5 ms·
The most likely danger with AI is concentrated power, not that sentient AI will develop a dislike for us and use us as "batteries" like in the Matrix.
by xutopia 1y ago
The most likely danger with AI is concentrated power, not that sentient AI will develop a dislike for us and use us as "batteries" like in the Matrix.
- preciousoo 1y agoSeems like a self fulfilling prophecy
- yoyohello13 1y agoDefinitely not ‘self’ fulfilling. There are plenty of people actively and vigorously working to fulfill that particular reality.
- fidotron 1y agoI'm not so sure it will be that either, it would be having multiple AIs essentially at war with each other over access to GPUs/energy or whatever the materials are needed to grow if/when that happens. We will end up as pawns in this conflict.
- ben_w 1y agoGiven that even fairly mediocre human intelligences can run countries into the ground and avoid being thrown out in the process, it's certainly possible for an AI to be in the intelligence range where it's smart enough to win vs humans but also dumb enough to turn us into pawns rather just go to space and blot out the sun with a Dyson swarm made from the planet Mercury. But don't count on it. I mean, apart from anything else, that's still a bad outcome.
- pcdevils 1y agoFor one thing, we'd make shit batteries.
- prometheus76 1y agoThey farm you for attention, not electricity. Attention (engagement time) is how they quantify "quality" so that it can be gamed with an algorithm.
- noir_lord 1y agoIIRC the original idea was that the machines used our brain capacity as a distributed array but then they decided batteries was easier to understand while been sillier, just burn the carbon they are feeding us, it’s more efficient.
- CuriouslyC 1y agoIf I could write the matrix reverted, Neo would discover that the last people put themselves in the pods because the world was so fucked up, and the machines had been caretakers that were trying to protect them from themselves. That revision would make the first movie perfect.
- antod 1y agoSounds about right, most of us already are. But why would the AI need our shit? Surely it wants electricity?
- beyarkay 1y agoThe Matrix only had people being batteries because a movie without humans in it isn't a fun movie to watch.
- darth_avocado 1y agoThe reality is that the CEO/executive class already has developed a dislike for us and is trying to use us as “batteries” like in the Matrix.
- ljlolel 1y agoCEOs (even most VCs) are labor too
- pavel_lishin 1y agoDo they know it?
- toomuchtodo 1y agoLabor competes for compensation, CEOs compete for status (above a certain enterprise size, admittedly). Show me a CEO willingly stepping down to be replaced by generative AI. Jamie Dimon will be so bold to say AI will bring about a 3 day week (because it grabs headlines [1]) but he isn't going to give up the status of running JPMC; it's all he has besides the wealth, which does not appear to be enough. The feeling of importance and exceptionalism is baked into the identity. [1] https://fortune.com/article/jamie-dimon-jpmorgan-chase-ceo-ai-impact-working-week-3-day-100-years-future/ https://fortune.com/article/jamie-dimon-jpmorgan-chase-ceo-a...
- Animats 1y agoThat's the market's job. Once AI CEOs start outperforming human CEOs, investment will flow to the winners. Give it 5-10 years. (Has anyone tried an LLM on an in-basket test? [1] That's a basic test for managers.) [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In-basket_test https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In-basket_test
- Eisenstein 1y agoNot if CEOs use their political power to make it illegal.
- 1y ago
- nancyminusone 1y agoTo me, the greatest threat is information pollution. Primary sources will be diluted so heavily in an ocean of generated trash that you might as well not even bother to look through any of it.
- tobias3 1y agoAnd it imitates all the unimportant bits perfectly (like spelling, grammar, word choice) while failing at the hard to verify important bits (truth, consistency, novelty)
- Gigachad 1y agoIt’s already been happening but now it’s accelerated beyond belief. I saw a video about how WW1 reenactment photos end up getting reposted away from their original context and confused with original photos to the point it’s impossible to tell unless you can track it back to the source. Now most of the photos online are just AI generated.
