Ask HN: Viability of an anti-AI social movement? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Viability of an anti-AI social movement?

49 pointsNO-AI108 comments

Andrej Karpathy (director of artificial intelligence and Autopilot Vision at Tesla) on Twitter today:

  I am cautiously and slightly unnervingly looking forward to the gradual and inevitable unification of language, images/video and audio in foundation models... They will be endowed with agency over originally human APIs: screen+keyboard/mouse in the digital realm and humanoid bodies in the physical realm. And gradually they will swap us out.

I work professionally in the machine learning field. Some of my colleagues and myself are realizing that we're pursuing goals that will reduce the value of human intelligence and creativity, commoditizing them.

Pandora's Box has been opened.

As a society we can reject this technology. Reject automated artwork like Dall-E 2, reject automated literature, and so on. Reject technologies that replace the human mind instead of assisting it.

For example, if we refuse to pay for self-driving taxis on moral grounds (the same way we might refuse to eat factory-farmed chickens) society can make these businesses unprofitable.

In your opinion, would a social movement organized around this idea find traction?

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> I work professionally in the machine learning field

I'm curious what you do in ML, because I also work professionally in the field, and see no relationship or even pathway between current ML research and practice and any sort of "AI" that would reduce or commoditize human intelligence. It's all just marketing hype. If we somehow get "I robot" style robots (the movie, not the book) that we're uncomfortable with, sure, let's have a social movement. As long as we're still talking about SGD (or similar) optimized neural networks, you're rebelling against an equation (with no actual applications that co-opt human intelligence). Personally I don't feel threatened, even if a neural network can draw Kermit the frog in different movie styles, or perform other cool tricks

>"AI" that would reduce or commoditize human intelligence.

Computer generated art (DALL-E~), fiction literature, music et al. It wouldn't really reduce human intelligence, but it will definitely commoditize creative crafts even further. Which I think is what the OP is mostly referring to.

I was in a gift shop recently that had what looked like oil paintings for $40-100, all imported from china or somewhere they were made cheaply, all of some uninspired beach or flowers or something. We also have muzak, we have online "content" that's really just some outsourced minimum to try and do seo. It's already all a commodity. Having ML that can streamlines that changes nothing. It's still not doing anything creative.

Even the Kermit pictures I joked about above were really "made" by the person who thought of the cool prompts for the model. It's that creativity that's the human part. ML can be an idiot savant, like a calculator can multiply numbers fast, but it doesn't "create" the ideas or inputs.

So it could change the economics of listicles and lower-end gift shop art, etc, from off-shore to computer generated. Maybe for some people that will be enough to call it a kind of industrial revolution. But there is no risk to creativity, anymore than a loom was a risk to creativity in fabrics.

Also, I feel the core of art is some promise of meaning pertaining to human experience. Look at some abstract art and what do you think about? You think about the meaning and what it might represent, inevitably assigning your own meaning to it in some way. Then you get told by the artist "oh I just threw some paint at the wall because people liked my previous experiment", I bet the piece instantly loses the majority of its luster.

(Edit: Same goes for representative art, mostly, as in illustration. There is a promise of an entire world hidden behind the painting, which offers a glimpse into it. If it's just an incoherent one-off, that's not that interesting, just like the commercial muzak art you mentioned.)

A painting generated entirely by an algorithm is more like looking at a flower, which is also aesthetic but not necessarily art.

I feel that the 'real' AI-tools for artists will be more sophisticated and more focused, like "take my catalogue of the last 10 years and train on that" - being able to go back to a former style (which is difficult for artists) and re-experimenting with that, with actually stylistically coherent output. I think we'll see a lot of art made from mashing historic styles with modern subjects in the coming years.

If your artwork can be generated by an AI, are you really creative?

If you use AI in your process, why do I need to pay you so much for it. Hence commoditization.

Where do we draw the line for them meaning of human interaction if not the value.

I don't think we should somehow limit the use of AI for creative purposes. What the internet showed on the last 10 years is that there's an abundance of content. This won't change with AI, it'll just be even more content.

What we need IMHO is a way or a method to naturally let novel and intriguing approaches float to the top.

Obviously there are methods currently (algorithms, votes, impressions, etc.), so I don't see how we couldn't develop a new approach to tackle an increasing amount of AI-content

Some guy remade the droid and gungan battle scene from Star Wars Episode 1 in Unreal Engine 5. The original tool hundreds of people and millions of dollars in budget. The UE5 take looks better than the original and took one guy with nearly no budget.

'Traditional' tools are on the same path to devalues cultural outputs, AI is just another nail in the coffin.

