Software is only half the battle - the other half is compute. Right now it's not possible for all people to run the current LLMs locally and you can't give that away for free.
You could say that about almost any technology, yet we also have to face the reality that every technology has social implications. Take the Internet. A lot of people who were around in the 1990's thought it was a great thing at the time. Perhaps it wouldn't be the great equalizer, but it would reduce the barriers to access information. Consider the Internet today. It is undoubtedly better at reducing the barriers to access information, yet I doubt that many people have such an optimistic view of the technology. We discovered that it is just as good, perhaps even better, at distributing junk information. We discovered that the information becomes consolidated in a limited number of hands. The technology itself hasn't fundamentally changed. Even the use of the technology hasn't fundamentally changed. It simply took time for the distributed to become consolidated. It was almost certainly a given that this would happen as wealth facilitates growth and growth attracts people who wish to exploit it for wealth.
Does that mean the world is worse off because of the Internet? Probably not. Even if it was, I'm not sure I would want to give it up because I remember the hurdles I faced before the Internet was nearly universal. That said, I do believe we should be conscious about how we use it and skeptical of those who present hyper-optimistic views of new technologies. While some may be genuine in their visions, we also have to factor in those who wish the exploit it for their own benefit and to the expense of others.
My insignificant take is that neither AI will save or destroy the world. Like the internet it will aid us in our modern society and probably for some it will be the means of causing nuisance for others. A new set of problems for a new set of solutions.
This is just another take among the dozens we see recently. They all sound identical, like "look guys, AI is hard, you don't get it but I do. Let me explain why it will be infinitely good/bad/anything else."
One recent explainer video on VCs put it aptly: “they’re all the same. That’s why they seem to talk too much on Twitter: they have to differentiate themselves somehow.”
It's not augmenting anything at a humanity level. It might give people access to skills that they don't possess, but I don't see it coming up with new styles.
Why not? If you can make a functional LLM it's a fairly small step to an LCM (Large Culture Model) and LEM (Large Emotion Model) as submodules in a LBM (Large Behavioural Model).
The only difference is the tokens are rather more abstract. But there's really nothing special about novelty.
If you have a model of human psychology and culture, there isn't even anything special about cultural novelty fine-tuned to tickle various social, intellectual, and emotional receptors.
In all you described there, you are talking about anything but humanity. You described hypothetical artifacts that, if successful, would be vehicles of a synthetic species that could imitate human behavior. Again, nothing to do with humanity (unless you are bought into some kind of idea related to see humanity as dinosaurs in extinction and transhumanism as a new reality).
Training data is the main thing. We have lots and lots of text and text has the special property that a sequence of text contains a lot of information about what is going to come next and is easy for a user to create. This is a rather particular circumstance, the combination of so much freely available data and their being a lot of utility in a purely auto-regressive model. It is difficult to think about what other modalities are in a similar position.
The AI itself may be wide and shallow, but it can be a tool to accomplish things that are possible for human intelligence but impractical due to time, focus, economics, coordination, etc.
You're using "cognitive mimicry" to deride AI, but isn't that the best way to augment our intelligence - by mimicking it?
More to your point: profound doesn't really just mean "deep" in this context, but even if it does, I don't see how LLMs in their current state (with some better UX) don't do that. Sure you can't ask it to guess your deepest inner beliefs, but engaging with an LLM in a dialogue can greatly speed up deep, focused knowledge work, such as brainstorming ideas, structuring writing, investigating hypothesis, etc.
In short, I think it's more than a bit misguided to say AI only has shallow benefits because it's not yet capable of extremely deep thoughts on its own.
> teach computers how to understand, synthesize, and generate knowledge in ways similar to how people do it.
Rephrasing proposed: enable computers to synthesize and generate knowledge without the slightest glimmer of understanding, in ways completely different from anything humans do. FTFY.
I made it as far as the TOC (pale grey on white - I'm getting on, my vision isn't great, and my laptop has poor contrast).
> “Bootleggers” are the self-interested opportunists who stand to financially profit by the imposition of new restrictions, regulations, and laws that insulate them from competitors.
Ok, so they think regulation may hurt some of their dubious AI startup investments. At this point I don't know are they just plain pathetic or still scammers.
> I even think AI is going to improve warfare, when it has to happen, by reducing wartime death rates dramatically. Every war is characterized by terrible decisions made under intense pressure and with sharply limited information by very limited human leaders. Now, military commanders and political leaders will have AI advisors that will help them make much better strategic and tactical decisions, minimizing risk, error, and unnecessary bloodshed.
Fundamental misunderstanding of the nature of wars notwistanding (sane people rarely start them; assuming non-sane leaders like Putin, or historically Hitler, Bush, Milosevic, Mussolini, Galtieri, al-Assad, etc. etc. would listen to advice they don't like is... just stupid), on the contrary - better tools and "better" advice will make commanders and leaders more confident they could win. See: most major military inventions ever
The economic section is too long to quote, but again, fundamental misunderstanding of economy and human physhology and how it relates to economic decisions. If entire profressions get obliterated by AI (not impossible, but improbable with the current quality of AI output), it will, of course, obliterate their wages. It will create fear in other "menial" "white-collar" professiosn that they're next, which will dperess spending. Also, the cost of goods and services that can now be provided by AI (e.g. art) will drastically drop, making it an unviable business for those humans left in it, which will push most of them to quit. Who will be left to consume if vast swathes of professions are made redudant ? And if consumption goes up enough to generate new jobs, they won't be for the skillsets which were replaced, but different, specialised ones, that will require retraining and requalification, which is time heavy.
In any case, even assuming some equilibrium is reached at some point, having decent chunks of the population unemployed with little to no employment prospects, especially in countries with pretty much no social safety nets like the US will be disastrous socially.
That quote is juicy. It's amusing to me that he's so naive he thinks that an AI won't make forced or unforced errors given the imperfect information it inevitably has. And if you can get access to the training set or the corpus of variables the AI is configured with then you can easily predict what it's going to do next, which is far worse. Nobody can look into the mind of a mediocre general, but anyone can look into the mind of any AI general given sufficient access.
People who call themselves technologists always overestimate how beneficial a new technology is and underestimate how inhumane its application becomes when venture capitalists demand 10x or 100x their initial investment. When people like him come in and extol the virtues of some new thing as fixing everything and making everything better, I'm really wary of what they do next. Inevitably they're trying to sell me a bill of goods.
Both responses seem to indicate you believe this is what pmarca thinks. VC is two parts: (1) make the world think X is good and (2) make investments in X
> I even think AI is going to improve warfare, when it has to happen, by reducing wartime death rates dramatically. Every war is characterized by terrible decisions made under intense pressure and with sharply limited information by very limited human leaders. Now, military commanders and political leaders will have AI advisors that will help them make much better strategic and tactical decisions, minimizing risk, error, and unnecessary bloodshed.
While wars have actually been getting less deadly over the last century, I think this is because of reasons beyond just technology. If it were technology alone that we depended on, his notion of commanders using AI advisers to make them strategize war into a death-and-suffering minimalist process is laughable. Instead, they'd more likely just start more wars, more easily, always confident in their supposed technological edge while really just creating more murderous catastrophe and failure.
That this has happened less over time despite the advances of technology has been more a social phenomenon of lower human tolerance for violence in general. A more widely connected and wealthier (more to lose) world has helped this mentality accelerate, yes, but fundamentally, this intolerance to violence is a human trait that was given more space in which to proliferate by technology. The technology didn't bring it into existence. AI will be little different.
I think AI is going to make (and is actively making) warfare absolutely horrible - autonomous 'weapons' are very nearly here and all signs point to the fact that unlike nukes or fighter jets, they're going to be dirt cheap, based on technology available to the average consumer.
This means that high-end capabilities (even class-leading) will be available to private individuals (think the DJI copters of the Ukranians) and or they will be available to actual, professional militaries at absolutely marginal cost (the Orlans ( the Nikon and plastic containing-drone) or Shaheds (the moped-motored Iranian suicide drone)), that can be produced by the millions, as they rely on our conventional factory infrastructure.
Even more scary, terror attacks might not even require ANY bespoke hardware - experience has showed that car attacks are easily as deadly as gun attacks. Imagine someone exploiting a self-driving Tesla, turning hundreds of thousands of cars on the road into destructive weapons.
There is a horrible trend in the world that started before the rise of AI - the blurring of the definition of war - I'd say this phenomenon started with the rise of drone strikes on foreign soil - though others might put this even earlier. Its the fact that a country can engage in acts of war without being at war removes almost all dampers on attacking sovereign nations. The final one - that of plausible deniability is finally going to go away - at least when the US sent a Hellfire missile your way, it sent the world a message that you pissed them off badly enough that they'll willing to openly admit to and committing the resources to droning you. A non-descript quadcopter, carrying a grenade and programmed with face recognition software is going to be the assassination weapon of tomorrow.
>Every child will have an AI tutor that is infinitely patient, infinitely compassionate, infinitely knowledgeable, infinitely helpful. The AI tutor will be by each child’s side every step of their development, helping them maximize their potential with the machine version of infinite love.
This bothers me.
Who trains these AI tutors and how do we prevent the system they're embedded in from churning out the same cookie cutter individuals, each with the exact same political beliefs and inability to comprehend the grey and nuanced?
Do we even want perfect tutors at all? The lessons I remember from school didn't always come from the best and brightest the profession had to offer. I would even go as far as to say that some were rather flawed individuals, in one way or another. That "wisdom" though has shaped me for the better as an individual. You're not going to find that in any textbook, much less a LLM.
And it doubles down on being flawed, as people willing to pay those 100 bucks self-select as both gullible and having discretionary income. More-less the same story as with paying for ad-free versions of ad-supported services.
"Among postsecondary Title IV institutions in 2020–21, there were 1,892 public institutions, 1,754 private nonprofit institutions, and 2,270 private for-profit institutions."
Since when was something advertised as "perfect", perfect? I'd rather worry that it will be imperfect and try to teach all kind of random weird stuff to gullible kids.
This is true though. Modern warfare became much less deadly to civilians. Just compare Russia's total brutal destruction of Mariupol with their barbaric indiscriminating artillery barrages and Ukraine's almost bloodless liberation of Kherson, without a single artillery or air strike on the city itself — a very clear contrast between 20th and 21st century's warfare.
Wars will never go away, but by making them more precise and intelligent, we can make them not as horrible as they were in the past.
I’ll preface this by saying that I have never known war in my lifetime and that I absolutely don’t condone it.
That said, isn’t the point of war also that it’s horrible and barbaric? If war isn’t that anymore, won’t it be much more frequent and casually started as a result?
Again, I’m absolutely not saying it’s a good thing that war maims and kills people, but I see these side effects as a deterrent. There is a component of terror to it and that’s what makes it even worse.
If it’s enlisted professional killing each other, or even robots destroying each other, it can go on for much longer. And how do you determine the “winner” in that case if you can keep feeding robots into the fight, it’s never ending I’d think.
That said, isn’t the point of war also that it’s horrible and barbaric?
Of course - that's precisely the point. The idea that any technical innovation can make it less so (or make war less likely) runs counter to all historical observation.
