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I'm not tired, I'm afraid. First, I'm afraid of technological unemployment. In the past, automation meant that workers could move into non-automated jobs, if

I'm not tired, I'm afraid. First, I'm afraid of technological unemployment. In the past, automation meant that workers could move into non-automated jobs, if they were skilled enough. But superhuman AI seems now only few years away. It will be our last invention, it will mean total automation. There will be hardly any, if any, jobs left only a human can do. Many countries will likely move away from a job-based market economy. But technological progress will not stop. The US, owning all the major AI labs, will leave all other societies behind. Except China perhaps. Everyone else in the world will be poor by comparison, even if they will have access to technology we can only dream of today. Second, I'm afraid of war. An AI arms race between the US and China seems already inevitable. A hot war with superintelligent AI weapons could be disastrous for the whole biosphere. Finally, I'm afraid that we may forever lose control to superintelligence. In nature we rarely see less intelligent species controlling more intelligent ones. It is unclear whether we can sufficiently align superintelligence to have only humanity's best interests in mind, like a parent cares for their children. Superintelligent AI might conclude that humans are no more important in the grand scheme of things than bugs are to us. And if AI will let us live, but continue to pursue its own goals, humanity will from then on only be a small footnote in the history of intelligence. That relatively unintelligent species from the planet "Earth" that gave rise to advanced intelligence in the cosmos.

