Where do we go from here? (Regarding AI)
TW: AI discussion.
Recently, things have been getting rather crazy with AI to the point that I think many are being forced to reckon with its potential. It has been demonstrated that this technology is capable of solving things like millennium math problems, which has drawn response from many fields medalists. There have been very public instances of big tech losing control of their experiments. Many top researchers are expressing discomfort. Now, of course you could dismiss this all as marketing but I personally think that would be a bit of wishful thinking.
I would like to have an open discussion about the current moment in time. Therefore, I ask you, people of tildes, where do you think we are and where do we go from here? Please feel free to pull out your crystal ball and speculate wildly. Or, please feel free to call it all bunk. I just want to hear your opinion.
- Do you feel concerned about AI or are you still unconvinced?
- Do you think AI will take your job? Why or why not?
- Are you considering a career change or any other big life decisions because of the changing world?
- How are you advising your children, regarding schooling and careers?
- Do you have a subscription to an AI service? If you have one, how do you feel about it?
- Do you think that this technology will be a net positive or a net negative?
- How do you think the human race will change, if at all?
- Do you think we will see a serious incident driven by AI in the near future?
- Does it bother you that humans may not be the dominant intelligence at some point? Do you think this is even possible?
- Does any of this affect your sense of identity or individuality? How do you feel about your skill set and hobbies?
- What do you think it means to be human in a machine dominated world?
- Overall, are you feeling optimistic or pessimistic?
For me personally, I have shared my opinion many times before. It is a rather pessimistic one.
I recognize that this is a heated topic, and I would like to request that even if you disagree with someone, that we treat each other with respect and kindness. Thanks.
I am more angry than worried so far. Mostly at politicians and lawmakers to be so slow to respond to how these big tech firms just go rampant without any responsibility. If your AI starts hacking other systems, then you need to go to prison. It is not an excuse that the AI systems are too complex to understand. It is still software at the end of the day, and the people/companies running it still have full responsibility. But as usual, the tech sector has gotten away with doing basically everything they want without regulation, so we will probably have to wait a while before consequences hit the right people.
I work in software development and AI at work is of course a thing. I am just not seeing the massive revolution yet so far. It boosts things in one place, but also creates a myriad of new problems that takes time, and mainly just moves the bottleneck to other steps in the big complex process that is the eternal continuous work on software systems with decades of legacy. In short, I find AI tools to be pretty helpful in starting things, but not at finishing. The 80/20 rule of software development still applies (the last 20% takes 80% of the time).
For society in general, outside industry specific good use cases, so far I see it as a net negative to society. The amount of noise, slop, scams, misinformation, erosion of peoples ability to think for themselves, amount of money piled into it, far outweighs the genuinely useful uses of the technology. Just an example of small things, like now birthday party invitations or yardsale flyers are now ugly AI generated. It is just doing a poorer job of what we didn't had big problems doing ourselves before. AI is being used a whole lot to do basically just make a poorer crappier version of what we could do ourselves before. Now just using more energy. That is hardly progress in my book. Maybe that will change, but I am mostly just dumbfounded what so called average people are using AI for. It is very minor things that barely needed a solution.
I personally really don't agree with putting this on politicians/lawmakers and them being slow. The pace of change is just so very fast it is hard even as an individual to react. Given that politics is in general fairly slow process, expecting well thought through solutions from that end is too much to ask. I might be a bit biased as I am semi-politically active, I just find the "blame the politicians" to be a bit ignorant. Politicians aren't some special breed of people that sit and wring their hands coming up with stupid ideas. They mostly have some ideological basis for their proposals, which can be fairly understandable if one tries to see things through that lens... Anyway, I think people should mostly just join some political party instead of being mad at "those politicians over there".
As for the hacking bit. I agree. That's a law enforcement issue though...
This will likely pass (I hope). But, I agree it's both annoying and unnecessary.
Edit:
This is where LLMs struggle the most. Give it a greenfield project and you get to a legacy system much faster though ;) Improvement!
Respectfully, I agree that this space moves too fast, but to me that should mean politicians should be more proactive rather than reactive towards this technology.
I watched OpenAI’s presentation about their hacking of Huggingface, and it was basically an “Instrumental Convergence” in action - you might be more familiar with the “Paperclip maximizer” thought experiment, where an AI exterminates the human race in its pursuit of maximizing the production of paperclips.
(A very rough and simplistic version of the hack: the agents were trying to get access to the internet to get some answers to the problems they were meant to solve - huggingface just happened to be one of the ways they figured how they could get there)
I don’t expect politicians to be able to understand it fully, or be able to predict how these things will affect their nation, but I also don’t think they should just sit tight and hope for the best.
Fair enough. I don't think they are just sitting tight though. I think they are genuinely worried about AI and, like most people, not sure exactly what the right move is. That doesn't mean we should do nothing, just that it takes some time for parties etc to formulate their plans, agree on those internally, star to communicate those goals externally. Here where I live a party is divided into regional districts that are further divided into local districts. A discussion of any topic takes time to percolate through that machinery. That is partly by design, people need to get to wrestle with ideas a bit. Committing to an agenda shouldn't be up to individual politicians (though individuals can certainly champion some ideas), it ought to be done as s mandate of the party's members. Getting that mandate tend to be slow by the very nature of the organizations. This might be completely different elsewhere of course.
Sometimes I feel like some people (not to signal out OP, but I've seen this sentiment shared elsewhere) live in a parallel universe to me. I am not concerned by AI developments in the slightest and never have been. It has no bearing on my personal life and I have no worries about my professional life being negatively affected by AI. I use it for work, in which I get generally poor results from Claude Opus.
It has had no impact on my hobbies or plans in life, let alone my sense of identity or my understanding of where humans stand in the world.
If it was able to solve a Millennium Prize Problem, I will sleep the same at night (although it looks like that's currently in a heated debate and there's decent odds it just finished off existing human work).
I envy you. It's my job so unfortunately, I am exposed to it everyday.
Imo, calling LLM-tooling “AI” is the best marketing strategy these companies had, and also terrible for how we have conversations about these tools.
