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The very best outcomes involve us intentionally and collectively turning our attention away from this technology.
by aorloff 19d ago
The very best outcomes involve us intentionally and collectively turning our attention away from this technology.
- amazingman 19d agoThat is pure fantasy.
- AngryData 19d agoWhy? There are numerous technologies we have ignored or abandoned for numerous reasons. Many of the benefits of AI is "requires less humans", but in an age where we question what work people could possibly do in the future, human labor isn't that hard to find. If the amish can do what they do for whack religious reasons, people could manage it with ai for cultural and social reasons. And I never saw an amish person starve to death. And that is if people don't get pissed enough to start burning stuff down and instead try to be peaceful hippie homesteader types.
- fc417fc802 19d agoBut notably the amish don't preclude the rest of us from existing. Some subset of humans could turn their attention away from AI but it would presumably still exist and continue to be developed. I can't think of any economically beneficial technologies that we've collectively ignored. If you manage to come up with a counterexample then that's an opportunity to make some money for yourself. It's a fundamentally unstable state given our economic system.
- Retric 19d agoSupersonic passenger aircraft were operated profitably and no longer exist. There’s levels of R&D required for many technologies where the question goes beyond could this be profitable to what are the risk vs reward that this specific project will succeed.
- fc417fc802 19d agoBut after accounting for maintenance & etc were they more profitable than sinking the equivalent amount of money into something else, such as slower aircraft? Notably there are currently efforts to develop new supersonic passenger liners.
- ben_w 19d ago> Supersonic passenger aircraft were operated profitably Were they? IIRC joint project by British and French national airlines, they expected to sell loads, hardly anyone wanted to buy the planes, the two airlines kept them flying out of government embarassment.
- cyanydeez 19d agoshould probably spell it out: _it wasn't allowed to get to supersonic speed_. Same way we dont _allow_ eugenics.
- fc417fc802 19d agoSure, the regulation that guarded against externalizing certain costs might well have been the only thing precluding profitability. Importantly it wasn't some shared cultural value leading to voluntarily leaving money on the table. Rather the regulator imposed it. We are able to effectively regulate things like the operation of massive aircraft, eugenics, the dumping of toxic waste, or the refinement of nuclear material. But there are also plenty of things that we can't effectively regulate for purely practical reasons.
- ben_w 18d agoOver the Atlantic? Nah, the problem was it was very expensive and not a great experience for the people rich enough to afford it. The US company trying to bring supersonic back are not only focussed on the flight speed, but also the entire customer experience.
- necovek 19d agoWere they? Did Concorde provide return on investment? When was the break-even expected? Sure, if we look at it as R&D subsidized by governments of UK and France, then yet, it was profitable. In particular, the problem with it was that it could not get to supersonic speeds over urban areas, which significantly limited routes where it made sense, and the range was not good enough to cover longer distances.
- lacy_tinpot 19d agoYou can't just stop AI without also stopping progress in computer hardware. You have to do both. The real implication of what they're saying extends beyond just AI. You have to stop the entire compute stack in order to prevent or slow down AI progress.
- bedstefar 19d agoAnd even if we did manage to limit/cull hardware development, what would keep people from continuing to find ever more efficient models runnable on contemporary hardware?
- ben_w 19d agoUnclear how much more efficient they can be. Bleeding edge models are putting the desk-job competencies of multiple professional fields into something with as many parameters as a single large rodent has synapses.
- kelnos 19d agoBecause "we" embodies a hugely diverse set of beings with different wants, needs, goals, and priorities. Not to mention different morality and ethics. So sure, let's say you get 95% of the world to not use or work on LLMs. 5% is still enough to build something that brings forth the End Times. That's the old checklist trope of "Your idea won't work because: [x] it requires that everyone in the world agrees to do something, all at the same time." As the GP said: pure fantasy.
- teiferer 19d ago> There are numerous technologies we have ignored or abandoned for numerous reasons. Are there? Nukes are a thing. Chemical weapons are a thing. Cluster bombs are a thing. Biological weapons are a thing. What is not a thing that shouldn't be? We say certain things should not be a thing, but then behind the scenes we made them a thing anyway.
- ant6n 19d agoNukes are barely used. The technology of nuclear detonations was practically abandoned: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Plowshare https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Plowshare
- teiferer 19d agoI find that a weird argument for saying humanity has "ignored or abandoned" nuclear weapons.
- int_19h 19d agoOn chemical weapons, most large state actors have got rid of them. Not because of any moral reasons, though, but simply because they don't actually work all that well in modern conventional warfare. This is then framed as an ethical issue, but you only need to look at where the same countries stand on e.g. landmines to realize how much bullshit it all is. Conversely, where you do still see chemical weapons used, it's usually asymmetric conflicts where "just gas the rebels" actually works much of the time and is much cheaper than other options. Big guys can afford the other options though, someone like Assad, not so much. More on this: https://acoup.blog/2020/03/20/collections-why-dont-we-use-chemical-weapons-anymore/ https://acoup.blog/2020/03/20/collections-why-dont-we-use-ch...
- teiferer 19d agoSo, you are actually arguing against yourself and are agreeing with me?
- hgoel 18d agoI'm baffled that people expressing your opinion don't understand what they're advocating for. Current generation smartphones are able to run AI models, people have managed to run very large models (even if slowly) via streaming from disk. The math for the underlying implementation is relatively trivial. Abandoning this technology means a cult-like extremist shift in culture against computers, or a global surveillance state of unprecedented scale and invasiveness. Not even getting into how much it requires us to give up on science, given the shared computational needs.
- SV_BubbleTime 19d agoWatch, very soon this is going to politically divide. They’re sowing the seeds right now with “antiai” campaigns. The right will for a change be for it but will be able to be talked into regulation because you know “small government” and all only when convenient. The left will bitch and moan about fairness and copyright and automation and UBI, they’ll be the doomers and worldwar chicken littles. The Uniparty will be for it, but only against the public having anything good. What will be funny to me is that normal tech people outside the frontier model companies are about to find themselves without a home on this topic.
- ben_w 19d agoThe world isn't the American political nonsense. > What will be funny to me is that normal tech people outside the frontier model companies are about to find themselves without a home on this topic. Already happened, just from agentic coding.
- teiferer 19d ago> The very best outcomes involve us intentionally and collectively turning our attention away from this technology. To expand on the "pure fantasy" sister comment: There is just no way this will happen. It's in the spirit of "we can just stop all wars" and "we can just end world hunger". Technically it's very easy to do. Socially it's impossible to do. Unless you ignore realities.
- calgoo 19d agoThe danger lies with someone asking the machine to solve those two questions and it decides to cheat the solution. Launching every nuke in the world stops all wars, just like wiping out 99% of humanity ends world hunger.
- carlob 19d agoI don't think killing people solves world hunger, we already produce enough food to feed everyone, it's just not evenly distributed.
- ako 19d agoThere can be more than one solution.
- unrented7977 18d agoCan't be hungry if you're dead
- teiferer 19d agoI don't see how that is more dangerous than two crazy head of states deciding that it's time for armageddon. The outcome is the same (99% of humans dead), it's equally easy to technically not do it (don't press the button, don't continue with LLMs), but also equally hard to regulate away given the real world. And that was my point.
- ako 19d agoYou forgot “we can stop climate change”…
- locknitpicker 19d ago> The very best outcomes involve us intentionally and collectively turning our attention away from this technology. Nowadays even small mom and pop restaurants use these models to generate their menus. Of course no one is going to stop using this technology.