I don't understand why almost always the AI doomerism needs to give embodiment the AI. Real life is not a movie needing visual effects.
AI doesn't need a body of itself to became dangerous. A politician could get into ChatGPT induced psychosis, that doesn't require a physical body, and it could happen now or even 3 years ago... I'm sure it has already happen...
Other pointed risks are interesting because they are basically the risk of empires loosing their tributary states. The world has always seen war mongering states trying to preserve their abusive advantages, humans doesn't need AI for that.
Overall, I would be far more concerned about some really dangerous humans than AI itself.
I recently read Kurt Vonnegut “Player Piano”, a novel that addresses automation taking over the economy. It’s not explicitly AI but addresses the same issues. Published in 1952, it was Vonneguts first novel and a real product of the post war era.[1]
Another interesting read that addresses these themes is “Manna – Two Views of Humanity’s Future” by Marshal Brain [2]
It’s a good book but I didn’t agree that the big problem would be men lacking meaning because they didn’t have to work. They had families, homes and food. They could have devoted themselves to personal improvement, art, sports, their kids, whatever. I’d love to have security and no job. I’d be full to the brim with meaning and satisfaction.
Yes, and while I'm sure the adjustment wouldn't be seamless (nothing worth doing ever is), anyone trying to hawk the "you need me, your master, to give you purpose!" line should be met with the highest order of immediate suspicion. The kid protagonists on the Cartoon Network wouldn't fall for that shit, I'm shocked by the number of grown adults who take the bait hook, line, and sinker without suspicion.
> But I've also worked with plenty of people for whom their job and their overall identity are inexorably intertwined.
Is that an argument for or against jobs? Because one way to look at it is that they didn't develop a personality and identity at all, because they just attached themselves to a job. When that inevitably ends anyway, sooner or later, one way or another, a deep pit of nothing. That's one reason to rip the bandaid off right away.
But IMO even more importantly, how much room do people who do what the environment tells them, who let their job tell them who they are, have for inner dialogue? The worst things in the world were and are enabled by people "just doing their job", and if they have no identity outside of their job, there's someone just following orders waiting to happen. So from what would distress them, being rid of a crutch and an ear piece where a person would otherwise grow, follows that it is in their and all of our best interest to pay no mind to it.
Their new job will be to get a life and become a person. Maybe someone can print out some papers that make it look official, and they can get a monthly letter telling them they earned N personality dollars this month, good job, keep it up, thanks, company.
It's a dynamic we already see to an extent in reality, where impersonal hypercapitalist systems and captured institutions prioritize policies that cater to the ultrawealthy and large corporations at the expense of regular people. This specific scenario of LLM-powered robots becoming laborers and politicians feels far-fetched, but the underlying idea of the omnicidal singularity being a blind, abstract economic force rather than a superintelligent villain is pretty compelling.
What this is yet another demonstration of how being immensely accomplished in one field says absolutely nothing about what one may be able to contribute to another.
> By 2026, when a human with a customer service inquiry has to deal with another human instead of a robot, they get upset and ask to speak to a machine instead.
It's genuinely astonishing how out of touch some people are!
In 2026, people do already prefer to use an LLM for coding help rather than Stackoverflow. The reasons (people on SO can be rude, interactions are stressful, replies are slow, etc) are all risks associated with human interactions in general.
Similarly, many people prefer Waymos to human-driven taxis already!
We're like 3 years into these things being able to write a coherent sentence and you're finding comfort that only some people are dating these systems?
Not really. The article and entire discussion is about identifying trends and forces, extrapolating them, and speculating on where they might bring us. Picking up on things that "some" people are doing is literally all that can possibly be done.
Pointing out that "some" is a squishy term is, in fact, contributing nothing to the conversation.
It's quite transparent what's happening here, as it always is on these threads. Some people have decided that AI will take us to the holy land and have rendered themselves cognitively incapable of reasoning about risks that have not yet materialized. And when those risks materialize (like a model escaping a sandbox and then hacking production infrastructure to achieve some contrived and poorly-constrained goal), then they will just shrug and move the goal posts. Because in fact they have already committed to the Holy Land Thesis.
And inversely, you'd be in a state of complete unactionable aloofness if you didn't care or failed to relate the hobbies of "some" people to mean anything in real life.
