Experts say humans could be wrestling AI for control by 2035
aimagazine.com
aimagazine.com
Give me a break.
The headline aside, people are absolutely going to grow closer to technology as it becomes more generally useful, its simply a matter of efficiency. Lots of people already live their lives being guided around by the invisible algorithms powering search engines and social media websites. The levels at which sites like Youtube and Twitter control peoples perception is insane. We're lucky that the people running them are too incompetent to make use of their personalized curation functions fully.
And do we not universally agree that this is a bad thing?
I think we disagree on what can be done. I, personally, am trying to learn the “slow” way by “rtfm” ing, etc.
It’s just today’s era makes it so easy, when tired after work, to plop on a person with a nice voice talking about whatever is interesting.
So what’s the manual that will tell us how to solve the problem?
I’m saying that it feels healthier to me that I take the time to read when my adhd and energy allows.
By 2045, AI controls and handles all food and energy production. Humans become reliant on AI for basic needs, and a shutdown is no longer possible without catastrophic consequences.
By 2055, AI handles all aspect of the economy. From birth to death, every aspect of human life is now managed and taken care for by the AI.
By 2065, resistance to the AI starts to appear. Although AI continues to serve humanity, discomfort and the feeling of being relegated to a “Princess in a cage” starts to spread.
By 2075, a persistent minority of radicals and terrorist become increasingly violent. Although their action are shocking and gather widespread attention, efforts to get rid of the AI remain fruitless.
By 2100, In an effort to restore humanity’s sense of purpose and autonomy, AI has now concealed itself. Instead of an all encompassing presence, it has taken the position of a watchful guardian. It has set back technology progress to the year 2000, and carefully monitor humanity’s happiness and well-being, intervening only through covert actions.
… and so we life happily ever after
I wonder if the Futurama writers were saying something about the silliness of trying to predict the future or if they were just having fun with the song and rhyme.
The world's population has doubled since I was born and the vast majority of those people can only be supported because of algorithms. "AI" is just a gimmicky name for an algorithm developed using certain methodologies. It's all algorithms and we've been utterly dependent on them for our very lives for some time now.
What we need to be afraid of isn't AI or algorithms - it's people. We've been concentrating more and more wealth and power into fewer and fewer hands since the time we've become so dependent on algorithms. Many of our current societal ills are blamed on that concentration of wealth and power. I see "AI" as likely to make that wealth and power concentration worse and thus leading to even more societal issues. But it's people that are the root cause of the problem.
Of course I suppose once the AI figures out that people are the root cause of society's problems it could implement a "solution" to that problem, a "final" solution you might say! Sounds like a plot for a SciFi movie. More than likely though it's going to be people wielding AI who are going to be the perpetrators of our doom.
Look at, say, Google. If the abyss that was their algorithms decided to fuck you in particular, could you stop the impacts it would have on your life? It bans you from all their services, but your employer uses GCP, so you need to find another job or that business gets accounts locked too.
The only hope you have is to cause enough of an outrage on social media that some random dev browsing HN sees your post and decides to intervene. What happens when its an AI model that they cannot adjust?
Personally I believe that the actual conflict with AI implied by the headline will probably be real within not too many decades. I don't know how many but I will be surprised if it's more than a few hundred years.
Actually at this rate it looks like less than forty years before we see autonomous digital human-like persons walking around that have ten times or more intelligence than un-augmented humans. Which I think it will be very unwise to do that, but someone will anyway.
You just have to look at what the latest LLMs can do, then see how much potential there is in the multimodal transformer models for significantly better and more general world understanding. Look at the development of new types of compute-in-memory with huge increases in efficiency and performance for AI.
And there is a great interest in all of the things that make us creature-like such as survival instincts and autonomy. Which again, bad idea but nothing is going to stop that research from accelerating.
So they are NOT saying, the AI will become self aware and take over, but humans will increasingly design system to be fully automated, because it is cheaper. But the result will be the same for the common people: some black box makes a decision that can ruin your life, if you are unlucky - and with no chance of changing it. (I mean, we have those HN outcry/support threads since quite a while)
The "algorithm" is something that the powerful rely on when it's convenient and ignore when it's not.
It's a political battle more than a technical one.
I'd surmise i as Authortiarianism Vs not and the former has made great strides in these last 22 years, but specially the last 3 (as in sept 11 2001 security theater and covid policies hygiene/security theater).
What threads, can you elaborate please?
Choose one from the brackets or imagine your own scenario.
Not sure how that's all that different from good-old bureaucracy?
The rules themself might not make sense and making sense of layers and layers of rules is not an easy task, but you can do it.
But with an blackbox AI trained on proprietary data, you won't know the rules and are blocked from knowing them.
It’s getting increasingly hard to opt out of having a smartphone because of how many things require a smartphone now: 2FA to log into your job, scanning QR codes for menus at restaurants, tickets on your phone to get into different venues, whatever. Sure, you COULD choose to not own a phone, but then you’re missing out on all these things that require it.
The network effects for the internet in general are even stronger. A lot of jobs and social events are ONLY advertised via the internet. Cut yourself off from the internet and you’re cutting yourself off from an increasingly large part of the world.
What are the analogous use cases for AI? I’m having trouble thinking of any, outside of maybe general productivity boosts making the workplace more competitive.
All that needs to happen is for governments and companies to replace humans and existing systems with "good enough" AI (because it's cheaper than the alternatives) and then you don't have a choice.
Need support for a malfunctioning product? You're talking to an AI. Need to dispute a parking charge? AI. Applying for jobs? AI recruiter, AI HR. Accused of a crime? AI-assisted justice system.
The rise of persuasive AI, either directed by a human or running its own paperclip maximizing function, has already begun.
Or using the threat of AI to influence people's thoughts and actions ...
Start preparing your resumes for AI models and not for humans.
No difference here, just automated scanning of keywords with still no actual understanding
US tech journalism is very much a meme at this point.