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Posted by alkyon 3 hours ago

Geoffrey Hinton: it might turn out we were better off without AI(www.theguardian.com)
109 points | 69 commentspage 2
gchamonlive 1 hour ago|
As is the case with any technology in the hands of careless people, but unfortunately we can't wait for society to catch up morally to the technical standards, innovation is organic and breakthroughs have no timing.
feverzsj 2 hours ago||
AI winter has arrived.
yewenjie 2 hours ago|
Said AI "experts" for the last 10 years.
emil-lp 1 hour ago||
Nobody has said that. The winter will probably come, but it's not at all clear when. First the bubble must burst.
hoppp 1 hour ago||
I think we did good inventing it and it's inevitable. Lets use it well.
ftchd 55 minutes ago||
What is the point of this quote? Or any of his quotes for that matter.
xnx 2 hours ago||
This is a bit like Rudolf Diesel saying maybe we're better off without airplanes. The field has long since left this guy behind.
coldtea 1 hour ago||
If the resulting issues are correct it doesn't matter whether the field left the guy behind or not.

He would still be right and the field practioners would be wrong.

Towaway69 1 hour ago||
So pumping CO2 into the atmosphere is a good thing and if someone does a backflip by recognising their mistakes that is a bad thing?
reverius42 1 hour ago|||
We should regulate data centers to require fully renewable power (solar/wind/hydro + battery).
vixen99 28 minutes ago|||
This is tangential encouraged by your point and other forays here. But one does wonder what arguments politicians (the power lies with them) understand when they make their pronouncements. The UK has for instance, prior to the new administration, totally and vociferously supported net zero. From the point of view (a fact for many but not for all informed authorities) that climate change is caused by CO2 and we are headed for a disaster - Net Zero is a logical step to trying to save humanity and the whole ecosystem. Now (November) I read that the UK powers that be, appear to have put it aside in actions at least. Countdown to Net Zero doesn't matter any more; open the oil fields, get rid of subsidies for photovoltaic and wind - and other measures. My point is not a political jibe but a stance I suspect to apply in other areas. Is climate change going to be a catastrophe or not? They should make up their minds.
librasteve 2 hours ago||
modern day Mary Shelley
perarneng 2 hours ago||
We are not but we need a better approach, https://www.ethicalacceleration.org
bemtevi 2 hours ago||
> It could help cure diseases, end boring work and give us more free time.

Seriously? It seems to be causing more problems, giving us more boring work, and less free time.... sounds like absolute bullshit.

_heimdall 2 hours ago|||
"Could" does a lot of work in these kinds of claims.

We need to build it as fast as possible because it could cure all disease. Ignore whether that's possible, how it might happen, whether all we're missing to do it is more intelligence, etc.

The only way I see us curing all disease is to throw out all the names we've given to collections of symptoms. What disease? I don't see no disease, you just have a sore throat, runny nose, and mild fever.

bemtevi 1 hour ago||
> We need to build it as fast as possible because it could cure all disease

Hell no. We need to risk pumping out even more CO2, causing more environmental disaster, ruining entire human communities, just to cure diseases? You might as well say it's better to be in prison because you're guaranteed three meals a day. The logic of some pro-AI people is baffling.

staminade 1 hour ago||||
How has AI given you less free time?
bemtevi 1 hour ago||
I have to spend extra time just trying to find AI-free things, AI-free writing, AI-free communities, and people who aren't addicted to AI. And get noticed/get a job by having to push through all this AI static. And having to interact with AI-based customer service agents that take 10x as long to resolve the problem as a human being. And having to wait a bit longer because there are 10x more 'Are You Human' Captchas slowing down website loading. And having to download OS updates that are 2x as large because they contain AI models. And having to double-check everything because there's so much more hallucinated crap out there.

The other day I hired an accountant and even he sent me an AI answer that sounded right but was actually bullshit.

In short, it takes a LOT more time just to find some sanity now.

