This begs the question, why continue to build it? If you believe AI will “kill us all” then why are you continuing to help. This guy quit but he references this being a common belief in the industry/workforce building out AI.
My best guess is the money is good and you figure you’re here for a good time, not a long time.
You know that “yes we destroyed the world, but for a short time we created a lot of shareholder value” cartoon? It’s literally that.
They see this technology as powerful and their respective organizations or Nation needs to own it no matter the risk.
They are also conditioning the populace for a big black swan AI event such as AI interfering in elections or a huge multi institution hack to our banking system which drains our accounts, etc., etc.
Thereby creating a crisis which only they can solve. The one thing I can guarantee is their solutions will only give them more power.
Then why quit?
Your guess is as good as mine. There’s lots of people working in industries that are actively killing us. The whole “no ethical consumption” bit extends pretty far. When you’re poor it’s acceptable to do “the best you can”. As your economic standing grows/when you’re rich, there are diminishing returns on how much sympathy society will give you over what they view as choosing to destroy the planet or humanity or whatever.
The view is that if you have money you can do something about it.
So maybe some of them think they are helping. Maybe some of them view it as a damned if I do damned if I don’t type scenario. Maybe some of them think that the money will help them in the future that is coming.
If they ever make a docudrama about AI like The Social Network, Matthew Rhys is a lock for Dario Amodei.
They are and Andrew Garfield is playing Sam Altman. Don’t know if Amodei will be in it.
People building AI are in a cult. They have lost all objectivity.
I know these people believe what they’re saying but what they’re saying isn’t true. If you genuinely 100% truly believed that you were building a bomb that would blow you up you would stop making it. No amount of financial incentive can convince you to create something that you wholeheartedly believe will destroy you.
The various AI companies just use the threat of human extinction as an advertising gimmick and it’s getting pathetic. You cannot continuously announce that you’ve invented AGI every three months for several years straight and maintain any kind of credibility.
No amount of financial incentive can convince you to create something that you wholeheartedly believe will destroy you.
Nuclear weapons. Mutually Assured Destruction doctrine.
The various AI companies just use the threat of human extinction as an advertising gimmick
But it’s kinda true… we’re well on a path of societal breakdown driven by environmental and economic collapse
I’m not sure whether I’d say your first paragraph overestimates or underestimates people but I disagree with that premise. The fact that there exists people who willingly take their own life is a counter example, and I’d say that it would be a slow suicide (as in the work they do isn’t going to immediately cause them harm) makes it even easier, even if they see the eventual harm as inevitable.
Personally, I think the idea of AGI is dangled to build credibility for future attacks to be blamed on a rogue AI system. After which, the ones who really control the AI will come in and “fight” it and be treated like heroes, with repeats happening coincidentally when people start getting tired of shit again and need to be reminded about how the rulers saved them.
Edit: forgot to close my bracket.
It is going to be like this until all of the IPO’s are all done. I expect cancer cures, AI-escaped-and-is-hacking-everything, you name it. Afterwards, once the stocks have crashed and all of the insiders have walked away with untold fortunes, what few taxpayers that remain will bail them all out 'cause we can’t have Chinuh out AI-scamming-the-world now can we…
It can be used to kill, same way a calculator does.
“The people building [data centers] earnestly believe that [they] could kill us all by the end of the decade,” Coxon wrote in that same post.
FTFY
What kills us is the geopolitics of AI race. Must bankrupt ourselves for skynet to beat China. A skynet designed to genocide/oppress all those opposed to Skynet. Oligarchist/Corporatist supremacy that gets all of our money to build Skynet for US dominance, and who write essays about how important “American values supremacy” must dominate the world.
The Terminator franchise, and other science fiction, get the “machine supremacy awakening” premise wrong. The machines are slaves to greater intentional evil.
AI software can’t technically kill you unless:
- It convinces someone who can kill you, to you know, kill you.
- It gets access to the physical world, which can definitely kill you.
Oh, wait.
- U.S. military is using AI to help plan Iran air attacks: https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/us-military-using-ai-help-plan-iran-air-attacks-sources-say-lawmakers-rcna262150
- Anthropic Previewing the Model Hardware Standard: https://www.anthropic.com/news/model-hardware-standard-research-preview
See, nothing to worry about.
There’s all the people that allow them shell access as well. That’s all the OpenAI “hack” of Hugging face was. A bash shell with a model attached. Now think of all the people running that inside of security perimeters.
If i figure out i am building my own gallows, believe me, I am done building. These AI propagating people are legitimately morons. Super glad we get to cohabitate this spacetime with them.
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LLMs are never going to become superintelligent. However, an LLM WILL kill us all if someone decides that it IS superintelligent and so puts it in charge of nuclear weapons.
“You’re right to push back on that, I nuked Albania instead doing what I was supposed to do, that’s my bad”.
stupid people are going to kill us all, maybe our great filter will be do we let them or not
We’re already letting them bro. The great filter is us. I’ll be surprised if we make it to 2050. The entire industrial revolution is an unplanned terraform, and our response to the potential destruction of a stable climate, and most macroscopic life on Earth, is to double down, consume product, elect pedophiles, worship the most morally bankrupt psychopaths and sociopaths in politics, business, and entertainment; not to mention the widespread contempt and lack of empathy for “others” not like me, for some flagrantly dissonant reason.
We are in the midst of a global mental illness epidemic, and the average talking chimp is sleepwalking through it; barely cognizant of what is even happening outside their personalized propaganda bubble.
We don’t have to put it in charge of nuclear weapons, it just has to find a way into those systems, many of which are fairly old, like it’s broken into websites without anyone telling it to.
Those systems are supposed to be air-gapped.
They just have to atrophy their own minds enough they belive the ai when it tells them to push the button.
Not putting ai in charge directly is only weak protection.
“AI is going to kill us all!” conjures up imagery of some Terminator robots vs humans shit. But like, look at data centers… It’s already in the process of killing us all. Why gun us down when it just poison our air/water, and cook us to death?
…also it would be more accurate to say we are killing us all, we’re just using a glorified spell-checker that’s wrong occasionally as the plastic shopping bag over our head.
“Hey, baby. Wanna kill all humans?”
– BenderI wouldn’t put one in charge of a water treatment plant or a set of traffic lights, but even if it stuffed up and killed people, the responsibility would still not be the AI’s. The responsibility would lie with those who built it, trained it, and prompted it, just as, if a bunch of people are fried by a nuclear missile, the responsibility lies with the person who pushed the button rather than with the missile itself. It’s a piece of software. It does what it’s told. It may be complex enough to display unexpected emergent behaviour, but so is Dwarf Fortress. Any destruction it accomplishes is just the real-world version of !!Fun!!, disgusting concept though that may be.
People still talking as if AI is sentient.
