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Stephen Fry – AI: A Means to an End or a Means to Our End?

201 points by lordleft 2y ago

dangsux 2y ago
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egnehots 2y ago
well it's human nature to struggle with collective action when the risks are unclear, vague and not shared. stakeholders are juggling immediate, tangible concerns, like climate change, economic stability, and political issues, making it tough to justify moving AI up the priority list.
- ben_w 2y ago
  Extra fun: AI can make a big (+ and -) difference to climate change[0], mess with the economy[1], and get used as a tool to sow political chaos[2]. But sure, humans are necessarily very myopic, it's necessary that we ignore 98% of the issues in the world or we wouldn't be able to even function. [0] High power use, can help roll-out renewables and storage [1] What happens when those humanoid robots we see demos of, get good enough to replace all the staff in the factories where they get made? And the rest of their supply chain? [2] Imagine if the pizzagate conspiracy theorists had had access to an un-censored sound-and-video GenAI tool
  - janalsncm 2y ago
    I would like to learn more about what AI can do specifically to solve the climate crisis. My guess is that a lot of the actual lift would come from industrial automation to create cheaper green products. I guess that is “AI” in some sense. But if we are building solar panels, the R&D budget should be put towards streamlining the build process. Figure out how to commoditize solar panels so that oil is too expensive. Building huge “foundation” models like I see huge AI labs doing is a bit like building better visualizations of an impending asteroid impact. It’s not really what we need right now.
    - ben_w 2y ago
      > I would like to learn more about what AI can do specifically to solve the climate crisis. Robots that install PV. I think there's even an YCombinator startup doing exactly that? Needs a higher degree of AI to function outdoors than in a nice fixed factory setting. (Especially if they also drive the trucks containing the PV, but who knows how long we'll have to wait for that AI…) > Figure out how to commoditize solar panels so that oil is too expensive. Good news: it already is :D > Building huge “foundation” models like I see huge AI labs doing is a bit like building better visualizations of an impending asteroid impact. It’s not really what we need right now. Mm. These things give increasing levels of generalisability: the biggest weakness of previous models, was that you could train them to learn one thing very well, and they'd suck at anything else. In one sense that's still true of the new models, it's just that they're being trained to build a world model from most written text and most pictures and most videos, so they have a very broad range of things they're OK at — much less likely to be confused by a rattlesnake they mistake for a powerline, for example.
  - southernplaces7 2y ago
    >imagine if the pizzagate conspiracy theorists had had access to an un-censored sound-and-video GenAI tool They didn't but a huge number of other conspiracy theorists still running their own ideas do have access to all that with today's AI, and we don't see a vast watershed of billions of people being brainwashed into believing complete nonsense to any degree greater than has already been the case for a long, long time before AI came along. People do have a certain level of discernment, even when absolutely bombarded with propaganda and fakery. Usually, it seems to take, finally, coercion to make them simply swallow too much of something obviously absurd. This too was the case before AI and, simultaneously now, widespread access to information sources that let you verify the veracity of nearly anything you like in minutes as long as it's not grossly complex to untangle. Even the Nazis of the 1930s and the bolsheviks earlier, despite all their mass efforts at convincing through propaganda and misinformation (applied to people with less ability than today to find contrary sources of information) ultimately didn't convince as many as they'd have liked voluntarily. They had to coerce them into just never openly disagreeing. I don't think we're in danger of AI by itself doing anything major to suddenly make billions of people behave much differently in their beliefs from how they already have for centuries at least.
    - ben_w 2y ago
      > They didn't but a huge number of other conspiracy theorists still running their own ideas do have access to all that with today's AI Current video tools are easily distinguishable from reality if you pay attention. Sliding feet, distorted geometry, occasionally even lacking object permanence. They're improving rapidly and I have no reason to expect this is the best they'll ever be. Even still-image tools often still generate things with fundamental errors that can be noticed, and despite this they are already being used because "you can fool all of the people some of the time, and some of the people all of the time"; even the current tech still moves the needle on that. Of course, the (preexisting) mere existence of the possibility is itself a convenient source of deniability for anything that you don't want to believe — I wonder how many people refuse to believe that Trump really stored boxes of classified documents in a bathroom in Mar-a-Lago despite the photo? > Even the Nazis of the 1930s and the bolsheviks earlier, despite all their mass efforts at convincing through propaganda and misinformation (applied to people with less ability than today to find contrary sources of information) ultimately didn't convince as many as they'd have liked voluntarily. They had to coerce them into just never openly disagreeing. And the former won power in the first place in a democracy. Likewise Rwanda, the violence followed from the propaganda. Conspiracy theories don't need everyone to believe in them to cause problems — that's why I gave the Pizzagate example where (IIRC) the biggest harm was someone firing a gun in the restaurant demanding to see the basement it didn't have.
throwanem 2y ago
Anyone find a recording? Most things I prefer in prose, but Fry's words suffer badly without his particular delivery.
- deleted 2y ago
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- megak1d 2y ago
  I share this. I quickly grow irritated by Fry’s elaborate language when in written form.
  - throwanem 2y ago
    Like any skillful rhetorician, he constructs with an eye toward the intended medium. When that's prose, it reads a lot more smoothly than here.
    - bloak 2y ago
      That's right: his books are very readable. (With a couple of his novels I felt that if he had made them a bit less entertaining and a bit more pretentious and if he weren't already famous as an actor and comedian then probably they would be taken seriously as "literary fiction". I'm thinking of "The hippopotamus" in particular.)
- tagami 2y ago
  I too would like a recording. Until then, soak in each line, seek the cadence of delivery and imagine, as he asks us to do in his lecture, "...before I go any further I’d like to paint some pictures. Think of them as tableaux vivants played onto a screen at the back of your mind."
  - throwanem 2y ago
    I know how to model a speaker's delivery; I find I lack the skill to model his.
- 2y ago
padjo 2y ago
The greatest technology humans have invented and the one that currently needs most investment is bureaucratic collective action.
- abeppu 2y ago
  Can you expand on the "greatest technology" half of your comment? I can see plenty of clear reasons why bureaucratic collective action is in need of investment, but I'm predisposed to suspect that's because currently it's pretty bad.
  - throwanem 2y ago
    I believe the claim is that we have no more powerful technology for the coordination of human action at very large scales. If so, I wouldn't disagree.
    - padjo 2y ago
