It's a winner-take-all, heavy-tailed distribution. It doesn't make sense to tell a whole population to buy lottery tickets. For kids, it's a modern equivalent of "I want to be in the NBA", "I want to be an astronaut".
- keiferski 3y ago
  You are missing the point I’m making. Everyone won’t be a YouTuber. But the successful people will cultivate skills that are similar to those needed by successful YouTubers. Being an anonymous worker with anonymous output means you can be easily replaced.
  - bo1024 3y ago
    All of the examples you gave are lottery-ticket professions, though. And even if a large number of people could be successful entertainers, I'm not even sure about the premise. AI-generated media could compete with YouTubers very soon. AI will take a long, long time to replace garbagemen.
    - keiferski 3y ago

Biologist123 3y ago

The writer says: “[My children] are more viscerally worried about climate change”. I’m not surprised. I recently heard from a friend that her 7 year-old child had, as a class assignment, to create a timeline setting out the impact of climate change over their lifetime. I was gobsmacked, and feel this amounts to a form of psychological child abuse. It’s a serious problem, don’t get me wrong, but having a small child labour to visualize modeled outputs is traumatizing. It’s really made me wonder about how reality morphs into millenarian thinking.

keiferski 3y ago
People like to think that all those crazy end-of-days cults just disappeared and were replaced by rational scientists. But that’s not how culture works. The apocalyptic impulse is still with us, but has found new outlets.
AnarchismIsCool 3y ago
When I was growing up they just traumatized us all into thinking our houses were going to burn down all the time and we'd frequently find ourselves on fire necessitating rolling around on the floor. Also, quicksand and outrunning alligators. Then again, that is the reality they're in now, so there's an argument they should be spending a good amount of time getting ready for that. I'd rather they not be sitting there pikachu-faced when the rate of human migration skyrockets so they decide to just start killing them all or something similarly stupid.
moshun 3y ago
I’m not sure being honest with children about something that impacts them so heavily is the wrong move here. Traumatized or not, I suspect teaching children about the problem in clear terms will lead to a better informed generation of scientists, lawmakers, and voters. Hopefully they make and stick to better decisions then those that came before.
- Biologist123 3y ago
  I hear what you’re saying, that children should be educated about the reality they find themselves in. If that is the case, and I would say their are exceptions until children are older, then strong guidelines are needed, partly because acting out of trauma is rarely a good idea. Secondly, because a full reality must be imparted including that projections are based on modeled outputs, and modeling complex systems is inherently problematic, there are many problems facing humanity, and resources must be rationally allocated between all.

thanatos519 3y ago

I'm much less concerned about the impact of AI than about climate change and ecological destruction. A radical shift in the distribution of work and wealth is long overdue. I'm sure our children will be better off for AI if it can help us get through the coming war, famine, plague, and "natural" disasters.

arpa 3y ago
AI is tipping the scales not to the favour of the proletariat. "The means of production" is in the hands of the powerful few, and I foresee a very bloody revolution.
- erur 3y ago
  This funny old narrative of a revolution in that direction sounds pretty misplaced if we're talking about a future where you won't need humans to get stuff done...
  - arpa 3y ago
    you know what is really funny? the neoliberal narrative of free markets and trickle-down economies and billionaires being valuable members of thr society. If humans are not needed to get stuff done, what's the use for those humans, mmmm?

j4yav 3y ago

I feel like the future pretty much has to be more local, in person, and human, and as much as you can interact with the internet as a utility rather than as the main source of interaction in your life it is for the best. That’s probably the best lesson you can teach your kids if you don’t want them to be part of society that just sort of permanently falls into the internet, always plugged in via goggles or brain implant and fed AI generated content, never to return. It already seems like there’s a group that is basically terminally online and it seems like it’s only going to get worse.

kmmlng 3y ago
While I agree that moving all human interaction to the internet is likely to be a net negative, there is only so much you can do as an individual. It takes two to tango, you need a sufficient number of other people with the same mindset to resist this move to the internet. As someone whose parents kept them away from certain forms of technology, media, etc., all it really did was alienate me from others. At the end of the day, I'd rather connect with others through the internet than not at all.
- j4yav 3y ago
  I guess where I live I’ve been lucky to find a nice community of people who don’t live online.

findingMeaning 3y ago

Well at least you guys are lucky enough to have kids. There are us unfortunate ones who happen to just graduate at the wrong time. We, are eternal juniors, with niche skills within a narrow CS domain. So competition is extremely high for us. We would be lucky if we get to survive next five years. There is no way for us to get into something tangible, if we are resident of relative south (asia, SA, Africa). Surviving for the next day in the developed world is the game we play. How about home country? What is the point when globalization floods the local market. We were wiped out there, hence we had to leave. Everything we want to do, giant corpos do it cheap or for free. In relative south of the world, people lack money. So data privacy doesn't matter. The concept of paying for software doesn't exists. In the developed side, existing is a dread with no hope. There are enough competent people joining the field who get more priorities. For eternal juniors like us, please show hope. Pretty you may find it difficult to relate to any words here. Anyone born in the west are taught to find their purpose, other countries not so much. It's all about money because money solves 99% issue over there. Username checks out.

