Or, you know, they might actually know something about the subject? On a similar note, most physicists don't think particle colliders will cause mini black holes which will swallow the Earth, but the fear gets repeated by non-physicists.
The author is not talking about sentient AI turning Hollywood film evil like Elon Musk did. Why no, that would be ludicrous. You would have easily noticed that if your mental model didn’t get trained to filter out article titles like these…
In fact what you did with your mental model is exactly some of the problems with AI that is dangerous. There are more banal problems with AI such as encoding discrimination and automating it, possibly absolving people of the responsibility of discrimination and prejudice. AI in its current form is a lot of automating assumption making. Imagine taking your assumption making powers, and extracting it into an unaccountable model that can be deployed at national or global scales.
Just say this part! This is what we could be talking about. It’s not a difficult mental model. But it’s just wrapped up in alarmist rhetoric that makes it hard for us to focus on the fact that the quote above is terrifying!!
>...if you ask [AI researchers] for probabilities of things occurring in a fixed number of years, you get later estimates than if you ask for the number of years until a fixed probability will obtain. This looked very robust in 2016, and shows up again in the 2022 [human-level machine intelligence] data. Looking at just the people we asked for years, the aggregate forecast is 29 years, whereas it is 46 years for those asked for probabilities. (We haven’t checked in other data or for the bigger framing effect yet.)
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/H6hMugfY3tDQGfqYL/what-do-ml...
> I am not a Luddite. I have been wildly enthusiastic about science, technology, and intellectual and material progress since I was a kid. I have a PhD in artificial intelligence, and I find the current breakthroughs fascinating.
By contrast, the questions that this book explores haven't received nearly as much expert attention. And if you poll the experts on whether those questions should receive more attention, they mostly say yes!
>69% of [ML researcher] respondents believe society should prioritize AI safety research “more” or “much more” than it is currently prioritized, up from 49% in 2016.
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/H6hMugfY3tDQGfqYL/what-do-ml...
The Luddites were not intrinsically opposed to the advance of technology. In fact, the whole reason why they were smashing looms was as a protest tactic - not an end goal. England's upper class invented the myth of the technology-hating Luddite as a way to slander and libel what was basically a prototype of a modern labor union. Parliament would then crush them with laws that made machine breaking a hanging offense.
Transposing this to today would give you artists angry that their work was trained on by DALL-E, SD, or Midjourney[0]. In both cases the opposition is not to the technology itself, but to the reallocation of wealth away from labor and to whoever owns the machines. The latter today would be akin to, say, "businessman" hustlebros using ChatGPT and art generators to create labor-free fly-by-night operations[1]. Most art generators are also hosted platforms whose access is sold for profit, creating a second layer of ownership on top of the hustlebros.
Meanwhile the main argument here is more akin to the stereotypical technophobe: AI can't be trusted. Hell, there's a whole chapter (not yet written) arguing that we should just junk neural networks entirely. This isn't Luddism, this is the god damned Butlerian Jihad[2].
[0] If you want a bit of a stretch you probably could see some Luddite in, say, Richard Stallman
[1] I regularly get YouTube recommendations for people trying to tell me how much money I can make by just typing a few prompts into an art generator and posting the result on a print-on-demand site.
[2] In the sci-fi novel Dune, the Butlerian Jihad is an event in which all computers are outlawed and mercilessly destroyed.
Yes, this is why /r/Dune banned AI art.
I find your comment both thought-provoking and well-formulated. As for the references to the Butlerian Jihad: I read Dune for the first time this summer. The quote “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.” has lodged itself within my mind. I’m not as fatalistic as the author Dr. Chapman seems to be, but I find myself thinking about it nearly every time I read of some new AI development coming out of a big corporation.
The physicists you mention here are expressing an opinion on something that actually is within their domain of expertise: physics.
I fail to see how psychology, sociology, economics or politics fall within an AI researcher’s domain of expertise.