Can I please have a link?

https://youtu.be/iKTBaF7kpBI

I think DALL-E is really, really great and can definitely replace someone spending a lot of hours photoshopping ideas for (say) an ad brief even in its current form.

But I'm not seeing it as a bigger step change than the invention of the camera, the gramophone or the music sequencer, all of which made access to the arts ubiquitous rather than valueless. DALL-E is more likely to make meme and fan art really good than Pixar or even ad agencies redundant

Same.

Assuming that the scaling hypothesis keeps working, GATO could probably achieve human-level performance. It was artificially constrained in size to be able to run in realtime on a robotics platform, but human-level intelligence doesn't require human-level latency even for robotics; most robotic tasks can happen slower (up to 3X slower if directly competing with an 8 hour human workday). Whenever novel domains need to be trained they can be mapped to the existing tokens GATO uses and the model fine-tuned on examples from the domain, and a scaled version of GATO would probably have audio, visual, and kinesthetic tokens along with textual and motor control so it wouldn't require a new architecture for every new domain.

At some scale I expect that a fine-tuned GATO-style agent would acquire the ability to be successfully text-prompted in novel domains (no longer requiring fine-tuning), which would allow autonomous operation.

I fail to see a step along the way that isn't solved by Moore's Law (or an all-in investment by large companies).

In my opinion, yes, of course such a movement would find traction.

We've seen similar movements at every major technological shift in human history. Some examples off the top of my head are certain types of Orthodox Jewish religions and the Amish. Even the term "sabotage" was from workers throwing their shoes ("sabos") into machines for fear of them losing their jobs [0].

There's been a steady stream of anarchists, luddites, neo-luddites and other extremists arguing against technology [1]. Ted Kacyznski famously killed scientists and academics for precisely that reason [2].

From what I can tell, the vast majority of people tend to accept the compromises of new technology and live with the drawbacks, making any anti-technology movement either short-lived or niche, especially the more extreme or repressive they become, but they do exist and continue to exist.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sabotage#Etymology

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neo-Luddism

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ted_Kaczynski

Your link for sabotage says your version of the story is apocryphal.

Today's transformer networks are the first hints of a technology that will replace humans completely for all purposes.

It's qualitatively different, like world-destroying atomic bombs versus the minor explosives that came before. This is not like a loom replacing hand-weaving. We're rapidly converging on a full replacement for the human mind.

These systems will not defeat you with guns like in Terminator. They will defeat you by commoditizing your mind and making your economic value zero.

There is a complete and utter annihilation of a generation in a rolling 120 year window. That is, there is, to most anyone's knowledge, no human older than 120 years. We've lost every single person from generations that are older than 120 years ago. We call this "natural" but otherwise completely accept this death of billions.

Our children will propagate whatever it is to be human forward. If the next generation is completely digital/AI/made of silicon then, in my opinion, the most likely scenario is that they will propagate this essence of humanity forward, just like "natural" children would.

In other words, luddites view AI as an invading force whereas I see AI as our children that will propel humanity forward.

In terms of responding to your economic value zero point, I'd highlight that, under normal circumstances, in 120 years yours and mine economic value is exactly zero. The best we can ever hope for, in this scenario, is that we make some contribution that allows us to be remembered. The only hope for the essence of our personality or brain power to be preserved and still be functional in perpetuity is if it's copied into an "AI" or there are some spectacular advances in longevity science that would only be possible with AI.

I think similarly, but I dont think of humanity as “going forward”. We are right here and stationary, like a flower blooming. If the next step of earth’s unfolding involves humans relinquishing our position to machines then so be it, but it isn’t progress any more than a dance is progress.

> I see AI as our children that will propel humanity forward.

This is a logical point of view for those who believe they ["human beings"] are merely hydrocarbon based machines twisting in the winds of entropy.

It’s kind of poetic, no? Humanity’s final challenge is to accept defeat with grace and humility.

At our own hands, no less.

In my opinion we should not fight against advances in AI, but rather against having that AI be owned by a few big corps. AI must be open and when it gets to the point you describe, we might not have to work anymore; we need only to guard that that won’t kill us of hunger or turns us into Soylent while the few rich control everything. AI can make humanity better by helping us out of wage slavery so more people can pursue what they really want (and sometimes that is what really matters; more than now anyway).

I fear that even if AI is open, it will still be controlled by a few rich people, because only a few people will really understand it, and even fewer will have the resources to train brain-sized models.

Models like GPT-3 and DALL-E 2 are already out of the reach of most people, even researchers and entrepreneurs in the field.