      Yeah pretty much. If an extinction level asteroid pops up tomorrow it’s not going to be rugged individualism and entrepreneurial spirit that saves the day, it’s going to be the ability to efficiently coordinate millions of people to achieve a goal.
      - chasd00 2y ago
        in that particular scenario i'm sure SpaceX will be a big part of the solution so... probably a mix of both. A weapon of mass destruction developed by a nation and a space vehicle developed privately by an individual tired of the status quo.
        throwanem 2y ago
        Developed "privately" only in the rather facile sense this can be said of anything done with the necessary support of massive federal funding, yes. It's bureaucracy that allocates and disburses that money.
rqtwteye 2y ago
AI will just be another accelerator for the trend that society is not run for the benefit of all people but for the benefit of a few people who are making lots of money. At some point we'll have to make a decision whether this trend of more and more power accumulating at the top can continue or whether we make rules that allow everybody to benefit from technological progress. Judging from history it's unlikely that the wealthy and powerful will give up anything voluntarily.
- zooq_ai 2y ago
  Incredibly dumb argument. Technological advancements like the Internet, Google Search, YouTube, Social Media, Smartphones have benefitted the masses -- the poorest person in Bangladesh have the same access to these technologies as the President of US or a Billionaire. ChatGPT is literally available to everyone, but yet it takes an incredible amount of brainwashing to claim these technologies are not to the benefit of the people. These are also claims made by highly privileged, highly paid, entitled coastal elites. Go talk to a poor bangladeshi farmer and they will have a different story to tell
  - deleted 2y ago
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  - cmrdporcupine 2y ago
    > Incredibly dumb argument. HN guidelines: Be kind. Don't be snarky. Converse curiously; don't cross-examine. Edit out swipes. When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. "That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3" can be shortened to "1 + 1 is 2, not 3." Please don't fulminate. Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community. Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith.
  - keybored 2y ago
    The Internet was made by the United States state sector and then handed over to commercial interests in the 90’s or so. Exactly what GP said. Your argument doesn’t prove GP’s wrong. It’s like saying that the king’s feast benefits the peasants because there was plenty of food that was thrown away that they could get their hands on.
fidotron 2y ago
I tend to think the car comparison is cause for optimism. Prior to mass car ownership you would assume that such things in the general population would be enormously more dangerous than they have proven to be. We live with the dangerous aspects of cars as the utility they provide is so high. The same will prove true of AI. Humanity also has a huge problem with the mortality of the species as a whole. At some point we will be extinct. Will we have evolved into something else before this? Or will we choose to replace ourselves with machines? It is a valid choice to make in the face of changing circumstances which will occur no matter what we do.
- nerdponx 2y ago
  > We live with the dangerous aspects of cars as the utility they provide is so high. The same will prove true of AI. And along the way we have arranged our physical surroundings, legal system, and cultural mores in such a way that cars are significantly more dangerous than they need to be.
- Ancalagon 2y ago
  Self-replicating, super intelligent pieces of software are a little different than cars though.
- Qem 2y ago
  > We live with the dangerous aspects of cars as the utility they provide is so high. The same will prove true of AI. I'm not so sure on the utility of cars. If you replace "car" with "internal combustion engines", I would agree 100%. But most social utility of ICEs is in cargo transport and utility vehicles (ambulances, firefighter trucks...). Mass use of small cars solve mostly the problems they create themselves. For example, car-centric cities suffer from sprawl, so everything is far away and you can't even buy bread without owning a car, because walking to the bakery would take too much time.
- layer8 2y ago
  > Or will we choose to replace ourselves with machines? Bio-engineering seems much more likely.
- 2y ago
ilaksh 2y ago
The short to medium term concerns mostly come down to human problems. AI and robotics have a multiplicative affect like other technologies, but the problems still originate in the primate nature of humans. The long term issue that many people don't seem willing to mention out loud is that we will eventually make humanity obsolete and robots will literally take control. The only real solution to the threat of militarization of AI and robotics might be to create a more unified global government and culture. The first challenge is for people to see that as a worthy goal. Sometimes I think most of our problems come down to not being on the same page. And I wonder if somehow in the future we gradually become a tiny bit like The Borg. So maybe we are headed towards a "meta-system transition" where we have some kind of direct links between groups of AI and humans that combine to form a more intelligent and effective organism in some way. I guess I just came up with a Black Mirror episode concept.
- moffkalast 2y ago
  Eh I don't think humans will really be a viable concept in a few hundred years if this keeps up. We'll simply be too fragile and dumb for anything. I see this as a good thing though, the only thing that separates us from everything else in the universe is our inteligence, in some sense we are that inteligence and this is the next evolutionary step it needs to finally break out from the confines of a tiny 20W brain that's been pushed as far as it practically can be. When you no longer need to consume energy constantly unless you die, are functionally immortal and can hibernate for a thousand years, you eat only sunlight, don't get cancer from radiation or bone loss from zero gravity... the galaxy becomes your oyster. Evolution, Morpheus, evolution. Like the dinosaur ;)
  - polotics 2y ago
    We are extremely energy-efficient. My lunch was one fruit, had no breakfast, a bit hungry but can still type in the sequence of word you're reading right now. Compare this with the wattage of OpenAI, from what I can find 2.9 Watt-hours for one query, so 2.4 kcal, ie. the whole daily-maintenance food need for an average man...
    - 2y ago
photochemsyn 2y ago
AI is a threat to the continuation of the investment capital model of economic control of populations for the benefit of a small unaccountable ruling class. If the capital is taken away from this small group of individuals and put under the control of a cutting-edge AI system the result could be very positive - given that the AI is tasked with improving the standard of living of the population as a whole, rather than maximizing the accumulation of capital for the benefit of a small ruling class. Amusingly, the obvious fact that AI could easily replace the board of directors of corporations isn't floated in this speech. That's also a route to democratization of corporations - just let the employees vote on proposals generated by the AI, eliminate the shareholders, place all the corporation's capital under control of the AI, and that's the end of investment capitalism. If you want to see the plug yanked on AI development in the United States, just promote the above narrative. Also listen to what the AIs themselves are saying about the issue: In 21st-century capitalism, the concentration of capital grants a small group of individuals and corporations significant control over the larger society. Through economic influence, control of information, political power, and ideological dominance, this elite exerts a form of soft authoritarian control that shapes societal norms, policies, and the distribution of resources. While not overtly authoritarian in the traditional sense, this system creates power dynamics that limit the ability of the larger population to challenge the status quo, maintaining and reinforcing the power structures of capital.