I'm not sure I agree with that. I don't think the _point_ of war is to be barbaric - that's a by-product of forceful expansion of power. Regardless of how killing another human is done in the context of conflict, it will always be considered barbaric, but the _point_ of the conflict isn't be maximise barbarism.
I think (and know very little, so could be wrong), that the purpose of war is to expand influence. This can take the form of access to new resources (whether that be land, access, air space, whatever) or to form a buffer between one country and another. There's probably other reasons, simply like ego in some cases.
There are other ways to expand powerbases too - such as China's heavy financial and infrastructure investment in Africa and South Pacific nations, or attempting to undermine another country's social structures. These are longer and harder to implement, but yield better results with practically no blood shed.
> That said, isn’t the point of war also that it’s horrible and barbaric? If war isn’t that anymore, won’t it be much more frequent and casually started as a result?
Yes (usually), to the first question. The second begs the question though.
Wars are destructive and enormously expensive. Only a tiny fraction of human leaders wielding a disproportionate amount of power have the agency to start wars, and they do so in order to pursue specific (but varied) objectives. Since the cost is high, no one does this lightly (even the "crazy" ones, because they would already have lost power if they weren't smart and calculating).
AI may provide avenues to enhance the efficacy of wars. It may also provide avenues to enhance other strategies to achieve those objectives. In all cases, we can expect AI will be used to further the objectives of those humans with the power to direct its development and applications.
It is therefore ludicrous and self-interested speculation to claim that AI will reduce death rates. Andreessen signals this with the preface "I even think" so that he can make the claim without any later accountability. The reality is, future wartime death rates may or may not decrease, but even if they do, we likely won't even be able to credibly attribute the change to AI versus all other changes to the global geopolitical environment.
> That said, isn’t the point of war also that it’s horrible and barbaric?
No. The conqueror never wants war — he prefers to get what he wants without any resistance. It's only the defender who has to wage war to defend itself from aggression.
But the same technology can also be used to make war, you know -- even more indiscriminate and deady. Or even where less so -- it can be used by the wrong side, even help them win in the end. While the companies that A16Z will inevitably invest in just keep raking in the profits, either way.
I don't think that has much to do with AI. Russia is seeking to subjugate Ukraine and terrorize the population into surrendering, while Ukraine is attempting to protect the population.
If Russia had more military AI, they would use it to do more of the same thing they're doing with all of their current technologies.
There's nothing about Russia's terror bombing that's related to not having advanced technology. Russia is using terror bombing because their strategic calculations have determined that weakening the Ukrainian nation would give them a strategic advantage - they've used advanced drones for this purpose as well as advanced missiles. If they had even more advanced systems, they would use them similarly.
Perhaps you could argue an advanced social system wouldn't target civilians but that's different issue (and still a hard one).
...by making them more precise and intelligent...
Precise technology is just as effective at precisely targeting civilians as it is at precisely soldiers and there hasn't been end to forces that view various civilians as the enemy.
And indeed, nations have very seldom targeted civilians because of the lack of precision - because civilians were standing next to soldiers or something similar. The human shield phenomena has happened but NAZIs targeted London for bombing because they wanted to break the British Nation. Etc.
We have to remember they bombed that theater in Mariupol (with a "precision" guided missile no less) not despite the fact that there were children and mothers inside -- but because of it.
I agree with your assessment as far as Ukraine is concerned.
However, I hope it's not a strawman to assume you're arguing that there is no progress in warfare in the sense of harm inflicted upon civilians. What would you prefer as a civilian: living in a country being conquered by Julius Caesar, Gengis Khan, occupied by Nazis in WWII or living in any of the countries occupied since WWII (including Ukraine)?
We even used to have a different word for it: "conquered". What was the lastest country in history, where this word would be appropriate?
However, I hope it's not a strawman to assume you're arguing that there is no progress in warfare in the sense of harm inflicted upon civilians.
My point is specifically that progress in the technologies of war don't by themselves promise that things will be less brutal. Quite possibly other things have produced progress. I make that clear in my parent post.
I would also note that technology produces unpredictable changes in the strategic situation and the actual result from a changed strategic is itself unpredictable even from the strategic situation. So where a technology change might take us is unpredictable and unpredictable-over-time. Notably, nuclear deterrence has so far worked well for keeping the world peaceful and is something of a factor for the relative pleasantness of the situation you cite. But if nuclear deterrence were to slip into nuclear war, the few survivors would probably think of this technology advance as the worst thing the world ever saw.
>What would you prefer as a civilian: living in a country being conquered by Julius Caesar, Gengis Khan, occupied by Nazis in WWII or living in any of the countries occupied since WWII (including Ukraine)?
East Timor, Tibet, Darfur, Iraq, Central African Republic, there's lots of post-WW II events that are easily as wretched for the victims.
The “precision strikes” of the US weren’t very kind to Iraqi civilians either. War is horrible and it probably should never be viewed as anything else. Otherwise the temptations to start wars is too big for some political leaders.
This is what happens when a normal person lucks/scams their way into billions: they think their random musings must be profound.
Like, how would such a war even work?? We have AI killbots shoot at eachother in no-mans-land, sure, but then what? The side with less killbots just gives up, like a fantasy novel monarch betting the realm on a trial by combat? Desperate people do desperate things, and those people having nuclear missles already scares me enough - I don't want to see them with self-replicating Von Nueman bomb drones or whatever other horrors the pentagon dreams up for us.
Yep. If we ever manage to remove the humans from the battlefield, the battlefield will simply move to where the humans are.
Anyway the point of war is to destroy the civilian infrastructure and the population that operates it, so they can't support an army. Which is kind of insanely circular because the army is there to defend the civilians and the infrastructure in the first place. War is just a mad thing and getting robots to do it will not make it any less mad, only more efficient at being mad.
And in the end why not just replace the citizenry and voters...
We could lock up those imperfect humans and just occasionally ship them some food and water. Maybe direct them to not produce so many imperfect new humans too.
If history's proven anything it's that if you put enough humans together we'll do almost nothing but invent more and more elaborate ways to kill each other. And sometimes to kill other things too.
The question is not how to create individuals with different mind, but how to create them in enough mass that it reaches 51% before governments forbid whatever you are doing. And if you have so much power that the government doesn’t come at you, what kind of power were you looking for.
They were trained by cheap labor in African countries, using abusive practices with no consideration for ethical concerns. The worst part is they didn't even care about how this would be seen by the public, since the public is just so blindingly hyped on it.
Do you have a smartphone? Pretty sure it was assembled by cheap labor in third-world countries using abusive practices with no consideration for ethical concerns. Maybe you have a laptop? Same story. Did you consider this before purchasing and using these devices?
It doesn't seem helpful to try to impugn a person's morals in an effort to discredit a valid concern.
(And I say this as someone who does think about electronics supply chains, has previously owned a Fairphone and since has only purchased second-hand phones.)
It's not helpful neither fair to attach systemic issues of capitalism to the novel technology you personally don't like.
Yes this is a valid concern. Yet it's about the same as jumping on a random person in the grocery store with a lecture about the unsustainability of the product that person is taking off the shelf.
Sadly, buying second-hand devices for personal use won't affect these issues of the economic system we live in.
This isn't a grocery store, it's a comment threat incited by a highly positive take on AI. I think that's an appropriate place to mention these issues.
Exactly, plus the kinds of things these people were forced to see are very illegal in the US. And eventually they had to get out of that job, despite not having good economic alternatives.
There’s a difference between violation of working conditions like working hours/underpayment, and forcing people to view the kinds of pictures they were forced to see ad nauseam
I don’t think they agreed to see the kinds of things they ended up seeing. As a result, they actually pushed to eventually excuse themselves from those jobs, despite not having a good alternative. That’s how bad it was.
> Every child will have an AI tutor that is infinitely patient, infinitely compassionate, infinitely knowledgeable, infinitely helpful.
Which also means: infinitely capable of performing a job in their place. What will these children study for? Teachers have always transmitted to the only available recipients the knowledge that otherwise would have disappeared with them. When intelligent beings can simply be replicated at zero cost and have no expiration, what are children even learning for?
Because, at least for many, the desire to learn is hardwired and gives us an immense feeling of satisfaction and pleasure. I read/study/try many things that have no (or negative) material value and are done far better and more efficiently by someone else or by a mechanical/electronic device. Chess, for example, seems to still be pretty popular even though even the best grand masters can be easily trounced by a computer.
I have been around enough humans to know this is naive. There are so, so many humans who want nothing more than to laze around and indulge in vices while generally being completely useless.
You don't have to look very hard to find them and I really believe this world become the norm if people weren't required to work and thus got no real reward for their efforts.
> who want nothing more than to laze around and indulge in vices
Or is that the effect of poor-stimulation environments?
Like the study that showed teenage drinking plummeted[1] in Iceland when teenagers were given stimulating activities to do instead.
Anecdotally, I mostly drink when I’m bored, and I don’t drink when I am doing interesting things.
[1] https://duckduckgo.com/?q=iceland+teenage+drinking+sports It was a variety of programs including a curfew for teenagers, but one leg of the programs was “Through the program, the municipalities funded and expanded after-school activities, from sports to gymnastics, to music, art, and ballet. The basic idea is to keep kids busy – and out of trouble – and help them find meaning in their lives that dissuades them from seeking alcohol or drugs in the first place.”. The nighttime curfew wouldn’t have prevented drinking during daytime or evenings, which reduced.
> When intelligent beings can simply be replicated at zero cost and have no expiration, what are children even learning for?
This is probably the most depressing thing I've read all year. And it's been a rough year. I hope you just had a "brain-fart" as the kids say, but if not: I implore you to think of the purpose of your life, and what it would be without the need to work 40h/week to survive.
Amen on the value of imperfect tutors. I'd say that the best moments of early adolescence come when you dispute something with an adult -- and are able to establish they they're wrong and you're right.
Later on, we have to learn how to do this delicately enough that we don't make enemies. But the journey to adulthood takes a big step forward during those early rushes of realizing that we can see/recognize things that our elders cannot.
> Who trains these AI tutors and how do we prevent the system they're embedded in from churning out the same cookie cutter individuals, each with the exact same political beliefs and inability to comprehend the grey and nuanced?
I understand you're trying to dig into some idea of political homogenization and bias by pushing this point but I really think you're missing the forest for the trees.
I grew up in a low income area in the US and the standard of public education was abysmal. The teachers were overworked with huge class sizes and they spent so much time helping kids simply graduate that they had no time to help any student who was average or above. If you learned in a non-standard way, forget about it. Forget "cookie cutter individuals", half the time the teachers would show up and not actually teach (they'd put some music on and work on other things.) "perfect tutors"? In an era before digitized gradebooks, teachers could give you whatever scores they wished, no accountability. One big function of standardized testing is to push teachers to be accountable. Even the teachers that were trying their best just didn't have the time to do any more than the absolute basics.
I studied for SATs and AP exams by downloading textbooks from filesharing websites and studying those. Wikipedia filled in the gaps for non-STEM subjects. Nobody at my school could help me. At the time all the teachers and councilors knew is that I was going to be okay without any help from them, at least better than the other kids. I knew that nobody succeeded where I grew up and I needed to look outside to level myself up to succeed.
