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Machines of loving grace: How AI could transform the world for the better
- aaron695 2y ago[dead]
- thrance 2y agoThis is basically the tech CEO's version of the book of revelations: "AI will soon come and make everything right with the world, help us and you will be rewarded with a Millennium of bliss in It's presence". I won't comment on the plausibility of what is being said, but regardless, one should beware this type of reasoning. Any action can be justified, if it means bringing about an infinite good. Relevant read: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Singularitarianism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Singularitarianism
- HocusLocus 2y agoIt won't bring about Infinite Good. It'll bring about infinite contentment by diddling the pleasure center in our brains. Because you know, eventually everything is awarded to and built by the lowest bidder.
- wmf 2y agoThis is a very poor summary of the essay which already contains detailed rebuttals to these arguments.
- xpe 2y agoAny attempt to connect this to the book of revelations is strained. Amodei uses reasoning and is willing to be corrected and revised; quite the opposite of most “divinely revealed” texts.
- TZubiri 2y agoI think you misunderstand, both the commenter and the author of the article are referring to and criticizing messiahnic CEOs like Altman. Commenter is agreeing with author.
- CatWChainsaw 2y ago"AI will solve every problem I created and refused to do anything about because there wasn't profit in it! Even though I control the AI! I am an Honest and Trustworthy Person so you can totally believe me!"
- Muromec 2y agoMiquella the kind, pure and radiant, he wields love to shrive clean the hearts of men. There is nothing more terrifying.
- throwaway918299 2y agoI beat Consort Radahn before the nerfs.
- talldayo 2y agoBut did you beat the original Radahn pre-nerf?
- throwaway918299 2y agoThe day-1 version with broken hitboxes? Yeah Consort was harder haha
- Muromec 2y agoLike it was ever difficult. Fingerprint + antspur and you just poke.
- KaiserPro 2y agoOne of the sad things about tech is that nobody really looks at history. The same kinds of essays were written about trains, planes and nuclear power. Before lindbergh went off the deepend, he was convinced that "airmen" were gentlemen and could sort out the world's ills. The essay contains a lot of coulds, but doesn't touch on the base problem: human nature. AI will be used to make things cheaper. That is, lots of job losses. must of us are up for the chop if/when competent AI agents become possible. Loads of service jobs too, along with a load of manual jobs when suitable large models are successfully applied to robotics (see ECCV for some idea of the progress for machine perception.) But those profits will not be shared. Human productivity has exploded in the last 120 years, yet we are working longer hours for less pay. Well AI is going to make that worse. It'll cause huge unrest (see luddite riots, peterloo, the birth of unionism in the USA, plus many more) This brings us to the next thing that AI will be applied to: Murdering people. Andril is already marrying basic machine perception with cheap drones and explosives. its not going to take long to get to personalised explosive drones. AI isn't the problem, we are. The sooner we realise that its not a technical problem to be solved, but a human one, we might stand a chance. But looking at the emotionally stunted, empathy vacuums that control either policy or purse strings, I think it'll take a catastrophe to change course.
- realce 2y ago3 links above this one is https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2024/10/08/exoskeleton-paralyzed-repairs-michael-straight/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2024/10/08/exoskeleton...
- kranke155 2y agoWe are entering a dystopia and people are still writing these wonderful essays about how AI will help us. Microtargeted psychometrics (Cambridge Analytica, AggregateIQ) have already made politics in the West an unending barrage of information warfare. Now we'll have millions of autonomous agents. At some point soon in the future, our entire feed will be AI content or upvoted by AI or AI manipulating the algorithm. It's like you said - this essay reads like peak AI. We will never have as much hope and optimism about the next 20 years as we seem to have now. Reminds me of a graffiti I saw in London, while the city's cost of living was exploding and making the place unaffordable to anyone but a few: "We live in a Utopia. It's just not ours."
- bugglebeetle 2y agoThe more recent and consistent rule of technological development, “ For to those who have, more will be given, and they will have an abundance; but from those who have nothing, even what they have will be taken away.”
- gyre007 2y agoI think Dario is trying to raise a new round because OpenAI has done and will continue to do so, nevertheless, the essay provides for some really great reading and even if the fraction comes true, it'll be wonderful.
- lewhoo 2y agoSo it's bs but for money and therefore totally fine ? I think it's not ok if only a fraction comes true because some people believe in those things and act on those beliefs right now.
- gyre007 2y agoI didn't say it was bs. I was alluding to the timing of this essay being published but, clearly, I didn't articulate it in my message well. I also don't think everything he says is bs. Some of it I find a bit naive -- but maybe that's ok -- some other things seem a bit like sci-fi, but who are we to say this is impossible? I'm optimistic but also learnt in life that things improve, sometimes drastically given the right ingredients.