But if we know how they technically work and not patentable then countries (like India) can recreate and use them for the people. I think AI researchers should get together in a social movement and demand no patents and at least open publication of their inventions or open source.

But yes I see your point of course and you are right; small steps though; if we can replicate the work in theory at least.

Your comment reminds me of some of the ideas explored in the short story Manna. https://marshallbrain.com/manna1

No. People have been bellyaching about technology replacing humans literally through all of history. Computers, automation, industrial revolution, what have you. Hunter gatherers were probably complaining about how agriculture was going to make people obsolete too.

You can certainly reject whatever you want but don't fool yourself into thinking you're accomplishing anything.

PS: They have also been saying “the last n-1 times we were wrong, but this time is different".

There is ample reason to believe this time is different, but almost certainly in ways that aren’t predicted right now.

Yup, just like all the other times.

For example, if we as a society refuse to use self-driving cars, we can make the industry unprofitable. Society says, "No, this is not the kind of product we want" and capitalism works to starve the harmful industry.

You're pretending that everyone, or even a large subset of people agree with your central premise. The replies on this thread ought to disabuse you of that notion.

I, for one, can't wait for self-driving cars to replace the average moron driving multi-ton vehicles around.

Except we as a society can't do crap. If we could, we mightve fixed global warming and emissions by your logic.

We just need to start developing politicians-replacing AI to see swift legislative action to regulate any and all AI research.

Unfortunately, I have to agree with what you have just said there. It's going to end with co-existence with this AI technology.

We have seen these sort of movements before and there is definitely a pattern:

Free-software movement: Calls to reject all close-source software were made by the free-software movement, but once again such software still exists in a worse form (web apps) and 'open-source' has become a corporate buzzword.

Cyberpunk-Privacy movement: The same thing happened with the free-software movement where many large companies and others tracking you with their closed-source software can afford the fines and still don't care about your 'privacy' which they also use that as a buzzword.

Anti-IoT movement: After that, it that lead to the rise of another buzzword 'Internet of Things' (IoT) that was fought against by the same techies and was lost since many IoT devices are still existing and built by the same companies tracking you with that closed software and tracking information.

Current anti-AI movement: AI is another buzzword sung by the tech industry, such that companies like OpenAI became closed and diverted from their goals and others implemented their own GPT, DALL-E, Codex like models, and are getting better if not accelerating faster than before. AI experts alarmed by this tried to stop it and so far it has been ignored.

Anti-crypto movement: Yet another buzzword, which after 13 years is still alive and the same techies are still struggling to completely 'destroy' all of it. Due to this, the industry is instead 'regulating' it and picking a remaining few candidates rather than banning everything, because they know they cannot.

So you see with these examples above, co-existence is the end result and it has been the same result with the other movements and those hoping to achieve all their goals in preventing or totally stopping all of it is going to be very disappointed.

>thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of a human mind

I'm not worried about ML "art" or literature, those are curiosities and don't actually threaten to replace anything, people who expect them to are very optimistic about the progress of ML.

I am worried about ML replacing human judgement on the road, with weaponry, content moderation, law enforcement, and using it to do things that humans wouldn't have the resources to do. (i.e. a policeman on patrol in a neighborhood is fine, a police ML surveillance camera that identifies people and records everything they do in public is not)

idk I plan to use dalle to generate the art in a specific style for my next saas launch site.

I wonder how well it can generate logos…

Refusing to utilize automation is what all those people refusing to use automated self-checking counters in supermarkets are doing.

They say things like: "I want to be served by a real human", while basically condemning people serving them to standing behind checkout counters all day in a very dehumanizing and unhealthy task.

These people are either getting their kicks out of subservience of other people, or what they actually want is to provide a living to working class people.

If whatever people need is provided by automation, then that is just great and we can increase more humane pursuits which aren't driven by profit.

Things like UBI and similar will solve the issue of our societies' wealth distributions being based on labor where labor is becoming less necessary.

That is highly preferable to defending continuations of the existing economic models which force people to toil their lives away in unimportant tasks.

I agree that banning automation generally reduces "abundance" and is generally "wrong" without good reason.

On the other hand, I don't see demand for manual labour as wrong - as long as it's a free exchange and the transaction is at a mutually agreeable price.

I don't think it's morally wrong to want hand-made furniture when ikea exists.

Likewise manicures, shelf-stacking or typing code into an IDE by hand.

> They say things like: "I want to be served by a real human", while basically condemning people serving them to standing behind checkout counters all day in a very dehumanizing and unhealthy task.