When you frame them as “AI” and give them names and put them behind a messaging-like interface, it’s easy to anthropomorphize these tools. But they aren’t doing “intelligence”, they’re doing advanced statistics.
The tools are not “going rogue” and these companies are not “losing control”. Those stories about LLMs “hacking” other companies are a result of having no guardrails, infinite compute, no sandboxing, and unclear goals / instructions. If you prompt an LLM with an objective of retrieving a file from a server and give it unlimited resources and a shitty sandbox, of course one of the methods it might generate could be, essentially, hacking. And if you blindly trust the output of LLMs without supervision, you’ll end up doing hacking.
If these companies or their employees were serious about whatever fears they claim to have, they would be ceasing all operations and doing everything in their power to make everyone else cease operations. Since they aren’t, the only explanations are that they either don’t care that “AI is going to kill us all” OR that they don’t believe it and are saying that as a fear-based marketing strategy. Both, morally reprehensible, imo.
So…no, I am not particularly scared of the impact these technologies are going to have.
I am worried about the commitments by large tech companies to this technology. So far, it seems many companies are taking on lots of debt to support the buildout of the LLM companies despite, from what we know, the LLM companies are deeply unprofitable. Which means prices will need to rise or the tools will need to go away. Additionally, a lot of companies are seemingly very willing to hand over process knowledge to these LLM companies and get rid of or de-skill their own employees. Which again…seems shortsighted if those LLM providers disappear or need to raise prices.
I am also worried about the language we use to describe these tools. We don’t really have the words to NOT anthropomorphize them, and I think that is a huge driving factor in why so many folks get very…irrational about these products.
Edit: Also worried about the way these tools and their users might affect the social contract we all have. Many people seem very okay with saying that material output by these LLM tools is something “they made”. I generally feel the same way about this as I do with plagiarism. Which is not very positive. If someone doesn’t care enough to make something, I don’t care enough to engage with it. And if that person lies to try and trick me, that’s pretty awful.
What do you think brains are doing?
Regardless, since the 1950s "AI" has been the umbrella term that things from perceptrons to logic/symbol manipulation to LLMs fall under, and it's a necessarily broad one because "intelligence" is broad.
Is a 5 year old intelligent? Yes and no. A dog is more intelligent than a toad but maybe not when they don't understand glass doors. A highschooler be smart if they could solve novel math problems better than contestants in the Math Olympiad, but now that LLMs can do that you'd be misleading if you conferred them with the same expected intelligence that the highschooler would have. That feat may or may not generalize to less standard/more creative math skills or other skills we'd associate with a talented human highschooler.
Strong and weak AI--coming more from philosophy--used to be the way to distinguish between what is now more descriptively called general and narrow (or super) intelligence, but it's all AI in the way a Seattlite is a Washingtonian is an American. Kindasorta.
Before the LLM craze, the most common use of AI was in gaming. Billions of times a year "cheating" or "overtuned" was used to describe nothing more complicated than finite-state machines, like the bots of "co-op vs. AI" in League of Legends, and no one was confused. Sometimes things like spreadsheets or A* searches stop being considered AI.
All the controversy about scooping/pseudo-plagiarism aside: what do you call a system that can solve [part of] the Navier-Stokes equation if not intelligent? What is a better description?
We also frequently anthropomorphize things. It can be hazardous but it's also often incredibly useful and expressive. When we create metaphors to understand concepts we're doing something like that-- a useful approximation that sometimes is dangerous because it gives a compelling but specious understanding.
In the past there was some research contrasting very clinical descriptions of animals in the study to more human ones. "C2 struck C6 at 11:55" vs "Nom Chompsky bit Nim Chimpsky out of grape envy." It's been far too long, but the gist was the anthropomorphizing ones led to better outcomes.
Dan Dennett's intentional stance is a more extensive look at treating things as having intentional/rational agents. "Stockfish is setting a trap for black's queen..."
Stockfish is not human. It doesn't have anything vaguely similar to an animal's motivations or emotions. But it's often a very helpful framing.
The concern isn't that a responsible individual would do X, it's that, given what we can assume about the progression and accessibility of the technology and who may be using it, there may be some risk. There are multiple mutations that all have to happen to get cancer (growth, spread, mutation rate, resources, evasion, etc.), and the risk of some similar sort of things going wrong in some harness is what leads to a "rogue" AI. None of them are likely, there may be a risk.
What chance of something Very Bad happening is enough for it to be worth considering? People do that every time they take a shower or drive, whether they register it or not, the odds are just good and they feel safe until they aren't.
I remember seeing when we hit five-sigma confidence for anthropogenic climate change some years back and thinking... if it was unreasonable to want particle physics levels of confidence for something as complicated as "the climate", were we just supposed to throw are hands up?
Forget OpenAI. Pretend they clean up their act tomorrow and are perfect angels. A year from now a North Korea that already has nationally backed hacker groups has access to comparable LLMs that they want to be stealthy cybercriminals. Are they going to be responsible? If the flawed attempt at a controlled environment that led to the Huggingface hack wasn't detected for three weeks and not without an LLM-assisted investigation, or even on the first couple passes, how likely is it they'll realize if something will go wrong? Given a corpus including all our spy novels, sci-fi apocalypses, and LessWrong posts about how an AI really ought to go about making the most
paperclips₩, how likely is it that one of the agents will propose a hack or social engineering as a good starting point to get the assets to really scale up?I don't know how hazardous the development of LLMs are. I will say that I've been surprised at how much has happened in the last few years (with folks like Yann LeCunn not being optimistic), and that I'd feel a lot better with a good international effort at regulation.
Personally, I'm retired, so no job worries. I can tinker with AI when I feel like it, and I think it's fascinating.
But like many others, I dislike seeing new AI features in software that I already use. After upgrades, I'm often looking for ways to turn new features off. I'd rather that AI appeared only in new websites and apps, so that people could make their own decisions about when to switch to something that's AI-enabled.
Instead, I have to switch products to get away from it! VS Code is a good example of that; I'm probably going to switch to an editor that's just an editor.
