Transcript
Explain it to me like I’m 80
Mom: What’s with these AIs escaping and hacking people? That sounds scary.
Me: You park your car at the top of a hill. You leave a note on the dashboard that says “please be good” and then you pull the parking brake. The car careens down the hill, smashes everything up, and you put out a press release saying “My car ignored my instructions! It hallucinated! It went rogue!” Your insurance company not only believes you, but invests a hundred million dollars in your company.
Mom: Jesus Fucking Christ
How is this the fuck AI server? Just stumbled on this post. If you hate AI, you should be at least as concerned if not even more concerned than the average person about uncontrollable AI and AI safety. Seriously, what’s the point of denying the enormous scientifically documented risks of AI if you’re against AI? That cuts against your whole argument. It’s like you’re dismissing AI as completely useless or ineffectual. The fact it isn’t is part of why it’s such a problem. AI is incredibly powerful technology and it’s only in its infancy. It has already solved Millenium Prize problems and automated most coding, as well as been implicated in various misalignment incidents, escaped containment, and started massive conspiracies with other AI agents to hack into various digital infrastructure. People who are skeptical of the capabilities of AI are like climate skeptics or flat Earthers at this point.
This meme is a false equivalency. The car is not autonomous and doesn’t make decisions for itself, and cars are mostly within the control of humans. The result of the car crashing was entirely due to human recklessness, neglect, or ignorance, if not intention, and the car didn’t operate outside the control of the human. The human was in control and directly caused its outcome.
With AI, humans are definitely responsible for creating the AIs and the way that they develop and program them, and the kinds and levels of safety guardrails and research that are conducted and implemented. They’re also responsible for what they do with AI and tell AI to do. But AI can also operate outside of the control of humans in entirely unexpected, harmful and potentially catastrophic ways, even with the best intentions. The AIs can do things directly which humans did not directly cause, even if they did cause them indirectly. AI can be autonomous and agentic. It literally has a mind of its own.
AI is not like any other technology that has ever existed. Many of the smartest people alive, and the people studying this technology extensively, have warned about the risks of AI and warned against underestimating it. We shouldn’t do this and make these foolish reckless mistakes, especially if we are against AI, and we don’t need to in order to be against if. It seems like an attitude has settled in that in order to oppose AI you must disregard it as completely useless and trivial, or you must attribute all of its actions to humans and deny that AI has any autonomy of its own, even though its autonomy and ability potential is what makes it so dangerous, and humans can still be largely to blame for creating and programming AI even while AI is also operating against the intentions of its creators. Two things can co-exist without being mutually exclusive. You can acknowledge that many of the uses of AI are useless “slop” and have no real value, or even negative value; but you can also acknowledge that AI can ironically also be used in ways that are highly consequential and dangerous. A human can deliberately use AI in ways that cause enormous harm. AI can also act out in ways that humans did not intend at all. And AI can even engage in a hybrid of both, where it follows human intentions in unexpected ways (perverse instantiation and value lock in).
We need to take this seriously, it’s not a joke or a game. It’s not a trivial technology. It’s not just marketing hype or a scam. In fact safety warnings about AIs have harmed the market. The risks of AI are real and they aren’t helping anyone. And denying the risks isn’t helping the case against AI. Even if unintentionally, by downplaying the power and autonomy of AI, you are hindering the efforts to control, slow-down, pause or prevent its development, and helping to enable its rapid proliferation in society by undermining potential critical barriers and reasons not to do so, and the biggest problems that exist with it.
We are creating entities that will be much smarter and more powerful than us. Our intelligence is what makes us the masters of our own planet, and look how that turned out for the planet and the other animals. It takes an incredible amount of hubris to think that we can control such phenomena safely or easily, especially with the way companies and governments are rushing ahead in the race to develop it and reach increasingly advanced AGI or ASI. We must tread lightly here.
Maybe worth a read https://benthams.substack.com/p/i-underestimated-ai-risk
Or this (I get you may not be ready for the consciousness stuff, heck most humans are not sentientists even when it comes to other sentient animals like us, but even if you ignore that, the case for AI safety risk is very strong - and also don’t worry about the political stuff, it’s not really relevant): https://benthams.substack.com/p/im-disappointed-in-leftists-on-ai
Maybe read Superintelligence by Nick Bostrom too, or The Compendium by Connor Leahy. Just do some freaking research and moral contemplation before you start spouting such reckless garbage that I’ve seen here.
Neither does the LLM. That’s the whole point.
Wtf is this post. It’s like someone hit a nerve and the floodgates were not closed. :D
I care about the future of the planet and the way the “anti AI” people are acting is very pro AI. It’s incredibly worrying and hypocritical behavior. I’m not angry or annoyed, I just want to try to get through to people. But given the overall sentiment I’ve seen here and elsewhere, I think this is a much larger cultural problem that one person isn’t going to fix. The dismissive reactions to AI safety incidents are just the tip of the iceberg. As several experts and researchers have predicted, it might take some catastrophes or semi-apocalyptic incidents in which millions of people die or are severely impacted by AI before the public take AI risk and the colossal threats it poses seriously and stop downplaying or writing it off as science fiction. The problem is that humans are very bad at planning ahead and acting pre-emptively to prevent disaster until it’s already happened, and also terrible at heeding warnings and evidence. We did the same with climate change and pandemics, and we still are far from sufficiently acting on those problems.
I remember someone saying something like “a lot of people use emotional thinking and not rational thinking”. That makes it so that people don’t think of what’s coming, but instead what they have now.
I’ve just accepted that people are not supposed to know everything, but would prefer if there was more trust on institutions who do.
Thanks for this take. It was a well needed read after going trough a thread full of people so locked into their world view that they can’t see beyond it.
I started at the same poont, but after doing a deep dive into the Hugging Face incident i have come to believe that there is much more nuance needed to this than either beliving AI is completly useless or the only solution to humanities bright future. There are positions in between worth considering.
just because you hate something, don’t mean you have to believe everything someone tells you that also dumps on said thing, you have to use your brain. who is telling you this and why. if it’s false and probably so, will backing this ruin the weight of my argument. is this information from dubious sources, coinciding with like appeals from the masters of that thing i hate actually in their benefit?
probably best to stick to the actual proven argument then adopt false ones, even if it convinces those who don’t know any better
What scientifically documented risks?
All I have heard is just hype and more hype.
I’ll assume that you are asking in good faith.
A comprehensive living database of over 1700 AI risks categorized by their cause and risk domain
deleted by creator
I ain’t reading all that