Hacker News Reader

Comment by abrichr | Hacker News Reader

> “AI is in this critical moment where humankind is trying to decide whether this technology is good for us or not,” Kim says. “If we don’t solve this problem of interpretability, I don’t think we’re going to move forward with this technology. We might just drop it.”

AI interpretability is a very important and exciting field, and I don't mean to detract from the rest of this article, or from the speaker's work. However:

1) Technology is neither good nor bad in and of itself. It is a tool that can be used for one or the other.

2) If it's useful for something, some people will use it, despite the protests of others. Have we ever collectively decided to "drop it" in the past, where "it" is a powerful technology?

View on HN

CFCs and asbestos are very useful and we've also decided to largely ban them outright because of the horrible side effects. It turns out there's hardly any safe ways to use them so they're not really worth the benefits.

Good point! From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chlorofluorocarbon:

> Because CFCs contribute to ozone depletion in the upper atmosphere, the manufacture of such compounds has been phased out under the Montreal Protocol, and they are being replaced with other products such as hydrofluorocarbons

Maybe this success is at least somewhat due to the fact that there is an alternative technology that has very similar utility and cost, but without the significant negative effects.

The absence of such an alternative might explain why Asbestos hasn't had similar success. From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asbestos#Usage_by_industry_and...:

> Some countries, such as India, Indonesia, China, Russia and Brazil, have continued widespread use of asbestos.

The CFC-free albuterol inhalers (for us asthmatics) introduced in the last ten years are objectively worse than the ones they replaced. On the bright side, the new formulations meant new patents for drug manufacturers and the elimination of cheap generic alternatives for patients, so there's that.

Was CFC the propellant, or part of what you inhaled? I find it hard to believe that inhaling CFC could be good for you.

CFC was used as the propellant.

https://www.fda.gov/Drugs/ResourcesForYou/Consumers/Question...

I'm not sure how applicable this is because of the nature of the AI beast. It took decades for asbestos to be banned and given how slow we were to collectively make the decision we might just be too slow in turning away from AI/ML tech.

The other problem with AI is a matter of definitions- how do you even define it? Whereas it's obvious what leaded gasoline or radium watch faces are. When you've got a technique that is contained in featureless server racks and produces outputs, not substances, you can't really ban the outputs (they're just decisions) and banning the techniques is probably impossible short of melting down all the GPUs or whatever.

One possibility is that a bad AI decision could create huge liability costs on whoever is running the algorithm. If the algorithm can't explain that its decision was reasonable, courts could get... testy. And that would drive people towards at least explainable AI.

That is, it might end up being cheaper to have some racist employees than a big monolithic AI making racist decisions (or other human failings like being a bad driver).

She's not talking about technology being good or bad, but rather about it being good or bad for us.

It doesn't matter, the statement "technology is neither good nor bad for us in and of itself" still holds true.

I feel like one big difference with AI is that, supposedly, at some point it's not just technology, it's conscious and conscious things can definitely be inherently bad.

at least to a certain level of consciousness, the goals of an AI are still determined by its creator (given they understand how to set goals for machines that are advanced enough to call them "conscious" on some level

I think cloning and certain types of stem cell research might fall into this category.

Both fields appears to be making progress.

From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloning:

> Macaque monkey: (2017) First successful cloning of a primate species using nuclear transfer, with the birth of two live clones, named Zhong Zhong and Hua Hua. Conducted in China in 2017, and reported in January 2018.[59][60][61][62] In January 2019, scientists in China reported the creation of five identical cloned gene-edited monkeys, using the same cloning technique that was used with Zhong Zhong and Hua Hua – the first ever cloned monkeys - and Dolly the sheep, and the same gene-editing Crispr-Cas9 technique allegedly used by He Jiankui in creating the first ever gene-modified human babies Lulu and Nana. The monkey clones were made in order to study several medical diseases.[63][64]

From Pluripotent stem cells: the last 10 years (2016) (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/27908220):

> Over the past 10 years, technological advances and innovative platforms have yielded first-in-man PSC-based clinical trials and opened up new approaches for disease modeling and drug development.

atomic bomb?

The underlying technology here is nuclear fission and fusion, which we do use for "good" purposes (i.e. energy generation).

Plenty of nations maintain those and are ready to use them - and there's even a decent argument that if they stop, the world will plunge into chaos.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com