AI companies are trying to build god. Shouldn’t they get our permission first? - The public did not consent to artificial general intelligence.
Posted by katxwoods@reddit | collapse | View on Reddit | 66 comments
GlitchCorpse@reddit
All AI does is predict the next logical word to place in a sentence, or pixel in an image. It is not conscious, it doesn't really "learn" the way you or I do. It's not a threat, it cannot 'go rogue's or 'become a god'. It's just a bunch of weighted bell curves all bundled together in a package that you can interact with.
This is just low effort fear mongering.
semoriil@reddit
You have described just the modern tech, but the term AI is not limited to it. By the way natural neural networks aka human brains are not that different. We are still to figure out the best way to implement it, but it sure is doable and the most fun part about artificial intelligence is that it can be scaled up much easier than our natural one limited by our biology.
GlitchCorpse@reddit
If we're having conversations about science fiction, then that's really not collapse related. Why aren't we worried about solving NP-complete problems? A solution for which would cause just as much chaos as "real" AI. Because AI is the hot new sensational buzzword and makes people think of Skynet which is scary. Nobody wants to hear about lame dumb math problems, even though those lame dumb math problems would render cryptography obsolete.
ljorgecluni@reddit
I'm gonna trust what u/GlitchCorpse says on Reddit over what Hinton and Altman and Eliezer and the US Justice Dept and that Google guy and all the rest of knowledgeable experts in the field have said. Because you probably know more and are certainly putting your reputation behind your claims.
Thestartofending@reddit
I personaly don't take Eliezer seriously. I see him as just a cult leader.
ljorgecluni@reddit
What's the cult that Yudkowsky has? Where is his following, and what is his following doing to benefit him?
As for immortality, humans have always had a lifespan of about 80 years. So I don't see that changing while we are organic humans built by evolution.
As for Mars, machines might get there but they will no more prioritize putting humanity on Mars than do humans prioritize putting cockroaches on the moon or atop Mount Kilimanjaro.
The difference between AI superspecies and Mars for people or immortality is the trend. Humans have not beaten the 80-year avg lifespan (nor should we); this is not a technical but a biological limitation. Mars is a technical matter, and Technology's constant advancement means it is not implausible that getting something from Earth to Mars is going to happen - I just don't think it will be people, rather, that the machines will get there. And in line with that, the advancement of Tech includes getting it autonomy, and empowering it to be far more capable than Man.
Thestartofending@reddit
The following is in the lesswrongwebsite and /r/controlproblem. In the lesswrong website they started getting more critical lately, but his words used to be taken as some incontrovertible sacred truths. What he gets from it ? Fund for his organization.
You may have a point about A.I, i disagree that technological progress is exponential generally. Its exponential in some areas, very slow on others (curing cancer let's say) , there are certain limits that are often hit as they turn out to be harder than other facets, but honestly this isn't even my point of contention. The point i was making isn't that this specific prediction is wrong, but that even expert predictions in their own areas should be taken with a healthy dose of skepticism, they often turn out to be wrong.
ljorgecluni@reddit
Well, I agree about retaining skepticism.
I don't know if curing cancer is an insoluble technological problem as much as a biological limitation problem - like making humans live 200 years. They can make the tech to do the job and replace our parts, but ultimately we are bio-limited creations of evolution. And cancer may be unstoppable while we are in a toxified environment to which are bodies are responding.
GlitchCorpse@reddit
The threat of AI is what people are going to do with it, not the AI itself because it's not conscious and cannot think.
ljorgecluni@reddit
Hey, you know how it's working? That's great! Why don't you explain it to the developers of it, who have referred to the "black box problem"?
GlitchCorpse@reddit
I... I genuinely don't think we're having the same conversation here. The reason it's called the "black box problem" is because once you add too many dimensions to your arrays, too many variables, it's not really possible to know what's interacting with what. It becomes too computationally complex to run analysis on the system, so you have to rely on comparing inputs to expected outputs.
