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Comment by vouaobrasil | Hacker News Reader

AI will be a net harm for us:

1. It will take over many creative pursuits, taking away the feeling of usefulness from many people.

2. It will cause humans to be too independent from each other, and remove the sense of community (technology does this to some extent, only AI enhances the effect much more so)

3. It will concentrate wealth into the hands of tech companies, who relentlessly make life worse by continually making consumerism more efficient and thereby destroying our connection with the natural world

4. It will create disinformation and be a tool of manipulation and crime that will be hard to counteract (such as spoofing, etc.)

5. It will foster a world where there is far too much information, which itself plays on our basal instinct to collect information. This instinct was adaptive in the time of information scarcity, but is now maladaptive

And many other reasons....

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This is like saying developing modern rocket and satellite tech is bad because it can be used in missiles. Is GPS bad because it was made for questionable purposes before it was made available to the public? Without rockets we wouldn't even have WD-40 that was made to solve a certain rocket rusting. Pushing boundaries in tech has always had a positive effect to the general public, because even with an insane goal such as AGI we get a lot of tech that can be applied in different ways along the way that we can't even imagine.

Positive effect: so climate change, species decimation, destruction of communities, etc? A positive effect? Can you be so sure that your comforts are worth that?

Climate change: rockets pollute less than planes with less harmful impurities (rocket propellant is heavily refined) while also allowing us to launch satellites that can help us study climate change, also helping farmers be more aware of their land through satellite monitoring. Also, some rockets use Hydrogen and Oxygen - waste is H2O. Modern rockets are starting to use Methane and Oxygen - while still polluting, it is still much less than the impure kerosene used by planes.

Species decimation: Satellite imagery has been used to expose illegal farming, mining, etc. operations that would have been otherwise undetected for a long time. Yay biodiversity!

Destruction of communities: Idk man I feel like Starlink is helping communities a lot by providing cheap and fast shared internet to communities that wouldn't otherwise have the technology.

It's not just my comforts that I'm thinking about. Rockets while individually may be seen as useless, just like AI, are a platform where a lot of overwhelmingly positive projects could stem from.

The critiques you mentioned could be applied to mobile phones. I doubt you would actually agree phones have no place in society - it's not just comforts that are a positive.

Most what you're saying can be applied to many other technologies. What about internet? Should we limit access to Internet?

Yes, I think the world would be better if the internet were slower...

Net harm for what? nobody takes away your creative pursuit, you will always be able to do it as a hobby.

Health and other related research getting massive boosts by future more powerful AI is not a "net negative", if you don't wanna live longer or have your family not die of an illness then good for you, not everyone thinks the same

You're confusing technology and the economic system that technology exists under. Your first three points are symptoms of Capitalism, not AI.

Your fifth point is largely moot, since there's already more information available to people than anyone could possibly obtain in their lifetime, and the amount is growing faster than anybody could consume it. The problem can't really get any worse.

Your fourth point is more interesting, but I'd argue that the tech is already widely available for any type of crime you'd want to commit using AI. Banning it at this point just makes it so that only the criminals have access to it, and ceasing further progress on AI doesn't really make sense because from here, improvements will benefit legitimate users who want consistent, correct responses from their chatbots far moreso than the criminals who can afford to cast wide nets.

> You're confusing technology and the economic system that technology exists under. Your first three points are symptoms of Capitalism, not AI.

You are confusing the reality with the theory.

We are in a (broader sense of) capitalist society. The same applies to the self-procalimed communism China.There are exception.

I'm just pointing out that societal problems arising from the adoption of AI are completely self-inflicted by our steadfast belief in our economic system. How fucked is it that we can look at a technology that reduces the need for human toil, and claim that's a bad thing? The complete elimination of the necessity of human labor should be one of, if not the highest, good.

> Banning it at this point just makes it so that only the criminals have access to it

I would argue that this isn't really the case; the number of people who have the ability to create something at the level of ChatGPT or to make use of what's out there right now properly, is really quite small.

In that sense, if we were to utterly ban the tech, right now, it would probably be sufficient to prevent criminals from using it for most of the things it will be used for criminally, 5 years from now. It's too niche of a field, in its infancy, that if it were utterly and completely shut down, the cartels would not pick up the tab to single-handedly do it themselves.

Obviously that won't happen though, nor am I advocating for it. Personally I think the good done will outtweigh the bad many, many times over.

You're mostly wrong, but more generally, why don't you give a try to not viewing it through the worst possible lens? What positives do you see?

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