I can only see AI tutors as much better than the nothing that often is public education. The status quo is just overworked, ineffective teaching. Being able to bounce off questions from an AI tutor when it's late and you're up with homework and your parents either can't help or are hostile to your educational goals (the reality in a low income area) would go a long way. Of course the reality is that maybe AI tutors aren't actually coming and all we'll get are LLMs trained on the contents of school textbooks, but even that is a lot better than what we have now. The important problem will be making sure that everyone gets access to these AI tutors and not just the privileged in the elite schools who were going to be funneled into an elite college anyway.
Would it be best if we were able to shrink class sizes and have world-class teachers for children? Of course. Are countries going to be willing to pay the tax burden needed to make this happen? Probably not. In the meantime it's best for the poor kids to have the cookie-cutter, AI tutor while the wealthy have their own private tutors. It's not very different from the status quo today except the poor kids have nothing.
If you live in a country which doesn't value giving everyone a good education to begin with, how will this be better? There will be few incentives to train new models, and when it does happen it might not be for the soundest of reasons (removal of references to LGBT on one side, or language deemed hateful by the other). Meanwhile the wealthy will have the option to opt out while continuing to get the best education for their children that money can buy.
It's not a matter of valuing a good education, it's a matter of making a limited education investment go further. I doubt the harms of whatever ideological tampering are so severe as to outweigh the sheer educational benefits to low income Americans and probably many middle income folks from developing nations.
It's not like individuals are free from their biases either. Humans can always learn more and change their beliefs, but without the basics of education they'll never get to a point where they can critically analyze the world around them.
I think it's much simpler than this. Either you're an autodidact or you're not. Children who are predisposed to teaching themselves stuff will now have more tools to help them learn what they want to learn.
When I learned through Encyclopedias and later from CD-ROM based formats like Microsoft encarta or The Way Things Work there were actually people creating the chapters. Later Wikipedia came about and spun up its own flavor of community based information, however flawed, there’s still a person curating information.
Now there’s this AI who can spit out information with the hubris of Harvard professor. The language model has no idea if it’s correct or not and there no one curating answers. No one can explain how it came up with the answer but it’s correct in a lot of cases.
I don't think there's a big issue with an unreliable tutor; a Harvard professor can spit out incorrect information, too. It's up to the learner to cross-check and verify the information. If you're uncritically ingesting facts from some other intelligence (artificial or otherwise), you won't be learning much anyway. The best lessons come when you make connections between different bits of information, so if an unreliable tutor forces you to make more of those connections in the process of checking its work, so be it.
"The AI tutor will be by each child’s side every step of their development, helping them maximize their potential with the machine version of infinite love."
Somebody clearly took a lot from the scene in Terminator 2 with John Connor trying to teach Arnold how to do a high five.
I don't necessarily like the idea of paying for AI to train my children to be AI dependent life long children who spent their whole life around benevolent AIs.
That said to move up the stack, the point is to paint a generally rosy picture. Not tell us that our kids will be raised by AI to be part of the futures uniform culture.
Whats the alternative? A lot of kids are left behind in the current education system. It happens on both ends. Kids that don't get it just get pushed through the system. That's why you have schools with <20% reading proficiency and <50% math proficiency but >95% graduation rates [0]. Do you think an 10th grade English teacher is going to stop his class to teach kids how to read?
It happens on the upper end of course and smart kids end up building bombs because they're bored [1]
AI tutors would be a huge benefit and allow people to explore the topics they're interested. Maybe a kid isn't so interested in historical battles but is more interested in the clothing people wore at the time. Or someone else might be interested in something completely different. The breadth of LLMs is a real killer feature for creativity and exploration. I think this would result in the opposite of cookie cutter as the current system where 30 kids sit in a room and study the same thing produces cookie cutter individuals, albeit extremely poorly as many don't learn anything
A) no one (sane) is recommending that we don't have teachers. I suppose you didn't grow up around those with wealth, who give their children massive advantages with focused, targeted, extensive 1:1 tutoring.
B) Who trains the human teachers? I don't think I need to cite any sources for the claim that many, many people in our society are already concerned about excessive uniformity and political brainwashing in our schools. I mean, just look to the nature of religious education in most of U.S. as a perfect example of completely AI-free objective brainwashing.
> how do we prevent the system they're embedded in from churning out the same cookie cutter individuals
Everybody's already so crazy different, both from genetics and from family influence, there's no need to worry. There's so much diversity in people.
> each with the exact same political beliefs and inability to comprehend the grey and nuanced?
Education (at least in the US and Europe) is usually about teaching critical thinking, not political indoctrination. Why do you think tutors would change this? (Teaching political science, for example, is very likely to reduce your strongly-held political beliefs and lead you to see things as much more gray and nuanced.)
> Do we even want perfect tutors at all?
There's no such thing as perfect. All it said was infinitely patient, infinitely knowledgeable, etc. Computers are already infinitely patient, and even just Wikipedia alone is getting qualitatively similar to inifinitely knowledgeable.
"Every child will have an AI tutor that is infinitely patient, infinitely compassionate, infinitely knowledgeable, infinitely helpful." - people use the internet so that they don't have to remember things. I'm not sure how this tutor will help because currently a lot of students are using AI to do their homework for them.
I grew up in Germany and our entire education system doesn't make a lot of sense and homework was something that only very few people actually did, since most just copied from the few or managed to stay under the radar and slither through classes without people noticing.
Homework was always a chore and not a challenge or something that would help you out in daily life.
IMVHO: those who cry "AI will destroy anything" AND those who equally cry "AI will makes anything better" are both largely wrong for the present and still wrong for the mean and long run.
Today "AI" systems are nice automatic "summarize tools", with big limits and issues. They might be useful in limited scenarios like to design fictional stuff, to be "search engine on steroid" (as long as their answers are true) and so on. Essentially they might help automation a bit.
The BIG, BIG, BIG issue is who train them AND how can we verify. If people start to get the habit of taking for truth any "answer" their grasp on the reality would be even lower that today "online misinformation", and that can go far beyond news (try to imaging false medical imaging analysis consequences). How can we verify is even more complex. Not only we can't train at home with interesting results but also we can't verify for truth the mass of training materials. Try to imaging the classic Eduard Bernays "dummy" sci journal publishing some true papers and some false one stating smoking is good for health... https://www.apa.org/monitor/2009/12/consumer now imaging the effect of carefully slipped false material in the big "ocean" of data...
They are trained using input from an army of underpaid "ghost workers", i.e. people without many rights or economic freedom, and no consideration for their well-being.
Slave labor produce poor quality results, of course, but per se have no specific bias, most western prosperity was made exploiting peoples for centuries so well... Any morality aside, I'm much more concerned by those who decide how to train and on what data than about the ghost slave labor they exploit...
I'm concerned which data these real human beings were forced to train it on. The images they had to review were highly disturbing and illegal in the US.
In this case there is no grift (he is likely investing in AI like literally everybody else) and these comments are nothing but noise.
"Social norms" are a poor excuse for "ostracizing" someone who isn't even here to be impacted by it, let alone the knock-on affect of getting in the way of effective communication and discussion.
I wouldn't say that anyone's ostracizing him at all (It is on the front page...), and even if they are, putting it down to "social norms" is a bit disingenuous, don't you think?
We're not talking about Socrates speaking rudely about the people in power, we're talking about a billionaire accused (seemingly [rightfully](https://www.blockdata.tech/blog/general/where-andreessen-hor...)?) investing in bad-faith to scam people out of their money. I think that's a form of a theft, and calling an aversion to theft a "social norm" is technically correct but practically a massive misapplication of the term.
This is by far the best piece I've ever written on the impact AI will have on society & the most articulate response to the hysteria gripping the discourse.
The biggest risk with AI, in the medium-term at least, is it will be used by governments and organizations with power to surveil and manipulate people on a previously-impossible scale. Automated systems monitoring everybody, pulling levers to prevent anybody from speaking out or causing trouble.
In the long run, it will be the end of human freedom
For example, it looks like Xi has been pretty actively pursuing this, based on the news over the last 10 years
> China has one surveillance camera for every 2 citizens (...) These camera [sic] checks if people are wearing face mask, crossing the road before the green lights for pedestrians are turned on. If caught breaking rules, people lose their social credit points, are charged higher mortgage, extra taxes and slower internet speed. Not only that, public transport for them gets expensive as well, and the list goes on. [1]
It's not like we're immune to this. All the malls I go to lately are packed with facial recognition systems to analyze our behaviour.
“Every person will have an AI assistant/coach/mentor/trainer/advisor/therapist that is infinitely patient, infinitely compassionate, infinitely knowledgeable, and infinitely helpful. The AI assistant will be present through all of life’s opportunities and challenges, maximizing every person’s outcomes.”
…will more likely turn into an indoctrination and compliance machine under authoritarian regimes.
We haven’t found a way yet to prevent authoritarian regimes from arising and spreading, so it’s unclear how AI will save the world. On the contrary, AI will make it easier for authoritarian regimes to expand and maintain their control.
All regimes asymptotically tend towards authoritarian in the long run; from their POV it's just easier to do their job that way. AI will greatly accelerate this trend.
AI will also make it easier for freedom fighters and democracy. If everyone on earth held a four-year bachelors degree, don't you think that would pose an issue for demagogues and emotion-based politicians?
Hopefully it's obvious to all of us that no technology, no matter how neat, will solve the social problems of humanity for us. And this is just the start of how I disagree with the author. But I would say it's not exactly a detriment either
Would it? If everyone on earth did have a 4-year bachelor’s degree, but you lived in a social-credit driven, machine vision, surveillance world, and you’re punished every time you step out of line—what are all those educated people going to do? They can’t even meet or communicate in private
How about a world in which bullies who spit on the social contracts (and society in general) get a free ride, benefit from it and win? Would you prefer that?
Weren’t they responding specifically to a comment that said AI would make it easier for “freedom fighters and democracy”? I don’t understand how your questions relate to that. Furthermore, you seem to be implying that AI will help deal with the bully problem… how?
You’ve also given an example that the world in which educated people can’t communicate in private is a poor place.
I’m giving a counter-example that a world in which there are no records and no supervision of antisocial behaviors could also be a poor place.
The way that AI can deal with bullying is exactly the same a good teacher could. You build a model of a good and intelligent teacher that deals well with bullying and put it out. Bullying gets solved. Everyone who is not a bully is slightly better off and can enjoy it.
The idea is that educated people would not be as likely to support authoritarian regimes. If you take authoritarian power as a given… idk what’s the point of anything?
I do agree that increased surveillance is very scary. But we have to maintain hope that the future holds promise for the less powerful to influence their government - in the 1770s it was via muskets, and in the 2070s who knows what it will be. (As an aside, I personally doubt it’s going to be guns…)
I don’t know about that. Ideologues who provide the justifications for authoritarian regimes tend to be very educated people. In addition, opposing authoritarian tendencies might require more the qualities of activists and physical action than intellectual education.
"But you can train it however you want!" is the main counterargument I hear against this (alas, my strawman).
Sure, you could, assuming accessible resources to decent compute nodes and good training data, but something tells me that this will be in the hands of a very few.
Also, even if decent AI remains affordable for most people, most people will still mindlessly take the default route of a corporate/government pushed apps.
Not to mention members of certain "high-risk groups" getting their own AI police officers to issue warnings and citations. Obviously not based on race, just based on objective risk factors such as having a direct social link to someone with an arrest record...