It's not a "black box" in the sense of a spooky mystery, but in the sense of mathematical complexity. I know, because I've worked with AI in CS courses. It's just making predictions based on available data sets. It just mimics intelligence because we've fed it an immensely large data set.
This isn't some esoteric knowledge, it's easily available. You can get set up with TensorFlow and build a simple neural net in an afternoon to learn the basics, and then read papers and textbooks about it to understand the more complex side of things. If all you read is sensational news articles, you're going to get a skewed perspective.
ljorgecluni@reddit
Okay, well why don't you solve the problems that the developers are having? You are wasting time on Reddit, they have huge budgets and problems they cannot surpass, and you know how it works and are sure to keep it reigned in. It's unknown "what's interacting with what" but it isn't doing anything dangerous, and creating machines with physical capabilities and more knowledge than all of humanity isn't a problem, and it isn't thinking or plotting at this point, so there is no danger of it doing anything contrary to human interests (or Nature's needs), so we're all good to go ahead, and you can get them there.
GlitchCorpse@reddit
Because I'm not worried about fixing this problem. I see it as a cool toy, and something that CEO's will abuse because it's essentially a technology that they can use to avoid accountability. The danger lies in the human element of capitalism and corporate greed, not a machine that can't even tell you how many "r's" are in the word "strawberry".
If we solved the black box problem, that would just make it easier for some emotionally stunted tech bro to squeeze even more revenue out of his income stream. Please educate yourself instead of living in fear. I am done having this conversation now, have a nice day.
desertash@reddit
Add Tegmark and Kurzweil.
EnlightenedSinTryst@reddit
So are you
GlitchCorpse@reddit
I don't need to be fed more books than have ever been written to come up with an original thought.
EnlightenedSinTryst@reddit
Your ability to do anything is a result of an incalculable amount of instruction via evolution. The differences are ones of time/scale/form, not function.
GlitchCorpse@reddit
We don't know what consciousness is. Unless you have information you're not sharing with the rest of us, I'm going to continue listening to the computer scientists who tell me that artificial intelligence is nothing more than a bunch of bell curves wrapped up in a computer program.
EnlightenedSinTryst@reddit
I didn’t say it wasn’t.
GlitchCorpse@reddit
So then there's no risk of it becoming a god which is what I've been saying.
EnlightenedSinTryst@reddit
“Becoming a god” doesn’t mean anything to me. It certainly seems likely that it will vastly outstrip our computational ability.
GlitchCorpse@reddit
The only way it can do that is if we feed it more information than has ever been created. There's a reason why so many of the fights around AI right now have to do with the data set that the AI can be trained on. If it was truly intelligent, we wouldn't need to feed it so much data. A human can learn how to drive a car in a few months, AI cannot. And while there's a really big "yet" in that sentence, I haven't seen anything that makes me feel like we're approaching that "yet" any time soon. We're talking orders of magnitude greater than any computer we're even capable of building with our current technology. Both in scale and efficiency.
EnlightenedSinTryst@reddit
It may be helpful to think of it as a baby?
GlitchCorpse@reddit
It is not, but thank you for your input.
EnlightenedSinTryst@reddit
Well, at least you’ve come around to the differences being scale/efficency, so I’ll take that :P
semoriil@reddit
The fun fact about AGI is that it's inevitable. You can't stop it, you can only delay it. Thanks to the technological progress your ordinary smartphone will have enough computational power to run that AGI and sure there will be someone to program his own that way.
bduk92@reddit
Innovators never ask permission.
Cyberpunkcatnip@reddit
This seems more tech related than collapse
Puzzleheaded_Bath245@reddit
collapse is tech related and the other way around
Cyberpunkcatnip@reddit
Yes what I’m saying is on a scale of collapse topic to tech topic, this is too far towards the tech side to be considered collapse material. Not all tech leads to societal collapse
Puzzleheaded_Bath245@reddit
The amount of energy and resources going into AI research definitely increases energy demand.
ljorgecluni@reddit
Tech advances only at the demise of Nature: for one to live, the other must be killed.
