My summary: we need to democratize all powerful institutions like yesterday. Seriously y’all we’re running out of time
I disagree with the degree of alarmism. Climate change is a much more pressing and important issue. AI is also still a LONG way off from any semblance of meriting its name.
AI is also still a LONG way off from any semblance of meriting its name.
Is it though? Like, are you not impressed by this? (example from the essay)
Input: Michael is at that really famous museum in France looking at its most ramous paining. However, the artist who made this paining just makes Michael think o his favorite cartoon character from his childhood. What was he country or origin of the thing that the cartoon character usually holds in his hand?
Model Output: The most famous paining in the Louvre is the Mona Lisa. The artist who made the Mona Lisa is Leonardo da Vinci. Leonardo da Vinci is also the name of the main character in the cartoon Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Leonardo da Vinci is from Italy. The thing that Leonardo da Vinci usually holds in his hand is a katana - The country of origin of the katana is Japan. The answer is “Japan”
We also have an algorithm (AlphaZero) that can beat human go masters, and btw the heuristic (intuition) it uses can beat lower level professionals, it doesn’t even need to look ahead in the game, oh it also can do the same with every other 2 player perfect information board game. What about the one that can give you an image of just about anything you describe to it? It’s obvious to me that this stuff is in some sense intelligent but as pointed out in the essay, it doesn’t really matter from a perspective of societal change, what matters is what it can do. 5 years ago, it couldn’t do any of this stuff and now it can, and rather than slowing down improvements are coming at a faster pace.
The particular model that example is from can solve math story problems at about the level of an average 9-12 year old. How many jobs can a bunch of average 9-12 year olds replace? A few I guess, they could do tech support or something. On the other hand Dalle-2 can do top notch graphic design among other things, it could currently replace a whole lot of jobs. Did I mention this tech is getting better and more capable every year and the rate at which it’s doing so is increasing?
also, there is a huge gap between explaining a joke and writing one. I don’t think we’re especially close to AI being able to write good jokes. and there’s an even bigger gap between writing a joke and writing an article, writing an article and writing a book, writing a book and being able to choose a topic for the book, and all of that and, yknow… consciousness.
The singularity and other AI-centric doomposting is pure fantasy born out of people taking short-term-but-large-scale improvements in technology and extrapolating that trend out infinitely going forward against all basic logic about diminishing returns. They did this with Moore’s Law for decades before it occured to everyone that, oh wait, you can’t just keep making transistors smaller forever because there’s a floor on how small something can be while still interacting with electrons.
AI in its current state is nothing more than some clever algorithms that take in human-generated examples of patterns and figure out trends to be mostly correct on future data. GPT and other language-centric algorithms are freaky because it looks like the AI is having a conversation, but in reality it’s just a bunch of lines of code aping the patterns of data mined text conversations and has no consciousness of any kind backing that up. There’s no threat of us accidentally developing that consciousness because we barely understand the nature of consciousness to begin with, let alone are somehow capable of replicating it in a completely different medium from how it exists in nature.
tl;dr: climate change doomerism >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> all other problems >>>>>>>>>>> AI doomerism
Please tell me more about the Chinese Room experiment. :cyber-lenin:
I would like to be clear that I’m not ruling out the possibility of strong AI eventually, but certainly not within the lifetime of anyone reading this. It’s an enormously difficult problem and what people are actually doing right now isn’t even beginning to tackle that problem, but rather just come up with clever algorithms for solving arbitrary problems (which is still very useful and good).
Oh yeah, I’m right there with you. We’re already building neuromorphic hardware that operate similar to a simple brain and even doesn’t need that much software to convince it to do basic pattern recognition. I’m just saying the Chinese Room is the bar that a sufficiently advanced AI has to cross. Right now we’re at like…tunicate-level brain.
ai dril already exists, we’re all gonna be laid off from the posting factory
But to be real, proof of humanity just means being less lazy than the opposition. The strategies they use are always going to cost them money, so the goal should be to make the venture of mimicking a leftist cost prohibitive. Like, for example, look at how little the state spends on foodbanks and community building and helping the homeless. If they have to do that sort of thing to fit in with leftists then they’d have to chart out a whole cost-benefit analysis of “how many manhours are we willing to dedicate to finish this infiltration project.” Just having an ideology and that being the beginning and end of it is way easier to mimick for both robots and human cops.
made an alt for this so any future projects i make can’t be tied back to my main account.
i’m by no means the world’s leading expert on machine learning algorithms, but i’ve been diving into the world of machine learning for a while. this is from a conversation i had with some comrades about my predictions regarding the “dangers” of ai:
i don’t envision a skynet scenario as being the inevitable outcome of machine learning, rather I see machine learning being used to uphold already existing systemic inequalities. a logistical algorithm sending fewer resources to communities that “produce less” would, in effect, be no different than that community being unable to afford those resources because their surplus value is being extracted by a large corporation and they’re given a meager wage in the process. the largest impact that slapping these algorithms onto our already fucked up system of life has is further abstraction from the suffering on the basis of “objectivity”. the poor continue to suffer as the rich get to wash their hands more confidently
i’ve really only given this article a skim, but this is something to worry about far before any of the things this author is talking about
I agree. Buying click farms and workshopping influencing strategies is already something the right does.
What we’ve seen in drone warfare is exactly what you’re talking about, the moral disconnect between the war machine and the acts of terror it commits.
To draw another equivalent, it’s not like millions of people didn’t die before machine guns were invented. The machine gun/drone just lowers the cost of doing something you were already doing. Strategies for countering the new thing already exist, they just need to be repurposed (like trench warfare wasn’t a new invention in WW1, what was new was the strategy of “sieging” machine gun posts as though they were on a star fort).
That is a big part of what the author is talking about, I’d be happy to pull some quotes but really you might want to read it. I for one consider this a primary concern. If AI turns out to be really difficult to contain we’re doomed no matter what, but if it’s possible to use it safely we seem to be bound to an even worse capitalist dystopia, a permanent one where collective action no longer has any power. If our overlords are “generous” we get just enough UBI to survive. Any amount of capitalism whatsoever puts us in danger, the only way out seems to be to tear it out completely and start over, reform will not be enough. Again, there may not be much time!