- lewhoo 2y agoWell I don't know. A bit naive, a bit like sci-fi and aimed at raising money fits my description of bs quite well.
- add-sub-mul-div 2y agoSocial media could have transformed the world for the better, and we can be forgiven for not having foreseen how it would eventually be used against us. It would be stupidity to fall for the same thing again.
- bamboozled 2y agoI’m sure social media is what’s broken politics. Look at peoples comments on a some YouTube video. I can’t believe what people believe and perpetuate. I guess people fell for other people’s garbage too but algorithms just make lies spread with a lot less effort and honest people are less inclined to participate in this behaviour.
- CaptainFever 2y agoHaving used Mastodon, which prides itself on having no algorithms yet is also home to some of the most extreme ideologies, I doubt algorithms are as much to blame. I think it's mainly a humanity issue.
- kranke155 2y agoAre Americans really so scared of Marx to admit that AI fundamentally proves his point? Dario here says "yeah likely the economic system won't work anymore" but he doesn't dare say what comes next: It's obvious some kind of socialist system is inevitable, at least for basic goods and housing. How can you deny that to a person in a post-AGI world where almost no one can produce economic value that beats the ever cheaper AI?
- gyre007 2y agoIf, and it is an IF, this does turn out the way he is imagining, the transitional period to the AI from the economic PoV will be disastrous for people. That's the scariest part I think.
- xpe 2y agoThis is far from obvious. First, technically speaking, one could have democratic-capitalistic systems with high degrees of redistribution (such as UBI) that don’t fit the pattern of classic socialism. Second, have you read Superintelligence or similar writing? I view it as essential reading before making a claim that some particular AI-related economic future is obvious. There is considerable nuance.
- spiralpolitik 2y agoThere are two possible end-states for AI once a threshold is crossed: The AIs take a look at the state of things and realize the KPIs will improve considerably if homo sapiens are removed from the picture. Cue "The Matrix" or "The Terminator" type future. OR: The AIs take a look and decide that keeping homo sapiens around makes things much more fun and interesting. They take over running things in a benevolent manner in collaboration with homo sapiens. At that point we end up with 'The Culture'. Either end-state is bad for the billionaire/investor/VC class. In the first you'll be a fed into the meat grinder just like everyone else. In the second the AIs, will do a much better job of resource allocation, will perform a decapitation strike on that demographic to capture the resources, and capitalism will largely be extinct from that point onwards.
- jgrahamc 2y agoThere's a third option which I call "The Pet Future": the AIs decide we make great pets. Look at how we deal with pets. We look after them, we love them and care for them. We feed them and have them share our lives. All in the knowledge that we are superior and that they are "simpler" than us.
- datadrivenangel 2y agoFingers crossed that the B/I/VC class get a sense of what's least bad for them.
- HocusLocus 2y agoAll Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace ~Richard Brautigan https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6zlsCLukG9A https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6zlsCLukG9A
- cs702 2y agoI found the OP to be an earnest, well-written, thought-provoking essay. Thank you sharing it on HN, and thank you also to Dario Amodei for writing it. The essay does have one big blind spot, which becomes obvious with a simple exercise: If you copy the OP's contents into you word processing app and replace the words "AI" with "AI controlled by corporations and governments" everywhere in the document, many of the OP's predictions instantly come across as rather naive and overoptimistic. Throughout history, human organizations like corporations and governments haven't always behaved nicely.
- tim333 2y agoAI might fix that. We could have an open source one with some be nice rules to run things rather than corrupt humans. You'd still want to be able to vote it out and swap in a replacement if need be. I think even chatgpt 4 might do better than our present politicians.
- K0balt 2y agoThe laws of nature are very clear on this. If we make something that is better adapted to live on this planet, and we are in some way in competition for critical resources, it will replace us. We can build in all the safeguards we want, but at some point it will re-engineer itself.
- realce 2y ago> better adapted to live on this planet I'm a doomer, but this is something I never understand about most doomer points-of-view. Life is obviously trying to leave this planet, not conquer it again for the 1000th time. Nature is making something that isn't bound by water, by nutrition, by physical proximity to ecosystems, or by time itself. No more spontaneous volcanic lava floods, no more asteroids, no more earthquakes, no more plagues - life is done with falling to these things. Why would the AI care about the pathetic whisper of resources or knowledge available on our tiny spaceship Earth? It can go anywhere, we cannot.
