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Comment by maaaats | Hacker News Reader

> and to believe so shows a complete lack of understanding of those problems and what real AI will become

When the CEO of one of the most well-known AI-companies makes a claim you disagree with, you should probably give a better reason for him being wrong than "a complete lack of understanding".

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Being CEO of an AI company doesn't mean he has a greater understanding of "social problems".

This.

I mean Schmidt, Ballmer or Scully, didn't seem to have much expertise in their field.

"Science talks about very simple things, and asks hard questions about them. As soon as things become too complex, science can’t deal with them… But it’s a complicated matter: Science studies what’s at the edge of understanding, and what’s at the edge of understanding is usually fairly simple. And it rarely reaches human affairs. Human affairs are way too complicated." — Noam Chomsky

To be fair, his background is in social work and public policy; Hassabis is the technical lead, Suleyman is very much focused on strategy and societal impact.

The original article title was a (now corrected) typo. Suleyman isn't CEO, but "Co-Founder & Head of Applied AI" (from their website).

What a CEO says is not what he thinks, but what he wants you to believe. There is lot of discussions and justified fears about the future of jobs in relation with AI, so he try to make us believe his company was founded to help our social problems, but I don't believe it was, I believe it was founded because it was a mean to do cool things in their domain of expertise and earn money in the process.

I guess with the OP is asking is: is there a technical reason that complex social problems are getting stuck. If so, how will general AI address those problems, and how will it itself avoid the same pitfalls?

It's not clear to me at all that throwing AI at a social problem somehow solves it, so...

An AI that calculates how to fix social problems would suggest SV billionaries to give up their money and power. We are a long away off from this, and not technologically.

Social structures today are built out of millions of independent agents, each of whom is modelling many others in detail, but not quite accurately, while also modelling themselves somewhat more accurately, modelling the world in general at a low level-of-detail, and trying to meet their own embodied needs. There are ways to make accurate social reasoning easier (transparency, egalitarianism, precise communication, etc.), but our social structures are currently moving away from those.

Adding one more agent who happens to be artificial is not going to make these social-reasoning problems any simpler.

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