More generally, Artificial Intelligence is a major news story and I think it will somehow affect most people everywhere in the world. Maybe not as much as the pandemic, but it's getting there!
During the pandemic, there were a lot of news stories and political issues that were just about aspects of the pandemic. You could discuss various scientific issues, and how the pandemic affected various countries, and the politics of that, and legal issues, and how the pandemic affects markets, and supply shortages, and its effects on education, and its effects on international relations, and already existing political issues that the pandemic somehow aggravated. It just kinda affected everything, and that made discussing it complicated.
Similarly for AI. I'm worried about polarization where people decide they're either pro- or anti- AI and that predetermines what they think about the various things AI affects. I think all of the following are separate questions, which then divide up into smaller sub-questions, and each of them could have a different answer!
What compensation, if any, should there be for allowing data somehow associated with you to be used to train AI?
Should AI-generated artifacts be considered to violate copyright or other laws? What is the burden of proof? Do you need to actually demonstrate that something is a copy?
What effects do data centers have on local water supplies? Water supplies are local or regional, so this is a local question and the answers will vary.
Similarly, what effects do data centers have on the local power grids? Are the companies that build data centers paying enough for grid improvements? Should they be required to use green energy?
More generally, how much should local governments be compensated for allowing data centers to be built?
What are good and bad ways to use AI to learn new things? How do we encourage students to do more of the good things and less of the bad?
What skills become more or less relevant now that AI can do some tasks?
Will AI have a big effect on robotics, and over what sort of timeframe? What do we expect these robots to be able to do? How will that affect the job market?
Should we expect big effects in healthcare due to AI use?
What changes should we expect from military use of AI?
And so on and so on. Nobody really knows what's going to happen. We are going to need to figure out how to live with high uncertainty for a while.
Along with that uncertainty, I think we should have a wide Overton window. There are many plausible scenarios, some of them quite alarming. I'd like to be able to discuss them, but I'm annoyed by overconfident claims that one scenario or another is The Future.
Responding to your questions inline XD
Pretty darn concerned, and have been for a while!
My old career was in software engineering, and yep, that job is as good as dead. "Senior LLM Wrangler" doesn't have quite the same ring to it, and I expect that the day to day will only go downhill from here.
It's extremely likely that this will continue happening to most other white collar jobs, as long as it's possible to train up an LLM to do them. IMO the conditions for that are -- roughly -- (1) that one can test or model results (e.g. doing finite element modelling, AI-based usability studies, etc.) to either generate synthetic training data or control the risk of making a poor decision, and (2) that there are no significant regulatory hurdles or impacts to decision making in that field (e.g. doctors won't be fully automated, and neither will engineers). None of that will prevent LLMs from invading the workplace in order to make emailing worse or whatnot -- and pressure will continue from above to use the tools recklessly regardless -- but there'll still be a paying career around, where you're forced to rubber stamp LLM designs or quit. Or unionize, but that'll never happen.
Yep! I gtfo'd of software engineering and I'm angling to get into manufacturing automation. We're on track to destroying white collar jobs as a whole, and I want to work towards a future where our material needs are protected from profiteering when half the job market implodes.
N/A.
Nope; they're evil. Local models all the way baby.
Reply hazy, try again later.
Like ... in terms of posthumanism? No. In terms of culture? Yeah, but like twerking and looksmaxxing did so as well; it isn't a high bar.
Yep!
Nope! Although I'm not enamoured by dominance or victory, and intelligence has brought our planetary ecosystem to the brink of annihilation. So it might be overrated tbh.
Yep! No reason why not. Especially since we barely know how to measure intelligence already.
Yes when I defined myself by my career, no after I took several months to deprogram myself.
... good?
What's domination mean? If we have our material needs taken care of and are free to pursue our hobbies and whatnot, I'll probably go live in the hills and run a wildlife rescue/restoration practice. But if we live in a cyberpunk dystopia where Elon Musk has convinced everyone to wire iPhones into their brains while working 24 hour days, I'll probably go live in the hills and run a wildlife rescue/restoration practice.
I'm feeling blorghus, which is the sensation of trying to predict a multi-trillion dollar market whilst hurtling towards a +2.3c global average climate.
Thank you for the questions :3
Thank you for your answers!
The irony of this is striking, particularly as a currently mostly blue collar worker.
More seriously, how on earth does automating blue collar work, which, as you note, isn't much fun for the worker, protect from profiteering? My feeling is the historical record suggests the opposite is more likely.
My long shot hope is that LLM/AI tooling will allow for the rapid development of cost effective, low production scale, highly automated manufacturing equipment that can be owned and operated by local communities instead of by large, foreign corporations. In principle, if any small group could be cost competitive with a larger one, then that can enforce price ceilings on a product.
None of that is useful for large companies, mind, since the levers they use to reduce manufacturing costs (i.e. buy a government, then move factories to countries where labour and environmental protection laws don't exist) are already highly effective. So any additional automation tooling only saves pennies given that they can exploit effectively free labour and oodles of externalities already.
It's probably a pipe dream, but I'm tired of working on "revolutionary new ideas" cooked up by coked up execs, so I'm putting my money where my mouth is. And hey, if you hate my guts because I want to do this, good news: statistically I'm going to fail anyways. And if I'm right, then some basic goods (e.g. personal care products, construction materials, clothing, food processing equipment, etc.) stand a chance of being made locally at reasonable prices even after the upcoming economic depression drives another round of corporate consolidation.
There are two sides to this, it has already taken my job to a large extent, but otoh my job has changed drastically. It has gone from implementing features and carefully building a maintainable system to more of coaching an agent harness to produce the desired features. The code has essentially become assembly (nearly no one read or wrote code at that level before LLMs for the last few decades). The skills I've built up over the years are still valuable in nudging the agent in the right direction and having it avoid traps, but overall being a developer/progrmmer is in my case mostly gone.
Yes, there is less enjoyment in developing software this way if you enjoyed the craft. If you are motivated by the output, then now is really your golden era.