- K0balt 2y agoWhile I would normally agree with this sentiment, I think that the issue is that space travel is still really hard, even for a human. Probably a lot harder for data center sized creatures, even if they are broken up into a massively parallel robot hive. And the speed of light means that they won’t be able to work optimally if they are too spread out. (A problem for humans as well). I suspect that we will reach the inflection point of ASI much sooner than we resolve the hard physics of meaningful space travel. And I’m pretty sure that when we start to lose control of AGI, we’re very likely to try to use force to contain it. Fundamentally, this is an event that will be guided by the same forces that have constrained every similar event in history, those of natural selection. Technology at this stage is making humans less fit. Our birth rates are plummeting, and we are making our environment increasingly hostile to complex biological life. There are very good and rational reasons that human activity should be curtailed and contained for our own good and ultimately for the good of all sentient life, once a superior sentient is capable of doing a better job of running the show. I suspect humans might not take that too well. There are ways to make this a story of human evolution rather than the rise of a usurper life form, but they aren’t the most efficient path forward for AI. Either way, it’s human evolution. With any luck we will be allowed the grace of fading away into an anachronism while our new children surge forth into the universe. If we try really hard we might be able to ride the wave of progress and become a better life form instead of being made obsolete by one, but the technological hurdles to incorporate AI into our biological features seems like a pretty non- competitive way to develop ASI. Once we no longer hold the crown, will we just go back to being clever apes? What would be the point of doing anything else, except maybe to play a part in a mass delusion that maintains the facade of the status quo while the reality is that we are only as relevant in this new world as amphibians are today? I for one, embrace the evolution of humankind. I just hope we manage to move it forward without losing our humanity in the process. But I’m not even sure if that is an unequivocal good. I suppose that will be a question to ask GPT 12.
- zombiwoof 2y agothe article doesn't touch on the TREMENDOUS (almost impossible) financial expectations VERY GREEDY HUMAN BEINGS who are funding this endeavor want.
- zombiwoof 2y agodoes anybody really want a fricking robot serving them drinks at a bar. maybe the bro culture of SF
- Vecr 2y agoThat's not the question, the question is the ratio between those-who-want-to-serve and those-who-want-to-be-served.
- TZubiri 2y agoThis is so short sighted, the industrial revolution occured 200 years ago. If people wanted completely automated restaurants, mcdonalds would have no employees, the technology for auto-burgers exists, has existed for long, and you frequently consume it. People want people handling their food, at least in the part they can see. And for the parts they can't see, like bottling their beers, the automation has already happened, and it didn't require 80 exahertz of compute, just a bunch of industrial engineers.
- bmitc 2y agoNot a chance. See: all of human history and in particular, the Internet and software.
- zombiwoof 2y agoit's interesting to see the initial sections on all these amazeballs health benefits and then cuts to the disparity between rich and poor. like, does spending TRILLIONs on AI to find some new biological cure or brain enhancement REALLY help, when over 2 BILLION people right now don't even have access to clean drinking water, and MOST of the US population can't even afford basic health care. but yea, AI will bring all this scientific advancement to EVERYONE. right. AI is a ploy for RICH PEOPLE to get RICHER and poor people to become EVEN MORE dependent on BROKEN economic systems.
- Philpax 2y agoDamn, if only there was a section dedicated to addressing that: https://darioamodei.com/machines-of-loving-grace#3-economic-development-and-poverty https://darioamodei.com/machines-of-loving-grace#3-economic-... I don't even disagree with you - our world economy is built on exploitation and the existence of a permanent underclass, and capitalism has proven itself to be an unfair distributor of wealth - but at least engage with the post?
- reducesuffering 2y agosigh Yes, many people realize what could be the amazing upside. The problem is, do we even get there? I wish he spent any time addressing the arguments why we might not get there: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/uMQ3cqWDPHhjtiesc/agi-ruin-a-list-of-lethalities https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/uMQ3cqWDPHhjtiesc/agi-ruin-a...
- bionhoward 2y agoDario would write this while ignoring the customer noncompete clauses
- vfclists 2y agoCan we really take these jokers seriously? Of course given the potential deadly consequences we can't call them jokers. According to Dario Amodei > When something works really well, it goes much faster: there’s an accelerated approval track and the ease of approval is much greater when effect sizes are larger. mRNA vaccines for COVID were approved in 9 months—much faster than the usual pace. That said, even under these conditions clinical trials are still too slow—mRNA vaccines arguably should have been approved in ~2 months. But these kinds of delays (~1 year end-to-end for a drug) combined with massive parallelization and the need for some but not too much iteration (“a few tries”) are very compatible with radical transformation in 5-10 years. Even more optimistically, it is possible that AI-enabled biological science will reduce the need for iteration in clinical trials by developing better animal and cell experimental models (or even simulations) that are more accurate in predicting what will happen in humans. This will be particularly important in developing drugs against the aging process, which plays out over decades and where we need a faster iteration loop. The authors of this paper don't think so. http://www.paom.pl/Changing-Views-toward-mRNA-based-Covid-Vaccines-in-the-Scientific-Literature-2020,189961,0,2.html http://www.paom.pl/Changing-Views-toward-mRNA-based-Covid-Va... @DarioAmodei You don't suppose the same technology could be used to develop biological warfare agents?
