Technology

What a bloody stupid take. No one cares about saving humanity unless that's their only pursuit in life?

OK, generative AI isn't machine learning.

But to get back to what AI is, the definition has been moving forever as AI becomes "just software" when it becomes ubiquitous. People were shocked that machines could calculate, then that they can play chess better than humans, then that they can read handwriting...

The first mistake have been to invent the term to start with, as it implies thinking machine but they're not.

Or as Dijkstra puts it: "asking whether a machine can think is as dumb as asking if a submarine can swim".

Supposedly they found a new method (Q*) that significantly improved their models, enough to make some key people revolt to force the company to not monetize it out of ethical concern. Those people have been pushed out ofc.

The definitions and semantics are getting stressed to breaking points. We don't have clear philosophy of mind for us humans let alone an overlay of other non human agents.

The problem is that it is capable of doing things that historically wasn't possible with a machine. It can "act natural" in a sense.

There are so many cans of worms

It has no awareness of what it’s saying. It’s simply calculating the most probable next word in a typical sentence and spewing it out.

Neither of these things are true.

It does create world models (see the Othello-GPT papers, Chess-GPT replication, and the Max Tegmark world model papers).

And while it is trained on predicting the next token, it isn't necessarily doing it from there on out purely based on "most probable" as your sentence suggests, such as using surface statistics.

Something like Othello-GPT, trained to predict the next move and only fed a bunch of moves, generated a virtual Othello board in its neural network and kept track of "my pieces" and "opponent pieces."

And that was a toy model.

Combine the two and we've got a proper Matrix situation on our hands

Instead we're going to get "D- All of the above."

Yeah but what if we unleash an evil AI on the universe? Our mess spilling over and fucking up nature again.

greed coupled with high ambition is the biggest problem. neither on its own is as destructive

Star Trek TNG had it pretty right in terms of what's moral or what is desirable

Empathy and decency are scarce precious commodities. But the ruthless predatory "thought leaders" have been in charge ever since we clubbed the last neanderthal.

"It Was Just Business" should be engraved on whatever memorial is left behind to mark our self-extinction.

But, according to Das Kapital (and the last two centuries) capitalists will always capture the government and regulators, neutering their ability to fulfill their role. Greed and the susceptibility to corruption will always drive the system to where it is today, in which only revolution will free us from the established system.

But even then, civil war rarely heralds a communist revolution, but usually a run of dictatorships, each overthrown by the next. We have to get very lucky or be tired of fighting before we can install a public serving state. And we haven't yet tried pre-writing and publishing the new constitution.

Sorry I made this before Drake was a ~~certified lover boy~~ certified pedophile.

No the "AI" isn't a threat in itself. And treating generative algorithms like LLM like it's general intelligence is dumb beyond words. However:

It massively increases the reach and capacity of foreign (and sadly domestic) agents to influence people. All of those Russian trolls that brought about fascism, Brexit and the rise of the far right used to be humans. Now a single human can do more than a whole army of people could in the past using AI. Spreading misinformation has never been easier.

Then there's the whole replacing peoples jobs with AI. No the AI can't actually do those jobs, not very well at least. But if management and the share holders think they can increase profits using AI, they will certainly fire a lot of folk. And even if that ends up ruining the company down the line, that costs even more jobs and usually impacts the people lower in the organization the most.

Also there's a risk of people literally becoming less capable and knowledgeable because of AI. If you can have a digital assistant you carry around on your pocket at all times answer every question ever, why bother learning anything yourself? Why take the hard road, when the easy road is available? People are at risk of losing information, knowledge and the ability to think for themselves because of this. And it can become so bad, when the AI just makes shit up, people think it's the truth. And in a darker tone, if the people behind the big AIs want something to not be known or misrepresented, they can make it happen. And people would be so reliant on it, they wouldn't even know this happens. This is already an issue with social media, AI is much much worse.

Then there is the resource usage for AI. This makes the impact of crypto currency seem like a rounding error. The energy and water usage is huge and becoming bigger every day. This has the potential to undo almost all of the climate wins we've had for the past two decades and push the Earth beyond the tipping point. What people seem to forget about climate change is once things start becoming bad, it's way too late and the situation will deteriorate at an exponential rate.

That's just a couple of big things I can think of on the top of my head. I'm sure there are many more issues (such as the death of the internet). But I think this is enough to call the current level of "AI" a threat to humanity.

i agree with the first part

AI on its own isn't a threat, but people (mis)using and misrepresenting AI are. That isn't a problem unique to AI but there sure are a lot of people doing dumb and bad things with AI right now.

Except for the environment