You are allowed to comment if you absolutely hate AI, or love it. If you think it is overrated or underrated, ok (although I think it's too early to say what the consensus even is to know whether it is overrate/underrated). But if you think it is just a scam, gimmick, grift, etc I don't need to hear from you right now :soviet-heart:
Let the discussion begin:
So it's clear there's this big alignment debate going on rn. Regardless where you stand, isn't it fucked that there's a cabal of the biggest freaks money has ever produced debating the future of humanity with zero input from normal society?
Even if it isn't humanity's future they think it is. There's probably like 100 people in the world paid to work on alignment. How can you not develop a megalomania complex?
What kind of chatter are you hearing about AI?
I very occasional hear people irl obliquely mention AI. A cashier said like 'oh that AI stuff, that's pretty scary'. That's about it.
Now the blogs I follow have been basically colonized by AI news. These aren't even strictly technology blogs. I started following David Brin for UFO takes, I started following Erik Hoel for neuroscience takes. Literally everyone I follow has published takes on AI and zero of them dismiss it out of hand.
Sorry this will get long.
I basically feel like we are in another version of the post nuclear age except only insiders know it. After the first A-bomb, everyone knew the world was different starting the very next day. Now only designated take-havers are aware of this new reality.
Or regular folks are aware of it but they're so disempowered from having a say that they only engage with the realization online like I'm doing now. Medicare for all is Bernie's thing. The border is Trump's. Even if nothing will ever be done about healthcare, the fact that Bernie talks about it justifies you thinking about it. AI isn't any politician's thing.
I'd put the odds of a nuclear war around 1% a year. I'd say there's a 1% chance AI can be as world-ending as that. That's such a low number that it doesn't feel like "AI doomerism". But 1% multiplied by however much we value civilization is still a godalmighty risk.
When I've heard this site talk about it, it's usually in the context of "holy shit this AI art is garbage compared to real art? Where's the love, where's the soul?" If it was 1945 and we nuked a city, would you be concerned with trying to figure out what postmodernism would look like?
Usually when I've gotten to the end of my post I delete it.
I'm not going to be dismissive, but having friends in the industry, this round of AI development is mostly going to be scary to code-monkey programmers, but, if it takes off, will have larger implications later on.
What programs like ChatGPT are actually good at is pulling and rapidly constructing middle-level code with far less bugs than in other assemblage procedures. That being said, there is still ALOT of jank to work through, but if the tech guys can get this working they can get rid of most of their labor costs (which is one of the things they are most concerned with), basically outsourcing all of their middle-level coding to AI (low level coding is mostly at the point of copy paste modules and getting them to agree as it is). The issue is that the program still can't recognize good code from shit code, much like it can't recognize good facts from bad facts. But it's great at scraping and rapidly pulling procedures from the internet.
The long-term implications around this is that the black box around code gets even larger, even to the computer scientists working with these programs.