AI probably won’t kill us all | Hacker News Reader

AI probably won’t kill us all

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18 pointsdjha-skin7 comments

In my cranky opinion I believe that the thing people are calling AI won't directly harm us but rather make us harm each other. Social media algorithms have already proven to be very powerful in rage baiting people, dividing people and causing social unrest. I see LLM's as several orders of magnitude more powerful than simple algorithms. Now it is armed with massive data sets and can perform human mimicry to the point where some people are claiming sentience. I think that is the actual risk, turning more of us against one another. I have absolutely no idea how to even begin to legally mitigate that.

> I have absolutely no idea how to even begin to legally mitigate that.

My view is that the only way to legally mitigate it is to target the generalization of the problem: social media. Niche forums/chats are probably acceptable, but anything with massive reach should just be categorically banned.

That's true for today. If what happened with chess happens with LLMs, they're going to blow past us in reasoning ability in a few short years. And it might not be LLMs, it might be a new architecture, maybe one that has an LLM as a component. What matters is that people are trying to create AGI, and they've been getting closer and closer. All our models for how things will go will break down at that point, and I think it's foolish to assume that it'll turn out well without any evidence. (you can argue that it's foolish to assume it'll turn out badly too! But it's not foolish to assume that it might and therefore we should be very careful)

Also -- life isn't fair, it's possible that there's no way to create beneficial AGI in real life, and we should not rule that out as a possibility. Maybe it'll cause problems now, and more problems (or extinction) later.

I think most of the chaotic engineering of Ai centers around software tools and social networks... As prime places to fool people into thinking they're talking to real people, Social networks have given bots free reign, and even driven bots to make their own sites look lively.

I think that the lack of accountability for major social media platforms and for software makers has really left us at the mercy of scams and manipulation of companies more than independent hackers. Social networks, even dating sites have spent years getting us used to the idea of a dead and isolating Internet.

Companies divide us through segmentation, paywalls, and by artificially limiting post reach because it's more profitable to keep everyone swimming alone. This is not what the Internet was made for at all... I feel we lost the battle for reasonability long ago.

The movie "Her" released years ago kind of sums up where I see all this going. It's a neat idea, but not sustainable, and eventually many people will rebel against the ideal of artificial company, it just can't work for everyone.

Of course AI won't kill us. It will empower us to kill ourselves faster.

> First, it isn’t even close to the sort of artificial superintelligence that might conceivably pose a threat to humankind. The models underpinning it are slow learners that require immense volumes of data to construct anything akin to the versatile concepts humans can concoct from only a few examples. In this sense, it’s not “intelligent”.

Yes, AI is different from the human brain. But human experience is also built up from thousands of hours of high-definition video and audio. An infant brain in an adult body would not be able to do anything "from a few examples". And we have far less knowledge than these LLMs do. An LLM trained solely on reasoning rather than predicting text might be much more capable of reasoning.

And current AGI designs work this way because that's the easiest way we've found so far, and we've barely explored the space! It's possible that we will soon discover ways for them to learn much more quickly.

> Second, many of the more catastrophic AGI scenarios depend on premises I find implausible. For instance, there seems to be a prevailing (but unspoken) assumption that sufficient intelligence amounts to limitless real-world power. If this was true, more scientists would be billionaires.

The flaw in this argument is that scientists are not typically motivated by money, they're motivated by the desire to do science themselves, or maybe by the desire to have high status among scientists. Billionaires are motivated by the desire to have lots of money (or lots of things that money can buy). And scientists are not necessarily more intelligent than billionaires.

Maybe most of the AGIs we create won't be good at gaining power. All it takes is a few, and every power-seeking human will try to create power-seeking AGIs for themselves. Does anyone think that politicians or dictators will not try to create AGIs that are good at manipulating public opinion?

It's crazy that the author thinks these are strong arguments that AGI is safe. I think it's true that this is a case where humanity needs a security mindset, and we don't. If we did, we'd be tackling anyone who even breathed a word about creating AGI without a bulletproof plan for making sure that it is completely aligned with humanity.

To quote Robert Miles:

> The trouble with thinking "scientifically" about the future is, you'll never find a peer reviewed study saying what it's like, there can only be speculation. So you never have to reject your "null hypothesis", and that can be anything you want because NH isn't well defined here.

> You end up saying "there's no evidence for any particular conclusion", but then go on to act as though you're pretty confident in whatever particular conclusion you arbitrarily picked as your "neutral default"

Probably.

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