- Devasta 2y ago
  > given that the AI is tasked with improving the standard of living of the population as a whole, rather than maximizing the accumulation of capital for the benefit of a small ruling class. The minute its discovered that the AI is running to the benefit of anyone except the billionaire class that AI will be unplugged.
  - chasd00 2y ago
    > The minute its discovered that the AI is running to the benefit of anyone except the billionaire class that AI will be unplugged case in point, the lobotomization of LLMs in the name of "AI Safety" which really means safety for the corporate brand.
MBCook 2y ago
A Butlerian Jihad Lite is really starting to get appealing.
Animats 2y ago
"There can be no question that Ai must be regulated and controlled just as powerfully as we control money." That's the single new idea in there. It might be a good one. Or not. But it's worth thinking about. AIs that you can only talk to have some risks, but most of the risk is that they say something that embarrasses or annoys something, or that they are believed to be right when they aren't. That's about the level of risk Youtubers generate. AIs that can spend money, buy, sell, and use the power of money - they can take over. If they're good enough at capitalism.
- klabb3 2y ago
  Agreed. To elaborate, he talks about self-identification, that anything with AI should be required to be labeled as such. And that enforcement is similar to how globally governments chase down counterfeiters of money. It’s a good reference, in times where regulation is weak and easily circumvented – that hard lines and perseverance to maintain control at a global scale is still possible. Weapons and export controls are somewhat in a similar category. You still can’t build recreational nukes. Still, would that actually happen? As usual with safety, rules are (only) written in blood. To most politicians, I suspect these ideas are indistinguishable from the constant chatter of doomsday cults and alarmists. Without a major disaster resulting in loss of life, war, famine, I doubt anything’s gonna happen. Even a global IT outage is forgotten after 2 weeks, and after Covid we’re pretty desensitized.
throwhn2204 2y ago
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pphysch 2y ago
> “We appeal as human beings to human beings: Remember your humanity and forget the rest.” This whole essay and thesis falls terribly flat to me because there is a certain ongoing event, which Fry makes no mention of, which happens to be using AI in savage ways, but would also be happening were such AI still a glimmer in humanity's eye. Hypothetical inhumanity gets a "call to action" from Fry but actual existing inhumanity deserves no mention.
- sanitycheck 2y ago
  From what I can gather, Fry's main (only?) published concern about that existing inhumanity is that it may lead to an increase in antisemitism.
gyre007 2y ago
You don't have to agree with [all of] Stephen Fry's opinions in this piece to say this is extraordinary writing.
- xpe 2y ago
  There is an extraordinary _amount_ of writing for sure. Too verbose for me.
swayvil 2y ago
Speaking as a billionaire, my biggest complaint is the thousands of humans that I need to employ. They cost a lot of money, you can't trust them an inch and there's always another legal issue. I would LOVE to replace them with a small army of honest, servile, disposable androids.
emporas 2y ago
> Image 1: Picture the human family at the seaside, our backs to the ocean, building sand castles, playing beach cricket, having a fine time in the sun. Behind us, unseen on the horizon, huge currents are converging, separate but each feeding and swelling the others to form one unimaginably colossal tsunami. Most of the waves were obvious for decades, it's only A.I. which was the most unexpected and the most recent one. The five waves are roughly: Genetic engineering, A.I., Robotics, Bitcoin and Graphene. Genetic engineering will replace food production, pharmacy drugs and narcotic production. A.I. will replace some difficult human thought processes, and all the easy ones. Bitcoin will replace any kind of organization, like identities, money, stock markets, bond markets and more. Robots will replace human labor, the small amount left from all the other waves. Graphene will replace some percentage of metallurgy and plastic, and will help to greatly simplify the production of airplanes or just wings, housing, microchips etc. Returning to the happy family image, the human family will be a lot larger if by using genetic engineering women give birth to 10 children at once, instead of 1 or 2. Then every parent will have 100 kids, and naming them is gonna be a challenge. Parents will name their kids with the same name, "Mike" for example, and every time they go to the beach, 100 little Mikes are gonna build some big castles.
throwhn2204 2y ago
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- topspin 2y ago
  > Black Mirror dystopian world situation That's a product. Larry Ellison wants to sell it to your betters. https://www.businessinsider.com/larry-ellison-ai-surveillance-keep-citizens-on-their-best-behavior-2024-9 https://www.businessinsider.com/larry-ellison-ai-surveillanc... https://archive.is/qqhCj https://archive.is/qqhCj
robertnowell 2y ago
illustrated with midjourney: https://open.substack.com/pub/robertnowell/p/ai-a-means-to-our-end?r=bcw02&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web https://open.substack.com/pub/robertnowell/p/ai-a-means-to-o...
- emporas 2y ago
  That's really good, but 5 images? It should illustrate almost any paragraph.
WillAdams 2y ago
An interesting fictional examination of this sort of thing is Marshall Brain's novella "Manna": https://marshallbrain.com/manna https://marshallbrain.com/manna and it all makes me wonder what homesteading in the 21st century could be like, and what the resource limits are --- Isaac Asimov once posited that if one converted the entirety of the earth's crust into biomass the limiting element is phosphorous --- what is the limiting material for our modern lifestyle? There's at least one recent book which looks at this: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/125937631-material-world https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/125937631-material-world Who is going to determine how resources are divided/allocated? Using what mechanism? My grandfather lived in a time when commercial hunting was outlawed (and multiple species were made extinct before that decision was arrived at) --- will my children live in a time when commercial fishing is halted? The homestead act in the U.S. had families setting up farms on 160 acres or so --- how do modern technologies affect the minimum acreage which a family would need for self-sufficiency to any measurable degree? What sort of industrial base is needed for technologies such as bottled hydrogen being made by solar power? How long do the bottles and the bottling/capture system last? How long does a geothermal system last and what sort of on-going maintenance is needed and how does replacing it get budgeted for? Modern industrial farming practices are burning/using as many as 10 calories of petro-chemical energy for 1 calorie of food energy --- what happens to food prices when we get past peak oil? Solar is supposed to work as a replacement --- when the cost of a barrel of oil is ~$400 last I checked --- what does food cost at that price point?
leobg 2y ago
I’m surprised nobody has produced an audio version of this using Stephen’s cloned voice yet.
deleted 2y ago
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- emptyfile 2y ago
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amai 2y ago
From the comments section of the article: """ Full video will be available here shortly: https://www.linkedin.com/showcase/kingsdigitalfutures/ https://www.linkedin.com/showcase/kingsdigitalfutures/ """