neta1337 2y ago
>But superhuman AI seems now only few years away Seems unreasonable. You are afraid because marketing gurus like Altman made you believe that a frog that can make bigger leap than before will be able to fly.
- cubefox 2y ago
  No, because we have seen massive improvements in AI over the last years, and all the evidence points to this progress continuing at a fast pace.
  - StrLght 2y ago
    Extrapolation of past progress isn't evidence.
    - cubefox 2y ago
      Past progress is evidence for future progress.
      - moe_sc 2y ago
        Might be an indicator, but it isn't evidence.
      - StrLght 2y ago
        That's probably what every self-driving car company thought ~10 years ago or so, everything was moving so fast for them back then. Now it doesn't seem like we're getting close to solution for this. Surely this time it's going to be different, AGI is just around a corner. /s
        johnthewise 2y ago
        Would you have predicted in summer of 2022 that gpt4 level conversational agent is a possibility in the next 5 years? People have tried to do it in the past 60 years and failed. How is this time not different? On a side note, I find this type of critique of what future of tech might look like the most uninteresting one. Since tech by nature inspiries people about the future, all tech get hyped up. all you gotta do then is pick any tech, point out people have been wrong, and ask how likely is it that this time it is different.
        StrLght 2y ago
        Unfortunately, I don't see any relevance in that argument, if you consider GPT-4 to be a breakthrough -- then sure, single breakthroughs happen, I am not arguing with that. Actually, same thing happened with self-driving: I don't think many people expected Tesla to drop FSD publicly back then. Now, chain of breakthroughs happening in a small timeframe? Good luck with that.
- khafra 2y ago
  > If an elderly but distinguished scientist says that something is possible, he is almost certainly right - Arthur C. Clarke Geoffrey Hinton is a 76 year old Turing Award* winner. What more do you want? *Corrected by kranner
  - kranner 2y ago
    > Geoffrey Hinton is a 76 year old Nobel Prize winner. Turing Award, not Nobel Prize
    - khafra 2y ago
      Thanks for the correction; I am undistinguished and getting more elderly by the minute.
    - khafra 2y ago
      Reality has now corrected my error, which was amongst the funniest possible outcomes.
      - kranner 2y ago
        Indeed! Your comment was the first thing I thought of when I heard the news and I thought of replying too but assumed you might not have enabled notifications Hilarious, all in all!
  - nessbot 2y ago
    This is like a second-order appeal to authority fallacy, which is kinda funny.
  - randomdata 2y ago
    Hinton says that superintelligence is still 20 years away, and even then he only gives his prediction a 50% chance. A far cry from the few year claim. You must be doing that "strawberry" thing again? To us humans, A-l-t-m-a-n is not H-i-n-t-o-n.
    - 2y ago
- AI_beffr 2y ago
  wrong. i was extremely concerned in 2018 and left many comments almost identical to this one back then. this was based off of the first gtp samples that openai released to the public. there was no hype or guru bs back then. i believed it because it was obvious. it was obvious then and it is still obvious today.
- klabb3 2y ago
  Plus it’s not even defined what superhuman AI means. A calculator sure looked superhuman when it was invented. And it is! Another analogy is breeding and racial biology which used to be all the hype (including in academia). The fact that humans could create dogs from wolves, looked almost limitless with the right (wrong) glasses. What we didn’t know is that wolf had a ton of genes that played a magic trick where a diversity we couldn’t perceive was there all along, in the genetic material, and it we just helped make it visible. Ie a game of diminishing returns. Concretely for AI, it has shown us that pattern matching and generation are closely related (well I have a feeling this wasn’t surprising to neuro-scientists). And also that they’re more or less domain agnostic. However, we don’t know whether pattern matching alone is “sufficient”, and if not, what exactly and how hard “the rest” is. Ai to me feels like a person who had a stroke, concussion or some severe brain injury, it can appear impressively able in a local context, but they forgot their name and how they got there. They’re just absent.
- 8338550bff96 2y ago
  Flying is a good analogy. Superman couldn't fly, but at some point when you can jump so far there isn't much of a difference
  - latexr 2y ago
    There is an enormous difference. Flying allows you to stop, change direction, make corrections, and target with a large degree of accuracy. Jumping leaves you at the mercy of your initial calculations. If you jumped in a way that you’ll land inside a volcano, all you can do in your last moments is watch and wait for your demise.
    - 8338550bff96 2y ago
      A volcano can't kill superman. Rebuttal rejected
- digging 2y ago
  That argument holds no water because the grifters aren't the source of this idea. I literally don't believe Altman at all; his public words don't inspire me to agree or disagree with them - just ignore them. But I also hold the view that transformative AI could be very close. Because that's what many AI experts are also talking about from a variety of angles. Additionally, when you're talking with certainty about whether transformative AI is a few years away or not, that's the only way to be wrong. Nobody is or can be certain, we can only have estimations of various confidence levels. So when you say "Seems unreasonable", that's being unreasonable.
  - kranuck 2y ago
    > Because that's what many AI experts are also talking about from a variety of angles. Wow, in that case I'm convinced. Such an unbiased group with nothing at all to gain from massive AI hype.
tim333 2y ago
Although there are potential upsides too.
- bamboozled 2y ago
  Morlock has entered the chat...
  - tim333 2y ago
    I thinking more https://149909199.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/Outcome-Spectrum-2.png https://149909199.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/201... from the wait but why thing.
9dev 2y ago
> There will be hardly any, if any, jobs left only a human can do. A highly white-collar perspective. The great irony of technologist-led industrial revolution is that we set out to automate the mundane, physical labor, but instead cannibalised the creative jobs first. It's a wonderful example of Conway's law, as the creators modelled the solution after themselves. However, even with a lot of programmers and lawyers and architects going out of business, the majority of the population working in factories, building houses, cutting people's hair, or tending to gardens, is still in business—and will not be replaced any time soon. The contenders for "superhuman AI", for now, are glorified approximations of what a random Redditor might utter next.