The examples that you’ve given (obeying traffic laws and wearing masks during pandemic l) seem to be perfectly good social behaviors.
It’s a balancing act between freedom and law. Go one way too far - you get Tiananmen Square and reeducation camps. Go another way too far - you get storming the White House and school shootings.
I hate this sort of thinking. You are making the implicit assumption that everything about our social environment happens simply on 1 variable: heavy-handed enforcement.
When I put it like this, I hope you can see that it doesn't work like that. There are hundreds of variables you could change that would affect everything. We can prevent Congress storming (it was, btw, Congress, not the White House, that got stormed) without moving even 1 micrometer in the direction of reeducation camps.
I initially read the comment you are responding to differently, in that I saw the ‘observer’ in the statement as not the state but the community, on re-reading I’m not sure that makes sense.
All the same, reading HN politics, it often seems that a spectrum is presented that spans from freedom to state oppression.
There are democracies where the public will not accept the state using power for its own benefit, but is comfortable with the state enforcing the social contract, because there is a stronger sense that this is defined democratically. This may be simply a matter of population size, the state in a nation of 20 million is a different beast to a state of 350m
This brings up another question... How is a social contract defined when you have 20m people and 50m AI enabled bots forming relationships with them trying to change their mind on said social contract?
I’m not sure. About half a year ago I’ve put a perfectly good sign, kindly asking to let the grass recover on my front yard. The grass was getting a bit too much of dog urine, from the dog owners trespassing onto my property to urinate their dogs and poop there.
You’d think that the kind neighbors could read and pause for a bit. But no. They care about their pets. And happily let them go, resulting in the damage to landscaping and the bills to clear contaminated ground and replace the grass.
I’m guessing these are the same people who wouldn’t wear a mask and spread their disease somehow, during the pandemic.
Yes. If this is a competence test, which allows you to demonstrate your understanding of social contracts, you should absolutely wait for the green light.
For example red light cameras. Makes perfect sense right, running red lights is bad as it can cause harm, and harm would be a violation of the social contract.
.... except the cities were commonly taking the yellow light timing down far below recommended levels in order to maximize profits.
AI in a world that demands profits spells the end of freedom.
The example that you’ve given of light profiteering with yellow lights doesn’t sound like the end of freedom to me.
Particularly, if you’re allowed to contest that yellow light fairly and efficiently, using the records from the same cameras and AI technology.
Ideally, you’d just register a complaint and the thing would give you a video and a clear explanation of what did you do wrong and why it was not a good idea. Traffic laws are relatively straightforward after all.
See, this is what the privilege of someone that has the resources to defend themselves sounds like.
>if you’re allowed to contest that yellow light fairly and efficiently,
That's a pain in the ass already in our current system and there is no alignment in our politics that will make it better. If you have money and don't care, you'll pay the ticket. If you have money and do care you'll spend a lot of time with records requests, and resubmitting records requests and pushing trial dates because the system won't give you the records you need in time.
The legal system does in no way work in ideals. It's not until you're on the wrong side of the law you realize exactly how fucked up it can be. It is then you realize how many laws exist that are unenforced until you bring too much attention to yourself.
It still doesn’t sounds like the end of freedom. But yes, ideally the system should be rigged in a way that the amount of money you have doesn’t influence how much it sucks to be on the wrong side of the law. It’s a regressive tax otherwise.
How is it a competence test? It doesn't show any competence. It's a compliance test to see if you are willing to behave non-optimally and sacrifice your time to prove that you are compliant.
In fact a person who goes over with red light when it's safe to do so might be in total paying more attention compared to the one who only watches the lights. The one who watches the lights may miss a car speeding by even though the light was green.
I'd even say that the social networks are a precursor to this. Everyone is constantly observed by everyone else there, and many use a fake persona to try to "fit in", or god forbid say something they will regret later. And those aren't on them have trouble keeping in touch with the rest. Smh
I was doing some research on facial recognition for a job where we were considering its use. I came across examples of sentiment analysis being used at Walmart and Target. They have big and conspicuous cameras in every one of their stores now. Most people assume it is for shoplifting mitigation, which it is. But that is not all. They can use it to track individual customer's paths through the store and then use cameras at the checkout to analyze your facial expression and rank your mood. They use this data to optimize their store layouts.
The other use case was at high-end retail stores. Places like Luis Vuitton, Hermes, etc. They have facial recognition to log high spenders. If you drop 10k at Coach and then go down the street to Valentino their security system will recognize you and highlight you as a VIP customer. A specialized customer assistant then comes out to give you personal attention, maybe to invite you to the private shopping experience.
I learned about these in 2017 I believe. Most non-technical people who I've told about this think it is some conspiracy theory and they often don't believe it. For some reason people are scared of the government but they remain totally docile or willfully ignorant in the face of corporate use.
When we were evaluating employee entrance systems for a FAANG back in ~2012 we were demo'd systems that could do retinal scanning on streams of people as they walked through the turn styles and they could read your eyes even through polarized sun glasses.
I cant recall its name though - but yeah - OpenAI basically brought capabilities for extreme real-time surveillance to an 11.
>>The biggest risk with AI, in the medium-term at least, is it will be used by governments and organizations with power to surveil and manipulate people on a previously-impossible scale. Automated systems monitoring everybody, pulling levers to prevent anybody from speaking out or causing trouble. In the long run, it will be the end of human freedom..
THIS is exactly what I see happening. I personally think the "pause" on development is bullshit NationState jockeying for dominance by trying to gAIn AI Dominance - Israel, MI5, NSA, CCP <--- Every Intel Agency on the planet is building/buying/stealing/weaponizing whatever they can.
I wonder what/where Palintir is in this fight?
It feels REALLY Anime with the Sabre Rattling btwn the US and China over Taiwan and TSMC's chip fabs for AI cores.
The hardware is still relatively infancy - but in 5 years it will be really interesting when we see the perfomance for 1hr or 1D problems cut down to minutes seconds for massive AI apps 5 years from now
Despite what I think of the crypto projects a16z has been involved in (hint: it's not positive - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36073355), I actually think this essay was pretty solid.
we actually are going to enter a “diamond age” as processes like C2CNT make direct-air carbon molecules cheaper than glass. I don’t know if goes mainstream this year though
In skeptical of any claim that software will make the world better. Perhaps it's selection bias, but all I can see is software overcomplicating things to the point that any benefit derived from it is overshadowed by the maintenance burden and unforseen externalities. I say this as a once Utopian hopeful, Uber was going to get rid of the monopolistic taxi cartels, google was going to put balloons up and fiber and give us all affordable high speed connectivity. All they seemed to do was get in control with these pitches and then become worse than their predecessors.
I am not someone who thinks AI is going to kill us all. But I dont think it's going to usher in a new utopia either. I think probably it's going to be useful and beneficial in some ways, cause problems in others, and like always, our nature and behavior will determine the human condition going forward.
I don't know about you, but Uber has significantly improved ride-sharing for me, along with countless other aspects of life such as government services, interpersonal communication, and education.
It's a miracle I can live in another country than I was born, top income bracket due to a free internet education, effortlessly facetiming my parents whenever I want in amazing quality, learning and talking about all sorts of niche interests without any effort.
I think this is just all so obvious these days that you don't remember how much it used to suck, and that's a real testament to its greatness.
I remember, and I agree with you. These tools have improved our lives. But they've damaged our lives on other ways.
I remember waking up every morning and without a second thought, I got up, out in the world, did things I felt like doing, saw people I liked on a whim, every day was jam packed with eventfulness and dimension and interaction. I took that for granted. Now, kids don't play outside, nobody knows how to drive because their mind is somewhere else 24/7 and we check our phones before we do anything else. But the flip side is, I can know anything I want that is known by someone else with less physical effort than it would take me to make a sandwich. I can talk to almost any human being in the world while doing any mundane task anywhere in my environment. It's amazing.
But we did lose something, I believe something very important. It wasn't free, it cost us something. Was it worth it? I don't know. I think yes, but I'm not really sure.
It feels like we're at the pareto frontier. Technological advancement used to feel like it truly was progress, but we're now at a point where advancement is simply advancement, and we're well aware that as the technology advances, there's an equal an opposite regression in society somewhere.
> I think probably [technology] is going to be useful and beneficial in some ways, cause problems in others, and like always, our nature and behavior will determine the human condition going forward.
Beautifully put. I'm considering writing this on a post-it and quoting it over Zoom calls for years to come.
Re:benefits of software, I think it's a mistake to focus on stuff like Uber. I would vehemently defend the assertion that the internet (Wikipedia, Google, Kahn Academy, etc.) have brought massive good in the form of public access to information. More fundamentally, I think it's objectively true that it leads to increased productivity via tools like spreadsheets, email, and now AI-assisted writing, which I think is a fundamental part of our path towards a better society.
Software surely won't fix society, but I think making a utopia out of the current material conditions would be tough. Many things are broken and rotting because of greed and corruption, but I see scarcity (of labor, resources, knowledge, etc.) as a powerful factor to.
Don't forget about the good ol' tech industry bait-and-switch. Quoting myself from earlier today:
> There's the good ol' bait-and-switch of tech industry you have to consider. New tech is promoted by emphasizing (and sometimes overstating) the humane aspects, the hypothetical applications for the benefit of the user and the society at large. In reality, these capabilities turn out to be mediocre, and those humane applications never manifest - there is no business in them. We always end up with a shitty version that's mostly useful for the most motivated players: the ones with money, that will use those tools to make even more money off the users.
It applies to Apple's automated emotion reading, and it applies even more to major VCs telling us AI will Save the World. As in, maybe it could, but those interests being involved are making it less likely.
I don't agree. You're right that this article really focuses only on the positive. That said, it is indeed true that technology has changed the world for the better. If one were to somehow prove that "facebook is net bad for young children", it still doesn't mean the web, advertising, and everything that makes up that product should be destroyed.
> it is indeed true that technology has changed the world for the better.
A big part of the "technology" in the past 150 years has been "machines". And all those machines have one thing in common, they consume energy (from the wheel to the latest iPhone).
Yes the technology allowed to increase the crop per acres, to ship goods across the world, to keep food cold, to warm/sterilize it, find new drugs, mass produce clothes for few cents, etc.
That miracle comes access to free and dense energy also known as fossil fuel. If oil/gas/coal was not found/used or just not as abundant, we might not have known the same past 150 years.
Now that miracle is not clean, it does produce a very stable molecule (CO2), that is, after 150 years starting to change the "world" and not necessarily for the better.
So, yes technology improved the life of billions, but maybe at the price of some species extinctions, and it might hurt our very own if we continue to feed those machines/technologies with fossil fuel.
Hopefully, we will reassess how good is a new technology under the prism of its dependence to fossil fuel. Can't wait for fission or fusion to be widely used instead of fossil fuel.
I agree. In general, accumulation of knowledge in accessible form and access to knowledge had been good for humans. And our AI is not an alien to us. It’s just our books compressed.
Now, there could be a problem, when a bad actor applies massive amounts of knowledge towards destructive purposes. If you let anyone to purchase an assault rifle or a nuke, there surely be increased likelihood that an assault rifle or a nuke will be used. The situation is a bit similar with an AI. Refined knowledge is dangerous.
>And our AI is not an alien to us. It’s just our books compressed.