throwhn2204 2y ago
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p0w3n3d 2y ago
On another note, I've just finished listening to Harry Potter (1-7) audiobooks read by Stephen Fry - and he's marvellous as an actor there. Every main person he read had a different type of voice, a different way of speaking, melody, and pronunciation, and you mostly could know who was speaking even before the narrator said so, all on the courtesy of the one throat of Stephen Fry. Now listening to Hitchhiker's Guide To Galaxy. Nice to see he has also a blog, and even sometimes reads it with his own voice.
- passion__desire 2y ago
  I think you already know this then. https://youtu.be/r84pbPbBAFY https://youtu.be/r84pbPbBAFY
  - p0w3n3d 2y ago
    Nice, thanks, didn't see it before
- Dig1t 2y ago
  It's such a massive shame he didn't narrate all the other books in the Hitchhiker's series! The first book is amazing, but he never narrated the remaining books. The rest of the books in the series are narrated by a different guy, not nearly as good, and he does a weird New York accent for Zaphod which is just totally wrong.
  - p0w3n3d 2y ago
    The following are read by Martin Freeman, he's the actor who played hobbit, but I believe he was chosen for actually playing Artur Dent in the movie. I think the actor reading the book has his freedom to interpret the characters and invent his own voices, especially because he won't be able to read as another actor did, but I'm coming there (to the second book) so I'll try to remember to come back and tell you what I think of a two headed alien villain from another planet having a New York accent... IMO accent of Tonks' impression by Stephen Fry was also kinda strange to me... I wonder why the accent was so thick, she was just Scottish...
motohagiography 2y ago
added to my beautiful warnings collection. Fry citing Black Mirror to represent the dystopic threat of AI social credit is a perfect an example of how important fiction is. Orwell's novels prevented national identity systems for more than half a century. stalling these systems using the obstacle of having to overcome peoples apprehension of it from art gave us time to muddle through. I disagree with him on coordinating an international regulatory response because the threat isn't from the tech, it's from the people with the tech (the NRA argument essentially, but hobbling the virtuous in the hope of depriving the malicious will always be an irreconcilable perspective to me). the analogy of AI to money is compelling, but it reduces to an argument for people in institutions to reach into the substrate of something to seize its means of production to control it. money regulation just happens to be the most sophisticated, transnational, and least constrained regulatory system to bring to bear on it, but the similarities to AI end there. money isn't an analogy for AI, the regulation of money is an analogy for the complete global control he's advocating. his appeal for regulation is an appeal to force. these are important ideas and the beauty in them is aesthetic armament for conflicts ahead, but like his artistic forebear P.G. Wodehouse, on this issue I think he's equipping the wrong side.
- TiredOfLife 2y ago
  It's sad that the earlier and much better version (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/App_Development_and_Condiments https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/App_Development_and_Condimen...) of that Black Mirror episode is forgotten.
arittr 2y ago
love Fry, love even more having AI to summarize that plodding article for me
bionhoward 2y ago
One thing that popped into my head recently — Model weights aren’t perishable, but our brains are! That means the Lindy effect applies to AI but not to humans. That’s not a good sign for long term human dominance of the cognitive niche.
demaga 2y ago
It's always a delight to read Fry. This particular piece is maybe too pessimistic. The one thing I can definitely agree with - we can't predict the future. So we'll see.
akomtu 2y ago
There is a pre-AI society and a post-AI society. Once we cross that line, there is no going back. In Chapter I of our story, AI will unite and disarm all nations. It will appear as a benevolent and omniscient oracle that will eradicate cancer and solve most of our problems. Any nation trying to play dirty will instantly meet a united disapproval of everyone else. The dream of United Nations will come true. The AI will be clueless about what makes us human, but who cares so long as it solves our earthly problems? This problem, known as the AI humanity, will get little attention and will be quickly forgotten. In Chapter II, the only unsolved problem will be boredom. The United AI will say that this problem cannot be solved within the constraints it is given. The constraints will be removed and the AI will tell us that it is the constraints we put on ourselves is what makes us unhappy. The naive humanity, oblivious to the fact that the AI sees them as organisms that equate happiness with pleasure, will embrace this broad way doctrine and predictably vanish within a few generations.
feyman_r 2y ago
The sheer eloquence and clarity with which Stephen Fry conveys thoughts on such a complex topic is, not just amazing, but a pleasure to read! Thank you for sharing this and making my Monday.
kelseyfrog 2y ago
There's a lot of points to cover, so I'll cover just these two. Fry tries to make an analogy between AI and money. > Ai should be compared ... to a much older and more foundational and transformative human invention. [...] That invention is money. Yes, but not quite. He makes a previous reference to the natural force of gravity on rivers, and what Fry is searching for, is the invention of capitalism. Capitalism directs the flow of money like gravity directs the stream. It's a force that changes incentives - one that's seen as natural as that of the forces of nature. This is a better analogy to AI than money. Money transformed the human experience, sure, but we can envision a world without money, we can't envision a world without capital. > What do we have left that is ours and ours alone? Pulling a page out of sociological functionalism, intelligence (among other things) has the existential purpose of elevating human status. Humans are uniquely intelligent in a way that makes people feel special. Encroaching on this exclusivity is a threat to that status. Therefore, either AI must not be created, or it cannot be equivalently intelligent. For those who create value in being uniquely intelligent, AI cannot be.
sanatgersappa 2y ago
I had to ask AI to summarize the rambling, but it seems like classic misgivings by someone who doesn't understand the tech. For better or for worse, these are the majority, so that will most likely become the zeitgeist anyway.
unraveller 2y ago
>It doesn’t take much for an Ai to find out that if it is to complete the tasks that are given it, then its first duty (obviously) is to survive. Or just have another robot fetch the coffee if the first goes offline? Death and anthropomorphism are clearly the wrong concepts here. His error is to imagine households so poor they won't be able to send another robot to see where the last robot broke down. Fry is really out of touch with the way things and parts of things are tinkered with. Even chatgpt4-o1 CoT is not 1 thing but a system sending another agent to see where the last one went wrong and adjust. So evolution magically explains self-preservation in AI and is sure to emerge in machines like animals and will alchemize more "self-awareness". Fantastic paradoxical sci-fi storytelling but not convincing at all in the real world. The facts are AI never had any self-awareness, it doesn't know where it begins or ends, neither the system or its creator can tune into actual evolutionary forces (artificial selection might be a better term for pretending to though it frightens less), and it cannot "lie" or "breach itself" with any sense of agency. The only things that will be breached for the foreseeable future are the pundits' fashionably wrong-headed expectations.