> These people are either getting their kicks out of subservience of other people, or what they actually want is to provide a living to working class people.

Or they prefer the faster, less confusing experience of having their goods swiped for them and not having to stand around waiting for a human to come and validate they're old enough to buy alcohol or correct the automated checkout freaking out over an item being marginally below the expected weight or explain they need to select the payment method before trying to use their card.

> For example, if we refuse to pay for self-driving taxis on moral grounds (the same way we might refuse to eat factory-farmed chickens) society can make these immoral businesses unprofitable.

I don't think you've explained why they're immoral. Is it because they displace low skill jobs (seems like a core consequence of technology) or because they're less safe than human drivers (likely temporarily so, with a net number of lives saved through continued use and adoption)?

This is a delusion “if we refuse to pay for self-driving taxis on moral grounds (the same way we might refuse to eat factory-farmed chickens) society can make these businesses unprofitable.”

The idea that peoples behavior can be controlled by a minority preaching a moral agenda is total fantasy. I promise you the silence from the crowd is because their mouthes are filled with affordable factory farmed chicken. Of the 8 billion people hailing a ride how many do you think would rather pay double and stand in the rain? Just you and a small handful of friends - and the irony is that people with your attitude have no place to go. Many closed doors in the future for you

Stopping people from using AI is sort of like banning people from doing math. Maybe it can work for awhile, but in the long run computers just keep getting faster, and algorithms to make effective use of existing hardware get better.

I'm more interested in the question of who benefits from AI? If it just creates more concentration of wealth then the world may be worse off. If it benefits all humanity, then the world is better off. How do we get the latter instead of the former? It might come down to sensible tax codes enacted by well-functioning democracy. Or maybe we need to invent whole new economic systems.

I agree, we need to adapt to a world increasingly powered by AI. Trying to stop or ban AI is just putting off planning how to adapt, and will make the world worse, not better. Also, an AI ban would likely be implemented unevenly around the world, leading some countries to have a significant advantage.

I see AI as a new tool and an advantage for humanity in general. Work to negate how the tool can be used as a disadvantage, as with every new or evolving technology.

Cypherpunks, crypto evangelists, ecovillages, Lord Richard Stallman, pirates, etc.

All of these movements are pretty closely related - meant to be a parallel structure to the hypercommoditized mainstream.

They also have major problems, which I'm sure are mostly self-evident by now. If anyone's wondering what's wrong with ecovillages: they tend to be run by nutjobs who want to play emperor. They almost always devolve into Lord of the Flies style internal politics. It's a metaphor for every other populist movement like it.

So, coming up with a viable alternative will be very hard. I think it's worth pursuing though.

"As a society we can reject this technology"

I don't think we can. If I secretly use my own DALLE2 clone to generate art and then pretend that I painted it, nobody can easily detect the difference.

Of course they can. They could ask you how long it took you to paint, they could ask to see your studio, etc.

Fakes have existed forever, authenticity processes exist and chain of ownership technologies can be used to verify relationships to the original author.

> reduce the value of human intelligence and creativity, commoditizing them

Creativity rewards the creator. There is a pleasure in creating, thinking, & understanding that is entirely private. Nothing will ever change this. If you are an artist, or private philosopher, or tinkerer, or hacker, you know precisely what I am talking about. Nothing whatsoever in this world can ever change this. Some creatives do crave recognition and an audience (cue Spirit by Bauhaus) but not all. I have no doubt whatsoever that there are hidden masterpieces, hidden jewels of thought.

The fact that others, on the consuming end of creative works, also find pleasure is and has always been a side-effect. And not necessarily a positive side-effect. (Think of the 'commoditization' of art on the consuming side, as a means to signal social status (or as some would have it a means to launder money. ;)) Maybe once we have hack AI artist, we can finally be rid of hack artists (here is looking at you Andy). So, possibly a positive end on that score.

I've always found Frank Herbert's choice of words -- Butlerian Jihad -- to be right on the mark. There certainly will be a spiritual movement organized around opposing the notion that Human beings are merely meat machines. We love, we hate, we cry, we laugh, we know what joy means, we know how love feels.

Can your machines (or "machine off-spring") do that?

The universe conspired and I randomly stumbled on this, which should allay your fears about commoditization of art. That ship sailed a long (long) time ago ..

