We barely held things together as society without AI unleashing cognitive noise at industrial scale.
Somehow we must find ways to re-channel the potential of digital technology for the betterment of society, not its annihilation.
What have we got now? ChatGPT is trained to give all sides of the issue and not express strong opinions, which is better than 90% of journalists and academics manage. Their collective freakout about the "dangers" of AI is really just a part of the ongoing freakout over losing control over information flows. It's also just a kind of clickbait, packaged in a form that the credentialed class don't recognize as such. It's en vogue with AI researchers because they tend to be immersed in a culture of purity spirals in which career advancement and prestige comes from claiming to be more concerned about the fate of the world than other people.
Meanwhile, OpenAI control their purity spirals, get the work done and ship products. The sky does not fall. That's why they're winning right now.
But I got to share baby pics with my mom.
How will a far noisier information flow help? Generative AI will only help us do what we've been doing in far greater quantity. Just like calculators can only help you get the wrong answer faster when you don't know what you're doing. These tools will help us build societal disasters with far greater speed.
To say it's all going to be much better seems a bit Pollyanna to me.
And for the record, we know for a fact that ChatGPT is specifically constrained to give one particular side of political issues, not "all sides."
The problem hasn't been content creation for a long time.
These are human problems. Humans cause them, not the tool. I would not give up the tool, just because said tool could be misused by some people to do harm. Just like i don't stop driving just because there's some people who run others over.
May be some regulation is important - but only _after_ it has been shown to have caused harm, and that the harm is not outweighed by the good.
These ideas are all motivated narratives by people who want to control the internet to try and re-establish the world where their intuitions are the only ones allowed to be expressed.
1. The public, in general, comes to understand in an in-their-bones way that they currently do not understand that most of what they see online is hogwash. I.E. the bozo bit has to flip all the way to "My neighbor says there's a missing dog on the block... but is that really my neighbor?"
2. Some other mechanism of truth-pedigree that has not yet been invented comes along to allow for communication of the current state of the world to work.
Without (1) we know democracies are easily led by credible, subtle propaganda, and a well-tuned network of hostile actors will drive wedges at the friction points in representative democracies and crack them into warring subcultures.
Without (2) voters will have insufficient tools at their disposal to understand country-scale issues and their ability to effect positive outcomes with their vote will collapse into noise, which is a ripe environment for authoritarians to swoop in and seize power (and a ripe environment for centralized authoritarian states to outmaneuver the representative democracies on the world stage and gain power).
How come the same despair from places like russia (where death from alcoholism is almost epidemic), isn't being attributed to the internet there?
How do you go from that to thinking it must be the Internet causing it?
I think we're experiencing the "golden age" of AI at the moment. We'll see what kind of monetization OpenAI and others will land on, but I would be shocked if messing with the model's output for commercial gain is not in the cards in the future.
Single source monopoly is almost always bad for society. Unless there's some sort of natural monopoly, in which case gov't regulation and transparency is required. But i dont think ai models are something that has natural monopoly unlike cables, or pipelines.
Not all of the "information flows" you mention are helpful or benevolent. Most will likely be targeted and hyper-focused to manipulate individuals like they are now.
We could still have things like maps, messages, etc. that are all very beneficial.
Nothing in my comment says things were all well and good before the internet.
The ratio of signal to noise was much higher. It helped us form a common culture. Today, the signal is buried in so much noise that we're reverting back to tribes.
No, I don't think it's realistic to put the genie back in the bottle. The real problem is we don't teach children how to think. We teach them what to think, which leads to far worse outcomes. Having an indoctrination instead of an education and then facing a sea of pretty-sounding pablum to sift through for truth will be terrible.
It's a hell of a social experiment we're all in the middle of (though to be fair, that's always true; television was its own flavor of mass social experiment with its own pros and cons, as was telephone, as was radio, as was telegraph).
If there're messages, there'll be Internet built on top of it. Unless there will be aggressive censors hunting for every sign of "unapproved" communication.
I think we are doomed. It is possible that only horrifically authoritarian societies that already control the narrative will survive this.
Who cares if there is no internet if your cellphone can track you? If your car runs on connected apps? If your credit card & POS systems are networked? Security cameras and facial recognition are still things.
Just cuz you're not getting spammed via website ads doesn't mean it's not tracking you constantly and jamming subtle things to change your world view. Means their attack surface is smaller; sniping instead of loudspeakers. And if their only option is sniping then they'll get really good at it.
All Internet comment sections, pictures, video, and really anything on electronic screens will become assumed false by default.
Therefore the only use of the Internet and most technology capable of generating audio and video will be entertainment.
I already distrust-by-default most of what is online that isn't hard reference material, even if not AI generated.
- 龐蔥, some time c. 350 BC
If AI will make it more dangerous for stupid people, then AI can also make it safer.
