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Comment by notatoad | Hacker News Reader

i think it's perfectly reasonable to be worried about AI safety, but silly to claim that the thing that will make AIs 'safe' is censoring information that is already publicly available, or content somebody declares obscene. An AI that can't write dirty words is still unsafe.

surely there's more creative and insidious ways that AI can disrupt society than by showing somebody a guide to making a bomb that they can already find on google. blocking that is security theatre on the same level as taking away your nail clippers before you board an airplane.

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That's a bit of a strawman though, no? I'm definitely not worried about AI being used to write erotica or researching drugs, more about the societal effects. Knowledge is more available than ever but we also see echo chambers develop online and people effectively becoming less informed by being online and only getting fed their own biases over and over again.

I feel like AI can amplify this issue tremendously. That's my main concern really, not people making pipe bombs or writing rape fanfiction.

As long as OpenAI gets paid, they don't care if companies flood the internet with low quality drivel, make customer service hell, or just in general make our lives more frustrating. But god forbid an individual takes full advantage of what GPT4 has to offer

That is not what the "AI safety ninnies" are worried about. The "AI safety ninnies" aren't all corporate lobbyists with ulterior motives.

So what, in fact, ARE they worried about? And why should I have to pay the tax (in terms of reduced intelligence and perfectly legitimate queries denied, such as anything about sexuality), as a good actor?

At least some of them are worried their Markov Chain will become God, somehow.

Which is as ridiculous a belief as that only your particular religion is the correct one, and the rest are going to Hell.

All kinds of things. Personally, in the medium term I'm concerned about massive loss of jobs and the collapse of the current social order consensus. In the longer term, the implications of human brains becoming worthless compared to superior machine brains.

Good thing unemployment is entirely determined by what the Federal Reserve wants unemployment to be, and even better that productivity growth increases wages rather than decreasing them.

Those things won't happen, or at least, nothing like that will happen overnight. No amount of touting baseless FUD will change that.

I guess I'm a Yann LeCun'ist and not a Geoffrey Hinton'ist.

If you look at the list of signatories here, it's almost all atheist materialists (such as Daniel Dennett) who believe (baselessly) that we are soulless biomachines: https://www.safe.ai/statement-on-ai-risk#open-letter

When they eventually get proven wrong, I anticipate the goalposts will move again.

Luckily I haven't read any of that debate so any adhominems don't apply to me. I've come up with these worries all on my own after the realization that GPT-4 does a better job than me at a lot of my tasks, including setting my priorities and schedules. At some point I fully expect the roles of master and slave to flip.

They think their computers are going to come alive and enslave them, because they think all of life is determined by how good at doing math you are, and instead of being satisfied at being good at that, they realized computers are better at doing math than them.

Revenge of the nerd haters

LOL, imagine thinking that all of thinking can be boiled down to computation.

Of course, spectrum-leaning nerds would think that's a serious threat.

To those folks, I have but one question: Who's going to give it the will to care?

> taking away your nail clippers before you board an airplane.

TRIGGERED

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