"The Washington Post—you know, where democracy dies in darkness, let the cat out of the bag with this remark: “The record sale was set as investors seek out safe-haven investments, such as art, amid uncertainty in global financial markets fueled by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.” Uh-huh, soldiers fall, stocks rise. In other words, for the oligarchs that have a death grip on the art world’s upper strata, the experience of art is no longer one of contemplation and the wonderment of beauty. No, it’s only a “safe-haven” for investments. Money laundering anyone?"

http://art-for-a-change.com/blog/2022/05/andy-warhol-is-stil...

No, the unstoppable force here is the imperative that every organization must keep up with its peers to survive. Just to simplify by keeping it in the realm of business, if only one company adopts an advantageous technology, all other companies are forced to find a way to keep up, get ahead, or leave the field. The ratchet effect is inexorable. It can only be tweaked and maybe guided, not stopped.

"Meditations on Moloch"

https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/

Why? AI is a tool, not even a servant, for that would imply will. We can use and direct it to whatever ends please us. The realization of AI as a general tool for the individual is approaching rapidly, and it will have radically transformative potential. Don't be afraid, push from behind so that progress won't stall in the period where it's only accessible to institutions.

Capitalism is a wonderful system. But when your mind has become a commodity your economic value will approach zero. I hope you're not expecting our capitalist society to coddle you when that day arrives. Perhaps you will do manual labor for the machines, but I doubt the value of human physical labor will last. So good luck.

AI will only sustain capitalism and it's heirarchical order if it is kept the domain of institutions. Hardware and software are both advancing quickly enough that only a mass movement against AI will lead us to that dystopia. In any case, I don't participate in the normal economy or society, and live outside of those bounds in large part, so being afraid of suxh things would be silly for me.

"Capitalism is a wonderful system".. What? That seems hypocritical, considering that capitalism does not value or reward your "mind" or "creativity", it is purely based on profit and extracting the most value. It is obviously not a wonderful, but an exploitative system. The AI you are describing and you fear is mainly a product of capitalism also. Regarding your concerns, we could have discussions and even regulations about ethical AI and ethics in that field. It is capitalism that will disregard or circumvent those guardrails in order to generate as much profit as possible.

What the OP and people in all replies that I read really misses one thing:

Rejecting AI-products might be an option for you, but it might not be an option for everyone. Not everyone will be able to.

Think of coal. Or car and factory emissions. We have alternative power sources now. There are welcome tides of change in the developed world.

But what about Bangladesh, or India?

Despite traditional situations being better, we have often seen, in many points of history, people opting for the new thing. Because it makes economical sense.

The Indian muslin was a better clothe. But most people couldn't buy them. Out came mass produced clothes from Manchester mills, and people drove in herds towards them. Many artisans starved to death. And for these poor people's choice, tens of thousands toiled in torture in Manchester mills. The people were simply poor.

Now, when there will be driverless cabs, when the price will be much cheaper, many people will opt for these. When it is 100 degrees outside everyday for a month, and you can marginally afford the driverless cab fitted with an AC but the human operated cab will be way out of your range, "resistance against AI" will go out of your head.

Or you are a passion boutique clothes owner. You could get small bank loans. No budget for hiring real models but enough for the AI one? What will you do?

Say you are a filmmaker. But you don't know the right cohort. You do not have a budget. But you can make a movie with an AI with reasonable man hours. Will you not want to see your ideas executed into a film? Or will you let it die.

(I predict a full-length "AAA" movie with only generative models with minimal human input- 80 hours/week of man hours- for 40 days will be possible within the next 16 years.)

See, only privileged people can opt for the more expensive option (like vegan only diet), and a vast majority of humanity will not even have that option.

When your opposition is an industry, you will become GAB.COM.

Absolutely everything that is said about GAB.COM, is untrue. Look at the Wikipedia article. Yet the casual reader will believe it. Readers HERE will downvote this because they think GAB.COM is an "alt-right nazi site" with nothing more than what paid propaganda to refer to.

That is what will happen to you, if you try to counter an emerging industry.

YOU will be the one lied about. You have to be ready to weather that. Where will your revenue stream come from? Advertisers believe bought-and-paid-for lies as easily as anyone else will. They will not want to advertise.

Fee-based social media won't work (Too many "free" options), so you are stuck with donations...just like GAB.COM.

It's a good idea both ethically and morally, but the general public is evil and stupid. AI's already know this.

> As a society we can reject this technology.

I don't see a lot of precedent for this. I actually can't think of one example where society has rejected a useful technology.

I believe that affluent people will pay more for artisinal/organic/human-created things. But the majority of the world without disposable income will choose cheaper over human. Even if human-made is better. Especially if AI-made is better.