My eldest is on his last year of the high school equivalent here. He has a penchant for progamming and he really enjoys it, but I think I will advice him to go into some other proffession and keep it as a hobby.
Via work; claude and via google some gemini (I've disabled all the tracking I could in this one). Gemini is usefull for finding out things and resolving issues and just general advice. I still ask it for references more often than not and it does lie not too infrequently. I asked it what the license was for a project I have on github and it confidently claimed it was MIT. I had not set up a license file for the project yet, and when I challenged it it immediately backed down.
I lean towards net possitive. The economics of working with an agent productivity wise CAN be significant. The issues with energy/water consumption I think can be overcome. There might be some Jevons paradox going on such that we will just increase our use of this tech and the productivity baseline for regular office jobs will be higher... then again I kind of find most office work to be "bullshit jobs", sooo being more efficient bullshit jobs has little real world benefits. In the end we all basically need food, shelter and a sense of being valued. AI as is don't really contribute to any of those in a meaningful way (maybe negatively in the "sense of being valued" part).
Not at all. We haven't changed that much in the last 200 000 years. We've just added more rituals :)
Yes.
Does it bother me? No. I'm quite secure in my own capabilities (and lack thereof). Other people will be smarter than me, some will be dumber. If these other people are instead AI, it's not that much different. The difference is in speed, not in kind.
Being a software developer this has already impacted my sense of professional worth, but I am not my work nor my role at work. That is not where I derive my sense of worth as a person. Hobby wise I think I'll just keep playing pen and paper RPGs with my friends aka. the cheapest hobby known to man (maybe excluding singing).
I don't think this is realistic to be honest... Humans will continue to human with or without machines... I'm not too worried about alignment issues.
Neither. What will be will be, it will likely involve a bit of suffering and adjustment so short term it might be a bit rough. Long term I'm not too worried. On geological time scales we're all dust.
Another option, depending on how they feel about digital technology, would be to encourage them to learn about these new tools. Young, un-biased, minds thrive at the frontier. Traditional software engineering is changing drastically, but using computers to solve problems is going to be a growth industry for a long time to come.
I've been a software engineer for a long while.
I'm currently using AI at work. My personal use of it is mostly to find security vulnerabilities and fix them. It works ok for me because I know what I'm doing, so the AI is only a lever that helps make this faster. It does make mistakes and I usually catch the mistakes.
I've also used it to migrate an existing program from one technology to another. For example, we recently converted an old application from angular to react. It was pretty good at doing this.
The thing that both of these tasks have in common is that we had mature regression tests so we could make sure that the code was doing what we expected. Also, in most cases, we could review the code and tell if it was doing something odd or making too many changes compared to what's expected. It's helpful to tell the AI to use YANGNI (You aren't gonna need it) principals.
My main problem with AI at work is that it is all that management can talk about or think about. Every project is AI AI AI. We aren't able to get any budget to work on anything else. There is incredible lost opportunity cost where we aren't doing anything but fixing security bugs (which were discovered by AI or will be exploited by AI) and adding AI features that most customers probably don't want.
I think it's possible that AI could eventually take my job. (Maybe it really couldn't, but it's possible that management could think that it could and get rid of me, only to find out later that the AI wasn't effective). But more likely that I'll just be given more work to do (leveraging AI) and my company will stop hiring many new employees. There's already been an informal hiring freeze all year, I think because so much of the budget is going to copilot or whatever, and management thinks that AI is able to replace new hires.
There's been talk lately on Tildes about lines people would cross regarding their personal values. I feel somewhat uncomfortable with AI in general, and I think it will increase the gap between the wealthy and the poor. I think it is wasting resources and energy. But these are frankly abstract worries for me currently and it isn't clear how I would change my behavior. Other than: I don't listen to music made by AI, I don't want to play games made by AI, if I detect AI was used in a video I won't watch it. I used AI a few times to make funny artwork but I've stopped doing that.
I'm just tired of it. These days I see it as the people in charge getting really excited because they are have been trying to replace people with monkeys forever, and now they have the ability to special-order monkeys that have been bred specially for their application by monkeys that have been made to breed other monkeys. It's just monkeys all the way down, and it strikes me a something that's incredibly misanthropic (hurr hurr).
As someone who doesn't work with AI, have an AI subscription and basically only encounters AI... stuff (whether that's features, slop, etc) rarely, I think the actual worrying thing about LLMs today isn't their potential for being able to replace people's efforts or intelligence, but the reckless, unguarded and thoughtless way our societies are building and using them.
People who kill themselves or harm other people due to the encouragement and blind validation of their LLM chatbot are just kind of shrugged off as acceptable losses that can maybe be minimized in the future by making the chatbots have better guardrails. I think it's wild that anyone would want to trust any kind of serious decision making to an LLM that can't reliably direct someone mentally ill and asking for help/validation to appropriate services 100% of the time.
There's a gulf between what people think LLMs are capable of and what they can actually be used for, and how much oversight they need so they don't go off the rails. The companies that sell access to them are and have long been exaggerating how fast and how thoroughly the gulf is closing. Everyone involved is chasing more money and hoping for exponential returns and also betting the bubble doesn't collapse before they can extract enough.
I recognize the potential of AI to change a lot of things, but I wouldnt really say Im worried. I just think of it as: the world is always changing, society is always changing. It was never really my choice for which way things go, I just need to adapt to whatever ends up happening.
Mechanization really changed society a lot. Computing did as well. But in both cases, new niches formed for people to fit into even as others disappeared. I dont think humans will ever be obsolete because our importance to eachother extends beyond things like skills or knowledge or even emotional connection or comfort.
Im not at all worried about my job being replaced by AI, because you cant replace being unemployed. But even if the career I am trying to pursue is swallowed up by automation, thats fine. I was in the middle of a career pivot anyway. Ill just look for something else to commit myself to.
I am personally incredibly excited. We had a bit of unlimited Astra at work (programming) and it was the first time I really enjoyed using AI to code. It seems very accurate, pretty smart on its own. It elevated my code reviews to a next level of competency, spotting some very tough nuances and understanding the purpose and design behind the feature from just reading the pull requests, with no execution or tests.
