Posted by alkyon 2 hours ago
The carelessness is also clear in how AI is rolled out. It's being presented as a disruptive technology, as is everything else presented by modern tech companies. The goal is a very large payout in a very short period of time, it's not to make anything better, or worse, either is just a side effect.
Had LLMs first been presented as a "better IntelliSense", where rather than auto-completing function names, your editor can now suggest implementations, very few people would have been upset. Same for writing, it's just a better version of Grammarly, it's fine, or as a tool in drawing software. The issue would have been, for the AI bosses, that this takes time and doesn't create trillion dollar companies. It only creates companies that they'd actually have to run, long term, and that's boring.
If it weren’t OAI and Anthropic, it would be others.
If it weren’t US companies, it would be others.
It is far too useful now to stop large scale deployment, it isn’t a matter of specific people or countries not being cautious or prudent enough. The entirety of the Earth is at issue now and there will always be people who cause the tragedy of the commons (if indeed AI turns out to be harmful in the long run, which is not remotely certain).
Look at what happened with fossil fuels. Even if the entire global west totally ceased use, there are many countries that simply will not stop because of local utility. AI is the exact same way.
There is something deeply rotten about the US mindset though, them being American is definitely a problem.
> Look at what happened with fossil fuels.
The west had a 100 years head start, on top of that these countries are producing everything you consume, don't start pointing fingers. Chinese current co2 per capita is the same as the US in 1900
Releasing artificial intelligence for the use of all of humanity is better than it being controlled by one or more shadow groups. That's what the Americans did, and the Chinese followed in.
Had AI been invented in the 20th century, it would have been kept secret and used only by state actors to facilitate genocides at mass scales. But we live in different times.
Uh? In what universe are openai and anthropic not shadow groups?
I know this sounds unusual, but I do think this wouldn't be the worst thing that could happen. Sure, it would cause a bit of chaos, but it might also make us think twice about continuing down our current path of unfettered development, and possibly even make us much more cautious, which might in turn even help us with the climate crisis.
Because human beings in a large mass only respond to one thing: immediate difficulty. They don't respond to delayed difficulty like "the climate is getting worse" or "technology will make life more difficult in the distant future". They only respond to immediate pain.
So I think it would be a good thing if the financial system had a serious threat. Then people with money, who tend to offset future problems with technical solutions and financial padding, would start to become much more suspicious of technology and defund AI and wasteful things that are likely to threaten their safety.
Blockchain despite all its flaws, is the canary in the coal mine. They have been dealing with an increasing amount of cyberattacks. Because it all happens publicly in the blockchain, there is no way to hide it.
However major bank gets hacked in the tune of over 100 millions and we get to know it happened because somebody who has no relationship to the hack turned his eyes to a bunch of suspicious transactions happening on Ethereum.
I disagree that something like this would be a good thing though. Whether it's a power outage, financial crisis, or something else people will die. If that's what happens and society ends up adjusting course after then that's what happens, but I can't call people dying a good thing.
This sort of thing was going to happen, with or without AI (state sponsored hackers, the US or China taking down systems they control, or whatever).
The later it happens, the more we will be down the path that lets it happen, and the worse the consequences. We are getting gradually worse consequences: AWS outages taking down websites, GCP outages taking down banks, attacks on fridges disrupting good supplies...
Its better for us to change path when something happens that causes dozens of people die rather than wait until its millions.
I don't think that's a good thing. But if we DON'T do anything, then even more poeple are likely to suffer. So while people dying is not a good thing, a thousand people dying is better than a million people dying because we don't do anything.
Same thing about burning your hand. It's not a good thing to burn your hand, but burning your hand once when you're young probably saves you from a more serious accident later on.
This is why I think AI is so stupid. It's just too powerful for anyone to control, especially with the inertial mass of capitalistic society powering it through the incremental, short-term advantages it gives.
Nuclear weapons are indiscriminate and make everyone worse off if used. And everybody has them. Your optimism is unfounded.
The difference is most people have not experienced any immediate effects of nuclear weapons. But people will experience the immediate effects of AI taking down the electricity grid, for instance.
If someone manages with the help of AI to hack into a vital system, then the system was already in a critically bad state beforehand. If developers can't use AI to check the code for security flaws, then security gets worse and not better.
Insecure is insecure and AI is just showing us we were/are less secure than we hoped.
I still don't know how Karpathy still works with those folks. I really think the guy is great but he makes me wonder
Programming has never been this awesome.
“I think [Mark] Zuckerberg and [Elon] Musk and Sam Altman, they understand the risks, and they don’t give a shit. They’d rather have the money. That’s my belief.”
That's a touching sentiment or whatever but the nature of the thing is that it will inevitably be opened and that it cannot be closed thereafter. So (I think) we'd all be better off putting our efforts towards predicting the likely outcomes and figuring out how to make the best of them.