Many technologists, including Elon Musk, Apple cofounder Steve Wozniak and OpenAI’s Sam Altman, have warned about A.I. potentially wiping out mankind.
In an open letter published on Tuesday, more than 1,370 signatories—including business founders, CEOs and academics from various institutions including the University of Oxford—said they wanted to “counter ‘A.I. doom.’”
“A.I. is not an existential threat to humanity; it will be a transformative force for good if we get critical decisions about its development and use right,” they insisted.
What a fair an unbiased title this article has. Also wipes away any form of credibility immediately by citing Elon Musk first and foremost. The dude has money, the brains comes from the people he treats like shit in his businesses.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but I thought the big risk with AI is its use as a disinfo tool. Skynet ain't no where near close, but a complete post truth world is possible. It's already bad now... Could you imagine AI generated recordings of crimes that are used as evidence against people? There are already scam callers that use recordings to make people think theyve kidnapped relatives.
I really feel like most people aren't afraid of the right things when it comes to AI.
That's largely what these specialists are talking about. People emphasising the existential apocalypse scenarios when there are more pressing matters. I think purpose of the tools in mind should be more of a concern than the training data as well in many cases. People keep freaking out about LLMs and art models while still ignoring the plague of models built specifically to manipulate and predict subconscious habits and activities of individuals. Models built specifically to recreate the concept of a unique individual and their likeness for financial reason should also be regulated in new unique ways. People shouldn't be able to be bought wholesale, but to sell their likeness as a subscription with rights to withdraw from future production, etc.
I think the ways we think about a lot of things have to change based around the type of society we want. I vote getting away from a system that lets a few own everything until people no longer have the right to live.
Isn't this already possible though? Granted, AI can do this exponentially faster, write the article generate deepfakes and then publish or whatever. But... Again, can't just regular people already do this if they want? I mean, with the obvious aside, it's not AI that are generating deepfakes of politicians and celebrities, it's people using the tool.
It's been said already, but AI as a tool can be abused just like anything else. It's not AI that is unethical (necessarily), it is humans that use it unethically.
I dunno. I guess I just think about the early internet and the amount of shareware and forwards-from-grandma (if you read this letter you have 5 seconds to share it, early 2000's type stuff) and how it's evolved into text to speech DIY crafts. AI is just the next step that we were already headed down. We were doing all this without AI already, it's just so much more accessible now (which IMO, is the only way for AI to truly be used for good. Either it's 100% accessible for all or it's hoarded away.)
This also means that there are going to be people who use it for shitty reasons. These are the same types of people for why we have signs and laws in the first place.
It seems to come down to do we let something that can do harm be used despite it? I think there's levels, but I think the potential for good is just as high as the potential for disaster. It seems wrong to stop the use of AI possibly finding cures for cancer and genetic sequencing for other ailments just because some creeps can use it for deepfakes. Otherwise, the deepfakes would still have existed without AI and we would be without any of the benefits that AI could give us.
Note: for as interested and hopeful as I am for AI as a tool, I also try to be very aware of how harmful it could be. But most ways I look at it, somehow people like you and I using AI in various ways for personal projects, good or bad, just seems inconcequntial compared to the sheer speed with which AI can create. Be it code, assets, images, text, puzzles and patterns, we have one of our first major technological advancements and half of us are arguing over who gets to use it and why they shouldn't.
Last little tidbit: think about AI art/concepts you've seen in the last year. Gollum as playing cards, teenage mutant ninja turtles as celebs, deepfakes, whathaveyou. Think about the last time you saw AI art. Do you feel as awed/impressed/annoyed by the AI art of last year to the AI art of yesterday? Probably not, you probably saw it, thought AI, and moved on.
I've got a social hypothesis that this is what deepfake generations are going to be like. It doesn't matter what images get created because a thousand other creeps had the same idea and posted the same thing. At a certain point the desensitization onsets and it becomes redundant. So just because this can happen slightly more easily, we are going to sideline all of the rest of the good the tool can do?
Don't get me wrong, I don't disagree by any means. It's an interesting place to be stuck, I'm just personally hoping the solution is pro-consumer. I really think a version of current AI could be a massive gain to people's daily lives, even if it's just for hobbies and mild productivity. But it only works if everyone gets it.
