zlacker

>>vforgi+(OP)
I did not expect this. Does Sam have any plans on what this could look like?

>>kranke+cy1
Sam is a crook

>>ipaddr+6z1
Essentially. He is marching on these bad scifi scenarios because he knows politicians are old and senile while a good portion of voters is gullible. I find it difficult to believe that grown ups are talking about an ai running amok in the context of a chatbot. Have we really become that dense as a society?

>>gumbal+fB1
No one thinks a chatbot will run amok. What people are worried about is the pace of progress being so fast that we cannot preempt the creation of dangerous technology without having a sufficient guardrails in place long before the AI becomes potentially dangerous. This is eminently reasonable.

>>hackin+yD1
Yes, thank you. AI is dangerous, but not for the sci-fi reasons, just for completely cynical and greedy ones.

Entire industries stand to be gutted, and people's careers destroyed. Even if an AI is only 80% as good, it has <1% of the cost, which is an ROI that no corporation can afford to ignore.

That's not even to mention the political implications of photo and audio deepfakes that are getting better and better by the week. Most of the obvious tells we were laughing at months ago are gone.

And before anyone makes the comparison, I would like to remind everyone that the stereotypical depiction of Luddites as small-minded anti-technology idiots is a lie. They embraced new technology, just not how it was used. Their actual complaints - that skilled workers would be displaced, that wealth and power would be concentrated in a small number of machine owners, and that overall quality of goods would decrease - have all come to pass.

In a time of unprecedented wealth disparity, general global democratic backsliding, and near universal unease at the near-unstoppable power of a small number of corporations, we really do not want to go through another cycle of wealth consolidation. This is how we get corporate feifdoms.

There is another path - if our ability to live and flourish wasn't directly tied to our individual economic output. But nobody wants to have that conversation.

>>diputs+xI1
I couldn't agree more. I fear the world where 90% of people are irrelevant to the economic output of the world. Our culture takes it as axiomatic that more efficiency is good. But its not clear to me that it is. The principle goal of society should be the betterment of the lives of people. Yes, efficiency has historically been a driver of widespread prosperity, but it's not obvious that there isn't a local maximum past which increased efficiency harms the average person. We may already be on the other side of the critical point. What I don't get is why we're all just blindly barreling forward and allowing trillion dollar companies to engage in an arms race to see how fast they can absorb productive work. The fact that few people are considering what society looks like in a future with widespread AI and whether this is a future we want is baffling.

>>hackin+pK1
This won’t be the first time. First world already had same situation during industrialisation, when economic no longer required 90% of population growing food. And this transformation still regularly happens in one or another third world country. People worry about such changes too much. When this will happen again it wouldn’t be a walk in a park for many people, but neigher this would be a disaster.

And BTW when people spend less resources to get more goods and services - that’s the definition of prospering society. Of course having some people changing jobs because less manpower is needed to do same amount of work is an inevitable consequence of a progress.

>>iavael+VS1
Historically, efficiency increases from technology were driven by innovation from narrow technology or mechanisms that brought a decrease in the costs of transactions. This saw an explosion of the space of viable economic activity and with it new classes of jobs and a widespread growth in prosperity. Productivity and wages largely remained coupled up until recent decades. Modern automation has seen productivity and wages begin to decouple. Decoupling will only accelerate as the use of AI proliferates.

This time is different because AI has the potential to have a similar impact on efficiency across all work. In the past, efficiency gains created totally new spaces of economic activity in which the innovation could not further impact. But AI is a ubiquitous force multiplier, there is no productive human activity that AI can't disrupt. There is no analogous new space of economic activity that humanity as a whole can move to in order to stay relevant to the world's economic activity.