Or is there a non-practical, only-hypothetical development of tech that doesn't lead to problems?
Cyberpunkcatnip@reddit
So you are saying the coral reef restoration tech, and the research of it, leads to natures demise? Or how about forest restoration tech… like using drones to seed. If your point has counter arguments it’s not a truth
ljorgecluni@reddit
Please reference the tech that isn't damaging so I can see and judge. Drones might drop seeds to reforest - and that may be good to do - but where do the drones come from, what is the required sacrifice of Nature to produce them, and what is the impact beyond this one (potential) good use you cite? If cars can help us do something good for the environment, does that negate or outweigh all the negative impact of cars existing, does it validate or overrule all the damage to Nature which is required to produce the cars? Cellphones can be used to coordinate forest defenders to block bulldozers, sure - and to create the cellphones mines and factories were made in habitat that used to be occupied by a vast diversity of Earthly lifeforms.
Perhaps you can analyze the "good tech" you cite and judge it thusly yourself, and then you won't need to cite it to me and have me weigh in on some coral reef restoration tech. And keep in mind that the tech to save forests or coral is at best countering the impact of other tech which destroyed the forest and the reef.
Cyberpunkcatnip@reddit
I’ve already gave you two examples. If you need me to provide references for basic, decades old technology that easily pop up 100 results with a quick google search I can’t help you
Turbohair@reddit
No collapse is organzation related... just like the tech.
Civilization have been collapsing for the same reasons for about 12,000 years now.
The reason civilizations collapse, by and large, is because elite interests take precedence over local interests creating instability and dissent. So when natural disasters strike, or wars and invasions... these are handled in the interests of the elite cadre... and not in the public interest.
Tech... cultural adaptation... is a tool used by moral authoritarians to gain and retain control. This has been true since we decided to allow a few peole to decide right and wrong, policy and distribution for everyone else.
thatguyad@reddit
The coming AI doom will have zero input from the general public.
NyriasNeo@reddit
"Shouldn’t they get our permission first?"
Lol ... did steve jobs ask for permission before building the smart phone? did the railroad barons ask permission before building trains and rails? Did Elon ask for permission before building starlink, neurolink and rockets? Did Zukerberg ask for permission before building Facebook?
Whether it should or it should not is irrelevant to the real world. Companies do what they what to do. The only power the public has is to vote with their dollars. Anything else is just hot air.
escapefromburlington@reddit
Every new technology eventually finds its way into becoming mandatory. So the public has basically no power because eventually they'll be forced to buy in.
BeardedGlass@reddit
Unfortunately, public transportation isn't as profitable as a car-centric infrastructure.
NyriasNeo@reddit
"Every new technology eventually finds its way into becoming mandatory."
Clearly not true. Never heard of the Amish?
escapefromburlington@reddit
That’s a niche population that’s not able to be expanded to a large enough scale to matter. After lots of degrowth maybe it’s viable to have a majority living like that.
imminentjogger5@reddit
the public hasn't consent to many things yet they just happen to us
BeardedGlass@reddit
The only time we voice our dissent is with enough people and enough drive/motivation to let those in power know and see through force.
Unfortunately, the "bread and circus" this time around is too successful and now here we are. Divided, placated and complacent, unmotivated, fearful of losing convenience and luxuries, "Stockholm Syndrome" with the status quo.
GreenPL8@reddit
By using this service you consent to...
jedrider@reddit
Ai is just a more powerful button. Look where powerful buttons have got us already.
MDFMK@reddit
Since when have the public had a say in much of anything of importance. Secondly most of the general public is sleepwalking, blind and dumb walking into a global catastrophe not saying it should be controls and discussions but insinuating the average person is educated enough to have a say is idiotic at best and very dangerous in reality. I don’t work with ai or really understand it those who do should be making decisions not the average person. Not advocating either way but honestly the number of people qualified to understand speak and have a real opinion on this is limited.