This is a potential mistake.
Do you have pets? Even if you don't you'd generally consider animals to be intelligent, right? But even the smartest animal you've seen is far dumber than the average human being (except visitors at national parks operating trash cans). I mean you can teach many kinds of animals quite a bit, but eventually you hit physical limits of their architecture.
Even humans have limitations. You can learn the most when you're a child, and you do this in an interestingly subtractive method. Your brain is born with a huge number of inner connections. As we learn and age we winnow down those connections and use a far lower portion of our energy output on our mind. Simply put we become limited on how much we can learn as we age. You have to sleep. You get brain fog. You end up forgetting.
With A(G|S)I there are many questions unanswered. How far can it scale? Myself I see no reason it cannot scale far past the human mind. Why would humans be the most optimized intelligence architecture there is? It seems evolution would create that. When you ponder on the idea that something could possibly be far more intelligent than you, you have to come back to the thought on your pets. They live in the same reality of you, but you exist on an entirely different plane of existence due to your thinking abilities. What is the plane of existence like for something that can access all of humanities information at once look like? What is the plane of existence like for something that can see in infrared, ultraviolet, in wireless, in context of whatever tooling it can almost instantly connect to and work with, something that can work with raw data from sensors all over the planet feeding data back to it at light speed?
Now, you're most likely correct in the sense before we get some super ASI that is far beyond us, we'll have some AGI just good enough to power someone greedy and cause no shortage of hell on earth. But if somehow that doesn't happen, then we still have the alien to contend to.
The books are not alien to us. A mind that's born out of compressing them might be an entirely different thing. Increasingly so as it's able to grow on its own.
It will be very alien to us - "it's just predicting the next word" is what I have heard repeatedly said about ChatGPT.
First, AI is far more than just chatgpt, don't presume this is the same thing happening everywhere.
Second, The LLMs are all reasoning machines drawing on encyclopedic knowledge. A great example I recently heard is like a student parroting names of presidents to seem smart - it isn't thinking in the exact manner that we do but it is applying a reasoning to it. Chat GPT may be doing something akin to prediction, but it is doing it in a manner that is exposing reasoning. As the parent mentioned, our own brains use networks that refine over time with removal, and a huge number of our behaviors are "automatic". If you go looking for "consciousness" you may never find it in a machine, but it doesn't really matter if the machine can perfectly mimic everything else that you do or say.
An unfeeling unconscious yet absolutely "aware" and hyperintellgent machine is possibly the most alien we can fathom, and I agree there is no "end game" there is likely no mathematical limit to how far you can take this.
Human minds also tend to predict the next word. And we still don’t know how intelligent behavior and capability to model the world emerges in humans. It’s quite possible that it is also based on predicting what would happen next and on compressed storage of massive amounts of associative memory with attention mechanisms.
> Yes the technology allowed to increase the crop per acres, to ship goods across the world, to keep food cold, to warm/sterilize it, find new drugs, mass produce clothes for few cents, etc.
> That miracle comes access to free and dense energy also known as fossil fuel. If oil/gas/coal was not found/used or just not as abundant, we might not have known the same past 150 years.
That's only because humans were too naive and risk-averse to recognize that once we split the atom we had access to 1000x the energy with comparable reductions in waste. Perhaps if we had AI back in the mid/late 20th century it could've explained to us the benefits of nuclear power vs fossil fuels. Instead we fell for hallucinations of our own making via events like Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, and Fukushima.
"hallucinations of our own making via events like Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, and Fukushima"
I suppose the millions executed under extremist politics were also "hallucinations" then... (e.g. German holocaust, Soviet prisoner camps)
These were all very real events with very real repercussions. They did not conclusively prove there is no "safe" nuclear power, but they did illustrate the consequences of getting it wrong.
The "new" procedures around "cleaner" fission processes e.g. with fuel recycling all sound nice, but ultimately they cary the same costs of "getting it wrong". Having objections to safety is not a "hallucination".
Unless you can clearly explain why a dangerous process has been made "safe", without insulting people's intelligence or understanding i.e. hand waving, you cannot prove you understand it well enough yourself to claim safety. This is my problem with the spate "nuclear is safe" going around - if only a small subset of highly trained personnel can operate and diagnose it safely, without repercussion in a closed loop, you cannot claim safety, just that there are specialized processes that under correct supervision might not be harmful, maybe.
> These were all very real events with very real repercussions. They did not conclusively prove there is no "safe" nuclear power, but they did illustrate the consequences of getting it wrong.
The worse consequences of these events came from the evacuation of the zones, not from the radiations.
Yes there were death due to direct radiations, about 31 for Chernobyl and none for Fukushima. But that's very small compared to all the death due to coal energy pollution, and even hydro which is catastrophic when a dam breaks (which happens way more than nuclear plant accidents).
So this is how we can talk about safety of nuclear plant: by looking at stats of the last 70 years and compare it to alternatives. Because unless we want to go back to candles and windmills we can't just say "nuclear seems dangerous so it's safer not to use it". We have to consider what we'll be using to produce electricity instead.
> The worse consequences of these events came from the evacuation of the zones, not from the radiations.
As if, had we only not evacuated people and left everyone around, nobody would have died and everything would have been better...
> Yes there were death due to direct radiations, about 31 for Chernobyl and none for Fukushima. But that's very small compared to all the death due to coal energy pollution, and even hydro which is catastrophic when a dam breaks (which happens way more than nuclear plant accidents).
This is not a good argument, or at least a bad statistic. You need to look at deaths per <X>, not deaths as a result of. Sure, deaths are fewer with Nuclear, but also, deaths are fewer per coconut. Deaths per terawatt is a bad argument because again, there are so many fewer nuclear plants and the tera-watts are also lower.
A better analysis would be acres of land made uninhabitable by energy source. It doesn't matter you have all the electricity if nobody can live anywhere, whether it is coal causing massive wildfires in Canada or failed Nuclear plants evacuating 40 mile regions (and you need to be careful even then - the wildfires are caused by heat which is caused in part by tera-watts, although largely by fossil fuels and chemicals in the atmosphere, the dams floods are caused by lack of upkeep, a problem shared by nuclear reactors...)
Energy is dangerous (mechanical, chemical, etc.) and produces waste.
And great power requires great responsibility.
"Safety" can be seen thru different lenses. If we measure by number of deaths, then nuclear is safer than dams or coal/gas power plant.
Nuclear requires some expertise to run safely, but now the plant designs are better. I am wondering if the fear of nuclear is greater than the actual risk.
I think you're missing the point. I'm not saying the tech is bad in principle. I'm saying that these people are out to scam you. They're trying to sell you vision that they fully know will not materialize - because while possible on paper, it's not possible in our current economy, not right now, not at the current stage of technology, and most importantly, it's not why they actually want it to happen.
As for
> If one were to somehow prove that "facebook is net bad for young children", it still doesn't mean the web, advertising, and everything that makes up that product should be destroyed
you're right that this does not follow - however, advertising absolutely should be destroyed, because it's a cancer on modern society, and it's not caused by bad tech companies - it's what causes tech companies to go bad (as well as many other nasty things, see http://jacek.zlydach.pl/blog/2019-07-31-ads-as-cancer.html).
> They're trying to sell you vision that they fully know will not materialize - because while possible on paper, it's not possible in our current economy, not right now, not at the current stage of technology, and most importantly, it's not why they actually want it to happen.
I used to think in this way as well, until I realized that it just isn't true. I've seen too many tech people who genuinely believe that their tech will save the world. Only if people could see how, behave in "the right way" etc. They are not different in any of messiahs outside of tech.
> I've seen too many tech people who genuinely believe that their tech will save the world.
I briefly was like that too. All high on TED talks and startup economy propaganda. Then, over the years, I saw all those promises fail, and I saw how and why they failed, and what we got instead.
And even earlier than that, I learned how to craft this kind of bullshit myself - how far a good story can take your worthless university project, even if at no point in telling it you were actually lying.
(I may have also spent an unreasonable amount of time pondering why technology in the real world is so shitty compared to sci-fi settings, even dystopian ones.)
So it's true that not everyone is going to trying to scam you on purpose. Some are still naive enough to believe (I say that without passing bad judgement - it would be nice if things were so simple, but they just aren't). But some are absolutely out there to get you - the regular Joe, or the regular Joe & Jane Inc. Not because they hate you, or the society you live in, but because there is monetary value that can be extracted from you, which they can put to some other use.
And yes, there are also those messiahs you mention, the people insisting their stuff can save the day, "Only if people could see how, behave in 'the right way' etc.". They are a danger to regular people too, but for the entrepreneurial/investor class, they're useful fools. They're tools that can be employed very cheaply, because they already believe the bullshit they're selling.
One does not preclude another. More often than not I've seen that it's a money that causes messianism. You are lucky at some point of the time to hit jackpot with some company, it makes you a lot of money and it makes you feel smarter than other mortals and special. So special that you think you have the right to teach everyone else how to live their lives, how to think etc.
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[ 2.6 ms ] story [ 331 ms ] threadDoes that mean the world is worse off because of the Internet? Probably not. Even if it was, I'm not sure I would want to give it up because I remember the hurdles I faced before the Internet was nearly universal. That said, I do believe we should be conscious about how we use it and skeptical of those who present hyper-optimistic views of new technologies. While some may be genuine in their visions, we also have to factor in those who wish the exploit it for their own benefit and to the expense of others.
Brutal, and true.
The only difference is the tokens are rather more abstract. But there's really nothing special about novelty.
If you have a model of human psychology and culture, there isn't even anything special about cultural novelty fine-tuned to tickle various social, intellectual, and emotional receptors.
LLM can already remove huge chunk of boilerplate or useless search. An actual AI would be on a completely different level.
AI has already made many problems much easier to solve and reduced the capital cost for a lot of economically valuable activities.
AI has had meaningful positive effects in almost everyone's life.
That said the capabilities of novel LLMs are pretty amazing - to the point where I'm able to be more efficient daily by using it.
More to your point: profound doesn't really just mean "deep" in this context, but even if it does, I don't see how LLMs in their current state (with some better UX) don't do that. Sure you can't ask it to guess your deepest inner beliefs, but engaging with an LLM in a dialogue can greatly speed up deep, focused knowledge work, such as brainstorming ideas, structuring writing, investigating hypothesis, etc.
In short, I think it's more than a bit misguided to say AI only has shallow benefits because it's not yet capable of extremely deep thoughts on its own.
Let's say, i have some small data to train my robot.
Day by day, i can teach it more things. But i want it to "learn once and creative 10 times".
It's how human brain got intelligence with only not large data to be trained.
Rephrasing proposed: enable computers to synthesize and generate knowledge without the slightest glimmer of understanding, in ways completely different from anything humans do. FTFY.
I made it as far as the TOC (pale grey on white - I'm getting on, my vision isn't great, and my laptop has poor contrast).
Ok, so they think regulation may hurt some of their dubious AI startup investments. At this point I don't know are they just plain pathetic or still scammers.
> I even think AI is going to improve warfare, when it has to happen, by reducing wartime death rates dramatically. Every war is characterized by terrible decisions made under intense pressure and with sharply limited information by very limited human leaders. Now, military commanders and political leaders will have AI advisors that will help them make much better strategic and tactical decisions, minimizing risk, error, and unnecessary bloodshed.