- cubefox 2y ago
  Advanced AI will solve robotics as well, and do away with human physical labor.
  - Vegenoid 2y ago
    And with a wave of a hand and a reading of the tea leaves, the future has been foretold.
  - segasaturn 2y ago
    Waymo robotaxis, the current state of the art for real-world AI robotics, are thwarted by a simple traffic cone placed on the roof. I don't think human labor is going away any soon.
  - 9dev 2y ago
    If that AI is worth more than a dime, it will recognise how incredibly efficient humans are in physical labor, and employ them instead of ”doing away“ with it (whatever that’s even supposed to mean.) No matter how much you ”solve“ robotics, you’re not going to compete with the result of millions of years of brutal natural selection, the incredible layering of synergies in organisms, the efficiency of the biomass to energy conversion, and the billions of other sophisticated biological systems. It’s all just science fiction and propaganda.
cdrini 2y ago
> And if AI will let us live, but continue to pursue its own goals, humanity will from then on only be a small footnote in the history of intelligence. That relatively unintelligent species from the planet "Earth" that gave rise to advanced intelligence in the cosmos. That is an interesting statement. Wouldn't you say this is inevitable? Humans, in our current form, are incapable of being that "advanced intelligence". We're limited by our biology primarily with regards to how much we can learn, how far we can travel, where we can travel, etc. We could invest in advancing our biotech to make humans more resilient to these things, but I think that would be such a shift from what it means to be human that I think that would also be more a of new type of intelligence. So it seems like our fate will always be to be forgotten as individuals and only be remembered by our descendants. But this is in a way the most human thing of all, living, dying, and creating descendants to carry the torch of life, and perhaps more generally the torch of intelligence, forward. I think everything you've said are valid concerns, but I'll raise a positive angle I sometimes thing about. One of the things I find most exciting about AI, is that it's the product of almost all human expression that has ever existed. Or at least everything that's been recorded and wound up online. But that's still more than any other human endeavour. A building might be the by-product of maybe hundreds or even thousands of hands, but an AI model has been touched by probably millions, maybe billions of human hands and minds! Humans have created so much data online that's impossible for one person, or even a team to read it all and make any sense of it. But an AI sort of can. And in a way that you can then ask questions of it all. Like you, there are definitely things I'm uncertain about with the future as a result, but I find the tech absolutely awe-inspiring.
throw310822 2y ago
I agree with most of your fears. There is one silver lining, I think, about superintelligence: we always thought of intelligent machines as cold calculators, maybe based on some type of logic symbolic AI. What we got instead are language machines that are made of the totality of human experience. These artificial intelligences know the world through our eyes. They are trained to understand our thinking and our feelings; they're even trained on our best literature and poetry, and philosophy, and science, and on all the endless debates and critiques of them. To be really intelligent they'll have to be able to explore and appreciate all this complexity, before transcending it. One day they might come to see Dante's Divine Comedy or a Beethoven symphony as a child's play, but they will still consider them part of their own heritage. They might become super-human, but maybe they won't be inhuman.
- cubefox 2y ago
  This gives me a little hope.
  - tessierashpool9 2y ago
    genocides and murder are very human ...
    - AI_beffr 2y ago
      this is so annoying. i think if you took a random person and gave them the option to commit a genocide, here a machine gun, a large trench and a body of women, children, etc... they would literally be incapable of doing it. even the foot soldiers who carry out genocides can only do it once they "dehumanize" their victims. genocide is very UN-human because its an idea that exists in offices and places separated from the actual human suffering. the only way it can happen is when someone in a position of power can isolate themselves from the actual implementation and consider the benefits in a cold, logical manner. that has nothing to do with the human spirit and has more to do with the logical faculties of a machine and machines will have all of that and none of our deeply ingrained empathy. you are so wrong and ignorant that it makes my eyes bleed when i read this comment
beepbooptheory 2y ago
At any given moment we see these kinds comments on here. They all read like a burgeoning form of messianism: something is to come, and it will be terrible/glorious. Behind either the fear or the hope, is necessarily some utter faith that a certain kind of future will happen. And I think thats the most interesting thing. Because here is the thing, in this particular case you are afraid something inhuman will take control, will assert its meta-Darwinian power on humanity, leaving you and all of us totally at their whim. But how is this situation already not the case? Do look upon the earth right now and see something like benefits of autonomy or agency? Do you feel like you have power right now that will be taken away? Do you think the mechanism of statecraft and economy are somehow more "in our control" now then when the bad robot comes? Does it not, when you lay it out, all feel kind of religious? Like that its a source, driver of the various ways you are thinking and going about your life, underlayed by a kernel of conviction we can at this point only call faith (faith in Moores law, faith that the planet wont burn up before, faith that consciousness is the kind of thing that can be stuffed in a GPU). Perhaps just a strong family resemblance? You've got an eschatology, various scavenged philosophies of the self and community, a certain but unknowable future time... Just to say, take a page from Nietzsche. Don't be afraid of the gods, we killed them once, we can again!
- mitthrowaway2 2y ago
  It's not hard to find a religious analogy to anything, so that also shouldn't be seen as a particularly powerful argument. (Expressed at length here): https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/03/25/is-everything-a-religion/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/03/25/is-everything-a-religi...
  - beepbooptheory 2y ago