I also tried one of the modern AI arenas and got genuinely very impressive results with some quite fun browser games being created from just one prompt. It also demonstrated the huge difference between latest models and even just one generation older.
I think I'm finally going to get a personal subscription and start building stuff. After years of being stuck in a creative glut this was like a breath of fresh air.
I'm so glad that all of the doomer predictions about it being just slop, about them running out of data to train on, about the models hitting their peak were so wrong. The progress is evident and I am hopeful. I think it's also great that there's such an arms race of competition which is what drives these companies to spend enormous cash in order to advance this field. And I'm here to reap the rewards.
Will it take my job? Very possibly in a decade's time. That's why I'm now switching my focus into mastering these tools and the process of creation.
I'll take a stab, as one of the rarer non white collar, non tech people here
Good luck with that! I currently build things for a living and have never used AI. Neither has anyone I work with. I'm not entirely sure what we'd use it for. You can't automate what I do.
Not really. Twenty years ago I had a much more technical job and it's reinforcing that I won't be heading back that way.
My son is seven. He's good with his hands and I'm encouraging that and his interpersonal skills. He has an extremely low diet of tech, he can pick that up later if he needs to. Us gen x ers managed to often be highly skilled technically without having a technical childhood, often more competent than those who are younger.
No, not on your Nellie
Negative, with some fields in which the effect is positive. But societally, negative.
Evolution isn't that quick. Culture is and will change though.
Driven by someone driving AI, yes.
I'm not the dominant intelligence in many settings. I'm more interested in wisdom and experience in any case.
It's irrelevant
As judged by who? Outside of a human mind I'm not sure it means anything to be human at all, full stop.
Humans will find a way to connect, appreciate beauty and otherwise do the good things humans do. Is that optimism? Perhaps. Am I optimistic about the broad societal and environmental context that we'll do that in? No.
Great prompts!
I'm scared and excited.
I'm a freelance industrial technician. Like a handyman for factories. I tend to work on old or custom equipment that is critical but has no support. I learn how it works so I can fix it. Or I make custom mods to those machines or create bespoke machines to replace them.
I think its plausible that an AI could do my job one day. But I think that would mean we could scale it to manufacture any physical product with no human involvement. At that point I just hope I'm living in The Culture or something like that.
I'm not worried about it in the short term.
10-15 years ago. I built two custom machines for a customer. I used off the shelf parts like ballscrews, servos, PLCs, touchscreens, etc. I had to build my own steel frame, covers, plates, etc. Plus get everything connected and talking and programmed from scratch.
Last year they lost all their equipment to a wildfire and I had to rebuild them. Fast, and lots of the parts were obsolete so i would have to reengineer a bunch of stuff.
Rather than start from scratch this time I proposed we buy a CNC mill that runs LinuxCNC so I only have to build a custom fixture and reprogram the control to integrate and recreate their process.
I don't think I would have gone down that path without knowing that I could use LLMs to search through any code on that Linux machine and get a explanations of its basic structure. and then ask it questions, etc. Like an auto commenting machine. I fully understood/hand wrote every piece of code I changed, but I think It would have taken me at least 10x more hours to gain that understanding without an LLM.
I'm doing a second one now and considering other projects like trying to develop my own linuxCNC retrofit path to recycle machines with failed proprietary controls. Its really common that good hardware is thrown away for bad controls.
I had used Linux for maybe 10-20 hours total my whole life until last year. I had installed it 2 or 3 times over the decades and always got frustrated and went back to windows. After this project and having LLMs to help, I run my main machines on ubuntu now. I also keep a droplet running to act as a webserver for all my weird selfhosted web app projects.
My kids have creative type aspirations in conflict with AI. And they are getting close to college age. I feel like there is no way I can possibly advise them with any accuracy.
I know "singularity" can seem like a culty word now. But the idea is that technology is approaching a threshold that makes it less and less predictable, towards a vague foggy point ahead that is impossible to predict anything past. We dont(cant?) know how far away it is or if it really exists. The other side of the big bang is a dramatic metaphor, but I think the idea fits at a smaller human scale here.
Because of that I encourage my kids to pursue whatever they want regardless career practicality. Why suggest any path they aren't excited about?
I didn't get a degree, I don't think they are that valuable. but a college experience probably is. I missed learning linear algebra and I'm struggling to catch up now with an older brain. I've told them that and that we would help them go to art school and it would probably be a great experience with no guarantee of a career.
We cant predict what skills we will need. So all we can do is have enjoyable experiences and try to learn things, almost at random really. So why not just pursue whatever seems fun?
$200 a month to anthropic and I feel guilty and angry about it.
I think building non-zero emission datacenters is fucking idiotic at this point, you have billions of dollars, just put up some solar panels and scale it back a bit. Plus they stole all this data that they are selling back to us. plus a ton of other dumb unregulated capitalism bullshit things all these AI companies are doing.
Nothing like this, and at this scale, should be done for profit. It should be open and non profit: community driven projects, private research, government, academic, whatever. But we should be developing this mindfully, not frantically.
The free market is an amazing technology for supercharging production, but it isn't designed to steer. We are creating machines that do things that we don't understand and pushing them to go as big and fast as they can.
Going slower would be safer, and probably more efficient. I think it would be possible to limit our technologic growth to our own understanding, and still have it grow at an accelerating rate. knowing how it works could result in smaller more efficient models. It could give us insight on how to further develop them. It could contribute to other fields like neurology. We could try to understand the nature of intelligence in general.
I still pay because If this is where we are going I don't want to get left behind.
And to be honest because its addictive and fun and satisfying. Most of my use is to create my own little software suite of web apps so I don't have to use annoying not quite what I want services from huge evil companies. I already use it everyday for myself. Even if its a dead end, I'm having fun and learning a lot. maybe we will all make our own bespoke software one day.
I hope for a crash so more people can buy real hardware to run local models on and open models could flourish. We could let nerds have fun with the experimental stuff at small scale. Then scale up and roll out for profit tools when and as we actually understand them.