Fundamental misunderstanding of the nature of wars notwistanding (sane people rarely start them; assuming non-sane leaders like Putin, or historically Hitler, Bush, Milosevic, Mussolini, Galtieri, al-Assad, etc. etc. would listen to advice they don't like is... just stupid), on the contrary - better tools and "better" advice will make commanders and leaders more confident they could win. See: most major military inventions ever
The economic section is too long to quote, but again, fundamental misunderstanding of economy and human physhology and how it relates to economic decisions. If entire profressions get obliterated by AI (not impossible, but improbable with the current quality of AI output), it will, of course, obliterate their wages. It will create fear in other "menial" "white-collar" professiosn that they're next, which will dperess spending. Also, the cost of goods and services that can now be provided by AI (e.g. art) will drastically drop, making it an unviable business for those humans left in it, which will push most of them to quit. Who will be left to consume if vast swathes of professions are made redudant ? And if consumption goes up enough to generate new jobs, they won't be for the skillsets which were replaced, but different, specialised ones, that will require retraining and requalification, which is time heavy.
In any case, even assuming some equilibrium is reached at some point, having decent chunks of the population unemployed with little to no employment prospects, especially in countries with pretty much no social safety nets like the US will be disastrous socially.
People who call themselves technologists always overestimate how beneficial a new technology is and underestimate how inhumane its application becomes when venture capitalists demand 10x or 100x their initial investment. When people like him come in and extol the virtues of some new thing as fixing everything and making everything better, I'm really wary of what they do next. Inevitably they're trying to sell me a bill of goods.
While wars have actually been getting less deadly over the last century, I think this is because of reasons beyond just technology. If it were technology alone that we depended on, his notion of commanders using AI advisers to make them strategize war into a death-and-suffering minimalist process is laughable. Instead, they'd more likely just start more wars, more easily, always confident in their supposed technological edge while really just creating more murderous catastrophe and failure.
That this has happened less over time despite the advances of technology has been more a social phenomenon of lower human tolerance for violence in general. A more widely connected and wealthier (more to lose) world has helped this mentality accelerate, yes, but fundamentally, this intolerance to violence is a human trait that was given more space in which to proliferate by technology. The technology didn't bring it into existence. AI will be little different.
This means that high-end capabilities (even class-leading) will be available to private individuals (think the DJI copters of the Ukranians) and or they will be available to actual, professional militaries at absolutely marginal cost (the Orlans ( the Nikon and plastic containing-drone) or Shaheds (the moped-motored Iranian suicide drone)), that can be produced by the millions, as they rely on our conventional factory infrastructure.
Even more scary, terror attacks might not even require ANY bespoke hardware - experience has showed that car attacks are easily as deadly as gun attacks. Imagine someone exploiting a self-driving Tesla, turning hundreds of thousands of cars on the road into destructive weapons.
There is a horrible trend in the world that started before the rise of AI - the blurring of the definition of war - I'd say this phenomenon started with the rise of drone strikes on foreign soil - though others might put this even earlier. Its the fact that a country can engage in acts of war without being at war removes almost all dampers on attacking sovereign nations. The final one - that of plausible deniability is finally going to go away - at least when the US sent a Hellfire missile your way, it sent the world a message that you pissed them off badly enough that they'll willing to openly admit to and committing the resources to droning you. A non-descript quadcopter, carrying a grenade and programmed with face recognition software is going to be the assassination weapon of tomorrow.
This bothers me.
Who trains these AI tutors and how do we prevent the system they're embedded in from churning out the same cookie cutter individuals, each with the exact same political beliefs and inability to comprehend the grey and nuanced?
Do we even want perfect tutors at all? The lessons I remember from school didn't always come from the best and brightest the profession had to offer. I would even go as far as to say that some were rather flawed individuals, in one way or another. That "wisdom" though has shaped me for the better as an individual. You're not going to find that in any textbook, much less a LLM.
Unless the field is incredibly competitive though it will cost orders of magnitude more than this.
https://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=1122#:~:text=Am....
Oh wait, here's another zinger: "I even think AI is going to improve warfare, when it has to happen, by reducing wartime death rates dramatically."
Wars will never go away, but by making them more precise and intelligent, we can make them not as horrible as they were in the past.
That said, isn’t the point of war also that it’s horrible and barbaric? If war isn’t that anymore, won’t it be much more frequent and casually started as a result?
Again, I’m absolutely not saying it’s a good thing that war maims and kills people, but I see these side effects as a deterrent. There is a component of terror to it and that’s what makes it even worse.
If it’s enlisted professional killing each other, or even robots destroying each other, it can go on for much longer. And how do you determine the “winner” in that case if you can keep feeding robots into the fight, it’s never ending I’d think.
Of course - that's precisely the point. The idea that any technical innovation can make it less so (or make war less likely) runs counter to all historical observation.
I think (and know very little, so could be wrong), that the purpose of war is to expand influence. This can take the form of access to new resources (whether that be land, access, air space, whatever) or to form a buffer between one country and another. There's probably other reasons, simply like ego in some cases.
There are other ways to expand powerbases too - such as China's heavy financial and infrastructure investment in Africa and South Pacific nations, or attempting to undermine another country's social structures. These are longer and harder to implement, but yield better results with practically no blood shed.
The point (in nearly all cases) is to win at any cost. From which the practice of limitless barbarism naturally follows.
Does it? WWII was less bloody than WW1, and nothing since has had anywhere near as many deaths.
World War II casualties: 70-85 million
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_War_II_casualties
World War I casualties: 40 million
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_War_I_casualties
Yes (usually), to the first question. The second begs the question though.
Wars are destructive and enormously expensive. Only a tiny fraction of human leaders wielding a disproportionate amount of power have the agency to start wars, and they do so in order to pursue specific (but varied) objectives. Since the cost is high, no one does this lightly (even the "crazy" ones, because they would already have lost power if they weren't smart and calculating).
AI may provide avenues to enhance the efficacy of wars. It may also provide avenues to enhance other strategies to achieve those objectives. In all cases, we can expect AI will be used to further the objectives of those humans with the power to direct its development and applications.
It is therefore ludicrous and self-interested speculation to claim that AI will reduce death rates. Andreessen signals this with the preface "I even think" so that he can make the claim without any later accountability. The reality is, future wartime death rates may or may not decrease, but even if they do, we likely won't even be able to credibly attribute the change to AI versus all other changes to the global geopolitical environment.
No. The conqueror never wants war — he prefers to get what he wants without any resistance. It's only the defender who has to wage war to defend itself from aggression.
If Russia had more military AI, they would use it to do more of the same thing they're doing with all of their current technologies.
Perhaps you could argue an advanced social system wouldn't target civilians but that's different issue (and still a hard one).
...by making them more precise and intelligent...
Precise technology is just as effective at precisely targeting civilians as it is at precisely soldiers and there hasn't been end to forces that view various civilians as the enemy.
And indeed, nations have very seldom targeted civilians because of the lack of precision - because civilians were standing next to soldiers or something similar. The human shield phenomena has happened but NAZIs targeted London for bombing because they wanted to break the British Nation. Etc.
We have to remember they bombed that theater in Mariupol (with a "precision" guided missile no less) not despite the fact that there were children and mothers inside -- but because of it.
However, I hope it's not a strawman to assume you're arguing that there is no progress in warfare in the sense of harm inflicted upon civilians. What would you prefer as a civilian: living in a country being conquered by Julius Caesar, Gengis Khan, occupied by Nazis in WWII or living in any of the countries occupied since WWII (including Ukraine)?
We even used to have a different word for it: "conquered". What was the lastest country in history, where this word would be appropriate?
My point is specifically that progress in the technologies of war don't by themselves promise that things will be less brutal. Quite possibly other things have produced progress. I make that clear in my parent post.
I would also note that technology produces unpredictable changes in the strategic situation and the actual result from a changed strategic is itself unpredictable even from the strategic situation. So where a technology change might take us is unpredictable and unpredictable-over-time. Notably, nuclear deterrence has so far worked well for keeping the world peaceful and is something of a factor for the relative pleasantness of the situation you cite. But if nuclear deterrence were to slip into nuclear war, the few survivors would probably think of this technology advance as the worst thing the world ever saw.
East Timor, Tibet, Darfur, Iraq, Central African Republic, there's lots of post-WW II events that are easily as wretched for the victims.
Like, how would such a war even work?? We have AI killbots shoot at eachother in no-mans-land, sure, but then what? The side with less killbots just gives up, like a fantasy novel monarch betting the realm on a trial by combat? Desperate people do desperate things, and those people having nuclear missles already scares me enough - I don't want to see them with self-replicating Von Nueman bomb drones or whatever other horrors the pentagon dreams up for us.
Anyway the point of war is to destroy the civilian infrastructure and the population that operates it, so they can't support an army. Which is kind of insanely circular because the army is there to defend the civilians and the infrastructure in the first place. War is just a mad thing and getting robots to do it will not make it any less mad, only more efficient at being mad.
And in the case of the VC community - you can hardly blame them, because everyone else seems to think so, as well.
If AI can be a perfect tutor, it can certainly be a perfect parent, perfect romantic partner, perfect employee, perfect employer, perfect VC...
In fact why not create a perfect economy, perfect media, and a perfect infinitely wise and knowledgable political system?
We could lock up those imperfect humans and just occasionally ship them some food and water. Maybe direct them to not produce so many imperfect new humans too.
If history's proven anything it's that if you put enough humans together we'll do almost nothing but invent more and more elaborate ways to kill each other. And sometimes to kill other things too.
The question is not how to create individuals with different mind, but how to create them in enough mass that it reaches 51% before governments forbid whatever you are doing. And if you have so much power that the government doesn’t come at you, what kind of power were you looking for.
(And I say this as someone who does think about electronics supply chains, has previously owned a Fairphone and since has only purchased second-hand phones.)
Yes this is a valid concern. Yet it's about the same as jumping on a random person in the grocery store with a lecture about the unsustainability of the product that person is taking off the shelf.
Sadly, buying second-hand devices for personal use won't affect these issues of the economic system we live in.
I am making no statements about anyone's morals.
Which also means: infinitely capable of performing a job in their place. What will these children study for? Teachers have always transmitted to the only available recipients the knowledge that otherwise would have disappeared with them. When intelligent beings can simply be replicated at zero cost and have no expiration, what are children even learning for?
You don't have to look very hard to find them and I really believe this world become the norm if people weren't required to work and thus got no real reward for their efforts.
Or is that the effect of poor-stimulation environments?
Like the study that showed teenage drinking plummeted[1] in Iceland when teenagers were given stimulating activities to do instead.
Anecdotally, I mostly drink when I’m bored, and I don’t drink when I am doing interesting things.
[1] https://duckduckgo.com/?q=iceland+teenage+drinking+sports It was a variety of programs including a curfew for teenagers, but one leg of the programs was “Through the program, the municipalities funded and expanded after-school activities, from sports to gymnastics, to music, art, and ballet. The basic idea is to keep kids busy – and out of trouble – and help them find meaning in their lives that dissuades them from seeking alcohol or drugs in the first place.”. The nighttime curfew wouldn’t have prevented drinking during daytime or evenings, which reduced.
