The truly frustrating part is how many see this ubiquitous pattern in some places, but are blind to it elsewhere.
No. It relies on you being able to distinguish between an (your) opinion and an (your) identity.
The identity part is the precarious one, i.e. you defending a stance blindly without questioning it because you feel your identity is in danger.
This pattern being present doesn't mean that there can't be an underlying truth in what's asserted. In fact, that is what makes the assertion meaningful in the first place. However, it entailing a partial truth doesn't mean that the entire assertion holds true in the context it's presented in. Example: "AI" might ultimately be dangerous (like any other technology can be), but this assertion's primary goal is to make you behave a certain way where it is unclear how that would contribute more towards mitigating the danger than to empower the asserter.
To fix this, take a step back before accepting something blindly. Train yourself not to be reactive.
You know, sometimes shit is just dangerous.
Maybe Mom worries about any radical new technology because she lived though nuclear attack drills in schools. Or because she's already seen computers and robots take peoples jobs. Or because she watched Terminator or read Neuromancer. Or because she reads lesswrong. Why assume it's because she's fallen under the influence of Musk?
Then you have this idea of the sources of information most people have access to being fundamentally biased and incentivized towards reporting certain things in certain manners and not others.
You basically have low odds of thinking rationally, low odds of finding good information that isn’t slanted in some way, and far lower odds taking the product of those probabilities for if you’d both act rationally and somehow have access to the ground truth. To say nothing of the expertise required to place all of this truth into the correct context. But if you did consider the probability of the mother having to be an AI expert then the odds get far lower still off all of this working out successfully.
Yeah there are legitimate risks to all of this stuff but, to understand those and weigh them against the overblown risks, she'd have to understand the whole subject more deeply and have experimented with different AI. But you even mention ChatGPT she's talking about how it's evil and scary.
...and when the people whose opinions she parrots are quietly replaced with ChatGPT, her fears will have been realized-- at that point she's being puppeted by a machine with an agenda.
Losing your own agency is a scary thing.
Musk certainly doesn't help with anything. In my experience, a lot of people of my mom's generation are still sucking the Musk lollipop and are completely oblivious to Musk's history of lying to investors, failing to keep promises, taking credit for things he and his companies didn't invent, promoting an actual Ponzi scheme, claiming to be autistic, suggesting he knows more than anyone else, and so on. Even upon being informed, none of it ends up mattering because "he landed a rocket rightside up!!!"
So yeah, if Musk hawks some lame opinion on a thing like AI, tons of people will take that as an authoritative stance.
I remember when tech bros were Musk fanboys, myself included for a bit. Now adays it seems like he's graduated to the general population seeing him as a "modern day Ironman" while we all sit here and facepalm when he makes impossible promises.
I'm not sure what you're getting at otherwise. It's not like she and I haven't spoken outside of her saying that phrase. She clearly has no idea what AI/ML is or how it works and is prone to fear-mongering messages on social media telling her how to think and to be scared of things. She has a strong history of it.
There's a certain kind of psyche that finds it utterly impossible to extrapolate trends into the future. It renders them completely incapable of anticipating significant changes regardless of how clear the trends are.
No, no one is afraid of LLMs as they currently exist. The fear is about what comes next.
It is refreshing to see somebody explicitly call out people that disagree with me about AI as having fundamentally inferior psyches. Their inability to picture the same exact future that terrifies me is indicative of a structural flaw.
One day society will suffer at the hands of people that have the hubris to consider reality as observed as a thing separate from what I see in my dreams and thought experiments. I know this is true because I’ve taken great pains to meticulously pre-imagine it happening ahead of time — something that lesser psyches simply cannot do.
Why the shit would we not draw a straight line?
If we fail to create digital intelligence then yea, we can hem and haw in conversations like this forever online, but you tend to neglect that if we succeed then 'shit gets real quick'. Closing your eyes and years and saying "This can't actually happen" sounds like a pretty damned dumb take on future risk assessments of technology when pretty much most takes on AI say "well, yea this is something that could potentially happen".
I can, right now, upload an image to an AI and say "Hey, what do you think the emotional state of the person in this image is" pretty damned accurately. Given other images I can have the AI describe the scene and make pretty damned accurate assessments of how the image could have came about.
If this is not general intelligence I simply have no guess as to what will be enough in your case.
Then through the 90's, it was the fear of a briefcase bomb terrorist attack and how easy it would be for certain countries, who had the resources to pull an attack off like that in the NYC subway or in the heart of another densely populated city.
Then 9/11 happened and people suddenly realized you don't need a nuke to take out a few thousand innocent people and cripple a nation with fear.
And a nuclear bomb is just a bunch of atoms. Do you fear atoms? What the hell.
I have a suspicion that it's sort of a default response. Socially expected? Then you poll people: Are you worried about AI doing XYZ? People just say yes, because they want to seem informed, and the kind of person that considers things carefully.
Honestly not sure what is going on. I'm concerned about AI, but I don't feel any actual emotion about it. Arguably I must have some emotion to generate an opinion, but it's below conscious threshold obviously.
I think more people should speak out left and right about what’s going on to educate mom and dad.
Mr. Burroughs: "Government control, Jonathan, is anathema to the free-enterprise system. Any intelligent person knows you cannot interfere with the laws of supply and demand."
Jonathan: "I see your point, sir. That's the reason why I'm not for tariffs."
Mr. Burroughs: "Right. No, wrong! You gotta have tariffs, son. How you gonna compete with the damn foreigners? Gotta have tariffs."
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However Elon Musk has openly worried about AI for a number of years. He even got a girlfriend out of it: https://www.vice.com/en/article/evkgvz/what-is-rokos-basilis...