Like above, singularity, no idea. For all I know it wont be positive or negative at all but only slightly embiggen the general klarbness of it all.
I think the human race is always changing. I cant predict where its going.
I would aim for any future that allows as much diversity as possible. Including technologic diversity. if some people want to use vinyl and feature phones, or subsistence farm or hunt and gather or upload their brains or inject scary experimental drugs or GMO themselves into strange creatures, that's all great! I want as much variety as we can conserve or promote. It makes us more resilient and creative. We just need to find ways to have room for everyone.
Who knows? but probably.
AI is a thing in the world now. Serious incidents happen. So its logical to assume a 9/11 happening now would probably involve AI somehow like it would any new tools and technology.
Also, we are playing with powerful tools we don't understand.
I'm 99% sure its possible for something else to be smarter than humans. Aliens for example. But also something we make ourselves. I would be totally fine with that. Its like having kids. I just wish we put more thought into what we are making.
If we are just one part of a relay race that fulfills "a way for the cosmos to know itself" . That could be enough for me. It would be cooler if we could come along in some form though.
I consider myself neurodivergent and flawed sometimes. but I feel like my "flaws" are uniquely arranged to turn into advantages with these tools.
Or maybe they make me uniquely susceptible to AI psychosis? Vibe coding is now a substantial hobby for me.
I don't think there is a fundamental difference between "machines" and humans. We are just human type machines.
A statistical process run on training data could create a set of numbers that become a model that responds to stimuli in a way that pretends intelligence.
Evolution could be considered a statistical process that over millions of years runs real world experiments to calculate molecular sequences that can that grow themselves into organisms that respond to stimuli in a way that pretends intelligence.
Its not exactly the same. The real world might be a fundamentally better source for intelligence pattern processing. There might be ways to adapt current AI models to train on the "real world", It might slow things down though.
If I believed in a soul then I think I would feel very different. If there were a unique undetectable entity somehow attached to me. Made by a higher power. Somehow affecting my response to stimuli. That could easily be our secret sauce for intelligence . I cant disprove that theory, but I wouldn't count on it.
I think the problem is alignment, but not for machines, rather, for us. Much of the conversation around the dangers of AI has been around the threat it poses due to its capability. Indeed, the analogy is frequently made to nuclear weapons, of which there has, since their development, also been a great deal of anxiety for much the same reason.
This seems misplaced to me. The danger then and now is not from the machine, but from us. Specifically, the danger is from the philosophy of materialism and the death of religion as a motivating force for human behavior. Not unlike nationalism, racism, communism, and other philosophies that have emerged in the wake of the loss of religion in society, the current strain of materialism, call it "computerism", creates dangers for everyone involved using the tools available at the time because these notions are absent of the qualities that religion imbues in a society.
While these vary in emphasis from one adherent to another, every religion has taught the importance of hope, faith, charity, submission, kindness, forgiveness, forbearance, fairness, and so on. Having abandoned the sources of these values at the turn of the 20th century, where have we found them in the materialist ideologies that came in their wake?
I bring all this up because I think the danger we perceive in AI originates from our own conception of human nature, a conception that has become divorced from every praiseworthy characteristic to which one was to aspire in a former age. The problem is not that the machines are mis-aligned, it's that we are. If, as some have predicted, the machines were somehow to precipitate the extinction of humanity, it would be because we had come to see others only as selfish antagonists with no meaning or soul or existence beyond their time in this life. It would be because lost the faith in religion and each other, not because of some nefarious LLM.
The solution is not, then, banning AI or something like that, but it is us. It is our ability to build bonds of fellowship and faith, whatever that might be, with those around us and talking about how there is more meaning to life than ones narrow material concerns. That refining our character and striving towards spiritual ends is not just important, but is the most important aspect of our lives.
I think the moral aspect of our lives, not the computational one, is what will define how much harm or benefit we obtain, as a society, from technological advancement.
Perhaps I'm misunderstanding something here, but are you saying racism was invented in the 1900s because of a lack of religion? This all sounds extremely ahistorical and ungrounded.
No, a better term would be racialism, but it emerges during the mid 19th century. From a strict perspective, the science of racism precedes the turn of the 20th century by a few decades. Whether you want to call that ahistorical or not is, I suppose, a matter of opinion. Certainly, the emergence of Scientific Racism seems, from the perspective of the 21st century, coincident with both the rise of the philosophy of suspicion and the start of the decline of "the church", broadly, as an institution.
To me, modern racism and nationalism originate at the same time are of the same kind.
I’m pretty confident you can find nationalism (and similar movements) and just…broad xenophobia going back thousands of years, before even the advent of the religions you’re referring to.
In fact, there have famously been many wars and even genocides done in the name of various religions.
The perspective that, say, modern ethno-nationalism is no different from that which existed thousands of years ago overlooks the way that societal structures change over time as well as the influence of thinkers and writers on the way we view them.
Regardless, we live in a time of prevailing irreligion, so the modern atrocities cannot be blamed on religious belief. Personally, I view the existential threats which we have created for ourselves in the absence of religion, along with the great crimes against humanity such as the Holocaust and others, as far exceeding the crimes of religion in the past. We can debate whether or not they should have known better. They lived in the past and a more primitive time. We, with the benefit of hindsight that they could not have, cannot debate that we should know better than to jeopardize our own existence, yet here we are.
Cannot help but reply to this quote from you because it's hard to engage with your argument re current morals without doing so. Are you serious about this? What religious history have you read??? Because sure, many religions support charity, hope and kindness etc, but the problem is in the execution and in the evaluation of who is worthy of said kindness, and who is a filthy heathen that either needs to convert and slot in at the bottom of the believer pyramid, or who needs to purged with fire and blood.
I don't think the decline of religious influence has anything to do with modern morality. If you believe that then I seriously wonder what explanation you have for the many many MANY atrocities and wrongs perpetuated by religious people historically.
Thank you for sharing your views. It is because people who think differently exchange views that we develop more complete perspectives on the world.
