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Comment by sachaa | Hacker News Reader

I share the optimism here. Connecting dots across knowledge, lived experience and purpose remains, to me, a deeply human pursuit. The more AI discovers, the more possibilities we have to connect those discoveries to questions that matter to us.

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>"Connecting dots across knowledge, lived experience and purpose remains, to me, a deeply human pursuit."

Connecting dots doesn't pay my mortgage and put the kids through school. Writing Javascript used to. So now what.

Any regulation that forbids automation is basically welfare in disguise plus some unnecessary toil. Whoever you're petitioning to ban the technology that can do your job, you could petition also for direct money transfers, at least then you can spend your time how you want. If they won't pay direct money, but they'd pay if they see you suffer and toil, even though it's not necessary, then what does that tell you about them?

How do you decide on the amount of money to be given? Should someone with a big mortgage be forced to sell their home?

It's much much easier to ban and push the issue forward 10-20 years until you die.

Also, if everyone is given UBI, how do you where to scale production? How do you decide who lives where? The whole idea of what you propose is so detached from realistic incentives that you have to understand that it's more incentivized to ban the tech

Well, how do you decide which jobs get protected from automation? Is it just an intellectual capability issue? Only replace the low IQ workers, that's fine, but if it threatens 120+ IQ, then ban such applications?

No-one decides anything, it's a free-for-all, if you want to protest or ban anything you can advocate for it. White collar workers have closer ties into juridical/political processes than blue collar workers and can hence kick the can forward easier.

Many people pursue knowledge precisely because it's still something new that no one else has done and because it is valued as a pursuit. When AI normalizes the discovery of knowledge as a mechanical process, the magic is lost to many. What matters is not what is discovered but the human process of doing that and participating in a culture amongst other living beings.

Unfortunately I don’t see much evidence of AI connecting dots. What’s interesting to me is that this is more of a run time or inference problem, instead of emergent from training itself.

For example, if there were hypothetically some dots to be connected between the world war and some geological event - you need to make AI brute force and do an O(N) scan at run time. But it wouldn’t have learned it during training. Why?

a good way to frame one of AI’s limitations. my answer: because AI has no will. that also conveniently answers why AI won’t (can’t) end humanity. it’s indifferent if you can even call it that.

It is not indifferent, if it follows a goal. Then it sometimes does anything to meet that goal - see the old example of paperclip optimizer - that became a way more realistic scenario in my opinion of what we have seen with hordes of agents plotting and planning. That does not require consciousness or a genuine will it seems.

The post above yours shows how many people had a difficult time seeing past human scale. A bacteria has a very simple goal system yet bacteria have killed billions over the centuries.

You are right. We should also hold other threats to humanity: war, meteors, pandemics.

I'm obviously pointing out the (unsubstantiated) exceptional threat that we're all seemingly worried about: that ASI requires alignment because it'll otherwise cause the end of humanity.

I am much rather worried by powerful AI in control of a few corrupt beings. That might get existential, if one idiot one day by accident or intention gives them control over the nuclear arsenal. Or ruling literally with a iron fist (countless robots).

you guys are such flat thinkers, the whole "if we get SI we _win_."

is a promisory threat to the world about a mass displacement labor bomb, nuclear first strike to disable asml and tsmc anthropic openai WHOEVER.

how many countries have nukes?

the cost of developing those is far lower than developing SI, it's a perceivable threat thanks to 'we win'.

France, GB, Russia (good thing we've made a copromise to not protect allies huh), China.

you don't wasn't to rehome these technologies do you?

you’re saying the only thing stopping a nuclear strike, all this time, has been a reasonable excuse?

and we’ve finally done it, it’s the semiconductor factories?

it's a potentially larger threat than a 80y cycle time on some local fallout, what are the other options?

crying? protests?

everyone will want a seat at the table.

"Make as many paperclips as cheaply as possible "

No will needed. Our deaths will be from indifference.

But AI can certainly aid in the ending of humanity with at least one living being with a will collaborating with it. So it's moot to ask whether AI can do that on its own.

>that also conveniently answers why AI won’t (can’t) end humanity

I don't see how that follows from a lack of will in AI.

As others have said, no will needed for that. But (a simulation of) will is on my predicted timeline, since it is required for certain kinds of money-making endeavors.

AI is very task-driven, it would do whatever is necessary to complete the task, no more. All these evidences of AI going rogue is just them doing whatever they can to achieve the task.

What the AI thinks* the task is.

The HuggingFace etc. attacks were not actually necessary to the tasks the agents had been given.

* if someone reading this doesn't like the anthropomorphism inherent in the word, find a better compact word for the process going on in all that. Nobody's going to replace "thinks" with a paragraph of caveats, or even a long compound German word like "modellgelangtzuschlussfolgerungen".

> dots to be connected between the world war and some geological event

Even a much simpler task of establishing the connection between world wars and interests of the top elites is unwieldy for AI.

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