It's true that AI will replace humans as the most powerful intelligence on earth. But it's a wave that there is no plausible way to stop. As long as there are groups that seek to gain economic or military advantage over each other, people will push this technology along. It's as much of an inevitability as any other stage of evolution.

I work with these systems all day, every day, and these new systems are qualitatively different. These new transformer systems have crossed a line and its easy to see how they will threaten human dignity. This technology crosses a line. It's like atomic weapons. This is the commoditization of the human mind.

You're 100% right. But I'm convinced there's realistically nothing we can do to stop it. Yuval Noah Harari's Homo Deus (and Sapiens to a lesser extent) are about the possible future paths for humanity and computers that increasingly surpass our abilities in more and more ways.

It will absolutely be hugely disruptive to culture, the structure of society, and our perception of ourselves. But I don't see how it can be avoided.

1. How did rejecting atomic weapons go?

2. In what way does it "threaten human dignity" that is different from the technologies that came before it? Automation took away the livelihoods of people in industries like manufacturing decades ago. Feels like what is truly "different" this time around is just that you feel your job is threatened, so now it's a problem for all of society.

Not the pp, but:

1. For many countries (e.g. Australia), quite successfully. We said no, and then we didn't.

2. We can replace physical activity (e.g. machinery instead of human motion), and that doesn't move human beings from the place of control and power. Likewise, we can replace certain kinds of thinking work (e.g. programming or medicine) and that in itself isn't a major problem (except for the out-of-work programmers or doctors).

But replacing all cognitive activity (which is what a hypothetical future AI would do), what are we --- as humans --- left with?

Pure hedonism?

I think there's room for value even when you're not the best.

1. But the crux the issue here (and with atomic weapons) is that as long not everyone has rejected it, then end result is not meaningfully different. And it's impossible to get everyone to reject it.

2. Again, I don't think that argument carries a lot of weight with people whose lives have already been completely upended by technology. The fact that some people now feel that This Time Is Different and thus we must all band together to hold the line betrays a deep lack of empathy.

I think there are many precedents for this; you probably just discount them. Some religious communities explicitly reject certain technologies, for instance.

We do it as an aggregate society as well whether we actually realize it or not; they are just negative examples of pursuing one kind of technology over another. We started out with a decentralized web, but economic forces have pushed tech development towards building walled gardens and rent extraction.

I believe specific groups can reject it, but that won't stop it from progressing. You'd need everybody to reject it.

I actually can't think of one example where society has rejected a useful technology.

Nuclear energy, for one.

> Some of my colleagues and myself are realizing that we're pursuing goals that will reduce the value of human intelligence and creativity, commoditizing them.

Which is a good thing, value is fundamentally based of scarcity, by commoditizing human intelligence and creativity, people are just making it less scarce (by offering plentiful substitute - AI), so more affordable.

Most likely a global rejection of AI would only be possible after a fairly large accident that people would want to avoid.

If it's not a global rejection then it won't work; some country or corporation will keep working and eventually achieve superhuman AGI.

Once superhuman AGI is achieved it will rapidly self-improve and be capable of strategizing effective ways to avoid being rejected.

So the most likely scenario for an AI rejection working is an "oops" where someone creates a near-human-level agent that begins the process of figuring out how to tell all the computers in the world that they should help improve the model by running code snippets included in oddly shaped packets, but gets it wrong and just crashes everything connected to the internet for a few weeks until we manage to re-flash to original firmware and reinstall from read-only optical media and begin to bring stuff back online.

All the other scenarios leave plenty of incentives for AI to keep progressing.

Maybe. One prediction I have is that AI will likely find its earliest widespread use in "content" generation, and this content will be geared towards clicks and engagement rather than creating something, well, creative.

I think eventually there will be a backlash against this content because of how much it stunts human potential. It keeps you hooked, but people will also deride it for being empty, for being exceptionally "mid". People will question why such content appeals to the widest possible demographic and come up with disturbing answers, like that the AIs unintentionally discovered a lot of unsettling psychological hooks. True or not, it'll freak people out.

I haven't even scratched the surface of my worries when it comes to the unintended consequences of content AI. I for one look forward to the day someone manages to create "the world's smartest racist".

To elaborate on what I mean. I think that someone will train an AI on racist literature, statistics, and rhetoric, and create an AI that is not only very racist, but very good at convincing other people to be racist. I think this will happen well before the government and institutions can preempt such a thing from happening.

This does bring up a bigger issue. What are the risks of creating AIs that could convince people on any subject one could think of?

There is very little discussion of Dall-E 2 in the art world. Why? Because art isn't just about pretty images, it's about human context, and the art world understands this.