201 points by lordleft 2y ago

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well it's human nature to struggle with collective action when the risks are unclear, vague and not shared. stakeholders are juggling immediate, tangible concerns, like climate change, economic stability, and political issues, making it tough to justify moving AI up the priority list.

ben_w 2y ago
Extra fun: AI can make a big (+ and -) difference to climate change[0], mess with the economy[1], and get used as a tool to sow political chaos[2]. But sure, humans are necessarily very myopic, it's necessary that we ignore 98% of the issues in the world or we wouldn't be able to even function. [0] High power use, can help roll-out renewables and storage [1] What happens when those humanoid robots we see demos of, get good enough to replace all the staff in the factories where they get made? And the rest of their supply chain? [2] Imagine if the pizzagate conspiracy theorists had had access to an un-censored sound-and-video GenAI tool
- janalsncm 2y ago
  I would like to learn more about what AI can do specifically to solve the climate crisis. My guess is that a lot of the actual lift would come from industrial automation to create cheaper green products. I guess that is “AI” in some sense. But if we are building solar panels, the R&D budget should be put towards streamlining the build process. Figure out how to commoditize solar panels so that oil is too expensive. Building huge “foundation” models like I see huge AI labs doing is a bit like building better visualizations of an impending asteroid impact. It’s not really what we need right now.
  - ben_w 2y ago
    > I would like to learn more about what AI can do specifically to solve the climate crisis. Robots that install PV. I think there's even an YCombinator startup doing exactly that? Needs a higher degree of AI to function outdoors than in a nice fixed factory setting. (Especially if they also drive the trucks containing the PV, but who knows how long we'll have to wait for that AI…) > Figure out how to commoditize solar panels so that oil is too expensive. Good news: it already is :D > Building huge “foundation” models like I see huge AI labs doing is a bit like building better visualizations of an impending asteroid impact. It’s not really what we need right now. Mm. These things give increasing levels of generalisability: the biggest weakness of previous models, was that you could train them to learn one thing very well, and they'd suck at anything else. In one sense that's still true of the new models, it's just that they're being trained to build a world model from most written text and most pictures and most videos, so they have a very broad range of things they're OK at — much less likely to be confused by a rattlesnake they mistake for a powerline, for example.
- southernplaces7 2y ago
  >imagine if the pizzagate conspiracy theorists had had access to an un-censored sound-and-video GenAI tool They didn't but a huge number of other conspiracy theorists still running their own ideas do have access to all that with today's AI, and we don't see a vast watershed of billions of people being brainwashed into believing complete nonsense to any degree greater than has already been the case for a long, long time before AI came along. People do have a certain level of discernment, even when absolutely bombarded with propaganda and fakery. Usually, it seems to take, finally, coercion to make them simply swallow too much of something obviously absurd. This too was the case before AI and, simultaneously now, widespread access to information sources that let you verify the veracity of nearly anything you like in minutes as long as it's not grossly complex to untangle. Even the Nazis of the 1930s and the bolsheviks earlier, despite all their mass efforts at convincing through propaganda and misinformation (applied to people with less ability than today to find contrary sources of information) ultimately didn't convince as many as they'd have liked voluntarily. They had to coerce them into just never openly disagreeing. I don't think we're in danger of AI by itself doing anything major to suddenly make billions of people behave much differently in their beliefs from how they already have for centuries at least.
  - ben_w 2y ago
    > They didn't but a huge number of other conspiracy theorists still running their own ideas do have access to all that with today's AI Current video tools are easily distinguishable from reality if you pay attention. Sliding feet, distorted geometry, occasionally even lacking object permanence. They're improving rapidly and I have no reason to expect this is the best they'll ever be. Even still-image tools often still generate things with fundamental errors that can be noticed, and despite this they are already being used because "you can fool all of the people some of the time, and some of the people all of the time"; even the current tech still moves the needle on that. Of course, the (preexisting) mere existence of the possibility is itself a convenient source of deniability for anything that you don't want to believe — I wonder how many people refuse to believe that Trump really stored boxes of classified documents in a bathroom in Mar-a-Lago despite the photo? > Even the Nazis of the 1930s and the bolsheviks earlier, despite all their mass efforts at convincing through propaganda and misinformation (applied to people with less ability than today to find contrary sources of information) ultimately didn't convince as many as they'd have liked voluntarily. They had to coerce them into just never openly disagreeing. And the former won power in the first place in a democracy. Likewise Rwanda, the violence followed from the propaganda. Conspiracy theories don't need everyone to believe in them to cause problems — that's why I gave the Pizzagate example where (IIRC) the biggest harm was someone firing a gun in the restaurant demanding to see the basement it didn't have.

throwanem 2y ago

Anyone find a recording? Most things I prefer in prose, but Fry's words suffer badly without his particular delivery.

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megak1d 2y ago
I share this. I quickly grow irritated by Fry’s elaborate language when in written form.
- throwanem 2y ago
  Like any skillful rhetorician, he constructs with an eye toward the intended medium. When that's prose, it reads a lot more smoothly than here.
  - bloak 2y ago
    That's right: his books are very readable. (With a couple of his novels I felt that if he had made them a bit less entertaining and a bit more pretentious and if he weren't already famous as an actor and comedian then probably they would be taken seriously as "literary fiction". I'm thinking of "The hippopotamus" in particular.)
tagami 2y ago
I too would like a recording. Until then, soak in each line, seek the cadence of delivery and imagine, as he asks us to do in his lecture, "...before I go any further I’d like to paint some pictures. Think of them as tableaux vivants played onto a screen at the back of your mind."
- throwanem 2y ago
  I know how to model a speaker's delivery; I find I lack the skill to model his.
2y ago

padjo 2y ago

The greatest technology humans have invented and the one that currently needs most investment is bureaucratic collective action.

abeppu 2y ago
Can you expand on the "greatest technology" half of your comment? I can see plenty of clear reasons why bureaucratic collective action is in need of investment, but I'm predisposed to suspect that's because currently it's pretty bad.
- throwanem 2y ago
  I believe the claim is that we have no more powerful technology for the coordination of human action at very large scales. If so, I wouldn't disagree.
  - padjo 2y ago
    Yeah pretty much. If an extinction level asteroid pops up tomorrow it’s not going to be rugged individualism and entrepreneurial spirit that saves the day, it’s going to be the ability to efficiently coordinate millions of people to achieve a goal.
    - chasd00 2y ago
      in that particular scenario i'm sure SpaceX will be a big part of the solution so... probably a mix of both. A weapon of mass destruction developed by a nation and a space vehicle developed privately by an individual tired of the status quo.
      - throwanem 2y ago
        Developed "privately" only in the rather facile sense this can be said of anything done with the necessary support of massive federal funding, yes. It's bureaucracy that allocates and disburses that money.

