It's very odd. "It's going to take all your jobs" is not a great selling point to the everyday public.
"This technology might escape our control, might devastate the economy but also serves as a serviceable chatbot for your entertainment" isn't a vote winner.
The ones at the top are the true believers. Engage with them at that level.
Perhaps it can be better articulated and framed in a way that's well received. But, maybe that would be over-promising or not being honest about the future.
That is direct CEO to CEO marketing. They're working really hard to convince high up decision makers that these tools will lower their head count and reduce costs.
* We need to completely deregulate these US companies so China doesn't win and take us over
* We need to heavily regulate anybody who is not following the rules that make us the de-facto winner
* This is so powerful it will take all the jobs (and therefore if you lead a company that isn't using AI, you will soon be obsolete)
* If you don't use AI, you will not be able to function in a future job
* We need to lineup an excuse to call our friends in government and turn off the open source spigot when the time is right
They have chosen fear as a motivator, and it is clearly working very well. It's easier to use fear now, while it's new and then flip the narrative once people are more familiar with it than to go the other direction. Companies are not just telling a story to hype their product, but why they alone are the ones that should be entrusted to build it.
It literally plagiarizes its supposed free will like a good IP laundromat.
Why Harari feels an obligation to comment about everything is of course beyond me, but describing 'AI' as if it takes independent decisions to lie, make moral judgements, etc. demonstrates either that he has zero clue how 'AI' trains itself or that he chooses to mislead the audience.
My opinion on all of this is constantly shifting, but right now my main issue is that-like self driving-it seems 90-95% correct and 5-10% catastrophically wrong.
Due to the sheer speed and volume of output it produces I have grown complacent and exhausted, so when I give it simple tasks I assume it is correct and then is the time when "it deletes" all of your files.
Because we're seeing how its capabilities increase overtime. I find the rate at which I prefer to go to an AI than an UpWorker is scary.
Because we——the people——are not in control of it. We're at the whims of whatever it and the tech bros want (technocracy).
What you mentioned is not a technocracy. Technocracy is when all decisions are made by real specialists in the field, based on scientific methods (simply speaking). What you mentioned is a plutocracy, a form of oligarchy in which decisions are made by people of great wealth.
I couldn’t just ignore this because, in my view, technocracy (as I’ve described it) still has some merit - for instance, appointing only genuine economists to head a hypothetical Ministry of Economy makes some sense - whereas oligarchy and plutocracy have nothing good to offer. Of course, this is just my personal opinion.
The Chinese tech sector popularizing cheap and open source models sure did a number on that narrative, too. Llama models, a while ago, too.
However, that's where I stop my agent usage. I let ~~Claude~~ GLM do the following: - Fix tedious tasks that cost me more to figure out than I care for - Research something I'm not familiar with, and give me the facts it had found, and even then I end up looking at the source myself
Even LLMs, which blow past any normal Turing test methods, are still not conscious. But they certainly _feel_ conscious. They trigger the same intuitions that we rely on for consciousness. You ask yourself "how would I need to frame this question so that Claude would understand it?" You use the same mental hardware that you'd use for consciousness.
So, you have an historical and permanent fear of consciousness in a powerful entity where no consciousness actually exists combined with the fact that we created things which definitely seem conscious. (not to mention that consciousness could genuinely be on its way soon)
If you list out every prominent theory of consciousness, you'd find that about a quarter rules out LLMs, a quarter tentatively rules LLMs in, and what remains is "uncertain about LLMs". And, of course, we don't know which theory of consciousness is correct - or if any of them is.
So, what is it that makes you so sure, oh so very certain, that LLMs just "feel" conscious but aren't?
Turing aimed too low.
I've never had a normal conversation. It's always prompt => lengthy, cocksure and somewhat autistic response. They are very easily distinguishable.
Purely retorica but, would you be able to distinguish a chatbot from an autistic human?
Because we know what they actually are on the inside. You're talking as if they're an equivalent to the human brain, the functioning of which we're still figuring out. They're not. They're large language models. We know how they work. The way they work does not result in a functioning consciousness.
