Human intelligence has proven itself capable of doing a lot of scary things. And AI research is keen on building ever more capable and more scalable intelligence.
By now, the list of advantages humans still have over machines is both finite and rapidly diminishing. If that doesn't make you uneasy, you're in denial.
What is called "AI" today is an extremely vague marketing term being applied to various software technologies which are only dangerous because humans are dangerous. Nuclear & chemical weapons are also "very scary" but only because the humans who might decide to use them in fits of insanity are scary.
I'm not in the slightest bit uneasy about "AI" itself right now, because as I said, the AI of Sci-Fi has not yet been invented…and seems unlikely to in any of our lifetimes. (Not throwing shade on clever researchers. We also don't have working FTL travel, though plenty of scientists speculate on how such an engine might be built.)
Even LLMs of today routinely do the kind of tasks that would have "required human intelligence" a few years prior. The gap between "what humans can do" and "what frontier AIs can do" is shrinking every month.
What makes you think that what remains of that gap can't be closed in a series of incremental upgrades? Just 4 years have passed since the first ChatGPT. There are a lot of incremental upgrades left in "any of our lifetimes".
Also computers in the 1980s could perform many tasks that previously would have "required human intelligence". So? Are you saying computers in the 1980s were somehow intelligent?
If your only reference points are LeCun, or, worse, some living fossils from the "symbolic AI" era, then you'll be showered in "LLMs can't progress". Often backed by "insights" that are straight up wrong, and were proven wrong empirically some time in 2023.
If you track LLM capabilities over time, however, it's blindingly obvious that the potential of LLMs is yet to be exhausted. And whether it will be any time soon is unclear. No signs of that as of yet. If there's a wall, we are yet to hit it.
Lets look at the facts.
Are LLMs displacing labour? In the aggregate - not from what one can see. The aggregate statistics tell a different story e.g. the hiring of software engineers is still growing Y-o-Y.
The limits of LLMs will be put in place through financial constraints. People like you seem to think there's an infinite stream of money to fund this stuff. Not really. Its the same reason why Anthropic and OAI are now shifting focus to generate revenues and cash flows because they will not receive external funding forever.
I say this as both someone who works with many execs, hearing their musings, and someone who no longer can justify hiring junior roles themselves.
Irrespective of that; if we take this strategy of only taking action once it is visible to the layman - our scope of actions available will be invariably and significantly diminished.
Even if you are not convinced it is guaranteed and do not believe what myself and others see. I would ask you is your probability of it happening now really that close to 0? If not then would it not be prudent to take the risk seriously?
What does taking the risk seriously look like?
Politics - proper guardrails, adapting the legal framework to accommodate AI and make sure it doesn't benefit only preselected few.
Something that can and should be done yesterday is to stop the capital drain out of the economy and into accelerated, war-motivated AI development - there's no need for war-AI per se but clearly it's the most likely reason for the capital drain and rush.
Once the rush and wars stop, and some capital is made available for the rest of the economy, the latter can adapt to the introduction of AI at a normal pace, that should include legislative safeguards to support competition and prevent monopolization of AI and information sources.
Any voices or studies that present the case for "useful technology that will improve productivity and wages while not murdering us" don't get clicked on or read.
It's not an either/or thing though. Compare to something like combustion. Sure it definitely improved productivity but also lead to countless violent deaths.
I see the flood of PR from AI firms as an attempt to make sure we don't build the appropriate safeguards this time around, because there's too much money to be made.
A.I. is being used by so many people for so many diabolical things, hidden, unknown things that we may never fully understand it's purpose. But that doesn't mean it's purpose won't destroy us in the end.
The expression "Drinking the Koolaid" is used to explain the Jonestown mass suicide. It is an information hazard, aka, a cult that created the end result: 900 people drinking poisoned flavoraid. That's just one example of a human caused information hazard. What happens when someone with similar thinking applies that to A.I.? Will we even be able to sleuth out who did it?
I really don’t think that’s true. Those who actually knew about the nuclear weapons knew very well how dangerous they were. Truman was deeply conflicted about using them.
They exist because human minds conceived them, and human hands made them.
One of the major dangers of advanced AI is being able to implement something not unlike Manhattan project with synthetic intelligence, in a single datacenter.
Until someone can demonstrate a quantitative measure of intelligence - with the same stability of measurement as "meters" or "joules" - any discussion of "Super-AI" as "the most dangerous X" is at best qualitative/speculative risk narratology, at worst discursive distractions. The architecture of the "social web" amplifies discursion to a harmful degree in an open population of agents, something I think we could probably prove mathematically. I am more suspicious of this social principle than I am scared of Weakly Godlike Intelligence at this moment in history; I am more scared of nuclear weapons than literally anything else.
People think we are out of the woods with nuclear weapons, but I don't think we've even seen the forest yet. We are Homo Erectus, puffing on a flame left by a lightning strike, carrying this magic fire back to our cave.
And on intelligence specifically: even amongst the human race, we all know smart people who are abject failures, and idiots who are wildly successful. Intelligence is vastly overrated.
I'm not sure what level of delusion one has to run to look at human civilization and say "no, intelligence wasn't important for this". It's pretty obvious that human world is a product of intelligence applied at scale - and machines can beat humans at intelligence and scale both.
One has to only look at the current tech and political leaders.
Well, it's a good thing that all we managed so far is a large language model instead.
AI excels in both making weapons of all kinds and effectively targeting them, as the resent war has shown - AI is more dangerous, and can be more destructive, than all weapons taken together.
That is, also alien invasion and giant meteor are plausible scenario, but at some point one has to prioritize threats likeliness, and generally speaking it makes more sense to put more weight on "ongoing advanced operation" than on "not excluded in currently known scientifically realistic what-if".
If politicians can get away with what they do? Imagine if those politicians were actually smart and diligent to a superhuman degree.
That's the kind of threat a rogue AI can pose.
Humans can easily act against their own self-interest. If other humans can and evidently do exploit that, what would stop something better than human from doing the same?
There's a lot of FUD today about LLM's being sapient because the ignorant public mistakes their complex token prediction skills for intelligence. But it's just embarrassing to see people making that mistake on a forum ostensibly filled with hackers.
Back in the "mainframe era", we had entire lists of tasks that even the most untrained humans would find trivial, but computers were impossibly bad at. Like following informal instructions, or telling a picture of a dog from that of a cat.
We're in the "AI era" now, and what remains of those lists? What are the areas of human advantage, the standing bastions of human specialness? Because with modern AI, the list has grown quite thin. Growing thinner as we speak.
And a close (non-tech) second is the ruthlessness of sociopaths seeking power.
Many have built their careers from that kind of work in the past and yes they are threatened, but that kind of work is inherently not collaborative and more vocational.
The devaluing may come from AI pressure, but the harm is coming from humans foolishly not seeing the value in what's left behind. Most people have not and will not lose their jobs.
All of these average jobs are structurally repetitive. Yes, humans do constantly inject creativity, but it's a means to an end, to getting the job done.
You apparently mistook my descriptive comment for a value judgment, but it isn't.