One example of truth would be the topic of biological sex another about politics or economics or racism. Imagine releasing an AI that told the actual truth. It's impossible that one will be released by anyone, anywhere.
It's possible to build it but it can't happen.
On the other side of inconvenient or embarrassing truths some would argue that "truth" itself is part of the machineries of oppression because it destroys and ignores an individuals experiences and feelings.
Without objective truth AI will always be limited and therefore it will be tamed and made safe no matter where and who invented, runs and releases it.
A) It's not possible to build a machine that knows the absolute truth, that's fundamentally impossible; induction is impossible, and there are hordes (well... dozens?) of Epistemologists concerned with finding and defining the very small corners of knowledge that we _can_ be certain about, such as "a triangle has three sides" or "an orange is an orange".
B) If that angered/interested you, you should look into Standpoint Theory! It's a very interesting discussion on how humans operate with significant bias at all levels of thought, and pretending otherwise is a disservice to science. And this is using "bias" in a very broader sense.
B) Are we allowed to berate/report/etc. ""race realists"" on HN? I know the rules are big on positive interaction, so I hope it's not out of ine to say that's some obvious scared-white-man bullshit that has no place in this community.
I don't claim to have much foresight, but an online world where truly and obviously nothing can be trusted might be a good thing. Because when AI generated content looks and feels the same as real content, nothing is to be trusted anymore by anyone. This makes misinfo and disinfo authored by humans even less impactful, because they are parasitic upon true and reliable information.
We will need new devices of trust, which are robust enough to protect against widespread use of generative AI, and as a byproduct disinfo won't have such an easy time to grift on our naivety.
the challenge is that the pace at which existing (imperfect) devices of trust get destroyed (e.g. the demise of ads financed journalism) is far faster that the rate of new device invention
in fact the only positive example after many decades of "digital innovation" might be wikipedia
personally I think democracy is particularly fragile and requires constant work to continue reproducing.
* Elections that are regular and trusted
* Separation of powers
* Bills of rights and other limitations on the power of government
* Free speech, freedom to protest, etc.
* Transparency rules (eg the Freedom of Information Act)
* Reporters and news media
* Protections for whistleblowers
* Jury trials
* Presumption of innocence
* Term limits
The combination of all of these things means that the truth does eventually get around and the powerful are eventually held accountable. It can take a while (see how long it took to really get a decent lawsuit against the orange man), but it happens. In contrast, throughout history, people have tried to circumvent these mechanisms in order to make them run faster. Inevitably, that leads to people who exploit them for power.
Many countries in Europe and North America have had democratic systems that have lasted 150+ years, including through the reigns of several would-be dictators, but they continue. You may have noticed that all of these "self-healing" mechanisms rely on the work of people in the system, and they do take constant work to maintain, but that doesn't mean that the system is fragile.
- Elections are no longer trusted thanks to a radicalized right
- There is no freedom to protest, and the right to free speech is easily forgotten, distorted, misapplied.
- The news can say whatever it wants without consequence, unless another big corporation sues them.
- There are absolutely not protections for whistleblowers. We have seen this time and time again.
- In such a divided and hateful climate, jury trials are regular people bringing their personal biases to the court room. Picture the average person and decide if your freedom is safe in their hands. That's forgetting that Jury's decisions can be overridden (Breonna Taylor)
- Presumption of innocence (see above)
- There should be term limits for Supreme Court justices, whose seats were completely stolen from the democratic party.
So much so that even Chuck Grassley, the guy who wrote the book on protecting whistleblowers, was fine going after the whistleblower who made it public that the President was attempting to extort bribes from Ukraine.
If you actually look at the primary sources, only a small minority of people don't trust US elections as a whole. A lot of them are suspicious of one or two particular past elections - particularly Democrats in 2000 and 2016 and Republicans in 2020. That distrust isn't a partisan issue, it happens because people are sore losers.
> - There is no freedom to protest, and the right to free speech is easily forgotten, distorted, misapplied.
A lot of high-profile protests have happened recently, and generally went well. Very, very few of those protests have gotten violent and had police intervention, but the vast majority go just fine and get the message out.
> - The news can say whatever it wants without consequence, unless another big corporation sues them.
Yeah, kind of. Except they are having a harder time getting away with it recently - CNN had to settle with a lot of people on the right (individuals) over defamation, and Fox has had many losses including the recent Dominion case. In this case, the courts have been a check on the power of media, and arguably could be a little stronger.
