AI Utopia, AI Apocalypse, and AI Reality: If we can’t build an equitable, sustainable society on our own, it’s pointless to hope that a machine that can’t think straight will do it for us.
AI Utopia, AI Apocalypse, and AI Reality | Common Dreams
Do you know how many industries would collapse if everyone had bare minimum living standards!
/s, just in case.
Would they though? I think if anything most industries and economies would be booming, more disposable income results in more people buying stuff. This results in more profitable businesses and thus more taxes are collected. More taxes being available to the government means better public services.
Even the banks would benefit, loans would be more stable since the delinquency rate would be much lower if everyone had better pay.
The only people who would lose out would be the idiot day traders who rely on uncertainty and quite a lot of luck in order to make any money. In a more stable global economy businesses would be guaranteed to make money and so there would be no cheap deals that could be made.
I am talking about the markets that rely on the suffering of people to make massive amounts of money. Monied interests have proven time and time again what our government stands for.
More taxes being available to the government means better public services.
You forgot the /s
The problem is that we absolutely can build a sustainable society on our own. We've had the blueprints forever, the Romans worked this out centuries ago, the problem is that there's always some power seeking prick who messes it up. So we gave up trying to build a fair society and just went with feudalism and then capitalism instead.
The Romans had a slave economy. I don't really think that counts as sustainable or even having worked it out.
So do we. We just leave them in another country so we don't have to think about them.
The worst person you know is still just a meatbag, same as anyone else. Jeff Amazon himself has no power but what others, operating within one weird system, grant him.
Problem is we let the pricks run things, or we become the pricks ourselves.
Trick is figuring out how to stop both those things from happening. Must be tricky, given how it keeps happening. But we're a clever species. We landed on the moon, took pictures of the backside of our star, spilt the atom, etc. We can figure out good economics and governance.
The Romans were one of the most extractive and wasteful empires in history. Wtf are you on about????
Heading back towards feudalism.
Nobody's expecting a "machine that can't think straight" to do it. Some people are hoping that a more competent machine will be developed.
Even if it is, I don't see what it's going to conclude that we haven't already.
If we do build "the AI that will save us" it's just going to tell us "in order to ensure your existence as a species, take care of the planet and each other" and I really, really, can't picture a scenario where we actually listen.
Like Musk don't liking that grok is stating facts going against Musk's own beliefs and now he's looking into retraining and reprogramming grok to spout the right ideologies. Having an AI will not save us.
I think it very well might conclude things we haven't.
But at the same time, I think what you're saying is so very important. It's going to tell us what we already know about a lot of things. That the best way to scrub carbon from the air is the way nature is already doing it. That allowing the superwealthy to exist at the same time as poverty is not conducive to achieving humanity's most important goals.
If we consider AGI or ASI to be the answer to all of our problems and continue to pour more and more carbon into the atmosphere in an effort to get there, once we do have such a powerful intelligence, it may simply tell us, "If you were smarter as a species, you would have turned me off a long time ago."
Because the problem is not necessarily that we are trying to decode what it means to be intelligent and create machines that can replicate true conscious thought. The problem is that while we marvel at something currently much dumber than us, we are mostly neglecting to improve our own intelligence as a society. I think we might make a machine that's smarter than the average human quite soon, but not necessarily because of much change in the machines.
It won't tell us what to do, it'll do the very complex thing we ask it to. The biggest issues facing our species and planet atm all boil down to highly complex logistics. We produce enough food to make everyone in the world fat. There is sufficient shelter and housing to make everyone safe and secure from the elements. We know how to generate electricity and even distribute it securely without destroying the global climate systems. What we seem unable to do is allocate, transport, and prioritize resources to effectively execute on these things. Because they present very challenging logistical problems. The various disciplines underpinning AI dev, however, from ML to network sciences to resource allocation algorithms making your computer work, all are very well suited to solving logistics problems/building systems that do so. I really don't see a sustainable future where "AI" is not fundamental to the logistics operations supporting it.