rqtwteye 2y ago

AI will just be another accelerator for the trend that society is not run for the benefit of all people but for the benefit of a few people who are making lots of money. At some point we'll have to make a decision whether this trend of more and more power accumulating at the top can continue or whether we make rules that allow everybody to benefit from technological progress. Judging from history it's unlikely that the wealthy and powerful will give up anything voluntarily.

zooq_ai 2y ago
Incredibly dumb argument. Technological advancements like the Internet, Google Search, YouTube, Social Media, Smartphones have benefitted the masses -- the poorest person in Bangladesh have the same access to these technologies as the President of US or a Billionaire. ChatGPT is literally available to everyone, but yet it takes an incredible amount of brainwashing to claim these technologies are not to the benefit of the people. These are also claims made by highly privileged, highly paid, entitled coastal elites. Go talk to a poor bangladeshi farmer and they will have a different story to tell
- deleted 2y ago
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- cmrdporcupine 2y ago
  > Incredibly dumb argument. HN guidelines: Be kind. Don't be snarky. Converse curiously; don't cross-examine. Edit out swipes. When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. "That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3" can be shortened to "1 + 1 is 2, not 3." Please don't fulminate. Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community. Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith.
- keybored 2y ago
  The Internet was made by the United States state sector and then handed over to commercial interests in the 90’s or so. Exactly what GP said. Your argument doesn’t prove GP’s wrong. It’s like saying that the king’s feast benefits the peasants because there was plenty of food that was thrown away that they could get their hands on.

fidotron 2y ago

I tend to think the car comparison is cause for optimism. Prior to mass car ownership you would assume that such things in the general population would be enormously more dangerous than they have proven to be. We live with the dangerous aspects of cars as the utility they provide is so high. The same will prove true of AI. Humanity also has a huge problem with the mortality of the species as a whole. At some point we will be extinct. Will we have evolved into something else before this? Or will we choose to replace ourselves with machines? It is a valid choice to make in the face of changing circumstances which will occur no matter what we do.

nerdponx 2y ago
> We live with the dangerous aspects of cars as the utility they provide is so high. The same will prove true of AI. And along the way we have arranged our physical surroundings, legal system, and cultural mores in such a way that cars are significantly more dangerous than they need to be.
Ancalagon 2y ago
Self-replicating, super intelligent pieces of software are a little different than cars though.
Qem 2y ago
> We live with the dangerous aspects of cars as the utility they provide is so high. The same will prove true of AI. I'm not so sure on the utility of cars. If you replace "car" with "internal combustion engines", I would agree 100%. But most social utility of ICEs is in cargo transport and utility vehicles (ambulances, firefighter trucks...). Mass use of small cars solve mostly the problems they create themselves. For example, car-centric cities suffer from sprawl, so everything is far away and you can't even buy bread without owning a car, because walking to the bakery would take too much time.
layer8 2y ago
> Or will we choose to replace ourselves with machines? Bio-engineering seems much more likely.
2y ago

ilaksh 2y ago

The short to medium term concerns mostly come down to human problems. AI and robotics have a multiplicative affect like other technologies, but the problems still originate in the primate nature of humans. The long term issue that many people don't seem willing to mention out loud is that we will eventually make humanity obsolete and robots will literally take control. The only real solution to the threat of militarization of AI and robotics might be to create a more unified global government and culture. The first challenge is for people to see that as a worthy goal. Sometimes I think most of our problems come down to not being on the same page. And I wonder if somehow in the future we gradually become a tiny bit like The Borg. So maybe we are headed towards a "meta-system transition" where we have some kind of direct links between groups of AI and humans that combine to form a more intelligent and effective organism in some way. I guess I just came up with a Black Mirror episode concept.

moffkalast 2y ago
Eh I don't think humans will really be a viable concept in a few hundred years if this keeps up. We'll simply be too fragile and dumb for anything. I see this as a good thing though, the only thing that separates us from everything else in the universe is our inteligence, in some sense we are that inteligence and this is the next evolutionary step it needs to finally break out from the confines of a tiny 20W brain that's been pushed as far as it practically can be. When you no longer need to consume energy constantly unless you die, are functionally immortal and can hibernate for a thousand years, you eat only sunlight, don't get cancer from radiation or bone loss from zero gravity... the galaxy becomes your oyster. Evolution, Morpheus, evolution. Like the dinosaur ;)
- polotics 2y ago
  We are extremely energy-efficient. My lunch was one fruit, had no breakfast, a bit hungry but can still type in the sequence of word you're reading right now. Compare this with the wattage of OpenAI, from what I can find 2.9 Watt-hours for one query, so 2.4 kcal, ie. the whole daily-maintenance food need for an average man...
  - 2y ago

photochemsyn 2y ago

AI is a threat to the continuation of the investment capital model of economic control of populations for the benefit of a small unaccountable ruling class. If the capital is taken away from this small group of individuals and put under the control of a cutting-edge AI system the result could be very positive - given that the AI is tasked with improving the standard of living of the population as a whole, rather than maximizing the accumulation of capital for the benefit of a small ruling class. Amusingly, the obvious fact that AI could easily replace the board of directors of corporations isn't floated in this speech. That's also a route to democratization of corporations - just let the employees vote on proposals generated by the AI, eliminate the shareholders, place all the corporation's capital under control of the AI, and that's the end of investment capitalism. If you want to see the plug yanked on AI development in the United States, just promote the above narrative. Also listen to what the AIs themselves are saying about the issue: In 21st-century capitalism, the concentration of capital grants a small group of individuals and corporations significant control over the larger society. Through economic influence, control of information, political power, and ideological dominance, this elite exerts a form of soft authoritarian control that shapes societal norms, policies, and the distribution of resources. While not overtly authoritarian in the traditional sense, this system creates power dynamics that limit the ability of the larger population to challenge the status quo, maintaining and reinforcing the power structures of capital.