I don't know why I previous post comments didn't show up in my profile. But it's very simple fact that:
A regular adult human being have 600 trillion synapses(connections between neurons), it would need to use 64bit int for indexing theses connection and it would cost you ~4.8PB to index these connections. A toddler have way more connections before we trim the unnecessary ones when we get older. It's freaking impossible for our modern distributed computing to do this efficiently(imagine DDoS your own networks by sending those astronomical amount of data around the section of your virtual brain.)
We do have a very limited scale simulation projects(for medical research etc), and yeah, it's not get smarter or anything, imagine how stupid regular human can be.
edit: I know you can subsection and index those connections with cluster hierarchy, it would cut some cost but the overhead is also introduced. if the overhead/search time etc is more than the cost of using 64bit index, then using 64bit index is "cheaper".(trade datasize for look up efficiency.)
Something you may not have considered is that the majority of our brains are used for things like sensory input and motor control, not for thinking. This is why brain size relative to body size is so important. A whale has a far larger brain than you or I, but is significantly less intelligent.
@fearout@throws_lemy There's a huge gap between South Korea and North Korea too. But just this week, some mentally distressed individual worked his way up to that gap and then scrambled across it, in violation of his own best interests. Whenever it becomes possible to cross a gap, it'll get crossed.
I hate this skynet discourse, like no fucking shit LLMs aren’t skynet, they’re not even AI. Acting like that’s a legitimate criticism that needs to be discussed is blatantly just an attempt to distract from the real issues and criticism.
There are real issues surrounding how these models are trained, how the data for the models is selected and who gets compensated for that data, let alone the discussions around companies using these tools to devalue skilled individuals and cut their pay.
But they don’t have to engage with any of that because they get to debate the merits of wether or not the shitty sitcom script autocomplete program will launch nukes or make paper clips out of people.
People are wildly overestimating the power and applicability of LLMs. I get that it’s scary to have a conversation with a computer, but we are still just as far from artificial general intelligence as we have always been.
Evil robot overlords aren't the problem. Evil human overlords replacing human laborers with robots, and then exterminating the human laborers, is the problem.
Every time I hear people worried about the robot uprising, I remember the time Google Location couldn't figure out what method of transportation I was using for 2 and a half hours between the Santa Ana, CA airport and the Denver, CO airport.
It honestly makes my blood boil when I read "AI will destroy everything" or "kill everyone" or similar. No, its not going to happen. We are nowhere close to that, we never will unintentionally or intentionally create unkillable beings like Terminator just because there is actually no material to build it with to make it par.
Big tech wanting to freeze AI just want to control it themself. Full speed ahead!
The real issue is that #AI is putting more stress on long-standing problems we haven’t solved well. Good opportunity to think carefully about how we want to distribute the costs and benefits of knowledge work in our society.
I don't think it's naive to think that there is an existential risk from AI. Yes, LLMs are not sentient and I don't think ChatGPT is Skynet, but it seems pretty obvious to me that if we could create an entity that is generally intelligent, has goals, and is orders of magnitude smarter than humans that is cannot be controlled. And that poses a risk if its interests come into conflict with ours
Global mega-corps are already a kind of AI. They're generally intelligent actors that find creative solutions to problems and work to advance their own interests, often at the expense of humanity, despite attempts to reign them in. A true AGI might be like a super-powered corporation, that can have it's big decision meetings every second instead of once a week
However, I am also concerned with global regulation of this stuff because if state actors are the only ones allowed to have AI, that could get dystopian very quickly as well so... 🤷♂️
It makes my blood boil when people dismiss the risks of ASI without any notable counterargument. Do you honestly think something a billion times smarter than a human would struggle to kill us all if it decided it wanted to? Why would it need a terminator to do it? A virus would be far easier. And who's to say how quickly AI will advance now that AI is directly assisting progress? How can you possibly have any certainty on any timelines or risks at all?
I'm no tech guy, but in my understanding, AI is just a tool, that in our capitalist nightmare of a world only amplifies opression and profit oriented practices over people and the planet but it's nowhere near being sentient or actually thinking
Exactly. It's almost impossible to imagine anything about AI being 'good' because so little of any real substance is permitted to work for 'good'.
It'll work for profit, just like everything else.
AI will be used to replace human labor, after which the vast majority of humanity will be exterminated. Not by the AI itself, that is, but by its wealthy human owners. That's my prediction.