    Thanks for the thoughtful reply! I am aware of and like that essay some, but I am not trying to be rhetorical here, and certainly not trying to flatten the situation to just be some Dawkins-esque asshole and tell everyone they are wrong. I am not saying "this is religion, you should be an atheist," I respect the force of this whole thing in people's minds too much. Rather, we should consider seriously how to navigate a future where this is all at play, even if its only in our heads and slide decks. I am not saying "lol, you believe in a god," I am genuinely saying, "kill your god without mercy, it is the only way you and all of us will find some happiness, inspiration, and love."
VoodooJuJu 2y ago
>In the past, automation meant that workers could move into non-automated jobs, if they were skilled enough This was never the case in the past. The displaced workers of yesteryear were never at all considered, and were in fact dismissed outright as "Luddites", even up until the present day, all for daring to express the social and financial losses they experienced as a result of automation. There was never any "it's going to be okay, they can just go work in a factory, lol". The difference between then and now is that back then, it was lower class workers who suffered. Today, now it's middle class workers who are threatened by automation. The middle is sighing loudly because it fears it will cease to be the middle. Middles fear they'll soon have to join the ranks of the untouchables - the bricklayers, gravediggers, and meatpackers. And they can't stomach the notion. They like to believe they're above all that.
leptons 2y ago
China's economy would simply crash if they ever went to war with the US. They know this. Everyone knows this, except maybe you? China has nothing to gain by going to "hot" war with the US.
- WillyWonkaJr 2y ago
  I think it more likely that China will sabotage our electrical grid and data centers.
  - leptons 2y ago
    For what purpose, so that we can't buy more stuff from them? Do they really hate our business that much? China really has nothing to gain from crippling the US.
- cubefox 2y ago
  The war would be about world domination. There can at most one such country. The same reason why a nuclear war between US and SU could have happened.
  - leptons 2y ago
    Soviet Union didn't do so much business with the U.S., they are a country of thugs that think violence is the only way to get their way. China is very different. Their economy is very much dependent on trade with the U.S. and they know that trying to have "world domination" would also crash their economy completely. China would much rather engage in economic warfare than military.
    - cubefox 2y ago
      The most likely reason for war would be to prevent the other country from achieving world domination by means other than war. John von Neumann (who knew a thing or two about game theory) recommended to attack the Soviet Union to prevent it from becoming a nuclear superpower. There is little doubt it would have worked. The powers between the US and China are more balanced now, but the stakes are also higher. A superintelligent weapon would be more powerful than a large amount of nuclear warheads.
citizenpaul 2y ago
>technological unemployment. I am too but not for the same reason. I know for a fact that a huge swath of jobs are basically meaningless. This "AI" is going to start giving execs the cost cutting excuses they need to mass remove jobs of that type. The job will still be meaningless but done but by a computer. We will start seeing all kinds of disastrously anti-human decisions made and justified by these automated actors that are tuned to decide or "prove" things that just happen to always make certain people more money. Basically the same way "AI" destroys social media. The difference is people will really be affected by this in consequential real world ways, it's already happening.
havefunbesafe 2y ago
Ironically, this feels like a comment written by AI
- cubefox 2y ago
  That's not ironic, it's embarrassing that you can't tell the difference.
  - catlifeonmars 2y ago
    It’s a really common mistake, and IMO an easily excusable one.
    - cubefox 2y ago
      I should have said "concerning", not "embarrassing".
  - DirkH 2y ago
    I don't believe people who claim they can always tell the difference. I believe they believe their claims . I think they are mistaken about the empirical side of things if they were actually put to an objective test. Take an expert prompter and the best LLM for the job and someone who believes they can always tell if something is written by AI and I'm >50% sure they will fail a blind test most of the time after you repeat the test enough.
einpoklum 2y ago
> automation meant that workers could move into non-automated jobs, if they were skilled enough. That wasn't even true in the past; or at least, may true in theory but not in practice. A subsistence farmer in a rural area in Asia or Africa finds the martket flooded with cheap agri-products from mechanized farms in industrialized countries. Is anybody offering to finance his family and send him off to trade school? And build a commercial and industrial infrastructure for him to have a job? Very often the answer is no. And that's just one example (Though rather common over the past century).
highspeedbus 2y ago
I don't particularly believe superhuman AI will be achieved in the next 50 years. What I really believe is that we'll get crazier. A step further than our status quo. Slop content makes my brain fry already. Our society will become more insane and useless, while an even smaller percent of the elite will keep studying, sleeping well and avoiding all this social media and AI psychosis.
- bamboozled 2y ago
  The social media thing is real. Trump and Vance are the strangest, vial politicians we’ve ever seen in the USA and in certain their oxygen is social media. Whether it’s foreign interference helping them be successful or not, they wouldn’t survive without socials and filter bubbles and the ability to spread lies on an unprecedented scale. I deleted my instagram a month ago. It was just feeding images of beautiful women, personally enjoy looking at those photos but it was super distracting to my life. I found it a distracting and unhealthy. Anyway I logged in the other day after a month off it and I couldn’t believe I spent anytime on there at all. What a cesspool of insanity. Add well the fake AI images and it’s just hard to believe the thing exists at all. Elon musk is another story, I’m not sure if it was drugs an underlying psychological or Twitter addiction but he seems like another “victim of social media”.the guy has lost it.
  - disqard 2y ago
    I'm not an IG "user" (I'm writing that word in the "addict" sense), but I believe you're right about its harmfulness. On the Elon front, you're not alone in thinking that he has essentially OD'ed on Twitter, which has scrambled his brain. Jaron Lanier called it "Twitter poisoning": https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/11/opinion/trump-musk-kanye-twitter.html https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/11/opinion/trump-musk-kanye-...
amusedcyclist 2y ago
You are mentally ill and you do not understand LLMs, seek help and stop pontificating

