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Comment by TCM | Hacker News Reader

It seems like right now "superhuman AI" is a buzzword that people like to use when they want to be covered by the press. I'm surprised OpenAI didn't chime in. Physicists seem to use Aliens or multiple dimensions for this purpose (But some also use AI for the same effect).

It sort of distracts people from actually asking real questions like how to use AI / ML responsibly because the former doesn't require much to speculate about.

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Journalists don't feel like they are qualified to report on the actual technology (which is a good thing), don't bother learning anything in order to become qualified (which isn't), don't bother speaking to qualified people on the front line of this technology (which is horrible).

So what they have resorted to is reporting on these "philosophical" topics, because all you need for that is a fucking opinion, right. It's a great Faustian bargain because you then get all those companies and people, who similarly have no clue but are fishing for PR, to pile on.

See "should the autonomous car hit the pedestrian or save its passengers" or "this artist drew a lane marker around his beater car".

Until it's conscious, AI is just a tool and the same ethics apply when using it as when using any other tool. If you use it to hurt people, to deceive people, to steal from people, etc, you go to jail. Well, ideally. But like insurance companies that are forbidden from charging different rates to people based upon their being a member of a protected class or any proxy which becomes essentially equivalent. So if their ML system starts jacking up premiums on one group of people because its found an indicator it likes, they're still breaking the law. Even if they can't explain why it keyed on that indicator beyond "look... here's a list of numbers. Those are weights in the neural net. We don't know what they mean."

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