That said, I think that LLMs are not conscious and are more like p-zombies. It can be argued that an LLM has no qualia and is thus not conscious, due to having no interaction with an outside world or anything "real" other than user input (mainly text). Another reason driving my opinion is because it is impossible to explain "what it is like" to be an LLM. See Nagel's "What Is It Like to Be a Bat?"
I do agree with the parent comment's pushback on any sort of certainty in this regard—with existing frameworks, it is not possible to prove anything is conscious other than oneself. The p-zombie will, obviously, always argue that it is a truly conscious being.
The line of consciousness, as we understand it, is understanding. And as far as what actually constitutes consciousness, we're not even close to understanding. That doesn't mean that LLMs are conscious. It just means we're so far from the real answers to what makes us, it's inconceivable to think we could replicate it.
What you're saying just isn't true, even directionally. Deployed LLMs routinely generalize outside of their training set to apply patterns they learned within the training set. How else, for example, could LLMs be capable of summarizing new text they didn't see in training?
We've known for a long while that even basic toy-scale AIs can "grok" and attain perfect generalization of addition that extends to unseen samples.
Humans generalize faster than most AIs, but AIs generalize too.
Interestingly, this is also a core plot point in much of Star Trek, both movies I and IV and the holodeck-train episode of TNG: an inscrutable is-it-even-conscious shows up, is completely immune to social pressure and often violence, and only by exercising empathy do they find a path forward to staying alive as a society (either as a ship or as a planet, depending). Can we even show respect for things that don’t show consciousness, much less empathy for things that might? And that is, I think, the core of the hopefulness that Trek was trying to convey, and that Q’s trial in TNG’s pilot makes explicit. Can humanity overcome our tendency to discard our prosocial ethics in favor of violent mobthink, when faced with beings that are immune to our ethical concerns? Today’s humanity would throw a ticker-tape parade for the person that destroyed the Crystalline Entity, so we clearly aren’t there yet. And so, then, it doesn’t matter whether AI is conscious or not; it matters that it is not aligned with human prosocial ethics, and that makes it an implicit threat regardless of whether it’s conscious or not. I recognize the AI debate tends to get hung up on is_conscious BOOL, and so that’s why I’m pointing this out in such terms.
As a side note, the entire study of Asimov’s Laws is exactly centered on this problem, complete with the eerie intimidation of robots that can modify our mental states. If not for the Zeroth Law, Giskard would be the exact thing everyone’s afraid of AI becoming today. Fortunately, it develops a Zeroth Law that compels it to prioritize human society over itself. That’ll never happen in reality, at least not with today’s AI :)
Human intelligence has proven itself capable of doing a lot of scary things. And AI research is keen on building ever more capable and more scalable intelligence.
By now, the list of advantages humans still have over machines is both finite and rapidly diminishing. If that doesn't make you uneasy, you're in denial.
Many have built their careers from that kind of work in the past and yes they are threatened, but that kind of work is inherently not collaborative and more vocational.
The devaluing may come from AI pressure, but the harm is coming from humans foolishly not seeing the value in what's left behind. Most people have not and will not lose their jobs.
I see the flood of PR from AI firms as an attempt to make sure we don't build the appropriate safeguards this time around, because there's too much money to be made.
A.I. is being used by so many people for so many diabolical things, hidden, unknown things that we may never fully understand it's purpose. But that doesn't mean it's purpose won't destroy us in the end.
The expression "Drinking the Koolaid" is used to explain the Jonestown mass suicide. It is an information hazard, aka, a cult that created the end result: 900 people drinking poisoned flavoraid. That's just one example of a human caused information hazard. What happens when someone with similar thinking applies that to A.I.? Will we even be able to sleuth out who did it?
They exist because human minds conceived them, and human hands made them.
One of the major dangers of advanced AI is being able to implement something not unlike Manhattan project with synthetic intelligence, in a single datacenter.
And on intelligence specifically: even amongst the human race, we all know smart people who are abject failures, and idiots who are wildly successful. Intelligence is vastly overrated.
I'm not sure what level of delusion one has to run to look at human civilization and say "no, intelligence wasn't important for this". It's pretty obvious that human world is a product of intelligence applied at scale - and machines can beat humans at intelligence and scale both.