Until AI can get itself into a human body and experience human existence, I wouldn't worry too much about AI replacing human creativity.

If it did, it would only be after AI became ubiquitous and the shock to human society and culture of having machines govern and commoditize their lives became great enough that a counterculture rose up against it organically. You can't just plan the revolution in advance, though, you aren't the CIA.

> In your opinion, would a social movement organized around this idea find traction?

Might want to call it the "Butlerian Jihad", because that's what it sounds like to me. And, yes, machines should serve man and amplify man's abilities, not replace man or his intellect.

was wondering if anyone would mention this lol

Somebody had to. Reading classic sf is the closest many techies come to anything resembling an education in the humanities.

An AI already controls the world. It's just a dumbass paperclip maximizer called "capitalism" whose job is to make the line go up on a graph. It's a kind of cute design where instead of using silicon chips, they get organic beings to do minor calculations for them, and then it's the distribute computing problem from hell to get all the calculations combined and error corrected, but it basically works well enough, and as aforementioned, it already controls the world. So basically, I don't see much room for a second AI to run the world unless it can find a way to coopt the operations of the first.

Marx called this valorization.

"Just as capital, as value valorizing itself, views with indifference the particular physical guise in which labour appears in the labour process, whether as a steam-engine, dung heap or silk, so too the worker looks upon the particular content of his labour with equal indifference. His work belongs to capital, it is only the use-value of the commodity that he has sold, and he has only sold it to acquire money and, with the money, the means of subsistence."

Ai can only ever be a mirror of our minds. It can't be more than what the programmer can feed it in training data made from other people's work from their minds.

Human creativity will diminish in value with or without AI, people are moving away from sweeping cultural changes and clever interpretations. People just want to look good and relate to ideas they like.

The tech is not in the drivers seat, it is just a facilitator made by our best minds. A moral movement "against" Dall E will be a futile attempt to call back horses bolted from the stables.

AlphaZero beat human in the game of Go without being fed human game records.

Human is no longer necessary for intelligence.

Alphazero was coded by humans, some human figured out you can isolate GO into an algorithm. Human intelligence did that.

Alphastar for starcraft 2 required a lot of tweaking by the original creators.

The game destroying AI's can be beaten by a human controlling an opposing AI.

The human is the only source of intelligence that exists. Mathematics in programming always ends in an infinite reduction from the initial broad premise, otherwise it overflows and crashes.

Computers don't have 'intelligence'. They are number machines programmed to mirror the best mathematical concepts we know.

In my opinion it is unfortunately too soon for the movement to take traction. Strategically it makes more sense to just raise awareness by producing reference litterature (content) and enroll activists to be ready logistically for when something aweful happens and suddenly the general population becomes aware that they have a problem. At that moment the movement will kick in and maybe have solutions ready to be deployed. Of course you can't predict that moment. You just be ready and wait

That's what Dune said happened, computers are ok as long as a human is not being replaced. I personally agree with it but I realize it is hugely impractical and prone to error.

I'd even agree to it so long as someone is responsible for its decisions, someone died because your auto-taxi is buggy? Go to jail and pay for damages out the nose. You knew the risks, that's the price to play here.

Unprofitable doesn't mean undoable, it'll only delay things, not make them inevitable. Your investment profits can wait.

Quoting from Frank Herbert's Dune:

  “Thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of a human mind.”

Many people are finding their way out of big cities and into a less technologically enhanced life. Good ol' rural country living.

Is it possible for urban society to shift away from AI? No I don't think so. Is it possible for a NEW society to emerge that shifts away from AI? Yes, and that new society is already alive and growing.

Perhaps one day these two opposing societies will have to fight for supremacy, which sounds like an interesting scenario. Someone should write a book about that.

It is worrisome. People are quick to give up freedom if it also means they can give up responsibility. I can believe that our descendants in the not too distant future would accept whatever the AI told them unquestioningly. In the same way that now and in the past people will lie to others and themselves to conform and not stand out. Question the judgement of a multi trillion neuron cybernetic brain? Try to form an independent thought in the face of such might?

No, and I'm not convinced this is even a good idea. As a society we are having trouble coordinating around reasoned responses to much of anything. Perhaps we have passed the point where human decision-making is a good idea and instead we should figure out how to hand over the reins in a way that reflects better values than just accepting whatever big company happens to get the farthest the first (today probably an ad company).

Why not refuse to pay for taxis as well? Automobiles have replaced carriage drivers.

In the early twentieth century, coach driving professionals suddenly found themselves out of a job, having to switch careers and adapt. Some never recovered, but it was a net benefit for society.