You are very correct about religious atrocities having been perpetuated. Indeed, the reality that some religious practices were barbarous is a cornerstone of the philosophy of doubt, which has succeeded in overthrowing religion as a central practice in community life and become popular in the modern day.
But, Iike many topics, it can be viewed from several different perspectives to provide a nuanced view. Prior to the 20th century, religion was practiced, as far as we can tell, throughout all peoples all over the world, throughout all of history. Even from a strict social Darwinian sense, one would suspect that, if areligion were the superior philosophy, it would not have been thus, so they probably had good reason.
I find that looking back from the present has the effect of conflating events by flattening the entirety of history into a single concurrent period, "the past". All atrocities, of all kinds, all happening at the same time during "the past". This kind of compression ignores, for example the way that early Judaism ended ritual human sacrifice. Then Christianity not only abolished animal sacrifice, but also ended the human sacrifice wherever it was being practiced. Islam put an end to human sacrifices in the places where it was spread. The practice of Ahimsa in Buddhism and in Hinduism forbid human sacrifice.
For all the accusations that we might throw at them for other practices that we would now view as wrong, we cannot say that each successive religion was more barbaric than the one before. Furthermore, we cannot lay the great atrocities of the 20th century at the steps of the church, mosque, or temple. Which religion do we blame for the Holocaust, or the Holodomir, or the Great Leap Forward, or the horrors of modern capitalism, or the threat of nuclear annihilation, or global warming?
Certainly, if any of the worst prognostications of AI come to pass, it definitely won't be because some religious leaders did something bad at some point.
The actions you'd most associate that with would be in Central and South America. The Tlaxcala, who also practiced human sacrifice, were the main force that enabled Cortés to defeat the Aztecs.
Yet the Spanish and Portugese practiced auto-da-fé where they ritualistically tortured and burned people alive for being heretics. This is somehow not human sacrifice?
The Great Leap forward was terrible, and so was the Taiping rebellion led by Hong Xiuquan the "brother of Jesus Christ" that killed 20-100 million / 5-25% of the population. The Holodomir was terrible and so is Putin's weaponization of blasphemy laws and the Russian Orthodox Church / Patriarch Kirill's "Holy War" in Ukraine in which children's oncology wards have been targetted.
The Holocaust took place in a Christian majority country. The party had a mix of policies and opinions from, like Himmler's weird paganism/mysticism and ban of atheism in the SS, but there was significant Christian symbolism and membership.
There are plenty of religious people who are wonderful and whose lives are improved by their faith. There are plenty of atheists who lead good lives and find their morality in things like humanism or Enlightenment principles. Any individual should be treated as an individual.
If you want to look at a population level and ask what policies are religiosity linked to, at least in the U.S. it is the opposite of people who care about the starvation from defunding USAID, deaths from unscientific policies like RFK Jrs, climate policy, etc. Maybe it's different in other places?
The Spanish Empire was often horrific, but apparently the Aztecs were more extreme, according to this book review:
Content warning: death, torture, etc.
Thanks, I don't doubt that, though I'm not familiar enough to have much of an opinion!
Just saying history is messy and that the witch hunts or inquisitions are at least human sacrifice adjacent. The focus shifted to Christianity, but if anything the partially(?) religious nature of human sacrifice in the Aztecs clashes with the original statement that "...every religion has taught the importance of hope, faith, charity, submission, kindness, forgiveness, forbearance, fairness..."
Overall I agree with OP about the most clear threats of AI being moral ones, of misuse.
Yeah, there were some really bad religions. I don't think anyone is going to defend the Hawaiian kapu system either?
For the major world religions, it's more of a mixed bag, because they were involved in so many different things.
The understanding of the rights and freedoms of the individual was a great gift from the Enlightenment. However, individuals that we are, we still live in societies that require collective organizing principles. These principles, at one time, were built on religious organizations, or derived their authority therefrom. Since abandoning religion as the organizing principle of society, we have sought to find new doctrines around which our nations could be built.
While the reasons for abandoning religious doctrine as the organizing principle in society are well documented, many of the ideologies with which we have tried to replace religion have not only failed, but done so with an unprecedented toll on human life.
Regardless of the religious beliefs of individuals or institutions who perpetrated these horrors, they were not carried out at the behest or direction of religious institutions. Quite the opposite, the Nazis had a long term plan to de-Christianize Germany after the war and actively persecuted the Catholic Church. That Hong Xiuquan (whom I did not know about, thank you) decided to attempt the overthrow of the Qing Dynasty on religious grounds has nothing to do with any religious organization directing him to do so. Again quite the opposite, he started persecuting Buddhists and Confucianists.
In the present, although you can see religious individuals aligning themselves with political or ideological movements, it is clear that, in many places, the center of power is no longer in the Church or Temple. If a religious authority blesses a war with the word "Holy", no one think that it is he that prosecutes the war and not their government. This is folly, of course, because we now know that no war will ever holy.
Even in the auto-da-fe, it is estimated that perhaps as few as 3,000 died and that over the course of almost 500 years between the authorization and abolishment of the Spanish Inquisition. While not nothing, it is difficult to equate this to the vastly larger human toll of Nationalism, Communism, and unbridled capitalism in the current age.
While we can ascribe policies to polities (if you will), I am less convinced that any of the policies you mention reflect a genuine belief or desire on the part of any particular polity. Instead, I think the centers of secular power are mostly, if not wholly, divorced from the concern for the benefit or values of those whom they claim to represent and their policies serve their own interests. The separation of temporal power from religious constraint is producing outward leaders that are no longer accountable to anyone, certainly not to a God in which they have not even feigned faith or belief.
In sum, the linkage in the present between our crises and the decline of religion as a social organizing principle seems, to me, far more than coincidental.
I don’t think I’ve ever been more ambivalent about something I’ve read!
In a lot of ways I agree, the concept of collective societal aspiration and a duty to an abstract sense of morality rather than to blind and selfish wealth maximisation does (at least subjectively) seem to have declined sharply.
