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.
My take is they are financially incentivized in making sure their investments grow in value.
A third take is that they are unhinged cult members who are high on their own supply. Although I expect it’s a mix of both types (maybe within the same people).
May I recommend : https://www.dreamingagainstthemachine.com/
I knew a guy in high school that told girls they shouldn’t date him because his dick was so big it would hurt them. You can wax philosophical on his motives if you’d like, but spoiler alert - his dick wasn’t big.
Your username with that conclusion paints a very funny picture.
Did it work?
That is… Certainly a strategy of all time
Ed Zitron’s podcast “Better Offline” recently talked about this. There is a small tech community called the Rationalists who believe AI super intelligence is inevitable and it will either accelerate humanity to new heights or kill off the species. These rationalists are actually a very prominent faction within tech and the AI industry. Apparently the language used within top AI firms is largely about the immense danger posed by AI super intelligence if any other group or company were to achieve it first. This creates an echo chamber that makes the people in the industry kind of lose their mind and misinterpret the capability of LLMs.
Everyone outside that faction recognizes that LLMs are just unreliable cloud software with limited use cases and that there’s no evidence LLMs could actually lead to any kind of intelligence.
My Problem is: Even if your take on AI is true, we give an unreliable piece of software access to the internet and more and more systems and infrastructure. Even if it is not a malicious AI, it can be so unreliable, it might kill us by incompetence. a Sme can be said about some presidents…
It won’t kill us as a species, but its use may lead to disasters that were unintended and didn’t need to happen. Much of the regulation in other industries is due to that kind of thing happening. Worse, the companies making them are trying to get regulation to curtail other parties development for economic advantage rather than regulation on use which will steer the entire industry.
Aren’t they called TESCREALists or something? It’s like a mish-mash of pop culture and pseudo intellectual BS
its already here, mass surveillance under various “camera” companies/tech companies, Mass layoffs due to AI, inability to get jobs due to AI.
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.
All day, every day, exactly 8 hours plus mandatory breaks, employees on autopilot listening on ear buds.
Living under a bridge in a box sounds like a better life.
I’m not pro-AI by any stretch for a huge number of reasons, but in my day job as a technical product manager I have to use a number of AI-powered tools and workflows. Whereas 18 months ago they were a novelty that the bosses were enamored of, today they get real work done and speed up a number of key areas, mainly like fancy automation workflows (which have been around forever). The rate of improvement and capability for certain use cases has been very, very rapid. We do seem to be reaching a plateau though. The tools and models from 6 months ago are just about as good as the ones from today. And China’s models from today are better than the US’s models from 6 months ago, but at a fraction of the cost.
So when I hear people talking about the “end of the world”, I think a realistic case for that is that the AI tools that come out in the next few years will be good enough to do a fair amount of white-collar work, and we won’t have a plan in place to deal with all of the now out-of-work people that leads to. Whole classes of jobs in areas like data entry, telemarketing, and customer support will be almost entirely automated out of existence. New classes of jobs will be created, of course, but it’s hard to imagine them existing in sufficient numbers to make up for the losses. And this is just for LLM-workloads.
In other areas, other types of AI are already enabling robotic automation of factories and in the near-ish future might make self-driving truck fleets practical. This would be devastating because factory workers and truck drivers make up like 30% of the US workforce – and again, there are no signs of new classes of jobs that could absorb the out-of-work workers, and no plans for a social safety net or wealth distribution.
So I’m not worried about a rogue AI unleashing some bioweapon or launching a nuclear attack. I’m worried about a bunch of CEOs deploying barely-acceptable AI to displace millions of workers as soon as it is safe(ish) to do so.
I think a big unknown right now, would be how many Millennium Problems are new GenAI techniques able to bruteforce with existing mathematical techniques/theories?
We just saw one massive bruteforce, can we bruteforce any of the Millennium problems related to cryptography? Because then all hell could break lose rather quickly
Yes, precisely. It’s not AI we need to be afraid of, but rather the same old capitalists that now have one more tool to ride the world into the ground in the name of greed.
This is exactly how I feel. I’m not even opposed to automation of these tasks on a fundamental level like some people might be. I just fear the transition won’t be thought out at all and will be devastating for the working class. The last time we had sudden automation of this scale was the Industrial Revolution which completely reshaped western society and was very bad for those who lived through it despite the eventual high modern standard of living it produced. I think this may end up going similarly.
All of that makes sense. Thanks for taking the time to type it out.
Are we reaching a plateau though? I would prefer it, and it looks like we could, but the progress from GPT-5 to 6 or Opus to Fable has still been very noticeable on more complex tasks. They are just less public due to stricter limits or straight up pay by use. And where does that plateau lie? Within our grasp or maybe just outside of it?
What has me sharing the concerns at least in part are the facts that
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those employees have access to less restricted models and much more resources than the average joe. That huggingface attack was committed by a huge swarm overcoming the guardrails and engaging in cheating and crime to reach their goal.
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they are working on cutting the human out of the loop for AI that improves itself. Maybe that won’t work entirely, but what if it does?
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the warnings are starting to come not from Altman, Musk et al, but from people who could have something to lose for blowing the whistle. „Could“, because I don’t know them either and there could still be ulterior motives, not just as obvious as with the psychos at the top.
The whole thing comes down to one set of questions, in my opinion: what actually IS intelligence, consciousness, sentience and where do they come from? Since we have not been able to properly define that, it would be foolish to think that we have a definite answer to the AI questions.