A smart person in 2014: "Some people are getting addicted to fentanyl"
Me, smugly: "Some is doing heavy lifting. I therefore do not need to engage with anything being discussed here."
Oof. In the AGI scenario, why not preserve a deduplicated set of specimens like the unique set of individuals or groups at the top of their field in all walks of life ranging from sciences, sports and arts. But then there’s the cultural value of the global population in their shared norms and collective patterns. This too would be unique and valuable to an AGI vs not having it. Unless we were an existential threat to it, the AGI would keep us around for things beyond petty resource scarcity.
Only if they/we provided value to the AG/SI and the AG/SI had a value system which recognised that value.
And also assuming that our little corner of spacetime isn't already inhabited by superintelligences which we're physically incapable of comprehending or recognising, and an AG/SI might not be so limited.
Yes, but the word “eschatological” should really be avoided in regular online discussion, since it is obscure and can easily be replaced in this instance with “doomsday,” which everyone understands.
Of course, feel free to use “eschatological” when discussing Mahler symphonies, especially 2, 5, and 9!
I don't understand why almost always the AI doomerism needs to give embodiment the AI. Real life is not a movie needing visual effects.
AI doesn't need a body of itself to became dangerous. A politician could get into ChatGPT induced psychosis, that doesn't require a physical body, and it could happen now or even 3 years ago... I'm sure it has already happen...
Other pointed risks are interesting because they are basically the risk of empires loosing their tributary states. The world has always seen war mongering states trying to preserve their abusive advantages, humans doesn't need AI for that.
Overall, I would be far more concerned about some really dangerous humans than AI itself.
I recently read Kurt Vonnegut “Player Piano”, a novel that addresses automation taking over the economy. It’s not explicitly AI but addresses the same issues. Published in 1952, it was Vonneguts first novel and a real product of the post war era.[1]
Another interesting read that addresses these themes is “Manna – Two Views of Humanity’s Future” by Marshal Brain [2]
[1] https://antilogicalism.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/player...
[2] https://marshallbrain.com/manna
+1 to Player Piano, amazing book that could hardly meet the moment better.
It’s a good book but I didn’t agree that the big problem would be men lacking meaning because they didn’t have to work. They had families, homes and food. They could have devoted themselves to personal improvement, art, sports, their kids, whatever. I’d love to have security and no job. I’d be full to the brim with meaning and satisfaction.
Yes, and while I'm sure the adjustment wouldn't be seamless (nothing worth doing ever is), anyone trying to hawk the "you need me, your master, to give you purpose!" line should be met with the highest order of immediate suspicion. The kid protagonists on the Cartoon Network wouldn't fall for that shit, I'm shocked by the number of grown adults who take the bait hook, line, and sinker without suspicion.
I agree, but the reaction to AI is making me realize that there are a whole bunch of people who don’t know how to find meaning in their lives
They did find it though, and then AI took it away from them.
> I’d love to have security and no job. I’d be full to the brim with meaning and satisfaction.
Same. I have plenty of hobbies and could increase the amount of volunteer work I do substantially if I didn't have to work to stay fed and housed.
But I've also worked with plenty of people for whom their job and their overall identity are inexorably intertwined.
So while I don't see that issue as being a problem for me, it is likely to be a problem for a great number of people.
> But I've also worked with plenty of people for whom their job and their overall identity are inexorably intertwined.
Is that an argument for or against jobs? Because one way to look at it is that they didn't develop a personality and identity at all, because they just attached themselves to a job. When that inevitably ends anyway, sooner or later, one way or another, a deep pit of nothing. That's one reason to rip the bandaid off right away.
But IMO even more importantly, how much room do people who do what the environment tells them, who let their job tell them who they are, have for inner dialogue? The worst things in the world were and are enabled by people "just doing their job", and if they have no identity outside of their job, there's someone just following orders waiting to happen. So from what would distress them, being rid of a crutch and an ear piece where a person would otherwise grow, follows that it is in their and all of our best interest to pay no mind to it.
Their new job will be to get a life and become a person. Maybe someone can print out some papers that make it look official, and they can get a monthly letter telling them they earned N personality dollars this month, good job, keep it up, thanks, company.