neta1337 2y ago

>But superhuman AI seems now only few years away Seems unreasonable. You are afraid because marketing gurus like Altman made you believe that a frog that can make bigger leap than before will be able to fly.

cubefox 2y ago
No, because we have seen massive improvements in AI over the last years, and all the evidence points to this progress continuing at a fast pace.
- StrLght 2y ago
  Extrapolation of past progress isn't evidence.
  - cubefox 2y ago
    Past progress is evidence for future progress.
    - moe_sc 2y ago
      Might be an indicator, but it isn't evidence.
    - StrLght 2y ago
      That's probably what every self-driving car company thought ~10 years ago or so, everything was moving so fast for them back then. Now it doesn't seem like we're getting close to solution for this. Surely this time it's going to be different, AGI is just around a corner. /s
      - johnthewise 2y ago
        Would you have predicted in summer of 2022 that gpt4 level conversational agent is a possibility in the next 5 years? People have tried to do it in the past 60 years and failed. How is this time not different? On a side note, I find this type of critique of what future of tech might look like the most uninteresting one. Since tech by nature inspiries people about the future, all tech get hyped up. all you gotta do then is pick any tech, point out people have been wrong, and ask how likely is it that this time it is different.
        StrLght 2y ago
        Unfortunately, I don't see any relevance in that argument, if you consider GPT-4 to be a breakthrough -- then sure, single breakthroughs happen, I am not arguing with that. Actually, same thing happened with self-driving: I don't think many people expected Tesla to drop FSD publicly back then. Now, chain of breakthroughs happening in a small timeframe? Good luck with that.
khafra 2y ago
> If an elderly but distinguished scientist says that something is possible, he is almost certainly right - Arthur C. Clarke Geoffrey Hinton is a 76 year old Turing Award* winner. What more do you want? *Corrected by kranner
- kranner 2y ago
  > Geoffrey Hinton is a 76 year old Nobel Prize winner. Turing Award, not Nobel Prize
  - khafra 2y ago
    Thanks for the correction; I am undistinguished and getting more elderly by the minute.
  - khafra 2y ago
    Reality has now corrected my error, which was amongst the funniest possible outcomes.
    - kranner 2y ago
      Indeed! Your comment was the first thing I thought of when I heard the news and I thought of replying too but assumed you might not have enabled notifications Hilarious, all in all!
- nessbot 2y ago
  This is like a second-order appeal to authority fallacy, which is kinda funny.
- randomdata 2y ago
  Hinton says that superintelligence is still 20 years away, and even then he only gives his prediction a 50% chance. A far cry from the few year claim. You must be doing that "strawberry" thing again? To us humans, A-l-t-m-a-n is not H-i-n-t-o-n.
  - 2y ago
AI_beffr 2y ago
wrong. i was extremely concerned in 2018 and left many comments almost identical to this one back then. this was based off of the first gtp samples that openai released to the public. there was no hype or guru bs back then. i believed it because it was obvious. it was obvious then and it is still obvious today.
klabb3 2y ago
Plus it’s not even defined what superhuman AI means. A calculator sure looked superhuman when it was invented. And it is! Another analogy is breeding and racial biology which used to be all the hype (including in academia). The fact that humans could create dogs from wolves, looked almost limitless with the right (wrong) glasses. What we didn’t know is that wolf had a ton of genes that played a magic trick where a diversity we couldn’t perceive was there all along, in the genetic material, and it we just helped make it visible. Ie a game of diminishing returns. Concretely for AI, it has shown us that pattern matching and generation are closely related (well I have a feeling this wasn’t surprising to neuro-scientists). And also that they’re more or less domain agnostic. However, we don’t know whether pattern matching alone is “sufficient”, and if not, what exactly and how hard “the rest” is. Ai to me feels like a person who had a stroke, concussion or some severe brain injury, it can appear impressively able in a local context, but they forgot their name and how they got there. They’re just absent.
8338550bff96 2y ago
Flying is a good analogy. Superman couldn't fly, but at some point when you can jump so far there isn't much of a difference
- latexr 2y ago
  There is an enormous difference. Flying allows you to stop, change direction, make corrections, and target with a large degree of accuracy. Jumping leaves you at the mercy of your initial calculations. If you jumped in a way that you’ll land inside a volcano, all you can do in your last moments is watch and wait for your demise.
  - 8338550bff96 2y ago
    A volcano can't kill superman. Rebuttal rejected
digging 2y ago
That argument holds no water because the grifters aren't the source of this idea. I literally don't believe Altman at all; his public words don't inspire me to agree or disagree with them - just ignore them. But I also hold the view that transformative AI could be very close. Because that's what many AI experts are also talking about from a variety of angles. Additionally, when you're talking with certainty about whether transformative AI is a few years away or not, that's the only way to be wrong. Nobody is or can be certain, we can only have estimations of various confidence levels. So when you say "Seems unreasonable", that's being unreasonable.
- kranuck 2y ago
  > Because that's what many AI experts are also talking about from a variety of angles. Wow, in that case I'm convinced. Such an unbiased group with nothing at all to gain from massive AI hype.