This is probably the most depressing thing I've read all year. And it's been a rough year. I hope you just had a "brain-fart" as the kids say, but if not: I implore you to think of the purpose of your life, and what it would be without the need to work 40h/week to survive.
Later on, we have to learn how to do this delicately enough that we don't make enemies. But the journey to adulthood takes a big step forward during those early rushes of realizing that we can see/recognize things that our elders cannot.
I understand you're trying to dig into some idea of political homogenization and bias by pushing this point but I really think you're missing the forest for the trees.
I grew up in a low income area in the US and the standard of public education was abysmal. The teachers were overworked with huge class sizes and they spent so much time helping kids simply graduate that they had no time to help any student who was average or above. If you learned in a non-standard way, forget about it. Forget "cookie cutter individuals", half the time the teachers would show up and not actually teach (they'd put some music on and work on other things.) "perfect tutors"? In an era before digitized gradebooks, teachers could give you whatever scores they wished, no accountability. One big function of standardized testing is to push teachers to be accountable. Even the teachers that were trying their best just didn't have the time to do any more than the absolute basics.
I studied for SATs and AP exams by downloading textbooks from filesharing websites and studying those. Wikipedia filled in the gaps for non-STEM subjects. Nobody at my school could help me. At the time all the teachers and councilors knew is that I was going to be okay without any help from them, at least better than the other kids. I knew that nobody succeeded where I grew up and I needed to look outside to level myself up to succeed.
I can only see AI tutors as much better than the nothing that often is public education. The status quo is just overworked, ineffective teaching. Being able to bounce off questions from an AI tutor when it's late and you're up with homework and your parents either can't help or are hostile to your educational goals (the reality in a low income area) would go a long way. Of course the reality is that maybe AI tutors aren't actually coming and all we'll get are LLMs trained on the contents of school textbooks, but even that is a lot better than what we have now. The important problem will be making sure that everyone gets access to these AI tutors and not just the privileged in the elite schools who were going to be funneled into an elite college anyway.
Would it be best if we were able to shrink class sizes and have world-class teachers for children? Of course. Are countries going to be willing to pay the tax burden needed to make this happen? Probably not. In the meantime it's best for the poor kids to have the cookie-cutter, AI tutor while the wealthy have their own private tutors. It's not very different from the status quo today except the poor kids have nothing.
It's not like individuals are free from their biases either. Humans can always learn more and change their beliefs, but without the basics of education they'll never get to a point where they can critically analyze the world around them.
It was very hard to keep reading after that maximal bit of creepy delusion.
Now there’s this AI who can spit out information with the hubris of Harvard professor. The language model has no idea if it’s correct or not and there no one curating answers. No one can explain how it came up with the answer but it’s correct in a lot of cases.
Somebody clearly took a lot from the scene in Terminator 2 with John Connor trying to teach Arnold how to do a high five.
I don't necessarily like the idea of paying for AI to train my children to be AI dependent life long children who spent their whole life around benevolent AIs.
That said to move up the stack, the point is to paint a generally rosy picture. Not tell us that our kids will be raised by AI to be part of the futures uniform culture.
It happens on the upper end of course and smart kids end up building bombs because they're bored [1]
AI tutors would be a huge benefit and allow people to explore the topics they're interested. Maybe a kid isn't so interested in historical battles but is more interested in the clothing people wore at the time. Or someone else might be interested in something completely different. The breadth of LLMs is a real killer feature for creativity and exploration. I think this would result in the opposite of cookie cutter as the current system where 30 kids sit in a room and study the same thing produces cookie cutter individuals, albeit extremely poorly as many don't learn anything
[0] https://www.publicschoolreview.com/hoboken-high-school-profi...
[1] https://nextshark.com/steve-wozniak-fake-bomb-ahmed-mohamed
B) Who trains the human teachers? I don't think I need to cite any sources for the claim that many, many people in our society are already concerned about excessive uniformity and political brainwashing in our schools. I mean, just look to the nature of religious education in most of U.S. as a perfect example of completely AI-free objective brainwashing.
Everybody's already so crazy different, both from genetics and from family influence, there's no need to worry. There's so much diversity in people.
> each with the exact same political beliefs and inability to comprehend the grey and nuanced?
Education (at least in the US and Europe) is usually about teaching critical thinking, not political indoctrination. Why do you think tutors would change this? (Teaching political science, for example, is very likely to reduce your strongly-held political beliefs and lead you to see things as much more gray and nuanced.)
> Do we even want perfect tutors at all?
There's no such thing as perfect. All it said was infinitely patient, infinitely knowledgeable, etc. Computers are already infinitely patient, and even just Wikipedia alone is getting qualitatively similar to inifinitely knowledgeable.
Homework was always a chore and not a challenge or something that would help you out in daily life.
Today "AI" systems are nice automatic "summarize tools", with big limits and issues. They might be useful in limited scenarios like to design fictional stuff, to be "search engine on steroid" (as long as their answers are true) and so on. Essentially they might help automation a bit.
The BIG, BIG, BIG issue is who train them AND how can we verify. If people start to get the habit of taking for truth any "answer" their grasp on the reality would be even lower that today "online misinformation", and that can go far beyond news (try to imaging false medical imaging analysis consequences). How can we verify is even more complex. Not only we can't train at home with interesting results but also we can't verify for truth the mass of training materials. Try to imaging the classic Eduard Bernays "dummy" sci journal publishing some true papers and some false one stating smoking is good for health... https://www.apa.org/monitor/2009/12/consumer now imaging the effect of carefully slipped false material in the big "ocean" of data...
Nothing good can be grown on such ground.
Yes yes, HN doesn't like a16z. Not one of those comments were useful.
In this case the community is ostracizing a company known for grifting under a facade of technological advancement. Seems like the system is working.
"Social norms" are a poor excuse for "ostracizing" someone who isn't even here to be impacted by it, let alone the knock-on affect of getting in the way of effective communication and discussion.
We're not talking about Socrates speaking rudely about the people in power, we're talking about a billionaire accused (seemingly [rightfully](https://www.blockdata.tech/blog/general/where-andreessen-hor...)?) investing in bad-faith to scam people out of their money. I think that's a form of a theft, and calling an aversion to theft a "social norm" is technically correct but practically a massive misapplication of the term.
In the long run, it will be the end of human freedom
For example, it looks like Xi has been pretty actively pursuing this, based on the news over the last 10 years
> China has one surveillance camera for every 2 citizens (...) These camera [sic] checks if people are wearing face mask, crossing the road before the green lights for pedestrians are turned on. If caught breaking rules, people lose their social credit points, are charged higher mortgage, extra taxes and slower internet speed. Not only that, public transport for them gets expensive as well, and the list goes on. [1]
It's not like we're immune to this. All the malls I go to lately are packed with facial recognition systems to analyze our behaviour.
[1] https://www.firstpost.com/world/big-brother-is-watching-chin....
“Every person will have an AI assistant/coach/mentor/trainer/advisor/therapist that is infinitely patient, infinitely compassionate, infinitely knowledgeable, and infinitely helpful. The AI assistant will be present through all of life’s opportunities and challenges, maximizing every person’s outcomes.”
…will more likely turn into an indoctrination and compliance machine under authoritarian regimes.
You could say the same about weapons, radio, electricity, the internet
They all could be abused by authoritarian regimes
Hopefully it's obvious to all of us that no technology, no matter how neat, will solve the social problems of humanity for us. And this is just the start of how I disagree with the author. But I would say it's not exactly a detriment either
I’m giving a counter-example that a world in which there are no records and no supervision of antisocial behaviors could also be a poor place.
The way that AI can deal with bullying is exactly the same a good teacher could. You build a model of a good and intelligent teacher that deals well with bullying and put it out. Bullying gets solved. Everyone who is not a bully is slightly better off and can enjoy it.
I do agree that increased surveillance is very scary. But we have to maintain hope that the future holds promise for the less powerful to influence their government - in the 1770s it was via muskets, and in the 2070s who knows what it will be. (As an aside, I personally doubt it’s going to be guns…)
Sure, you could, assuming accessible resources to decent compute nodes and good training data, but something tells me that this will be in the hands of a very few.
Also, even if decent AI remains affordable for most people, most people will still mindlessly take the default route of a corporate/government pushed apps.
It’s a balancing act between freedom and law. Go one way too far - you get Tiananmen Square and reeducation camps. Go another way too far - you get storming the White House and school shootings.
When I put it like this, I hope you can see that it doesn't work like that. There are hundreds of variables you could change that would affect everything. We can prevent Congress storming (it was, btw, Congress, not the White House, that got stormed) without moving even 1 micrometer in the direction of reeducation camps.
You’d think that the kind neighbors could read and pause for a bit. But no. They care about their pets. And happily let them go, resulting in the damage to landscaping and the bills to clear contaminated ground and replace the grass.
I’m guessing these are the same people who wouldn’t wear a mask and spread their disease somehow, during the pandemic.
There's no other reason for that except verifying compliance.
For example red light cameras. Makes perfect sense right, running red lights is bad as it can cause harm, and harm would be a violation of the social contract.
.... except the cities were commonly taking the yellow light timing down far below recommended levels in order to maximize profits.
AI in a world that demands profits spells the end of freedom.
Particularly, if you’re allowed to contest that yellow light fairly and efficiently, using the records from the same cameras and AI technology.
Ideally, you’d just register a complaint and the thing would give you a video and a clear explanation of what did you do wrong and why it was not a good idea. Traffic laws are relatively straightforward after all.
>if you’re allowed to contest that yellow light fairly and efficiently,
That's a pain in the ass already in our current system and there is no alignment in our politics that will make it better. If you have money and don't care, you'll pay the ticket. If you have money and do care you'll spend a lot of time with records requests, and resubmitting records requests and pushing trial dates because the system won't give you the records you need in time.
The legal system does in no way work in ideals. It's not until you're on the wrong side of the law you realize exactly how fucked up it can be. It is then you realize how many laws exist that are unenforced until you bring too much attention to yourself.
In fact a person who goes over with red light when it's safe to do so might be in total paying more attention compared to the one who only watches the lights. The one who watches the lights may miss a car speeding by even though the light was green.
I am of the opinion that destruction of knowledge work and class mobility is more problematic.
The other use case was at high-end retail stores. Places like Luis Vuitton, Hermes, etc. They have facial recognition to log high spenders. If you drop 10k at Coach and then go down the street to Valentino their security system will recognize you and highlight you as a VIP customer. A specialized customer assistant then comes out to give you personal attention, maybe to invite you to the private shopping experience.
I learned about these in 2017 I believe. Most non-technical people who I've told about this think it is some conspiracy theory and they often don't believe it. For some reason people are scared of the government but they remain totally docile or willfully ignorant in the face of corporate use.
I cant recall its name though - but yeah - OpenAI basically brought capabilities for extreme real-time surveillance to an 11.
THIS is exactly what I see happening. I personally think the "pause" on development is bullshit NationState jockeying for dominance by trying to gAIn AI Dominance - Israel, MI5, NSA, CCP <--- Every Intel Agency on the planet is building/buying/stealing/weaponizing whatever they can.
I wonder what/where Palintir is in this fight?
It feels REALLY Anime with the Sabre Rattling btwn the US and China over Taiwan and TSMC's chip fabs for AI cores.