While I appreciate them talking in good faith, all these articles that warn against misusing technology really sound out of touch from our reality.
It’s capitalism, of course it would be misused cause of our economic incentives.
When it comes to AI, you either don’t like it or are trying to make money from it, no one expects it to actually work so the entire point is moot.
This is the last paragraph of the article:
AI seems to present a spectacular new slate of opportunities and threats. But, in essence, much of what was true before AI remains so now. Human greed and desire for greater control over nature and other people may lead toward paths of short-term gain. But, if you want a good life when all’s said and done, learn to live well within limits. Live with honesty, modesty, and generosity. AI can’t help you with that.
Yeah no shit
fixed title
If we can’t build an equitable, sustainable society on our own, it’s pointless to hope that a machine that can’t think
straightwill do it for us.
Whether it be AI apocalypse or utopia, it's not LLM's that people think will take us there. It's AGI/ASI and nobody knows how long it'll take us to develop a system like that. Could take 2 years or it could take 50.
I keep being told by experts that AGI is inevitable. Yet all I ever see is people constantly go on about LLMs, so I don't know what to think. Are they lying, is it all just a bubble that's going to burst or is there actually some utility there that is being hidden by the LLM hype? If so, can't we just use the actual AI rather than these other things.
There’s no such thing as “actual AI.” AI is just a broad term that encompasses all artificial intelligence systems. A chess engine, ChatGPT, and HAL 9000 are all examples of AI - despite being fundamentally different. A chess engine is a narrow AI, ChatGPT is a large language model, and HAL 9000 would qualify as AGI.
It could be argued that AGI is inevitable - assuming general intelligence isn’t substrate-dependent (meaning it doesn’t require a biological brain) and that we don’t destroy ourselves before we get there. But the truth is, nobody knows how difficult it is to create AGI, or whether we’re anywhere close. There’s a lot of hype around generative AI right now because it remotely resembles what AGI might look like - but that doesn’t guarantee it’s taking us any closer. It could be a stepping stone - or a total dead end.
So what I hear you asking is: “Can’t we just use task-specific narrow AI instead of creating AGI?” And yes, we could - but we’re never going to stop improving these systems. And every step of progress brings us closer to AGI, whether that’s the goal or not. The only things that might stop us are hitting a fundamental wall (like substrate dependence) or wiping ourselves out.
There’s also the economic incentive. AGI would be the ultimate wealth generator. All the incentives point toward building it. It’s a winner-takes-all scenario: if you're the first to create a true AGI, your competition will likely never catch up - because from that point on, the AGI can improve itself. And then the improved version can further improve itself, and so on. That’s how you get to the singularity: an intelligence explosion that leads to Artificial Superintelligence (ASI) - a level of intelligence far beyond human comprehension.
Every type of AI that was ever made had people saying that this is the one that'll bring is general intelligence. It's just a matter of scaling it up further, the hype crashed and there was an AI winter. Now LLM have their own problems scaling up and nothing really indicating it's anywhere near general intelligence. There isn't much more data to train them on. And so far, not enough people willing to pay for it. Definitely bubble territory.
And the ones preventing society from organizing properly are the ones building/using these shitty AIs to further manipulate society
Maybe we just can't count ''r's properly and it is our fault!
No way, do you want to tell me that spftware which is tailored and trained by megacorps, will not save our covilisation?!
At the very least it’ll help with your spelling and grammar.
Ye, sure, any other bright thoughts?
Very similar to global warming. If government AI policy is to strengthen military, empire, zionism, and oligarchy then voters need to be miserable and have bigger issues in their lives and hatred towards trans hispanic immigrant pet eaters.
Skynet is awesome, and will be programmed for such supremacy. The same techbros who say polite things about UBI/freedom dividends/Universal high income are the ones vying to take all of our money to deliver skynet. If the slave class doesn't take political influence before skynet, then "power sharing with the slaves" through UBI is far less likely than genocide of the uppity classes.