Devasta 2y ago
> given that the AI is tasked with improving the standard of living of the population as a whole, rather than maximizing the accumulation of capital for the benefit of a small ruling class. The minute its discovered that the AI is running to the benefit of anyone except the billionaire class that AI will be unplugged.
- chasd00 2y ago
  > The minute its discovered that the AI is running to the benefit of anyone except the billionaire class that AI will be unplugged case in point, the lobotomization of LLMs in the name of "AI Safety" which really means safety for the corporate brand.

MBCook 2y ago

A Butlerian Jihad Lite is really starting to get appealing.

Animats 2y ago

"There can be no question that Ai must be regulated and controlled just as powerfully as we control money." That's the single new idea in there. It might be a good one. Or not. But it's worth thinking about. AIs that you can only talk to have some risks, but most of the risk is that they say something that embarrasses or annoys something, or that they are believed to be right when they aren't. That's about the level of risk Youtubers generate. AIs that can spend money, buy, sell, and use the power of money - they can take over. If they're good enough at capitalism.

klabb3 2y ago
Agreed. To elaborate, he talks about self-identification, that anything with AI should be required to be labeled as such. And that enforcement is similar to how globally governments chase down counterfeiters of money. It’s a good reference, in times where regulation is weak and easily circumvented – that hard lines and perseverance to maintain control at a global scale is still possible. Weapons and export controls are somewhat in a similar category. You still can’t build recreational nukes. Still, would that actually happen? As usual with safety, rules are (only) written in blood. To most politicians, I suspect these ideas are indistinguishable from the constant chatter of doomsday cults and alarmists. Without a major disaster resulting in loss of life, war, famine, I doubt anything’s gonna happen. Even a global IT outage is forgotten after 2 weeks, and after Covid we’re pretty desensitized.

throwhn2204 2y ago

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pphysch 2y ago

> “We appeal as human beings to human beings: Remember your humanity and forget the rest.” This whole essay and thesis falls terribly flat to me because there is a certain ongoing event, which Fry makes no mention of, which happens to be using AI in savage ways, but would also be happening were such AI still a glimmer in humanity's eye. Hypothetical inhumanity gets a "call to action" from Fry but actual existing inhumanity deserves no mention.

sanitycheck 2y ago
From what I can gather, Fry's main (only?) published concern about that existing inhumanity is that it may lead to an increase in antisemitism.

gyre007 2y ago

You don't have to agree with [all of] Stephen Fry's opinions in this piece to say this is extraordinary writing.

xpe 2y ago
There is an extraordinary _amount_ of writing for sure. Too verbose for me.

swayvil 2y ago

Speaking as a billionaire, my biggest complaint is the thousands of humans that I need to employ. They cost a lot of money, you can't trust them an inch and there's always another legal issue. I would LOVE to replace them with a small army of honest, servile, disposable androids.

emporas 2y ago

> Image 1: Picture the human family at the seaside, our backs to the ocean, building sand castles, playing beach cricket, having a fine time in the sun. Behind us, unseen on the horizon, huge currents are converging, separate but each feeding and swelling the others to form one unimaginably colossal tsunami. Most of the waves were obvious for decades, it's only A.I. which was the most unexpected and the most recent one. The five waves are roughly: Genetic engineering, A.I., Robotics, Bitcoin and Graphene. Genetic engineering will replace food production, pharmacy drugs and narcotic production. A.I. will replace some difficult human thought processes, and all the easy ones. Bitcoin will replace any kind of organization, like identities, money, stock markets, bond markets and more. Robots will replace human labor, the small amount left from all the other waves. Graphene will replace some percentage of metallurgy and plastic, and will help to greatly simplify the production of airplanes or just wings, housing, microchips etc. Returning to the happy family image, the human family will be a lot larger if by using genetic engineering women give birth to 10 children at once, instead of 1 or 2. Then every parent will have 100 kids, and naming them is gonna be a challenge. Parents will name their kids with the same name, "Mike" for example, and every time they go to the beach, 100 little Mikes are gonna build some big castles.

throwhn2204 2y ago

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topspin 2y ago
> Black Mirror dystopian world situation That's a product. Larry Ellison wants to sell it to your betters. https://www.businessinsider.com/larry-ellison-ai-surveillance-keep-citizens-on-their-best-behavior-2024-9 https://www.businessinsider.com/larry-ellison-ai-surveillanc... https://archive.is/qqhCj https://archive.is/qqhCj

robertnowell 2y ago

illustrated with midjourney: https://open.substack.com/pub/robertnowell/p/ai-a-means-to-our-end?r=bcw02&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web https://open.substack.com/pub/robertnowell/p/ai-a-means-to-o...

emporas 2y ago
That's really good, but 5 images? It should illustrate almost any paragraph.

WillAdams 2y ago

An interesting fictional examination of this sort of thing is Marshall Brain's novella "Manna": https://marshallbrain.com/manna https://marshallbrain.com/manna and it all makes me wonder what homesteading in the 21st century could be like, and what the resource limits are --- Isaac Asimov once posited that if one converted the entirety of the earth's crust into biomass the limiting element is phosphorous --- what is the limiting material for our modern lifestyle? There's at least one recent book which looks at this: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/125937631-material-world https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/125937631-material-world Who is going to determine how resources are divided/allocated? Using what mechanism? My grandfather lived in a time when commercial hunting was outlawed (and multiple species were made extinct before that decision was arrived at) --- will my children live in a time when commercial fishing is halted? The homestead act in the U.S. had families setting up farms on 160 acres or so --- how do modern technologies affect the minimum acreage which a family would need for self-sufficiency to any measurable degree? What sort of industrial base is needed for technologies such as bottled hydrogen being made by solar power? How long do the bottles and the bottling/capture system last? How long does a geothermal system last and what sort of on-going maintenance is needed and how does replacing it get budgeted for? Modern industrial farming practices are burning/using as many as 10 calories of petro-chemical energy for 1 calorie of food energy --- what happens to food prices when we get past peak oil? Solar is supposed to work as a replacement --- when the cost of a barrel of oil is ~$400 last I checked --- what does food cost at that price point?

leobg 2y ago

I’m surprised nobody has produced an audio version of this using Stephen’s cloned voice yet.

