We aren't enslaved or at any risk just yet with this form of "thinking machine", but we do need to culutrally and emotionally come to terms with them.
Let's not have any other "jihad" just yet, there's plenty of other jihads going on right now.
> With the rise of AI came the rise of a technocratic class that created and controlled these machines, leading to oppressive structures over knowledge and the economy.
It also quotes Dune, where it is said more directly:
> Once men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free. But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them.
Totally, but we can try to resist it. Technocrat is a perfectly fine word, and I'd hate to see it go away permanently from its current meaning.
That's not removing the amazing ability of LLMs and the scale of this accomplishment, don't get me wrong - it's incredibly impressive that specialised models are now able to walk down pathways for creative problem solving - but I don't think that suggests a sentience or profoundness - rather it's just number-crunching at a astronomically larger scale.
The people complaining about becoming stupider because of their AI usage might have something to say. Those that wish they didn't have to use AI but are coerced by their workplace might disagree. What of the day something negative happens to you based on the wrong, unreviewed decision without appeal by an AI agent? Do you truly believe this day will never come?
You don't need literal chains to be a slave.
It’s as if calling something AI is all that’s needed to justify it being the same thing as Skynet, Dune automation, Terminators, Neuromancer, and every other cultural trope using the label of AI.
The ultimate fact is that LLMs are a pretty powerful technology that has little to nothing to do with most fictional depictions of intelligent machines.
Sloppy thinking all the way down.
My thought about the turnaround: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48343390
It annoys me to no end that people keep looking at the finger while pointing at the moon. No, we don't have Skynet today, but you can believe Sam Altman would have loved to see Skynet appear out of ChatGPT. That is the end goal, and it's worth discussing now, not when it's too late.
When talking about artificial superintelligences, you don't want to study their potential effect on humanity the day they appear, because it is too late.