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Comment by mcpackieh | Hacker News Reader

Is Mom scared because Musk told her to be scared, or because she thought about the matter herself and concluded that it's scary? Why do you assume that people scared of AI must be under the influence of rich people/corps today, rather than this fear being informed by their own consideration of the problem or by decades of media that has been warning about the dangers of AI?

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?

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Because most sociologists suggest that most people don’t take time to critically think like this. Emotional brain wins out usually over the rational one.

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.

100% accurate! She has a tendency to read one person's opinion on it and echo it. I have seen it for years with things. I'm not shocked AI is the current one but I wish it were easier to get her to take time to learn things and think critically. I have no idea how I'd begin to teach her why so much of the fear mongering is ridiculous.

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.

> She has a tendency to read one person's opinion on it and echo it.

...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.

I mean, fox news seems to manage doing exactly that just fine without ChatGPT

Obviously, I don't know that person's mom, but I know mine and other moms, and I don't think it's a milquetoast conclusion that it's a combination of both. However, the former (as both a proxy and Musk himself) probably carries more weight. Most non-technical people's thoughts on AI aren't particularly nuanced or original.

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.

This is my mom to a T. She started using Twitter because he bought it and messed with it. Like, in the era where companies are pulling their customer service off of Twitter and people who are regular users are leaving for other platforms, she joined because "Musk owns it"

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.

First, I don't assume, I know my mom and her knowledge about topics. Second, the quoted text was a quote. She literally said that. (replacing the word "her" with "me")

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.

AGI is scary, I think we can all agree on that. What the current hype does is that it increased changes the estimated probability of AGI actually happening in the near future.

OP specifically mentioned their mom citing Musk.

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