threedark 3y ago

What happened to all the people who were saying AI is just a stochastic parrot and aren't worried at all about AI? Is it that this thread only attracts people who are worried about AI or is there an actual paradigm shift that all the nay-sayers are realizing they were wrong? Serious question, don't take it the wrong way if you were a nay-sayer. No offence at all.

ben_w 3y ago
There's a few such comments[0], though my assumption is there's some kind of assortative selection going on that means all the bear comments congregate in one set of threads and all the bull comments congregate in a slightly different set. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39408125 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39408125 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39407263 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39407263

archsurface 3y ago

I'm curious to know what people are going to be like when they've grown up in a world of things that are not comprehensible. Eg, I grew up easily understanding how films were made, but I wonder how a child's character will develop when growing up with "films" made by something called a neural net - will there be eg a sense of detachment from the world around them? Will there be an extended period of life during which time children don't understand things? What effect will that have?

valine 3y ago
The math behind diffusion models is entirely comprehensible. People will always ask why they need to learn calculus and when they will use it in the real world. Here’s another great answer.
- archsurface 3y ago
  I was thinking of young children.

Barrin92 3y ago

It's always astonishing to me when people talk about what they want their children to be or do and the answer is a list of soft skills. The Protestant work ethic really has done a number on some people. I always thought the answer is simple (though not easy), I want my kids to be healthy, honest, loyal and kind, what they do from 8am to 4pm is for them to figure out, but it's not that important.

larodi 3y ago
Missing Ref. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Protestant_Ethic_and_the_Spirit_of_Capitalism https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Protestant_Ethic_and_the...

teekert 3y ago

A lot trying to predict the future. But kids need love and attention. And if you teach them to think for themselves there is not much more you can do. As for the “should I even have kids” argument? Sure don’t have kids. Your line ends here while others will potentially live among the star. I’m sorry I’m an optimist.

lewhoo 3y ago
> Sure don’t have kids. Your line ends here while others will potentially live among the star. That's a weird take. This isn't house Lannister vs house Stark you know. To keep the bloodline going really shouldn't be the first thing that comes to mind while considering having a child imho.
- teekert 3y ago
  That’s true we do all share a lot of genetic code. And even then, better choose a life you’re happy with.

unsigner 3y ago

This feels incredibly detached from my reality. In my reality, there’s a brutal land war two countries over, and I’m agonizing whether I’m dooming my children by not teaching them battlefield first aid, trench digging and FPV drone piloting.

ianlevesque 3y ago
Oh it's detached from global reality too.
Epa095 3y ago
Don't you think the drone flying will be fully automated by the time your kids have to enter the trenches?
- unsigner 3y ago
  Thousands of tanks will be attacked by millions of human-piloted drones before we get to fully autonomous drones, if ever. The existence of 1.5 mln dollar Tomahawk missiles hasn’t made the unguided 155 mm shell (costing a few hundred dollars) unnecessary

dwroberts 3y ago

I think the future predictions miss one major possibility: That ubiquitous/powerful AI is available only to very few people (super rich and corporations) and everybody else is pushed back to basically subsistence living, where they have nothing of value to offer the other side of society because everything has been automated away. So maybe sharpen your kids on their manual labour too

VladimirGolovin 3y ago

My problem with children and AI is much more practical. My daughter (17) is an artist, and she wanted to begin a career in animation. However, the progress in generative AI (namely Midjourney, Stable Diffusion, and now Sora) makes this a dubious idea. Frankly, as a parent, I have no idea what to advise her.

Vecr 3y ago
A disease control consultant for hospitals, nursing homes, etc. Maybe she can convince them to do the basic stuff like polished copper door handles, bow ties, hair length limits, shaved faces, checklists, and all rooms negative pressure with the doors kept shut as much as possible. Maybe they'll get UV figured out by then, but she'd still have to work to keep up with the increasing antibiotic resistance.

elforce002 3y ago

Listen, I have 2 boys (6yrs and 8 months) and I'm doing all I can to buy a house and land to cultivate just in case. It'll be really hard since everything is expensive but I'm hopeful things could get better if the war in Ukraine ends, the pending global recession start to fade away, and interests go down. The end game here is to have just enough just in case AI comes to fruition and we all go bust. I'm still trying to teach my children how to code, Electronics, etc... Since, well, that's what I know. Other than that, I'm just trying to give them a head start in life even I didn't have one.

niemandhier 3y ago

Life changed less than you think: The cobbler down the streets still makes shoes, the butcher next door still cures meat, the carpenter in the neighbourhood still builds chairs. It’s just that the cobblers brother works in a bio-factories clean room, and the carpenters wife is a sysadmin.

ben_w 3y ago
I've not seen any "down the street"-scale cobbler outside a museum, and the only trained carpenter I know was literally homeless until they found a chance to be a software tester. There are butchers around, though who knows how long that will last, once vat-grown flesh is both affordable and available.
- niemandhier 3y ago
  I guess Europe is just different,I drive past 2 carpentries and one cobbler on my way to work, and there are 7 butchers and 9 bakeries in a 15km radius.