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Comment by cf | Hacker News Reader

The real risk is that worrying about fantastical disaster scenarios distracts us from addressing the more immediate problems we already face with AI. Whether it is facial recognition being used by China to aid in ethnic cleansing of a minority group, or Tesla Autopilot regularly killing its passengers.

Even if you don't like my particular examples I can highlight a dozen more problems AI software has created or exacerbated right now. Why all the focus on hypothetical problems?

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Oh good grief, not another we should do this before we do that post. As if the entire human species is incapable of walking and also chewing gum simultaneously.

Let’s stop Nick Bostrom and a load of AI experts from doing their current work, put them all on a plane and send them to China to solve political oppression. I’m sure that will work.

> As if the entire human species is incapable of walking and also chewing gum simultaneously

Do you believe that attention is an infinite resource?

Do you believe human capacity is infinitely fungible and specialization is a myth?

Because many communist regiemes already found out how they are not with command economic failures. Even if the specialization is misapplied reaiming them takes time - like how you start with training a battlefield useful longbowman's grandfather.

No I don't, but 6 billion people is a lot of attention to spread around. Why?

From your remark you'd think these were two entirely different problems. I'll try to say it more clearly. There are people deliberately promoting fear of long-term problems as an excuse to not address these short-term problems.

I'm ok with people working on both. I just feel so much less attention is being placed on these more immediate problems. Tesla has deployed to production software for driving that is unable to detect pedestrians. So at least Tesla can't do both.

Every time there's an autopilot related accident, they're all over the mainstream news, and prominently voted up and extensively discussed on HN. That isn't going to stop because the media will be too busy reviewing Nick Bostrom's next book to report on the latest Autopilot death.

I see it quite differently. raising the long term issues is absolutely part of highlighting the risks of these immediate issues. They are part of the same problem, so raising their profile is synergistic, not competitive.

Because these problems for humans started existing with absolutely modest level of AI development and nothing remotely similar to super-intelligence. So the argument is - if we have serious problems now as small-level, narrow-focused AI "does not consider" some of the side-effects, imagine the problems if we reach high-level, narrow-focused AI...So author's argument is that we need to change the way we're building it so we either set the goals to more broadly ensure human benefits, or build something else other then the narrow-focused AI (which surely is another Pandora's box).

I think applying agency to the software in my examples is actually very pernicious. It's not the software that dislikes the ethnic minority, it's the Chinese government. Blaming the software lets bad actors off the hook.

Perhaps what's really needed is ethical standards for technology. This would have the added advantage of being applicable even if the technology doesn't feel like AI to some people.

I agree and I think similar reasoning is behind some of the working groups for AI that Musk and others advocate for - "let's make sure that if we're breaking new ground, we're doing so with proper ethical and safety standards"...But we're nowhere near that level of social maturity on global level for such initiatives to take precedence over potential gain / profit of getting "there" first. As is evident from still such a large division even over the question if risk exists at all...

Unexpected problems appear often when giving automated decision making free reign to make decisions without human intervention.

It is simply that I see zero evidence that the Nick Bostron, Lesswrong, and etc. school of thought provides any insight in regard to these problems. The thing the "AI might become autonomous" school doesn't seem at all interest in the processes of human bureaucracy or in even AI as it exist now but rather views as simply a god, devil or Genie which grants wishes or damns to hell. If anything, the approach seems counter-productive.

Or hyperbole needlessly scaring people. China doesn't need facial recognition to repress minorities and Tesla's autopilot is still safer than some rando on the road, who's probably texting some juicy gossip to their friends instead of avoiding the car stopped in front of them.

AI is making things better.

Why is Autopilot on that list? Humans are killing their passengers on a much larger scale...

The "self-driving vehicles failing and killing people" argument is pretty lame in the context of other, more important things, but the "self-driving vehicles becoming practical" scenario is pretty much equivalent to "instant 10-20% increase in unemployment", and that's going to be bad for everybody.

Or AI drones that the US will soon be using to kill various people around the world.

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