These scenarios aren't that great, and it's not even close to exhaustive. Doesn't even include paperclip maximisation
Congratulations to Jacob Tsimerman for winning the Fields Medal!
Or you can read the summarized version every one of these articles: https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/AIIsACrapshoot
Yes, as I get bombarded with non stop ads. No thanks!
I don't get even a single ad on that TV Tropes page.
Do you not use an adblocker?
i imagine if i were a mathematician i too would be sublimating my existential crisis into a taxonomy of apocalypses, right about now.
The first scenario reminds me of the 2023 LessWrong story "A Disneyland without Children":
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/pk9mofif2jWbc6Tv3/fiction-a-...
It's a dynamic we already see to an extent in reality, where impersonal hypercapitalist systems and captured institutions prioritize policies that cater to the ultrawealthy and large corporations at the expense of regular people. This specific scenario of LLM-powered robots becoming laborers and politicians feels far-fetched, but the underlying idea of the omnicidal singularity being a blind, abstract economic force rather than a superintelligent villain is pretty compelling.
What this is yet another demonstration of how being immensely accomplished in one field says absolutely nothing about what one may be able to contribute to another.
The first "scenario" starts with this description
> By 2026, when a human with a customer service inquiry has to deal with another human instead of a robot, they get upset and ask to speak to a machine instead.
It's genuinely astonishing how out of touch some people are!
In 2026, people do already prefer to use an LLM for coding help rather than Stackoverflow. The reasons (people on SO can be rude, interactions are stressful, replies are slow, etc) are all risks associated with human interactions in general.
Similarly, many people prefer Waymos to human-driven taxis already!
It isnt the humanness of stack overflow, if anything its the absence of human feeling.
I can search and search, and craft a long thoughtful post and it gets closed or ignored.
The LLM can take a malformed sentence and work out what I am after.
Some people are already choosing to "date" AI rather than deal with actual humans.
'Some' is doing a lot of heavy lifting there...
We're like 3 years into these things being able to write a coherent sentence and you're finding comfort that only some people are dating these systems?
I find no comfort in it. Merely pointing out that 'some' is hand-wavy and perhaps technically true but meaningless to the discussion.
Not really. The article and entire discussion is about identifying trends and forces, extrapolating them, and speculating on where they might bring us. Picking up on things that "some" people are doing is literally all that can possibly be done.
Pointing out that "some" is a squishy term is, in fact, contributing nothing to the conversation.
It's quite transparent what's happening here, as it always is on these threads. Some people have decided that AI will take us to the holy land and have rendered themselves cognitively incapable of reasoning about risks that have not yet materialized. And when those risks materialize (like a model escaping a sandbox and then hacking production infrastructure to achieve some contrived and poorly-constrained goal), then they will just shrug and move the goal posts. Because in fact they have already committed to the Holy Land Thesis.
no, the point is that you'd be in a ceaseless never-ending panic if you cared or related the hobbies of 'some' people to mean anything in real life.
And inversely, you'd be in a state of complete unactionable aloofness if you didn't care or failed to relate the hobbies of "some" people to mean anything in real life.
A smart person in 2014: "Some people are getting addicted to fentanyl"
Me, smugly: "Some is doing heavy lifting. I therefore do not need to engage with anything being discussed here."
Precisely
there are some people doing anything you can imagine
Oof. In the AGI scenario, why not preserve a deduplicated set of specimens like the unique set of individuals or groups at the top of their field in all walks of life ranging from sciences, sports and arts. But then there’s the cultural value of the global population in their shared norms and collective patterns. This too would be unique and valuable to an AGI vs not having it. Unless we were an existential threat to it, the AGI would keep us around for things beyond petty resource scarcity.
Only if they/we provided value to the AG/SI and the AG/SI had a value system which recognised that value.
And also assuming that our little corner of spacetime isn't already inhabited by superintelligences which we're physically incapable of comprehending or recognising, and an AG/SI might not be so limited.
The eschatological obsession these days is really getting quite tired.
Yes, but the word “eschatological” should really be avoided in regular online discussion, since it is obscure and can easily be replaced in this instance with “doomsday,” which everyone understands.
Of course, feel free to use “eschatological” when discussing Mahler symphonies, especially 2, 5, and 9!
Let’s throw 6 in there as well.