The hardware is still relatively infancy - but in 5 years it will be really interesting when we see the perfomance for 1hr or 1D problems cut down to minutes seconds for massive AI apps 5 years from now
Is anybody keeping score on Neal Stephenson novel plot points becoming real-world news in 2023? ("The Diamond Age" in this case.)
I am not someone who thinks AI is going to kill us all. But I dont think it's going to usher in a new utopia either. I think probably it's going to be useful and beneficial in some ways, cause problems in others, and like always, our nature and behavior will determine the human condition going forward.
It's a miracle I can live in another country than I was born, top income bracket due to a free internet education, effortlessly facetiming my parents whenever I want in amazing quality, learning and talking about all sorts of niche interests without any effort.
I think this is just all so obvious these days that you don't remember how much it used to suck, and that's a real testament to its greatness.
I remember waking up every morning and without a second thought, I got up, out in the world, did things I felt like doing, saw people I liked on a whim, every day was jam packed with eventfulness and dimension and interaction. I took that for granted. Now, kids don't play outside, nobody knows how to drive because their mind is somewhere else 24/7 and we check our phones before we do anything else. But the flip side is, I can know anything I want that is known by someone else with less physical effort than it would take me to make a sandwich. I can talk to almost any human being in the world while doing any mundane task anywhere in my environment. It's amazing.
But we did lose something, I believe something very important. It wasn't free, it cost us something. Was it worth it? I don't know. I think yes, but I'm not really sure.
Uber did the exact opposite of that for me. I still curse their existence on a regular basis for the impact they've had.
Beautifully put. I'm considering writing this on a post-it and quoting it over Zoom calls for years to come.
Re:benefits of software, I think it's a mistake to focus on stuff like Uber. I would vehemently defend the assertion that the internet (Wikipedia, Google, Kahn Academy, etc.) have brought massive good in the form of public access to information. More fundamentally, I think it's objectively true that it leads to increased productivity via tools like spreadsheets, email, and now AI-assisted writing, which I think is a fundamental part of our path towards a better society.
Software surely won't fix society, but I think making a utopia out of the current material conditions would be tough. Many things are broken and rotting because of greed and corruption, but I see scarcity (of labor, resources, knowledge, etc.) as a powerful factor to.
You are in the wrong community pal. Maybe try an Amish blog instead.
> There's the good ol' bait-and-switch of tech industry you have to consider. New tech is promoted by emphasizing (and sometimes overstating) the humane aspects, the hypothetical applications for the benefit of the user and the society at large. In reality, these capabilities turn out to be mediocre, and those humane applications never manifest - there is no business in them. We always end up with a shitty version that's mostly useful for the most motivated players: the ones with money, that will use those tools to make even more money off the users.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36211006
It applies to Apple's automated emotion reading, and it applies even more to major VCs telling us AI will Save the World. As in, maybe it could, but those interests being involved are making it less likely.
A big part of the "technology" in the past 150 years has been "machines". And all those machines have one thing in common, they consume energy (from the wheel to the latest iPhone).
Yes the technology allowed to increase the crop per acres, to ship goods across the world, to keep food cold, to warm/sterilize it, find new drugs, mass produce clothes for few cents, etc.
That miracle comes access to free and dense energy also known as fossil fuel. If oil/gas/coal was not found/used or just not as abundant, we might not have known the same past 150 years.
Now that miracle is not clean, it does produce a very stable molecule (CO2), that is, after 150 years starting to change the "world" and not necessarily for the better.
So, yes technology improved the life of billions, but maybe at the price of some species extinctions, and it might hurt our very own if we continue to feed those machines/technologies with fossil fuel.
Hopefully, we will reassess how good is a new technology under the prism of its dependence to fossil fuel. Can't wait for fission or fusion to be widely used instead of fossil fuel.
Now, there could be a problem, when a bad actor applies massive amounts of knowledge towards destructive purposes. If you let anyone to purchase an assault rifle or a nuke, there surely be increased likelihood that an assault rifle or a nuke will be used. The situation is a bit similar with an AI. Refined knowledge is dangerous.
This is a potential mistake.
Do you have pets? Even if you don't you'd generally consider animals to be intelligent, right? But even the smartest animal you've seen is far dumber than the average human being (except visitors at national parks operating trash cans). I mean you can teach many kinds of animals quite a bit, but eventually you hit physical limits of their architecture.
Even humans have limitations. You can learn the most when you're a child, and you do this in an interestingly subtractive method. Your brain is born with a huge number of inner connections. As we learn and age we winnow down those connections and use a far lower portion of our energy output on our mind. Simply put we become limited on how much we can learn as we age. You have to sleep. You get brain fog. You end up forgetting.
With A(G|S)I there are many questions unanswered. How far can it scale? Myself I see no reason it cannot scale far past the human mind. Why would humans be the most optimized intelligence architecture there is? It seems evolution would create that. When you ponder on the idea that something could possibly be far more intelligent than you, you have to come back to the thought on your pets. They live in the same reality of you, but you exist on an entirely different plane of existence due to your thinking abilities. What is the plane of existence like for something that can access all of humanities information at once look like? What is the plane of existence like for something that can see in infrared, ultraviolet, in wireless, in context of whatever tooling it can almost instantly connect to and work with, something that can work with raw data from sensors all over the planet feeding data back to it at light speed?
Now, you're most likely correct in the sense before we get some super ASI that is far beyond us, we'll have some AGI just good enough to power someone greedy and cause no shortage of hell on earth. But if somehow that doesn't happen, then we still have the alien to contend to.
First, AI is far more than just chatgpt, don't presume this is the same thing happening everywhere.
Second, The LLMs are all reasoning machines drawing on encyclopedic knowledge. A great example I recently heard is like a student parroting names of presidents to seem smart - it isn't thinking in the exact manner that we do but it is applying a reasoning to it. Chat GPT may be doing something akin to prediction, but it is doing it in a manner that is exposing reasoning. As the parent mentioned, our own brains use networks that refine over time with removal, and a huge number of our behaviors are "automatic". If you go looking for "consciousness" you may never find it in a machine, but it doesn't really matter if the machine can perfectly mimic everything else that you do or say.
An unfeeling unconscious yet absolutely "aware" and hyperintellgent machine is possibly the most alien we can fathom, and I agree there is no "end game" there is likely no mathematical limit to how far you can take this.
> That miracle comes access to free and dense energy also known as fossil fuel. If oil/gas/coal was not found/used or just not as abundant, we might not have known the same past 150 years.
That's only because humans were too naive and risk-averse to recognize that once we split the atom we had access to 1000x the energy with comparable reductions in waste. Perhaps if we had AI back in the mid/late 20th century it could've explained to us the benefits of nuclear power vs fossil fuels. Instead we fell for hallucinations of our own making via events like Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, and Fukushima.
I suppose the millions executed under extremist politics were also "hallucinations" then... (e.g. German holocaust, Soviet prisoner camps)
These were all very real events with very real repercussions. They did not conclusively prove there is no "safe" nuclear power, but they did illustrate the consequences of getting it wrong.
The "new" procedures around "cleaner" fission processes e.g. with fuel recycling all sound nice, but ultimately they cary the same costs of "getting it wrong". Having objections to safety is not a "hallucination".
Unless you can clearly explain why a dangerous process has been made "safe", without insulting people's intelligence or understanding i.e. hand waving, you cannot prove you understand it well enough yourself to claim safety. This is my problem with the spate "nuclear is safe" going around - if only a small subset of highly trained personnel can operate and diagnose it safely, without repercussion in a closed loop, you cannot claim safety, just that there are specialized processes that under correct supervision might not be harmful, maybe.
The worse consequences of these events came from the evacuation of the zones, not from the radiations.
Yes there were death due to direct radiations, about 31 for Chernobyl and none for Fukushima. But that's very small compared to all the death due to coal energy pollution, and even hydro which is catastrophic when a dam breaks (which happens way more than nuclear plant accidents).
https://www.statista.com/statistics/494425/death-rate-worldw...
So this is how we can talk about safety of nuclear plant: by looking at stats of the last 70 years and compare it to alternatives. Because unless we want to go back to candles and windmills we can't just say "nuclear seems dangerous so it's safer not to use it". We have to consider what we'll be using to produce electricity instead.
As if, had we only not evacuated people and left everyone around, nobody would have died and everything would have been better...
> Yes there were death due to direct radiations, about 31 for Chernobyl and none for Fukushima. But that's very small compared to all the death due to coal energy pollution, and even hydro which is catastrophic when a dam breaks (which happens way more than nuclear plant accidents).
This is not a good argument, or at least a bad statistic. You need to look at deaths per <X>, not deaths as a result of. Sure, deaths are fewer with Nuclear, but also, deaths are fewer per coconut. Deaths per terawatt is a bad argument because again, there are so many fewer nuclear plants and the tera-watts are also lower.
A better analysis would be acres of land made uninhabitable by energy source. It doesn't matter you have all the electricity if nobody can live anywhere, whether it is coal causing massive wildfires in Canada or failed Nuclear plants evacuating 40 mile regions (and you need to be careful even then - the wildfires are caused by heat which is caused in part by tera-watts, although largely by fossil fuels and chemicals in the atmosphere, the dams floods are caused by lack of upkeep, a problem shared by nuclear reactors...)
"Safety" can be seen thru different lenses. If we measure by number of deaths, then nuclear is safer than dams or coal/gas power plant.
Nuclear requires some expertise to run safely, but now the plant designs are better. I am wondering if the fear of nuclear is greater than the actual risk.
https://what-if.xkcd.com/29/
https://xkcd.com/radiation/
As for
> If one were to somehow prove that "facebook is net bad for young children", it still doesn't mean the web, advertising, and everything that makes up that product should be destroyed
you're right that this does not follow - however, advertising absolutely should be destroyed, because it's a cancer on modern society, and it's not caused by bad tech companies - it's what causes tech companies to go bad (as well as many other nasty things, see http://jacek.zlydach.pl/blog/2019-07-31-ads-as-cancer.html).
I used to think in this way as well, until I realized that it just isn't true. I've seen too many tech people who genuinely believe that their tech will save the world. Only if people could see how, behave in "the right way" etc. They are not different in any of messiahs outside of tech.
I briefly was like that too. All high on TED talks and startup economy propaganda. Then, over the years, I saw all those promises fail, and I saw how and why they failed, and what we got instead.
And even earlier than that, I learned how to craft this kind of bullshit myself - how far a good story can take your worthless university project, even if at no point in telling it you were actually lying.
(I may have also spent an unreasonable amount of time pondering why technology in the real world is so shitty compared to sci-fi settings, even dystopian ones.)
So it's true that not everyone is going to trying to scam you on purpose. Some are still naive enough to believe (I say that without passing bad judgement - it would be nice if things were so simple, but they just aren't). But some are absolutely out there to get you - the regular Joe, or the regular Joe & Jane Inc. Not because they hate you, or the society you live in, but because there is monetary value that can be extracted from you, which they can put to some other use.
And yes, there are also those messiahs you mention, the people insisting their stuff can save the day, "Only if people could see how, behave in 'the right way' etc.". They are a danger to regular people too, but for the entrepreneurial/investor class, they're useful fools. They're tools that can be employed very cheaply, because they already believe the bullshit they're selling.