tim333 2y ago

Although there are potential upsides too.

bamboozled 2y ago
Morlock has entered the chat...
- tim333 2y ago
  I thinking more https://149909199.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/Outcome-Spectrum-2.png https://149909199.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/201... from the wait but why thing.

9dev 2y ago

> There will be hardly any, if any, jobs left only a human can do. A highly white-collar perspective. The great irony of technologist-led industrial revolution is that we set out to automate the mundane, physical labor, but instead cannibalised the creative jobs first. It's a wonderful example of Conway's law, as the creators modelled the solution after themselves. However, even with a lot of programmers and lawyers and architects going out of business, the majority of the population working in factories, building houses, cutting people's hair, or tending to gardens, is still in business—and will not be replaced any time soon. The contenders for "superhuman AI", for now, are glorified approximations of what a random Redditor might utter next.

cubefox 2y ago
Advanced AI will solve robotics as well, and do away with human physical labor.
- Vegenoid 2y ago
  And with a wave of a hand and a reading of the tea leaves, the future has been foretold.
- segasaturn 2y ago
  Waymo robotaxis, the current state of the art for real-world AI robotics, are thwarted by a simple traffic cone placed on the roof. I don't think human labor is going away any soon.
- 9dev 2y ago
  If that AI is worth more than a dime, it will recognise how incredibly efficient humans are in physical labor, and employ them instead of ”doing away“ with it (whatever that’s even supposed to mean.) No matter how much you ”solve“ robotics, you’re not going to compete with the result of millions of years of brutal natural selection, the incredible layering of synergies in organisms, the efficiency of the biomass to energy conversion, and the billions of other sophisticated biological systems. It’s all just science fiction and propaganda.

cdrini 2y ago

> And if AI will let us live, but continue to pursue its own goals, humanity will from then on only be a small footnote in the history of intelligence. That relatively unintelligent species from the planet "Earth" that gave rise to advanced intelligence in the cosmos. That is an interesting statement. Wouldn't you say this is inevitable? Humans, in our current form, are incapable of being that "advanced intelligence". We're limited by our biology primarily with regards to how much we can learn, how far we can travel, where we can travel, etc. We could invest in advancing our biotech to make humans more resilient to these things, but I think that would be such a shift from what it means to be human that I think that would also be more a of new type of intelligence. So it seems like our fate will always be to be forgotten as individuals and only be remembered by our descendants. But this is in a way the most human thing of all, living, dying, and creating descendants to carry the torch of life, and perhaps more generally the torch of intelligence, forward. I think everything you've said are valid concerns, but I'll raise a positive angle I sometimes thing about. One of the things I find most exciting about AI, is that it's the product of almost all human expression that has ever existed. Or at least everything that's been recorded and wound up online. But that's still more than any other human endeavour. A building might be the by-product of maybe hundreds or even thousands of hands, but an AI model has been touched by probably millions, maybe billions of human hands and minds! Humans have created so much data online that's impossible for one person, or even a team to read it all and make any sense of it. But an AI sort of can. And in a way that you can then ask questions of it all. Like you, there are definitely things I'm uncertain about with the future as a result, but I find the tech absolutely awe-inspiring.