AI is shit.

perarneng 1 hour ago||||
That's the whole point of the site. Did you read it. AI should not cause harm, direct or indirect.
bemtevi 1 hour ago||
Of course I read it. But my thesis is that one cannot avoid that. Causing harm, whether direct or indirect, is the fundamental nature of AI.
perarneng 19 minutes ago||
It can be avoided, humans control AI still. Humans are the ones causing harm with the help of humans.
233mhz 1 hour ago|||
I mean, it could if "we" "just" got out of globalized financial capitalism, changed everything about our political, economical, financial, social systems, etc.

Only 14 years old and accelerationists think we can just push the capitalism pedal further and somehow get social changes going their way

bemtevi 1 hour ago|||
I don't think accelerationists think we can do anything. The thought process of the accelerationist is partly fueled by the 'excitement' of betting and playing musical chairs and hoping to be the first ones out holding a bag of money and partly fueld by the delusion that technological advancement is always good at any level of complexity.
koe123 2 hours ago||
You’re a cultist
perarneng 1 hour ago||
How did you come to that conclusion?
bondarchuk 1 hour ago||
So why did he start to develop it in the 1970s?
emil-lp 1 hour ago|
Why did he start a research direction that 50 years later "might turn out" to not be a good idea?

That's a relatively silly question, don't you think?

bondarchuk 1 hour ago|||
No it's a completely serious question. The goal has always been to replicate human/biological thinking processes in software, and now that this has been more or less achieved he's suddenly not happy about it. There's been plenty of opportunity to actually think about "what if all of this actually works" but they chose not to.
injidup 1 hour ago|||
Sounds like sour grapes. He worked on it for a long time but he doesn't own a trillion dollar company. Missed the boat?
jdw64 1 hour ago||
To be honest, I think it depends on the environment. In the past, if you didn't come out of a good university, your access to knowledge was limited. But these days, in terms of access to knowledge, I think things have clearly improved, whether or not AI is illegally sharing knowledge.

Looking back now, was it really happier before AI existed? I'm not sure. In the past, when I wanted to find out whether I was right or wrong about some piece of knowledge or information, I'd contact several people and, far from getting an answer, I'd often be told not to bother them. But AI, in that respect, is the best teacher I can think of.

I think the times are continuously getting better. It's just that there's a problem of power concentration among the people who handle it. Still, if AI is a tool of that nature, then I suppose that can happen.

But considering what access to knowledge was like before AI came along, I think having AI is better.

TonyStr 9 minutes ago||
Knowledge was already extremely accessible in the age of the Internet, but it required time to read and learn. AI is making that same knowledge applicable without the prerequisite of learning.

Most people are not interesting in learning for learning's sake, they are motivated to learn something they can apply (see: kids complaining about how learning Math in school doesn't transfer to useful skills). Why learn about architecture and technical debt, if you can tell the machine to make it faster?

graemep 45 minutes ago||
The internet pre-AI did far more to make knowledge accessible than AI has done. Its useful, but its not the critical thing.
deadbabe 1 hour ago|
We should introduce regulation so only credentialed software engineers are allowed to use AI.
harvey9 1 hour ago||
I would rather see the onus on the company owners to be responsible for what they sell. Serious penalties for seriously bad products.
carlosjobim 35 minutes ago|||
Absolutely! And software engineer should be an hereditary title as well.
jdw64 1 hour ago||
In East Asian countries, certification systems are still maintained, but in reality they're practically meaningless. If a certification system exists, people will take an interest in CS and work harder at it, or so you'd think—but in reality, the exam questions end up stuck in the old style. In other words, there's a big gap between the exams and the actual field.

Because a certification has to be fixed at a particular point in time. Korea's certification exams start with the 23 GoF patterns and go on to rote memorization of countless patterns and layered terminology.

The problem is that the way you learn for this certification is the old way, so someone who gets the certification ends up writing legacy code.

But if you always update the questions to the latest, then nobody can pass the certification. So, having seen how the certification system works in East Asia, I don't think it's all that good

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