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Comment by LinuxBender | Hacker News Reader

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.

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> 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.

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