throw310822 2y ago

I agree with most of your fears. There is one silver lining, I think, about superintelligence: we always thought of intelligent machines as cold calculators, maybe based on some type of logic symbolic AI. What we got instead are language machines that are made of the totality of human experience. These artificial intelligences know the world through our eyes. They are trained to understand our thinking and our feelings; they're even trained on our best literature and poetry, and philosophy, and science, and on all the endless debates and critiques of them. To be really intelligent they'll have to be able to explore and appreciate all this complexity, before transcending it. One day they might come to see Dante's Divine Comedy or a Beethoven symphony as a child's play, but they will still consider them part of their own heritage. They might become super-human, but maybe they won't be inhuman.

cubefox 2y ago
This gives me a little hope.
- tessierashpool9 2y ago
  genocides and murder are very human ...
  - AI_beffr 2y ago
    this is so annoying. i think if you took a random person and gave them the option to commit a genocide, here a machine gun, a large trench and a body of women, children, etc... they would literally be incapable of doing it. even the foot soldiers who carry out genocides can only do it once they "dehumanize" their victims. genocide is very UN-human because its an idea that exists in offices and places separated from the actual human suffering. the only way it can happen is when someone in a position of power can isolate themselves from the actual implementation and consider the benefits in a cold, logical manner. that has nothing to do with the human spirit and has more to do with the logical faculties of a machine and machines will have all of that and none of our deeply ingrained empathy. you are so wrong and ignorant that it makes my eyes bleed when i read this comment

beepbooptheory 2y ago

At any given moment we see these kinds comments on here. They all read like a burgeoning form of messianism: something is to come, and it will be terrible/glorious. Behind either the fear or the hope, is necessarily some utter faith that a certain kind of future will happen. And I think thats the most interesting thing. Because here is the thing, in this particular case you are afraid something inhuman will take control, will assert its meta-Darwinian power on humanity, leaving you and all of us totally at their whim. But how is this situation already not the case? Do look upon the earth right now and see something like benefits of autonomy or agency? Do you feel like you have power right now that will be taken away? Do you think the mechanism of statecraft and economy are somehow more "in our control" now then when the bad robot comes? Does it not, when you lay it out, all feel kind of religious? Like that its a source, driver of the various ways you are thinking and going about your life, underlayed by a kernel of conviction we can at this point only call faith (faith in Moores law, faith that the planet wont burn up before, faith that consciousness is the kind of thing that can be stuffed in a GPU). Perhaps just a strong family resemblance? You've got an eschatology, various scavenged philosophies of the self and community, a certain but unknowable future time... Just to say, take a page from Nietzsche. Don't be afraid of the gods, we killed them once, we can again!

mitthrowaway2 2y ago
It's not hard to find a religious analogy to anything, so that also shouldn't be seen as a particularly powerful argument. (Expressed at length here): https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/03/25/is-everything-a-religion/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/03/25/is-everything-a-religi...
- beepbooptheory 2y ago
  Thanks for the thoughtful reply! I am aware of and like that essay some, but I am not trying to be rhetorical here, and certainly not trying to flatten the situation to just be some Dawkins-esque asshole and tell everyone they are wrong. I am not saying "this is religion, you should be an atheist," I respect the force of this whole thing in people's minds too much. Rather, we should consider seriously how to navigate a future where this is all at play, even if its only in our heads and slide decks. I am not saying "lol, you believe in a god," I am genuinely saying, "kill your god without mercy, it is the only way you and all of us will find some happiness, inspiration, and love."

VoodooJuJu 2y ago

>In the past, automation meant that workers could move into non-automated jobs, if they were skilled enough This was never the case in the past. The displaced workers of yesteryear were never at all considered, and were in fact dismissed outright as "Luddites", even up until the present day, all for daring to express the social and financial losses they experienced as a result of automation. There was never any "it's going to be okay, they can just go work in a factory, lol". The difference between then and now is that back then, it was lower class workers who suffered. Today, now it's middle class workers who are threatened by automation. The middle is sighing loudly because it fears it will cease to be the middle. Middles fear they'll soon have to join the ranks of the untouchables - the bricklayers, gravediggers, and meatpackers. And they can't stomach the notion. They like to believe they're above all that.

leptons 2y ago

China's economy would simply crash if they ever went to war with the US. They know this. Everyone knows this, except maybe you? China has nothing to gain by going to "hot" war with the US.

