I’m not an AI techie and I’m not well educated on LLMs/AI in general. The issue I’m having is the dichotomy between how people talk about it. I’ve heard completely opposite ends of the spectrum. From AI is quickly becoming advanced enough to threaten human society, all the way to its a glorified dictionary/search engine that can’t really do much of anything. I know Lemmy has a steep anti-AI slant. But, can someone talk about this in a way I can wrap my head around why the divide seems so big?
The people claiming it’s humanity ending are all directly involved in the AI companies. One take is that they are the ones that know the most about it.
My take is they are financially incentivized in making sure their investments grow in value.
The biggest risk I see is Idiocracy. Like, the movie.
Business workers become afraid to do or propose anything without AI signoff. Retail & service workers are told to do what the AI says, the way the AI says to do it, or get fired.
Technology innovator Marshall Brain (RIP) wrote a book in the early 2000s about an AI called “Manna” designed to replace fast food managers:
https://web.archive.org/web/20201204080050/https://marshallbrain.com/manna1
The AI just talks in your ear all day: “Empty one bag of fries into the fryer. You have 6.5 minutes, switch to the sandwich station. Make one Big Burger: grab one patty from the 1/4 pound bin and place it on the griddle… … The fries are ready, turn around and lift them into the drain hopper…”
All day, every day, exactly 8 hours plus mandatory breaks, employees on autopilot listening on ear buds.
Personally, this just feels like marketing and these big asshole companies trying to resurrect the 2025 level of hype in order to salvage their IPO’s.
If they honestly believed this I can’t imagine that their workers wouldn’t do something more drastic.
They want regulation to create a cartel. Failing that they want hysteria to increase pre IPO valuations.
As Patrick Boyle said. It would be like Coca Cola, Pepsi and Irn Bru getting together to beg for regulations because their soft drinks are just too delicious.
What’s going to happen is:
- The big players know that the token pricing crisis is coming up.
- When the price increases hit, regular users are going to scramble for alternatives.
- Local models will be an attractive alternative for many users. The cost of hardware and energy will constrain local model power, but many will be willing to live with it.
- So these would-be cartel members want to hit the local and open weight models with the “safety” card. Otherwise they might be holding the bag on all of those data centers.
“You see, it’s just too dangerous to humanity to experiment with AI at home. You need to use a safe provider like Open AI.”
In addition to what everyone else said, I’ll tell you why I don’t think that what we have currently can become some runaway superhuman intelligence:
All “AI” people are talking about are basically “just” LLM wrappers: tools built to run a LLM in a loop while giving it access to the ability to write and run code. This gets pretty powerful, since you can do a lot programmatically (including monetary transactions), but has a fundamental limit:
LLMs are trained ahead of time. And that’s a very cost intensive, long process. Beyond that, the LLM has only a context window of finite length. So there are no long-term planning capabilities. While running after being trained, the LLM can only condense knowledge into a summary and then re-read it, a lossy process that might introduce mistakes in “understanding” and will make any prolonged task degrade over time.
And even if they figure out how to make the things actually self-modify and learn things, you can’t give every session that ability, since that’ll vastly increase the storage and performance requirements. Do sessions with that ability will be closely monitored and limited.
So I don’t see any space where an evil AI could emerge, even when factoring in an essential possible future improvement to the technology.
I’m not worried about AGI. I’m worried about the insane military applications they’re developing right now, and giving Artificial Incompetence control.
I watched a grokbot get confused connect to the wrong vnc console and try to shut down its own little computer.
I’m not worried about AI taking over the planet. I’m worried about it clicking the wrong button with no oversight
Same, I am worried about humans using ANNs to kill people. Current society is a gigantic apparatus that is constantly shifting shuffling responsibility around. LMMs only accelerate the problem.
it’s pretty disrupting tech, not without risk. general population is behind on the real capabilities of AI and tech companies are doing smart marketing which gives a big spread in perception.
AI isn’t a danger to humanity, per se. Humans abandoning their duties of being responsible stewards of systems is a genuine source of danger though.
We already have algorithmic abuse where people are subjugated by welfare and debt systems with little oversight or flexibility. Some organisations even breaking the law and going against their stated missions to achieve goals and maintain order.
Social murder is the concept that society can kill a person through stress, pressure, abandonment and indifference to the individuals struggles and needs. We’re seeing a lot of it today with the declining health of younger people being especially alarming.
AI can scale the two things I’ve mentioned beyond limits set by current bureaucratic systems, I.e. the slowness of people running a system. Systems which already kill and harm people without AI. The small erroneous tendencies of logic and algorithms in systems will be scaled up, further and faster. AI can enable algorithmic abuse and social murder on scales comparable to mass murder.
‘Sensationalist hooey, cooked by superstitious yokels seeing phantoms of their own imagining.’
So apparently we’re using up all our resources in order to create something that might kill us all.
Sounds like a fantastic idea.
I’m going to go cry now.
Check out Robert MILES’ channel: he’s an expert, one of the most prominent on AI safety
take your time to understand the mechanics of it, its a bit technical at times but ultimately very understandable
and try not to freak out when you find out it’s from several years ago, mostly before the advent of LLMs
How will “AI kill us all”? I can see it creating harm and getting people out of jobs. But kill us??
I’m also looking for that answer
How will “AI kill us all”? I can see it creating harm and getting people out of jobs. But kill us??
There are currently 120 dead Iranian schoolgirls as a result of AI targetting and it using 10 year old out of data data.
The IDF have been using AI for target selection in the Gaza war.
There’s been a story this week where AI was used by the US military in analysis of a Chinese cargo ship and concluded it was carrying nuclear weaponry components to Iran. The US military were planning on boarding the vessel which would be considered an act of war. Only a last minute analysis of the intelligence revealed it was false.
Developing new viruses and deadly diseases that spread too fast to be cured. By enabling low cost sensors to resolve messy data for low cost high precision weapons. By eroding the skillset of humanity so that we just fail in a few generations. By accelerating how we were already killing ourselves.
Ignore word “AI” and worry about advanced autonomous computer tools with massive computing resources working towards a goal, with most of those resources controlled by power maximizing government and bond villain oligarchs, setting the goals. A shared goal among the 2 is neutralizing any popular opposition to AI, and massive wealth/power concentration from AI profits. Even without the pursuit of evil as a goal for AI, establishment/oligarchy will refuse to redistribute power through UBI/freedom dividends, and genociding the uppity classes is far preferred for them.
Mass murder as a result of of AI/tools is a fairly likely result of intentional evil goals that compute can assist with, and a total certainty as the indirect political preference of establishment power in response to a uselesss slave class.
There’s blood on their hands. Either they keep the hype up or go to jail regardless of any of their statements being true or not.
Whatever. Ban all these people from employment and public assistance. Make them starve
I doubt any of them have ever been employed nor do they look like they ever eaten anything that wasn’t adderall or ketamine.
It’s been reported a few times that Ukraine is already using AI for drones.
The human operator chooses the target, the AI takes over and eliminates the target.
Is that “just an LLM”?
Seems more capable than that to me. But, I don’t know if this is actually true, or just a claim to frighten the Russians (and me).
It’s good to see Doomsday Cults back in vogue. Too bad Robert Anton Wilson is not around.