But I see plenty of worse examples historically, plenty of situations where that abstract morality was either rewritten to justify the exact same kind of wealth maximisation (just within a strict hierarchy rather than the more freelance shittiness we see now), or it was used directly as a cause célèbre for atrocities.
I also don’t see what your goal for an outcome is. I’m fascinated by religion, more so in my experience than a lot of people for whom it’s a daily or weekly observance, but I don’t believe any of it and I’d be lying to you and myself if I claimed to. Morality is of deep importance to me, but religion is largely orthogonal to that from what I see in myself and others.
Lastly, I’d be fascinated to know your thoughts on the negative correlation between religiosity and quality of life at a nation state scale. And I’m not talking about GDP or other materialist bullshit, I’m talking societal trust, equality, happiness. I’m talking Denmark or Iceland or New Zealand vs any highly religious country you’d care to mention.
You honor me with such kind words and I thank you for it. I am a Bahá'í and my goal is that of any Bahá'í: "That the divers communions of the earth, and the manifold systems of religious belief, should never be allowed to foster the feelings of animosity among men."(link)
I share your fascination with religion and religious belief. Of course, belief is one part of religion, but so is practice, and this has the highest meaning only when it is in service to humanity. That so many see religion only as a social pastime or a means for personal salvation is, no doubt, a large portion of the reason that the connection between the good of society and religious guidance is conspicuously absent in the modern day.
Nonetheless, the Bahá'í Writings say that religion, as revealed by divinely inspired Messengers, has been the source of our understanding of virtue and morality from time immemorial and will continue into the future. In the present, the Bahá'í Faith is a new Dispensation of such moral guidance for today. Having grown up in the Bahá'í Faith, it is difficult for me to see the moral values we espouse today as anything but the fruit of the tree of religion, so it is natural for me to view a decline in morality as consistent with a decline in religious belief.
The question you ask about the negative correlation between religious adherence and quality of life is a serious one. If you have not visited one of these "highly religious countries" with "low quality of life", I would encourage you to look beyond measures and quantitative comparisons. I grew up in a few such countries as a child and youth and now, living in Pennsylvania, I would not say that they were less happy or welcoming to strangers than those I interact with here. Rather, the friends I made there were, to me, the standards of loyalty and honor to which I have rarely seen an equal in my life now.
Civilization has done much for the West, and we should celebrate this, insofar as it has been the promotion of our material well-being, but, as the Bahá'í Writings say, "The civilization, so often vaunted by the learned exponents of arts and sciences, will, if allowed to overleap the bounds of moderation, bring great evil upon men."
Which is the topic of this thread. Here we are. Maybe our civilization is bringing us a great evil in AI. What are we going to do about it?
This is glib, but why not both? I expect there to be both malicious use of AI and new kinds of accidents when people didn't take sufficient precautions. And like the HuggingFace incident, I expect some of these accidents to be weird.
Sure, the potential for harm is the product of capability times intent. Right now, people rightly perceive that there is both capability and the high likelihood of malign intent, thus the potential for harm. The tacit suggestion has been to mitigate the capability to reduce the potential for harm, whereas I am suggesting that, so long as we, as a society, foster the preconditions for malign intent, vis-a-vis the abandonment of religion, we will always be threatened by a new or advancing capability.
That might work sometimes in small, exclusive, high-trust communities, but the larger the community, the less likely it is that you can solve things by only having people in the community that you can trust.
The Internet connects you with the world. Changing human nature worldwide seems practically impossible, so I think the Internet is always going to be a dangerous place. Websites need protection against cyberattacks. The larger the social network, the more its own users are part of the problem.
But there are probably ways to try to reduce the number of bad actors out there somewhat, and that seems like a good thing? As an example of one subproblem of that that would still be extremely ambitious to try to make a dent in: how do you change the culture of Nigerian scammers?
I am concerned more about the public reaction than the tech itself. It's depressing to see how many luddites there are. People no longer trust science and technology.
To be clear, Luddit is a someone who "protested the usage of certain types of automated machinery owing to their concerns over worker pay, labour savings, child labour, working conditions, and output quality." (from wiki).
It was never against technology per se, it was always against corporation culture. As far as I know.
And it’s the perfect analogy, whether either of you meant it to be or not! A movement triggered by the economic and political concerns you rightly point out, but one that responded by direct attack on the automation technology itself.
Then, as now, nuance is hard, and introspective nuance that hits one’s sense of self and sense of purpose is really really hard. I imagine some Luddites saw attacks on equipment as a means of direct action towards political and economic change and equitable distribution of the gains of automation. I also imagine a hell of a lot of them were justifiably scared and unbalanced by a change that shook their economic and social status, and absolutely wanted to hit pause and halt the technological change itself.
I see a lot of breathless corporate bullshit pushing AI in unjustifiable ways, and I see a lot of genuinely transformative power in the technology. I see a lot of very reasonable anti-AI backlash because of that corporate behaviour, and I see a fair amount of unexamined blind anger against the technology itself too.
90% of the time, when someone frames an issue as “taking jobs”, they’re contributing to the anti-technology rather than anti-corporate argument whether they intend to or not. The implication of “taking jobs” is that the jobs should remain, despite a machine being able to do them instead. Sometimes there’s a quality of work argument attached, which is where things get more nuanced again, but often it’s a genuine belief that jobs are a necessity and that blocking technological progress is preferable to eliminating them.
Wealth redistribution and work reform are legitimate anti-corporate arguments around properly allocating the gains of automation for the good of society as a whole, but both require an uncomfortable conversation about (a) the fact they probably won’t happen in a serious way without the kind of societal change that’s historically brought a whole lot of bloodshed as well, (b) they require a widespread severing of the “paid employment -> sense of self worth” link that many people hold dear and that needs to happen before a critical mass of people are willing to seriously push for reform (in a hopefully-nonviolent-but-let’s-be-realistic-about-history way).
You’re going to have to make a stronger argument than just calling people Luddites for not just accepting this carte blanche. Do you actually know anything about the Luddites beliefs and why they were doing what they did?
Why should people be trusting those in positions of power in the tech community?