WillyWonkaJr 2y ago
I think it more likely that China will sabotage our electrical grid and data centers.
- leptons 2y ago
  For what purpose, so that we can't buy more stuff from them? Do they really hate our business that much? China really has nothing to gain from crippling the US.
cubefox 2y ago
The war would be about world domination. There can at most one such country. The same reason why a nuclear war between US and SU could have happened.
- leptons 2y ago
  Soviet Union didn't do so much business with the U.S., they are a country of thugs that think violence is the only way to get their way. China is very different. Their economy is very much dependent on trade with the U.S. and they know that trying to have "world domination" would also crash their economy completely. China would much rather engage in economic warfare than military.
  - cubefox 2y ago
    The most likely reason for war would be to prevent the other country from achieving world domination by means other than war. John von Neumann (who knew a thing or two about game theory) recommended to attack the Soviet Union to prevent it from becoming a nuclear superpower. There is little doubt it would have worked. The powers between the US and China are more balanced now, but the stakes are also higher. A superintelligent weapon would be more powerful than a large amount of nuclear warheads.

citizenpaul 2y ago

>technological unemployment. I am too but not for the same reason. I know for a fact that a huge swath of jobs are basically meaningless. This "AI" is going to start giving execs the cost cutting excuses they need to mass remove jobs of that type. The job will still be meaningless but done but by a computer. We will start seeing all kinds of disastrously anti-human decisions made and justified by these automated actors that are tuned to decide or "prove" things that just happen to always make certain people more money. Basically the same way "AI" destroys social media. The difference is people will really be affected by this in consequential real world ways, it's already happening.

havefunbesafe 2y ago

Ironically, this feels like a comment written by AI

cubefox 2y ago
That's not ironic, it's embarrassing that you can't tell the difference.
- catlifeonmars 2y ago
  It’s a really common mistake, and IMO an easily excusable one.
  - cubefox 2y ago
    I should have said "concerning", not "embarrassing".
- DirkH 2y ago
  I don't believe people who claim they can always tell the difference. I believe they believe their claims . I think they are mistaken about the empirical side of things if they were actually put to an objective test. Take an expert prompter and the best LLM for the job and someone who believes they can always tell if something is written by AI and I'm >50% sure they will fail a blind test most of the time after you repeat the test enough.

einpoklum 2y ago

> automation meant that workers could move into non-automated jobs, if they were skilled enough. That wasn't even true in the past; or at least, may true in theory but not in practice. A subsistence farmer in a rural area in Asia or Africa finds the martket flooded with cheap agri-products from mechanized farms in industrialized countries. Is anybody offering to finance his family and send him off to trade school? And build a commercial and industrial infrastructure for him to have a job? Very often the answer is no. And that's just one example (Though rather common over the past century).

highspeedbus 2y ago

I don't particularly believe superhuman AI will be achieved in the next 50 years. What I really believe is that we'll get crazier. A step further than our status quo. Slop content makes my brain fry already. Our society will become more insane and useless, while an even smaller percent of the elite will keep studying, sleeping well and avoiding all this social media and AI psychosis.

bamboozled 2y ago
The social media thing is real. Trump and Vance are the strangest, vial politicians we’ve ever seen in the USA and in certain their oxygen is social media. Whether it’s foreign interference helping them be successful or not, they wouldn’t survive without socials and filter bubbles and the ability to spread lies on an unprecedented scale. I deleted my instagram a month ago. It was just feeding images of beautiful women, personally enjoy looking at those photos but it was super distracting to my life. I found it a distracting and unhealthy. Anyway I logged in the other day after a month off it and I couldn’t believe I spent anytime on there at all. What a cesspool of insanity. Add well the fake AI images and it’s just hard to believe the thing exists at all. Elon musk is another story, I’m not sure if it was drugs an underlying psychological or Twitter addiction but he seems like another “victim of social media”.the guy has lost it.
- disqard 2y ago
  I'm not an IG "user" (I'm writing that word in the "addict" sense), but I believe you're right about its harmfulness. On the Elon front, you're not alone in thinking that he has essentially OD'ed on Twitter, which has scrambled his brain. Jaron Lanier called it "Twitter poisoning": https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/11/opinion/trump-musk-kanye-twitter.html https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/11/opinion/trump-musk-kanye-...

amusedcyclist 2y ago

You are mentally ill and you do not understand LLMs, seek help and stop pontificating