1 yr. ago • 63%

Five ways AI might destroy the world: ‘Everyone on Earth could fall over dead in the same second’

www.theguardian.com Five ways AI might destroy the world: ‘Everyone on Earth could fall over dead in the same second’

Artificial intelligence is already advancing at a worrying pace. What if we don’t slam on the brakes? Experts explain what keeps them up at night

Technology @beehaw.org Five ways AI might destroy the world: ‘Everyone on Earth could fall over dead in the same second’

29 comments

And monkeys could fly out of my ass. Before we start hand wringing about AI someone would probably need to actually invent one. We're probably closer to actual room temperature fusion at this point than we are an actual general purpose AI.

Instead of wasting time worrying about a thing that doesn't even exist and probably won't in any of our lifetimes, we should probably do something about the things actually killing us like global warming and unchecked corporate greed.

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- Exactly. There was an article floating around just a couple of days ago that from what I recall was saying that billionaires were funding these AI-scare studies in top universities, I presume to distract the public from the very real and near scare of climate disaster, economic inequality, etc. Here, unfortunately paywalled: https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2023/07/05/ai-apocalypse-college-students/
  
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  There is this concept called "crityhype". It's a type of marketing mascarading as criticism. "Careful, AI might become too powerful" is exactly that
  
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  @xapr @orclev here’s an archive link for the article for those who want it https://archive.is/K1TUL
  
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  A lot of the folks worried about AI x-risk are also worried about climate, and pandemics, and lots of other things too. It's not like there's only one threat.
  
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- I absolutely hate this craze. Most of the questions I get about AI are just facepalming because everyone is feeding off each other with these absurd things that could hypothetically happen. Clearly because actually explaining it doesn't generate clicks and controversy
  
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  Clearly because actually explaining it doesn't generate clicks and controversy
  
  Solving real problems is hard because if it wasn't they would be solved already, but making up fake problems is really easy.
  
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- Amen. The “AI” everyone is freaking out about is good at a narrow range of things, but either dumb as shit or completely incapable otherwise
  
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- like global warming and unchecked corporate greed.
  
  And the unnecessary cruelty @orclev@lemmy.world puts poor monkeys through.
  
  Come on man let the poor things out. No matter what they did to you. They don't deserve that.
  
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Large Language Models are nothing but very advanced regurgitation machines. That's the AI these articles are hand wringing about - not a real Artificial Intelligence.

These articles remind me of the bitcoin articles we used to see.

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- What ability do you think that they are currently missing that makes them 'regurgitation machines' rather than just limited and dumb but genuine early AI?
  
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  Discreet object recognition. Right now they can't answer the simplest questions that require counting discrete objects. Which to me implies they have no discreet object sense at all. They're just looking for word patterns.
  
  I'll give you an example, If you were to ask one of these. "I was on my way to the store when I saw a sow with six piglets, how many feet do we have?"
  
  We could have a lively debate about what potential answers would be acceptable. Maybe there's only 2 feet because the rest are hooves, maybe there's 30 because that's how many foot like appendages there are in total, but the answer it will give you will make absolutely no sense.
  
  Chat GPT will be like, "11" or "15" and if you ask it any questions or follow up it genuinely does not have any answer for how any of these objects could be discreetly counted or partitioned. It can try to explain itself but quickly starts babbling nonsense.
  
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  Sentience
  
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Shit i dunno, everyone dying the same instant doesnt sound so bad. Quick and painless is certainly better than the options most of us face ¯_(ツ)_/¯

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Calling LLMs intelligent is what caused this mass hysteria.

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Another good article to read for balance and more background on why some people may be trying to restrict "AI": https://theconversation.com/no-ai-probably-wont-kill-us-all-and-theres-more-to-this-fear-campaign-than-meets-the-eye-206614

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I’m not worried at all. I look forward to our AGI overlords.

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- Covering your bases I see
  
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As long as AI doesn't go around financing wars around the globe and sanctioning opposing or outright bombing them, I'm fine with it.

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Thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of a human mind.

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AI is the be-all-end-all worst idea humans ever conceived.

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- It is both the best and worst idea humans ever conceived.
  
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