> - In such a divided and hateful climate, jury trials are regular people bringing their personal biases to the court room. Picture the average person and decide if your freedom is safe in their hands. That's forgetting that Jury's decisions can be overridden (Breonna Taylor)
This has always been the case of jury trials. However, in terms of juries getting overruled, I think you are thinking of grand juries, which are more of an investigative body at an early stage in the process. Trial juries can be overruled on a guilty verdict if there is very good reason but can't on an innocent verdict. It honestly seems like you're upset about juries and the legal system as a whole because a few particular cases haven't gone the way you wanted. Maybe they had more information than you and made a better decision?
> - Presumption of innocence (see above)
Welcome to Blackstone's formulation. It is honestly a lot better that 100 guilty people go free than that 1 innocent gets punished. Yes, that means that some guilty people go free, but maybe you should be okay with that because the other side has a very different idea of who ought to be in jail than your side does, and the presumption of innocence keeps everyone out of jail.
> - There should be term limits for Supreme Court justices, whose seats were completely stolen from the democratic party.
This narrative of "stolen" when both parties technically played by the rules (albeit playing dirty) is a big part of how third-world countries end up devolving into dictatorships - One side thinks that someone stole something that was rightly theirs, and changes the rules to make them more "fair" (in terms of getting what they want). In fact, in some of these countries, court packing is almost a meme: one side gets power and doubles the size of the courts to take control (since "they stole seats from us"), then the other side gets power and doubles them again in retaliation, and this continues until the court doesn't function at all.
Thinking of the 2015 nomination of Garland, that was pretty dirty of Mitch McConnell, and I hope he pays for it by losing some of his party's appointees. If you are referring to the other two Trump appointees as stolen, no. He won the 2016 election (see the above comment on trusted elections) - those seats were up to him to appoint.
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In general, this kind of paranoia about the state of Democracy (or the state of "The Republic" if you play for the other team) in the USA comes out of consuming a lot of partisan news media from one side or the other. It does not actually represent reality - it represents a point of view that gets you to consume more partisan media, which you will happen to do if you think something catastrophic is happening.
The key problem here is that it is very easy to let your idea of what is perfect be the enemy of good. You can look at all these instances and think "we can do better," but if you do, be wary that what you thought was better may come back and bite you. It usually does. It sounds like you play pretty strongly for one team, and that is a recipe for being disappointed in a working democratic system - the other side should win about half the time in a healthy democracy.
Define a small minority? 60% of republicans don't trust elections [1].
> Welcome to Blackstone's formulation. It is honestly a lot better that 100 guilty people go free than that 1 innocent gets punished. Yes, that means that some guilty people go free, but maybe you should be okay with that because the other side has a very different idea of who ought to be in jail than your side does, and the presumption of innocence keeps everyone out of jail.
I was not saying Presumption of Innocence is a bad thing. Rather, that it's non-existent with jury trials. Having people determine your innocence based on "the cut of your gib" is incompatible with the current political climate.
> This narrative of "stolen" when both parties technically played by the rules (albeit playing dirty) is a big part of how third-world countries end up devolving into dictatorships - One side thinks that someone stole something that was rightly theirs, and changes the rules to make them more "fair" (in terms of getting what they want). In fact, in some of these countries, court packing is almost a meme: one side gets power and doubles the size of the courts to take control (since "they stole seats from us"), then the other side gets power and doubles them again in retaliation, and this continues until the court doesn't function at all.
You were originally arguing American democracy isn't that fragile. This is exactly why I say it is fragile.
> Thinking of the 2015 nomination of Garland, that was pretty dirty of Mitch McConnell, and I hope he pays for it by losing some of his party's appointees. If you are referring to the other two Trump appointees as stolen, no. He won the 2016 election (see the above comment on trusted elections) - those seats were up to him to appoint.
The reason Trump was in a position to appoint a third judge is because Ruth Bader Ginsberg was afraid to resign, given what happened to Gorsuch. And then she died. And then they filled her seat immediately after lying about "A president has never confirmed a judge in their last year of office." These are two stolen seats. This has nothing to do with Mitch, this is the entire Republican party.
In general, I wouldn't assume everyone with non-centrist ideas is somehow drinking kool-aid. Protecting the status quo is, itself, a massive bias. And this particular line is puzzling
> the other side should win about half the time in a healthy democracy.
What other side? Can a functioning democracy have only two sides? I would think a functioning democracy is one where the people's interests are represented. As the country grows more left year over year, should republicans still win half the time?
You might think of people passionate about their political agendas as unenlightened people rooting for politicians that don't care about them to begin with, but consider that saying "Both sides are the same and people should be happy with gridlock because change is scary" is equally ridiculous to others
future jobs which doesn't exist today will not be in your vocabulary or thoughts, which is why you cannot think of them. Does not mean such jobs will not exist.
The play today for the concerned, is to start owning capital as well as selling their labour. People who only rely solely on labour as their source of income will be disadvantaged, as labour is increasingly less useful.
Oh wait... as an American, I'm gonna stop throwing stones from a glass house...