Flaccidchadd@reddit
The multipolar trap doesn't ask for permission
canibal_cabin@reddit
Good thing noone is building any Ai, let allone AGI, this is just PR to pump the stocks.
Thestartofending@reddit
I bet a SuperIntelligence * would remain for decades to come like the alleged UFO "disclosure" that some dogmatists believers expect to be always "imminent", "around the corner", but it never comes.
By superintelligence i mean the crazy kurzweil type of God AI, not beating humans at markeeting or whatever job.
HomoColossusHumbled@reddit
G🌎d laughing
Turbohair@reddit
The OP understands the first thing about the moral authoritarian order.
We aren't the power elites.
ljorgecluni@reddit
You can label AGI a "superspecies" and avoid the implications you don't want brought by the "God" label.
But this is always the case with technological advances, there is no consent and often no request for them, they are experiments unleashed upon the world by the engineer and technician class. They create, release, and we suffer the consequences, and sometimes there are attempts to reign in and limit those negative consequences. See: cellphones, social media, opiates, deepfakes, Starlink satellites, drones, etc.
stevefiction@reddit
This is why pretty much everything should be democratized. We know 'the market' doesn't perform this function well or we wouldn't be knee deep in climate change and with unanswered questions about the limits of AI.
Fuck0254@reddit
People are stupid, they'd still pick climate change
stevefiction@reddit
They would, and are, now. I don't know if that's the case if they had never reaped the 'benefits' of that choice. It's hard (impossible?) to take away convenience and services once they're implemented, much easier to eschew them if you don't know if they'll bring about our extinction.
Mazzozo17@reddit
Sure, like the church and actually all the inventors of new religions should have had, at any time than in theory. Did they? No. Si what?🤷♂️
individual_328@reddit
AI companies aren't trying to build god, they're trying to get rich by convincing gullible people it's possible with shitty tools that do not have any actual intelligence.
NiceConsequence8009@reddit
buddy had to write this with chatGPT
ExtraBenefit6842@reddit
There are many issues with AI but why would anyone have to consult "the public" to create something?
HomoExtinctisus@reddit
Yeah crazy talk. Plus quit interrupting me, I have all this manure to dump in a nearby lake.
gmuslera@reddit
We need something to answer our last question.
RedBeardBock@reddit
One mortal asking another for permission to build a god. I am sure there is a fable in there somewhere.
Camiell@reddit
But we do, the moment we buy something out of them.
The moment we trade convenience with knowledge. Like the underage slave labor a cellphone needs to be made. Or the amount of sugar in colas.
StatementBot@reddit
The following submission statement was provided by /u/katxwoods:
Submission statement: calling superintelligent AI "god" has so many connotations, and some of them certainly don't apply (e.g. benevolence, wisdom, etc). But the general gist of making something vastly more intelligent and powerful than us is apt.
Perhaps more Greek gods than an Abrahamic God.
But I like the metaphor because it brings up the relevant question: is it wise to build something far smarter and capable than any human? Instead of gods creating humanity, what if humanity created gods? How is that likely to go?
I'd say, collapse of humanity at least seems quite plausible.
Please reply to OP's comment here: https://old.reddit.com/r/collapse/comments/1g2t4o0/ai_companies_are_trying_to_build_god_shouldnt/lrqkluc/
katxwoods@reddit (OP)
Submission statement: calling superintelligent AI "god" has so many connotations, and some of them certainly don't apply (e.g. benevolence, wisdom, etc). But the general gist of making something vastly more intelligent and powerful than us is apt.
Perhaps more Greek gods than an Abrahamic God.
But I like the metaphor because it brings up the relevant question: is it wise to build something far smarter and capable than any human? Instead of gods creating humanity, what if humanity created gods? How is that likely to go?
I'd say, collapse of humanity at least seems quite plausible.