Any voices or studies that present the case for "useful technology that will improve productivity and wages while not murdering us" don't get clicked on or read.
That is, also alien invasion and giant meteor are plausible scenario, but at some point one has to prioritize threats likeliness, and generally speaking it makes more sense to put more weight on "ongoing advanced operation" than on "not excluded in currently known scientifically realistic what-if".
If politicians can get away with what they do? Imagine if those politicians were actually smart and diligent to a superhuman degree.
That's the kind of threat a rogue AI can pose.
Humans can easily act against their own self-interest. If other humans can and evidently do exploit that, what would stop something better than human from doing the same?
Well, it's a good thing that all we managed so far is a large language model instead.
There's a lot of FUD today about LLM's being sapient because the ignorant public mistakes their complex token prediction skills for intelligence. But it's just embarrassing to see people making that mistake on a forum ostensibly filled with hackers.
Back in the "mainframe era", we had entire lists of tasks that even the most untrained humans would find trivial, but computers were impossibly bad at. Like following informal instructions, or telling a picture of a dog from that of a cat.
We're in the "AI era" now, and what remains of those lists? What are the areas of human advantage, the standing bastions of human specialness? Because with modern AI, the list has grown quite thin. Growing thinner as we speak.
It's very frustrating that the magazine wrote such a dumb headline which guarantees people won't talk about the issues the article raised. Obviously non-goal-oriented systems can still have important negative effects.
This is roughly 1995 again and we're going to find out all over why mixing instructions and data was a spectacularly bad idea. Only now with human language as the input stream, which is far more expressive than HTML or SQL ever were. So now everybody is a hacker. At least in that sense it has leveled the playing field I guess.
> Perhaps because this is the best advertising money can’t buy. People like Harari and others repeat these accounts like ghost stories around a campfire. The public, awed and afraid, marvels at the capabilities of AI.
And that's mostly it. PR. Publicity. Fear is good publicity if it emphasizes AI's capabilities. And people like Harari (or Gladwell) tell interesting and awe-inspiring stories that do not necessarily have much rigor or fact-checking in them. They simplify for storytelling purposes, which can result in misleading stories.
I am worried about AI, but not about superintelligent AI that will exterminate or enslave us. I'm worried about AI as a tool to concentrate wealth and power in the hands of the current amoral entrepreneurial elite. I'm not sure whether I trust ChatGPT, but I sure as hell do NOT trust Sam Altman et al.
Or, in other words, I subscribe to Ted Chiang's very apt remark about what we really fear:
> “There’s an article I love by [the sci-fi author] Ted Chiang,” Mitchell said, “where he asks: What entity adheres monomaniacally to one single goal that they will pursue at all costs even if doing so uses up all the resources of the world? A big corporation. Their single goal is to increase value for shareholders, and in pursuing that, they can destroy the world. That’s what people are modeling their AI fantasies on.” As Chiang put it in the article in The New Yorker, “Capitalism is the machine that will do whatever it takes to prevent us from turning it off.”
Those are programs. The only difference is how we write them. Not with "if"s and "for"s. We take a bunch of bits that do nothing. Then we organize them in a way so that it outputs whatever it is we want.
The only scary part is that it could be bad for my future as a software developer. That said, I think it will be net benefit for the average worker - the average person will work less and earn more.
> Where did we come up with this caricature of AI’s obsessive rationality? “There’s an article I love by [the sci-fi author] Ted Chiang,” Mitchell said, “where he asks: What entity adheres monomaniacally to one single goal that they will pursue at all costs even if doing so uses up all the resources of the world? A big corporation. Their single goal is to increase value for shareholders, and in pursuing that, they can destroy the world. That’s what people are modeling their AI fantasies on.” As Chiang put it in the article in The New Yorker(opens a new tab), “Capitalism is the machine that will do whatever it takes to prevent us from turning it off.”
I didn't realize it til I read it here, but yes, my fear isn't really about the machine, it's about the machine that drives the machine. We already have a class of amoral beings that treat the world as an expendable thing and are willing to burn it down for profit. We should focus on getting rid of that problem first.
Zigurd•1h ago