- chongli 1y agoI see that as the death knell for general search engines built to indiscriminately index the entire web. But where that sort of search fails, opportunities open up for focused search and curated search. Just as human navigators can find the smallest islands out in the open ocean, human curators can find the best information sources without getting overwhelmed by generated trash. Of course, fully manual curation is always going to struggle to deal with the volumes of information out there. However, I think there is a middle ground for assisted or augmented curation which exploits the idea that a high quality site tends to link to other high quality sites. One thing I'd love is to be able to easily search all the sites in a folder full of bookmarks I've made. I've looked into it and it's a pretty dire situation. I'm not interested in uploading my bookmarks to a service. Why can't my own computer crawl those sites and index them for me? It's not exactly a huge list.
- worldsayshi 1y ago> power resides where men believe it resides And also where people believe that others believe it resides. Etc... If we can find new ways to collectively renegotiate where we think power should reside we can break the cycle. But we only have time to do this until people aren't a significant power factor anymore. But that's still quite some time away.
- SkyBelow 1y agoI agree. Our best technology at current require teams of people to operate and entire legions to maintain. This leads to a sort of balance, one single person can never go too far down any path on their own unless they convince others to join/follow them. That doesn't make this a perfect guard, we've seen it go horribly wrong in the past, but, at least in theory, this provides a dampening factor. It requires a relatively large group to go far along any path, towards good or evil. AI reduces this. How greatly it reduces this, if it reduces it to only a handful, to a single person, or even to 0 people (putting itself in charge), seems to not change the danger of this reduction.
- mrob 1y agoWhy does an AI need the ability to "dislike" to calculate that its goals are best accomplished without any living humans around to interfere? Superintelligence doesn't need emotions or consciousness to be dangerous.
- Yoric 1y agoIt needs to optimize for something. Like/dislike is an anthropomorphization of the concept.
- mrob 1y agoIt's an unhelpful one because it implies the danger is somehow the result of irrational or impulsive thought, and making the AI smarter will avoid it.
- Yoric 1y agoThat's not how I read it. Perhaps because most of the smartest people I know are regularly irrational or impulsive :)
- ben_w 1y agoI think most people don't get that; look at how often even Star Trek script writers write Straw Vulcans*. * https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/StrawVulcan https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/StrawVulcan
- surgical_fire 1y ago"AI will take over the world". I hear that. Then I try to use AI for simple code task, writing unit tests for a class, very similar to other unit tests. If fails miserably. Forgets to add an annotation and enters in a death loop of bullshit code generation. Generates test classes that tests failed test classes that test failed test classes and so on. Fascinating to watch. I wonder how much CO2 it generated while frying some Nvidia GPU in an overpriced data center. AI singularity may happen, but the Mother Brain will be a complete moron anyway.
- alecbz 1y agoRegularly trying to use LLMs to debug coding issues has convinced me that we're _nowhere_ close to the kind of AGI some are imagining is right around the corner.
- surgical_fire 1y agoAt least Mother Brain will praise your prompt to generate yet another image in the style of Studio Ghibli as proof that your mind is a tour de force in creativity, and only a borderline genius would ask for such a thing.
- ben_w 1y agoSure, but also the METR study showed the rate of change is t doubles every 7 months where t ~= «duration of human time needed to complete a task, such that SOTA AI can complete same with 50% success»: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.14499 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.14499 I don't know how long that exponential will continue for, and I have my suspicions that it stops before week-long tasks, but that's the trend-line we're on.
- Pulcinella 1y agoBut will it actually get better or will it just get faster and more power efficient at failing to pair parentheses/braces/brackets/quotes?
- 1y ago
- ben_w 1y agoConcentrated power is kinda a pre-requisite for anything bad happening, so yes, it's more likely in exactly the same way that given this: Linda is 31 years old, single, outspoken, and very bright. She majored in philosophy. As a student, she was deeply concerned with issues of discrimination and social justice, and also participated in anti-nuclear demonstrations. "Linda is a bank teller" is strictly more likely than "Linda is a bank teller and is active in the feminist movement" — all you have is P(a)>P(a&b), not what the probability of either statement is.
- navane 1y agoThe power concentration is already massive, and a huge problem indeed. The ai is just a cherry on top. The ai is not the problem.
- mmmore 1y agoYou can say that, and I might even agree, but many smart people disagree. Could you explain why you believe that? Have you read in detail the arguments of people who disagree with you?
- alfalfasprout 1y agoI mean, you can't really disprove either being an issue.
- beyarkay 1y agoGiven that they both seem pretty bad, it seems wrong to not consider them both dangerous and make plans for both of them?