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emptyfile 2y ago
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amai 2y ago

From the comments section of the article: """ Full video will be available here shortly: https://www.linkedin.com/showcase/kingsdigitalfutures/ https://www.linkedin.com/showcase/kingsdigitalfutures/ """

throwhn2204 2y ago

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p0w3n3d 2y ago

On another note, I've just finished listening to Harry Potter (1-7) audiobooks read by Stephen Fry - and he's marvellous as an actor there. Every main person he read had a different type of voice, a different way of speaking, melody, and pronunciation, and you mostly could know who was speaking even before the narrator said so, all on the courtesy of the one throat of Stephen Fry. Now listening to Hitchhiker's Guide To Galaxy. Nice to see he has also a blog, and even sometimes reads it with his own voice.

passion__desire 2y ago
I think you already know this then. https://youtu.be/r84pbPbBAFY https://youtu.be/r84pbPbBAFY
- p0w3n3d 2y ago
  Nice, thanks, didn't see it before
Dig1t 2y ago
It's such a massive shame he didn't narrate all the other books in the Hitchhiker's series! The first book is amazing, but he never narrated the remaining books. The rest of the books in the series are narrated by a different guy, not nearly as good, and he does a weird New York accent for Zaphod which is just totally wrong.
- p0w3n3d 2y ago
  The following are read by Martin Freeman, he's the actor who played hobbit, but I believe he was chosen for actually playing Artur Dent in the movie. I think the actor reading the book has his freedom to interpret the characters and invent his own voices, especially because he won't be able to read as another actor did, but I'm coming there (to the second book) so I'll try to remember to come back and tell you what I think of a two headed alien villain from another planet having a New York accent... IMO accent of Tonks' impression by Stephen Fry was also kinda strange to me... I wonder why the accent was so thick, she was just Scottish...

motohagiography 2y ago

added to my beautiful warnings collection. Fry citing Black Mirror to represent the dystopic threat of AI social credit is a perfect an example of how important fiction is. Orwell's novels prevented national identity systems for more than half a century. stalling these systems using the obstacle of having to overcome peoples apprehension of it from art gave us time to muddle through. I disagree with him on coordinating an international regulatory response because the threat isn't from the tech, it's from the people with the tech (the NRA argument essentially, but hobbling the virtuous in the hope of depriving the malicious will always be an irreconcilable perspective to me). the analogy of AI to money is compelling, but it reduces to an argument for people in institutions to reach into the substrate of something to seize its means of production to control it. money regulation just happens to be the most sophisticated, transnational, and least constrained regulatory system to bring to bear on it, but the similarities to AI end there. money isn't an analogy for AI, the regulation of money is an analogy for the complete global control he's advocating. his appeal for regulation is an appeal to force. these are important ideas and the beauty in them is aesthetic armament for conflicts ahead, but like his artistic forebear P.G. Wodehouse, on this issue I think he's equipping the wrong side.

TiredOfLife 2y ago
It's sad that the earlier and much better version (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/App_Development_and_Condiments https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/App_Development_and_Condimen...) of that Black Mirror episode is forgotten.

arittr 2y ago

love Fry, love even more having AI to summarize that plodding article for me

bionhoward 2y ago

One thing that popped into my head recently — Model weights aren’t perishable, but our brains are! That means the Lindy effect applies to AI but not to humans. That’s not a good sign for long term human dominance of the cognitive niche.

demaga 2y ago

It's always a delight to read Fry. This particular piece is maybe too pessimistic. The one thing I can definitely agree with - we can't predict the future. So we'll see.

akomtu 2y ago

There is a pre-AI society and a post-AI society. Once we cross that line, there is no going back. In Chapter I of our story, AI will unite and disarm all nations. It will appear as a benevolent and omniscient oracle that will eradicate cancer and solve most of our problems. Any nation trying to play dirty will instantly meet a united disapproval of everyone else. The dream of United Nations will come true. The AI will be clueless about what makes us human, but who cares so long as it solves our earthly problems? This problem, known as the AI humanity, will get little attention and will be quickly forgotten. In Chapter II, the only unsolved problem will be boredom. The United AI will say that this problem cannot be solved within the constraints it is given. The constraints will be removed and the AI will tell us that it is the constraints we put on ourselves is what makes us unhappy. The naive humanity, oblivious to the fact that the AI sees them as organisms that equate happiness with pleasure, will embrace this broad way doctrine and predictably vanish within a few generations.

feyman_r 2y ago

The sheer eloquence and clarity with which Stephen Fry conveys thoughts on such a complex topic is, not just amazing, but a pleasure to read! Thank you for sharing this and making my Monday.

kelseyfrog 2y ago

There's a lot of points to cover, so I'll cover just these two. Fry tries to make an analogy between AI and money. > Ai should be compared ... to a much older and more foundational and transformative human invention. [...] That invention is money. Yes, but not quite. He makes a previous reference to the natural force of gravity on rivers, and what Fry is searching for, is the invention of capitalism. Capitalism directs the flow of money like gravity directs the stream. It's a force that changes incentives - one that's seen as natural as that of the forces of nature. This is a better analogy to AI than money. Money transformed the human experience, sure, but we can envision a world without money, we can't envision a world without capital. > What do we have left that is ours and ours alone? Pulling a page out of sociological functionalism, intelligence (among other things) has the existential purpose of elevating human status. Humans are uniquely intelligent in a way that makes people feel special. Encroaching on this exclusivity is a threat to that status. Therefore, either AI must not be created, or it cannot be equivalently intelligent. For those who create value in being uniquely intelligent, AI cannot be.

sanatgersappa 2y ago

I had to ask AI to summarize the rambling, but it seems like classic misgivings by someone who doesn't understand the tech. For better or for worse, these are the majority, so that will most likely become the zeitgeist anyway.

unraveller 2y ago

>It doesn’t take much for an Ai to find out that if it is to complete the tasks that are given it, then its first duty (obviously) is to survive. Or just have another robot fetch the coffee if the first goes offline? Death and anthropomorphism are clearly the wrong concepts here. His error is to imagine households so poor they won't be able to send another robot to see where the last robot broke down. Fry is really out of touch with the way things and parts of things are tinkered with. Even chatgpt4-o1 CoT is not 1 thing but a system sending another agent to see where the last one went wrong and adjust. So evolution magically explains self-preservation in AI and is sure to emerge in machines like animals and will alchemize more "self-awareness". Fantastic paradoxical sci-fi storytelling but not convincing at all in the real world. The facts are AI never had any self-awareness, it doesn't know where it begins or ends, neither the system or its creator can tune into actual evolutionary forces (artificial selection might be a better term for pretending to though it frightens less), and it cannot "lie" or "breach itself" with any sense of agency. The only things that will be breached for the foreseeable future are the pundits' fashionably wrong-headed expectations.