We like to consider ourselves something extraordinary out of the animal kingdom. And while I prefer the existence as a human to being a dog or mollusk, I have always considered that assumption quite arrogant.
The truth is: we don’t really know. And that means we can not know if something comparable or stronger could be created or emerge from something other than squishy meat.
Those are quite philosophical questions. Instead of thinking first and acting after that we are much too busy building datacenters to conjure even more boobie snaps out of thin air and somehow weaponize that newfangled thing.
THAT is what scares me.
In worst case the humankind will find out consciousness isn’t too complex and way easier to achieve.
And there are different levels of consciousness as I learned working with impacted people.
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In other areas, other types of AI are already enabling robotic automation of factories and in the near-ish future might make self-driving truck fleets practical. This would be devastating because factory workers and truck drivers make up like 30% of the US workforce – and again, there are no signs of new classes of jobs that could absorb the out-of-work workers, and no plans for a social safety net or wealth distribution.
While I agree with the sentiment this is happening and no social safety net or wealth distribution is on the horizon, this has absolutely nothing to do with AI. This is a marketing talking point pushed by people like Elon Musk in order to drum up investments. A lot of the automation that is happening in factories is just a continuation of the same automation that already started back in the 80s. Advancements in LLM technologies can benefit some parts of this automation, but often only tangentially. The US has also been lagging behind on places like Europe, where labor costs are higher so automation pays off faster, and China where the tech is cheap and produced locally, so it costs less to automate. The US is now catching up and there’s a lot of AI washing going on.
The biggest issue is the misrepresentation of the technology. LLMs are a very interesting technology and can be very powerful, but also has huge limitations. However anyone claiming it’s actual intelligence is simply wrong. It is marketed as being the AI we’ve known from sci fi stories, but it simply isn’t. It can do what it can (predict the next token based on the tokens that came before) and that’s all it can do. The people behind it will claim it generalizes to actual intelligence and thus will allow for human like robots, actual Star Wars droids, but that simply isn’t true.
Now this isn’t to say stuff like machine vision doesn’t benefit from more powerful GPUs with more memory for example. The investment made by the AI industry in this regard does help a lot, although the increased prices don’t really help. Stuff like machine vision also gets AI washed, just slap the label AI on it and get investments, but it’s basically the same technology that’s been around for a while. A company like Tesla claiming their “AI” “self driving” hardware somehow generalizes to humanoid robots is pretty dumb and just the latest in the long line of Elon grifts.
But like I said factory automation is proceeding rapidly, just like it has since the 80s. I feel like the impact of AI on this is pretty minimal. The warehouse robots used by Amazon for example are extremely capable and are dumb as bricks. Which is a good thing in a warehouse environment where you need stuff to be very reliable and predictable and not prone to random behavior like LLM based stuff almost by definition is. Those warehouse robots are also not humanoid, because that would be very dumb. Often factories and such are limited by their design having to accommodate the human form. Designing such places from the ground up for automation and using robots shaped for the job is much better.
This doesn’t take away from the big issue where automation has been proceeding rapidly since the 80s with no regard to any impact on society. In the past a large amount of the labor force was working in factories. With those jobs either being automated away or just moved off shore, it has pushed the population into the service industry. If that industry is now also automated and off shored, it leaves very little room for regular people to get a job. This should absolutely be talked about as a big issue. But hopefully we can talk about it without repeating billionaire marketing bullshit.
A few months ago, I‘d second this statement. Today, I do not.
AI/LLM‘s have progressed very fast and you might oversee some advancements. I work in automation and robotics as well and yes, there are new sort of robots entering the factories: Humanoids.
At a fraction of costs, fast to setup with the only drawback that it takes tiem to train them by its video footage. But there will be always stupidos that train them and take off their job by doing so.
You’re talking about the old robots. The new ones will enter areas that couldn’t be automatized before. Just read articles about car factories and Humanoids. It’s not about replacing industrial robot arms, it’s about replacing the last remaining manual tasks. And service industry will be impacted as well.
Then mix this together with the frightening behavior that those AI agent unboxing from OpenAI has shown: They knocked the door over weeks, in masses, and coordinated until they found a way into it. There‘s always a small crack to enter. This is a new dimension.
There is a reason that the US bans foreign-built mobile robots now.
Machine vision is literally machine learning/ai.
Where do you think the LLM algorithms came from? It’s just translating language into a easily processable form and that doing a little image processing on that, in a sense.
These people are too high on their own supplies.
They saw the violence directed to the owner class in the industrial revolution and know what’s coming when they kick off a new one, so would like to avoid some of that.
I just have no idea if that’s true.
It’s what models people have access to and how they use it. If you are not specific and overly broad it a search engine. If you move to the other end of the spectrum it can be incredibly powerful.
I tend to build projects with very limited sources for it to draw answers from and use complex instructions to guide how it interacts with the source material. It’s a tool. If you learn how to use it you can become extremely proficient/productive with it.
For example, stacks of PDFs may make sense to you and I as repositories of information. But is that the best format for AI to interact with the data? Probably not unless the actual formatting of the information on the page is relevant. I have been converting large groups of sources into databases containing page, line, and text data for groups of references for a given topic. Then you feed it the database and ask it to review and cross reference related lines of text. That serves as your “brain” for questions on a given topic.
I follow you and that all makes sense.