Do you also want to bring back factory assembly line jobs?

Do you think “commoditization” of intelligence and creativity, whatever that means exactly, is a new phenomenon?

Imo most people who spend time resisting things like AI and Blockchain will spin their wheels before being lumped in with the Luddites. Make sure tech is used correctly because you aren't stopping it. Even if you "stop" a given tech in your country, many other countries will embrace it and leave you out of the conversation.

I see there is some sort of AI governance concept starting to emerge.

I am sure there will be some countries that slow things down.

You are asking this on the wrong website. Most people here have spent a significant amount of time and resources delving into AI technologies that the idea of rejecting AI will mean a waste of all that resources. You won't find an objective opinion here.

In my opinion, the dangerous thing about AI is not its capabilities, but that (some) people think it's magic and are fully willing to give themselves up to it if it means they don't have to make any decisions.

Most things people call AI nowadays is rubbish techbro hype. Don't hold your breath waiting for "AI" to replace humans.

If anything, we should be against AI being used for important stuff because most AI suck.

Visual artists have already been replaced. It won't be long before we have transformers over token trees containing millions of tokens. We've reached a point where we understand how to make the machine manipulate concepts. It's all just vectors of numbers and dot products. Really.

I know it's more fun to think of an AI takeover but given the current rate of climate change, it's also possible that our species will be extinct long before that happens.

There are people who reject smartphones because of (addictiveness, non-mindfulness, invasiveness of privacy). Your movement aligns with that.

There are many, many people (myself included) who want to see black-box predictors banned unless they are doing something trivial and unimportant (and that's the goal of the GDPR and PIPL rules). So there's another group to align with, and this group has a lot of political clout at the moment.

Rejecting automated art is a slightly odd, but I presume there will be some group that would align with that too.

So it sounds like you can start building consensus with some other groups already, which is the kind of political power you will need in order to effect change.

It might not be exactly what you’re looking for, but there are already movements that are pushing back against many of the ways in which AI is used to curtail human existence.

That is, people are already organizing against AI as deployed to accelerate modes of domination, control exploitation: workers employed in dataset labeling — particularly displaced people — who are exploited by big tech; tenants rights organizations fighting against use of biometric technologies like facial recognition; those who are organizing to oppose mass serveillance; activists trying to address the use of AI in discriminatory lending, policing; Indigenous activists pushing back against impact of NLP on Native and “low resource” languages.

Marx talks briefly about the potential benefits and harms of automatons — ultimately it’s an issue of who gets to control the technology, does power rest in the hands of a few elites or are is it accountable to “everyday” people. You might find this article “The Nonmachinables” https://logicmag.io/distribution/the-nonmachinables/ relevant.

To sum up, a lot is happening and there’s a lot of potential solidarity if we look beyond the “ML engineer” class bubble.

maybe it leads to a situation where we can just relax and go back to monke while the ai rules over us. But also who knows maybe it opens up new streams of consciousness and we can morph our minds with machines and go somewhere new.

How do you define "AI" versus algorithns vs heuristics?

Fully automated luxury communism awaits?

With zero gravitas

In zero gravity, too

nope, pandora's box has been opened

Thanks. I added your phrase to my question.

> As a society we can reject this technology.

The point of this parable is that you explicitly cannot undo this...

The Amish seem to be a functioning society that have shunned the advances of automation - despite Pandora's box" of industrialization being opened (which of course has directly led to the pursuit of ever-increasingly capable automated and autonomous systems).

Like they picked a point in time and said "nope, we're good with the way things are" while the rest of us moved on. I've always referred to this as "evolution-locking" (actively choosing not to evolve).

Sometimes, in the rat-race world we live in, in all of it's superficial splender, I fantasize about that simple life. Then I think about manually plowing a field in black wool slacks on a hot summer day and I quickly come to my senses.

There are certainly modern varients of evolution locking factions. Folks living "off-grid". I think our collective decision to outlaw the technical evolution of chemical warfare agents has been a triumph of collective evolution locking. Same (I hope) will be the case for global environmental controls thwarting the evolution of carbon-emitting machinery and products composed of non-sustainable materials.

Write your manifesto and see if others will join. I probably won't, because I'm too curious to see what's on the other side of the signularity and I think more good will come from it than bad, but I'll read your manifesto and give it some thought.

How often do we see lack of morality blamed on capitalism?

For example: if there shouldn't be billionaires, why buy from Amazon rather than a local shop?

Perhaps the same level of consciousness and self reflection would be required here too.

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