Comment by qualudeheart | Hacker News Reader

Comment by qualudeheart | Hacker News Reader

Dark times ahead.

If you haven’t already made it big with crypto or startups, you are toast and will be trapped in the permanent UBI underclass. That assumes that there will be a UBI at all. Combined with inflation this will mean that only those with $5 million or more in the bank will live what still count as middle class lifestyles. Those with less money will be forced into poverty. Many will adopt petty crime for survival.

I predict mass unrest, beginning in the global south and spreading to the global north. The anti-racist protests of 2020, the farmer protests in India and Europe, and the Sri Lankan anti-corruption protests all show how this will play out. The state may be forced to accept the demands of the protesters.

Only an AI security system could let the state win, again showing how very important the AI advantage is.

The resulting political turmoil may be exploitable for AI alignment purposes. Those of us who are concerned with AI alignment and automation must ally with whichever political faction wins the fight.

That will be our last chance to implement UBI, make AI alignment mandatory and buy a few more decades for humanity.

I hate AI so much, man.

Things will be shaken up, the way they were when the steam engine was invented. But there's no reason to believe we're headed for a dystopic future.

The result of this development and the underlying trend is vastly increased wealth creation. That's a good thing. You'd have to be a luddite to think otherwise.

Read e.g. https://moores.samaltman.com/, where Sam Altman (OpenAI CEO) suggests a scheme for wealth taxation that gives everyone direct ownership of the AI-created wealth and the machinery to make it.

I'm pretty confident that there would be strong democratic support for a scheme along these lines, given how few are able to participate in the highest echelons of the wealth creation in the kind of AI-driven society that will happen before AI becomes truly autonomous.

The difference is that the steam engine created jobs that went to humans.

Strong AI, if it does create jobs, does not necessarily create jobs for humans. Any jobs that it creates could also be done by AI, cutting humans out of the growth of the economy.

Now I am in fact a luddite if it means (most) humans become second class citizens and especially if there’s no transhumanist enhancement option for us to stay competitive. Even more so if I’m among the people locked in the UBI class.

I like Altman’s welfare plan. I think it’s one of the easier ways to prevent the riots and emergent fascism that I predicted in other posts.

> there's no reason to believe we're headed for a dystopic future.

Oh idk. The recent shifts in wealth distribution, gig economy and cost of living crisis squeezing bottom end sure feels a little dystopian to me

Because graphic designers and software engineers will have some of their work AI-assisted...there will be no more jobs for anyone and the world is going to riot?

It's alarmist nonsense like this that I expect to find on Reddit.

I do believe AI alignment and safety is a huge concern, and unfortunately thinks are moving so fast there is not enough time for society to adapt.

However, if we can safeguard that I am very optimistic about what a sufficiently advanced AI (we don't even need AGI) can do to help with climate change, medical advances, etc. Costs of goods will plummet as things become more abundant.

The question is which path are we on, the utopia or dystopia, or somewhere in between?

We’re headed for dystopia.

We desperately go transhuman with Musk’s Neuralink tech or we die as slaves.

Once AI approaches AGI it will enable a highly dangerous form of fascism. Society can be controlled top down by a dictatorship using AI to oppress whoever it doesn’t like. That means the recently impoverished masses will be at the mercy of whichever fascist or totalitarian government is in charge.

You have to do transhumanism in order to make yourself strong enough to resist machine fascism, or you somehow slow technological progress so any mass technological unemployment can’t happen fast enough to cause the civil war meets economic riots scenario that I’ve alluded to in my last post.

Note that I’m not saying the riots inherently lead to fascism, but that fascism may emerge as a reaction by current economic elites against the uprisings, or as a result of an extremist takeover caused by the crisis. The latter would be like the Bolshevik or Nazi takeovers in Russia or Weimar Germany.

If you slow progress down enough there also can’t be a point where machines progress past human level without humans also upgrading themselves at the same speed.

The crux of my argument is that progress in AI is dangerous because of the direct economic consequences and second, third order risks from political chaos.

If I had my way GPT-3 wouldn’t have happened until we already had brain computer interfaces at an economically useful level. Unfortunately neuroscience looks way to hard for that to happen.

I would not at all be surprised if Neuralink isn’t even economically useful by the time AGI happens.

We don’t have the equivalent of the scaling hypothesis for transhumanism yet. Scaling neural networks is simply the best way to make them better. It’s dead simple. You just throw money at the problem.

We need something like that for whatever tech can preserve human agency i.e. Neuralink.

We are moving too fast to put in adequate safeguards unfortunately. Demis Hassabis, founder of DeepMind, recently mentioned something interesting on a Lex Fridman interview. They are going to double down on safety since the algorithm side has moved much faster than expected.

Moreover, Max Tegmark, MIT scientist and author of the famous book Life 3.0 said this on a podcast last month: "Frankly, this is to me the worst-case scenario we’re on right now — the one I had hoped wouldn’t happen. I had hoped that it was going to be harder to get here, so it would take longer. So we would have more time to do some AI safety. I also hoped that the way we would ultimately get here would be a way where we had more insight into how the system actually worked, so that we could trust it more because we understood it. Instead, what we’re faced with is these humongous black boxes with 200 billion knobs on them and it magically does this stuff."

Do you have a link to this interview? Would be interesting to hear more about what DeepMind is currently up to.

Even if alignment works and AI is "safe", what does that actually mean?

Frank Herbert in Dune wrote about AI: 1. "Once men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free. But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them."

If a few people control super intelligent systems, they could probably control all your thinking. Would these machines run all the media, all the politics, all of society? These machines could likely persuade you into any believe or action.

2. "Humans had set those machines to usurp our sense of beauty, our necessary selfdom out of which we make living judgments"

These early art generating AIs will only be the beginning to superhuman visual and audio art. All music, movies, games and whatever will come might be created by AI at a superhuman level. Will they control our sense of beauty and will you find human art to be dull in comparison?

This is just some perspective on what might be wrong with an AI utopia.

It won’t happen because of Jevon’s Paradox and comparative advantage.

If everyone was unemployed then who would buy AI produced output?

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