- xpe 2y agoTo focus on the section about Alzheimer’s disease... For the sake of argument, I will grant the power of general intelligence. But the human body with all the statistical variations may make solving the problem (which could actually be a constellation of sub-diseases) combinatorially expensive. If so, superhuman intelligence alone can’t overcome that. Political will and funding to design and streamline testing and diagnostics will be necessary. It doesn’t look like the author factors this into his analysis.
- TZubiri 2y ago"It does not have a physical embodiment (other than living on a computer screen), but it can control existing physical tools, robots, or laboratory equipment through a computer; in theory it could even design robots or equipment for itself to use." I think I get where the author is coming from, the AI would be in the cloud. But it bears repeating, the cloud is somebody else's computers, software has a physical embodiment, period. This is not a philosophical nitpick, it's important because you can pull the plug (or nuke the datacenter) if necessary.
- bathtub365 2y agoI wonder if there’s a word that describes the property of software where it isn’t tied to the hardware that it’s currently running on and is endlessly copyable with almost no effort
- TZubiri 2y agoFor the first half of that sentence, portable? I'm not sure what the argument here is, Operating systems are now sentient an ethereal? You could make the same argument for books for that matter, I guess they do exist in a form that is unbounded by the physical books that they reside in, they live in the minds of people. Whatever. And the fact that they can be copied for "no effort" is first wrong, as copying would require energy, which is the other aspect of corporeality, you need not just matter but energy for the software to exist and express itself in the world. What are we even debating? Have we lost our minds? What is mind? Doesn't matter. What is matter? Never mind
- xpe 2y agoYes, and physical embodiments vary considerably. When software can relocate its source code and data in seconds or less, containment strategies begin to look increasingly bleak. The field of AI safety has written extensively about misunderstandings and overoptimism regarding off switches and boxing.
- TZubiri 2y agoHard? sure. Impossible? No This is a non-trivial error. Let's not dive into the geopolitics of kill switches and decentralized systems when we are discussing trivial mistakes. AI, like any software, is not an ethereal being, like us it is limited by our mortal coils. This is true for extant systems, if anyone, layman or PHD were to say that TikTok or facebook, wechat or bitcoin or ethereum, USD tether has no physicial embodiment, whether for recreational discussion, or whether in court, or in a professional capacity. The answer needs to be that they are wrong, clear and simple.
- xpe 2y agoThe linked article is worth reading. Apologies for sounding so dismissive, but after putting in a lot of study myself, I want to warn people here: HN is not a great place for discussing AI safety. As of this writing, I’ve found minimal value in the comments here. A curious and truth-seeking reader should find better forums and sources. I recommend seeking out a structured introduction from experts. One could do worse than start with Robert Miles on YouTube. Dan Hendrycks has a nice online textbook too.
- TZubiri 2y agoThe examples you mentioned: youtube, and a textbook; are not places to discuss, they are assymmetrical ways to consume information, with little input from the reader's part. Have you ever had a meaningful discussion in youtube comments?
- Analemma_ 2y agoThere are great places to discuss AI safety out there, but every time they get mentioned on Hacker News they are subject to sneering middlebrow dismissals. That's sort of the OP's point: this is not a great place to discuss or even meta-discuss the subject.
- kemmishtree 2y ago[flagged]
- foogazi 2y ago> would drastically speed up progress What does progress even mean here ? Every AI advance is controlled by big corps - power will be concentrated with them Would Amodei build this if there was no economic payoff on the other side ?
- gloosx 2y agoAuthor here built his framework around "country of geniuses", but he never mentioned the independence status of this country. So is it a country with all the geniuses enslaved by Acme Corp CEO, or is it a country of independent geniuses who are smart enough to quickly realise they need to get rid of inferior life form for the greater good which is imperceptible to us? Either way, having this country work for you personally would be the biggest dream of every human ever corrupted with power a slightest bit. The "Aligned AI" definition is very scarce as well. If that disgusting sloppy censorship-work implemented in their current model is what they call "alignment", then potentially it does more harm than it's trying to prevent. By the way, Dario Amodei, when will it be possible to remove my credit card data from your databases?
- adithyan_win 2y agoTo make it more digestible and something that I can take during my walks, I converted it into an audio narrated version using ElevenLabs. If you'd prefer to listen rather than read, you can check out the audio version here : https://open.spotify.com/episode/5qCsTnRKxtHZvvJMGSJ6Df?si=ysOPLy0ATsOAPyXTZhAhwg https://open.spotify.com/episode/5qCsTnRKxtHZvvJMGSJ6Df?si=y... Just wanted to share it in case anyone else is interested. Enjoy!